Max Pechstein
1881–1955 · Germany · Expressionism
The story
In the spring of 1914 Max Pechstein sailed halfway around the world to the Palau Islands in the Pacific, chasing the same dream of an untouched paradise that had drawn Gauguin to Tahiti. Pechstein was a leading member of Die Brucke, the German Expressionist group that painted in hot, flat, clashing colours, and he wanted to live and paint among the islanders.
The timing could hardly have been worse. The First World War broke out within months, Japanese forces took the German-held islands, and Pechstein made a long, harried journey home, losing most of the work he had made there.
Two decades later his own country turned on him. The Nazis branded his art degenerate, threw him out of the Berlin Academy, and pulled his pictures from museum walls for their travelling exhibition of mockery. Pechstein sat out the war quietly in a remote fishing village, and lived to be reinstated as a professor in Berlin, dying there in 1955.
