Beckmann was dismissed from his teaching post in Frankfurt the day after Hitler's 1937 speech denouncing "degenerate art". He left Germany that same evening and did not return. The speed of the departure, one speech, one night, one exile, defined the rest of his life.

He was born in Leipzig in 1884 and trained at the Weimar Academy. His early work was relatively conventional; the First World War, where he served as a medical orderly, shattered both his style and his psychology. The paintings that followed, dense, allegorical, packed with symbolic figures in compressed, claustrophobic spaces, resist easy classification. His monumental triptychs, painted in exile in Amsterdam and later St Louis, combine mythology, autobiography and contemporary history.

He remains one of the twentieth century's most ambitious figurative painters, comparable in scale and intention to Picasso but less interested in formal innovation than in moral weight. He died in New York in 1950, at sixty-five.