HANNES BECKMANN (1909-1977)
Available Work | Biography
Biography • Hannes Beckmann (1909-1977)
Hannes Beckmann was born in Stuttgart, Germany. He studied at the Dessau Bauhaus from 1928 to 1932 with Wassily Kandinsky, Josef Albers, and Paul Klee. In 1932 Beckmann traveled to Vienna, where he studied photography for two years. In 1934 Beckmann relocated to Prague, serving as the director of a photography studio. During the German Occupation of Czechoslovakia, Beckmann joined the resistance and was interned in a concentration camp from 1944 to the end of the war. With the assistance of Hilla Rebay, Beckmann and his wife Elsa immigrated to the United States in 1948. In 1949 the Museum of Non-Objective Painting has an exhibition Paintings by European Artists that include twenty paintings and watercolors by Beckman along with works by Otto Nebel, Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart, and Lotte Konnerth (MNOP Exh #38). Beckmann became the director of the photographic department at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. In 1952 Beckmann began his teaching career at the Cooper Union in New York. He was invited to be artist-in-residence at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire in 1970.
Beckmann executed his paintings with an analytical rigor, often using slight modulations of a single hue to examine transparency and illusions of space and light. In a statement for the exhibition 1+1 = 3 on retinal and perceptual art, Beckmann called his process “a spontaneous geometry of vision and a controlled palette based on the reaction of our nervous system to color sensation.” Beckmann, along with Josef Albers and Max Bill, represented the Bauhaus teachers who influenced the younger generation of perceptual painters and continued to work in a geometric style in The Responsive Eye at the Museum of Modern Art in 1965. In a CBS interview with Mike Wallace at the time of The Responsive Eye, Beckmann described Op art as “a kind of expression of what is going on also in the world of science. It runs parallel to what is going on in the world of mathematics, in physics. That things are not absolute.”
COLLECTIONS: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Harvard Art Museums (Busch-Reisinger Museum); Bauhaus Archiv, Berlin; Newark Museum; Chase Manhattan Bank; Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College; De Cordova Museum, Lincoln, MA; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY
ONE-MAN EXHIBITIONS
1949
European Painters (with Otto Nebel, Vordemberge-Gildewart and Lotti Konnerth), The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Museum of Non-Objective Painting, New York, New York, January 18- February 20
1962
Kanegis Gallery, Boston, Massachusetts (also '63, '64, '65, '66, '68, '74)
1970
Beaumont-May Gallery, Hopkins Center, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire
1973
Jacob H. Strauss Gallery, Hopkins Center, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire
1975
Carpenter Galleries, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire
1976
Nashua Arts and Science Center, Nashua, New Hampshire
1976
Danforth Museum, Framingham, Massachusetts
1976
Johnson Gallery, Middlebury College, Middlebury, Vermont
1977
Ava Gallery, Hanover, New Hampshire
1977 - 1978
Geothe Institutte Touring Exhibition - Atlanta, Worcester, Burlington, Boston, Montreal, Toronto and New York City
GROUP EXHIBITIONS
1951
Museum of Non-Objective Painting, New York, New York
1958
Lincoln Gallery, Brooklyn, New York. Newark Art Museum, Newark, New Jersey
1960
Group Ten, Riverside Museum, New York, New York
1961
Logic and Magic of Color, Cooper Union School of Art and Architecture, New York, New York
1962
American Painting, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA.
1963
New England Painters, De Cordova Museum, Lincoln, Massachusetts
Science and Technology In Art, I.B.M. Gallery, New York, New York
Color and Form, Castellane Gallery, New York, New York
Art School Faculty Exhibition, Cooper Union School of Art and Architecture, New York, New York
1965
Color Dynamism, Then and Now, East Hampton Gallery, New York, New York
1+1 = 3, University of Texas Museum (now the Blanton Museum of Art), Austin, Texas
The Responsive Eye, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York (also, The City Art Museum of St. Louis, Seattle Art Museum, Pasadena Art Museum, Baltimore Museum of Art)
1966
Art for the United States Embassies, Art in Embassies Program, State Department Traveling Exhibition
1967- 70
Fifty Years Bauhaus, Wurttembergischer, Kunstverein, Stuttgart (also London, Amsterdam, Paris, Chicago, Pasadena, Buenos Aires, Tokyo)
1968
Visitors' Forum, Beaumont-May Gallery, Hopkins Center, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire
1969
Art For Study: The Modern Tradition, Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts
The Square in Painting, curated by Richard Anuszkiewicz, American Federation of Arts traveling exhibition
1970
The Studio Museum in Harlem
Martha Jackson Gallery, New York, New York
1971
Concepts of the Bauhaus: The Busch-Reisinger Museum Collection, Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard, University, Cambridge, Massachusetts (catalogue text by Beckmann)
1973
A Retrospective of Selected Artists in Residence, Jaffe-Friede Gallery, Hopkins Center, Dartmouth College and the New City Hall Exhibition Galleries, Boston, Massachusetts
Artists of the Bauhaus, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan