Born in Stuttgart, Germany, Hannes Beckmann (1909-1977) began his artistic studies at the Bauhaus, Dessau in 1929. Here, Beckmann studied under and became close friends with Josef Albers, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee. Some of the courses he took included painting classes with Kandinsky and Klee, in which he focused on color, composition, and movement. Beckmann also studied stage design and received teachings of Gestalt psychology at the Bauhaus. After receiving his diploma in 1931, Beckmann returned to the Bauhaus to take a photography creation course.
Beckmann left Germany with Matylda Weiner, a fellow Bauhaus student and his future wife, briefly studying photography in Vienna before moving to Prague under the threat of German social and political influence. Beckmann’s focus in this period shifted from photography to painting, and he created both surrealist and purely abstract compositions. Beckmann became a Czech citizen in 1938, but faced the hardships of the deportation of his wife to Terezín ghetto, his own arrest and deportation to a penal camp for “Jewish cross-breeds and degenerate Aryans,” and the loss of his son in an air raid. Beckmann moved to New York in 1948 with the aid of Hilla Rebay, taking a position at the Guggenheim Museum, then called the Museum of Non-Objective Painting. After working at this position until 1952, Beckmann left to teach at The Cooper Union and later at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, where he died in 1977.
Beckmann’s work was exhibited in Prague, in the First Exhibition of Unassociated Artists (February 5-27, 1936) at S.V.U. Mánes, an organization that supported emigration and artistic freedom. It was only upon arriving in New York that Beckmann began exhibiting more widely, notably in European Painters (1949) at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting and in the first museum exhibition devoted to Optical Art, The Responsive Eye (1965) at the Museum of Modern Art.
Public collections that hold works by Beckmann include the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts; Harvard Art Museums / Busch-Reisinger Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin; Newark Museum, Newark, New Jersey; Chase Manhattan Bank, New York City, New York; Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire; De Cordova Museum, Lincoln, Massachusetts and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City, New York.