Max Ackermann

Max Ackermann was a groundbreaking representative of abstract art in Germany. Following a diverse education under, amongst others, Henry van de Velde, Franz von Stuck and Adolf Hölzel, he developed a distinctive visual language that straddled figuration and abstraction.

After the First World War, he increasingly turned his attention to political and socially critical themes; several drawings of street scenes in the style of New Objectivity were produced during this period. At the same time, he engaged intensively with abstraction. In 1928, he exhibited in Stuttgart alongside Wassily Kandinsky and George Grosz – two of the leading figures of abstraction and New Objectivity.

From the 1930s onwards, he taught in Stuttgart and founded a ‘Seminar for Absolute Painting’. Ostracised as ‘degenerate’ artist during the National Socialist era, he took refuge on Lake Constance and continued to work there. During this creative phase, figurative and abstract elements still merged in his work, yet after the Second World War, Ackermann devoted himself exclusively to a non-representational visual language, to which he remained faithful until his death.

In his later work, he experimented with bright colours, acrylics and pastels – always in search of a universal form of expression.