How SLAM accumulated a world-class German art collection

The Saint Louis Art Museum’s extraordinary collection of 20th-century German art can be traced back to 1947, when Max Beckmann moved to St. Louis to take a temporary teaching job. During the previous two decades, the German artist had experienced great success in his career followed by government censorship and years of turbulent exile. Today, the Museum boasts the world’s largest collections of both Beckmann paintings and prints. 

Beckmann began his adult life and developed his unique style of art in Berlin in the early 20th century. Between 1904 and 1915, he met several artists who would leave an indelible impression on his future works, including Lovis Corinth and Edvard Munch. Beckmann’s art career was disrupted by the outbreak of World War I, during which he worked as a medical corpsman, transporting injured soldiers. Exposure to the horrors of war caused a shift in his work. The drawings and paintings created after 1915 often took on a cynical tone, and many dealt with religious overtones and themes of death, lust, and violence.

Similar themes continued throughout the next decade of his career. After rising to power in the 1930s, the Nazi regime declared Beckmann’s work “degenerate” and forced the artist to end his time as a professor at the Städel School of Art in Frankfurt. Political tensions heightened in Germany, and the Nazi party became more aggressive in their denouncement of Beckmann, removing and censoring scores of his works on view in museums; some of these works were destroyed. He was prominently featured in the traveling exhibition Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art), an exhibition that was intended to prejudice the German public against art that the Nazis believed to be too modern and “un-German.” Beckmann fled to Amsterdam, living in self-imposed exile after the Germans occupied the Netherlands; he immigrated to St. Louis after the war. 

Beckmann’s time in St. Louis was short but impactful. He arrived to fill an interim position at the Washington University art school, temporarily taking over a teaching post held by artist Philip Guston. In this period, post–World War II, many Germans wanted to come to the United States, but non-Jewish immigrants like Beckmann were required to show proof of employment before they were allowed to enter the country. SLAM’s director and the director of the Washington University fine arts department worked together to offer the interim position to Beckmann, allowing him and his wife to safely move to America.

Beckmann and his wife, Mathilde, known as Quappi, adapted to life in the United States, embracing the change of scenery and the chance to start anew after years of harrowing exile. On September 18, 1947, he wrote in his journal, “It is possible that here it may be possible to live again.” The couple lived in an apartment on the university’s campus.  

Beckmann arrived in St. Louis at the same moment that St. Louis businessman Morton D. May discovered an interest in modern German art. At the time, May was the president of May Department Stores Company, a retailer founded by his grandfather in 1877 that operated the Famous-Barr department stores. SLAM, then known as the City Art Museum, hosted Max Beckmann: A Retrospective Exhibition in 1948, which was attended by May and other notable figures in the community. This was Beckmann’s first museum exhibition in the US, and it toured many venues across the country, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

May was an avid collector, accomplished photographer, and amateur painter, who later donated a wealth of Beckmann artworks to the Museum. The businessman initiated the friendship by requesting Beckmann paint his portrait. The pair bonded over visual art, and Beckmann visited May’s studio to critique May’s work. The two sustained their friendship even after Beckmann moved to New York City in 1950 to teach at the Brooklyn Museum Art School.  

In 1950, Beckmann visited St. Louis from his new home in New York to receive an honorary doctorate from Washington University. Later that year, he died of a heart attack in New York City at the age of 66. 

“I hope to establish a Beckmann room at the St. Louis Museum which some day will attract people from all over the world such as the Prado for El Greco and in Venice for Tintoretto,” May said in 1955 in correspondence with Quappi.  

When May died in 1983, he bequeathed his collection to the Museum, including a number of Beckmann works. Through the generosity of May and other donors, SLAM has become the institution with the largest collection of Beckmann paintings in the world.  

Other SLAM benefactors include Louise and Joseph Pulitzer Jr.; American artist George Rickey and his wife, Edith; and Beckmann’s art dealer, Curt Valentin, who all donated Beckmann works to the Museum. Today, SLAM’s collection includes 40 paintings and 377 prints and drawings that provide an expansive view of Beckmann’s career. 

May’s bequest also spurred SLAM to prioritize acquisitions of important works by modern and contemporary German artists. Totaling more than 2,500 objects by artists from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, the Museum’s holdings include strengths in German Expressionism—which, in addition to Beckmann, include works by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee, Käthe Kollwitz, Paula Modersohn-Becker, and Max Pechstein—and contemporary German art by Joseph Beuys, Georg Baselitz, A. R. Penck, and Gerhard Richter.