Dimensions: 96.5 x 96.5 cm
signed, dated and described on the reverse: 'T'ai-chi tu | canvas on Masonite | oil 1968 | Hannes Beckmann'.
Origins
institutional collection, Poland
Literature
Hannes Beckmann: artist in residence, exhibition catalog, Beaumont-May Gallery, Hopkins Center, Dartmouth College, Hanover 1969, p. 12 (ill.)
Hannes Beckmann: Dessau - Prague - New York, Prague 2017, cat. no. 220, p. 262 (ill.).
Biography
Hannes Beckmann, a Czech-German painter, photographer and stage designer, was born in Stuttgart in 1909. The beginning of his work did not foretell that the artist would become one of the most recognizable artists of the op-art movement. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, he studied at the famous Bauhaus school of arts and crafts, where students included Paul Klee, Vassily Kandinsky and Josef Albers. He then trained in photography in Vienna. After the Nazis came to power and the Nazis criminalized avant-garde art, emigration became a necessity - especially in the face of the anti-Semitism of the Third Reich authorities. After the turmoil of war, during which Beckmann and his wife - heiress to a fortune - fled Germany for Prague, the artist settled in New York. Among Beckmann's best-known works from the American period are acrylic paintings in the op-art style, which were created in his studio from the 1940s onward. Nevertheless, today Beckmann is known not only as a painter, but also as a photographer. Beckmann was co-founder of the collection and curator of the photography department at the Solomon L. Guggenheim Museum in New York (then the Museum of Non-Objective Painting) and taught at Cooper Union, Yale and Dartmouth. In his photographic work, he experimented with solarization, controlled overexposure and strong contrasts. Optical effects were also central to Beckmann's painting: he based his creative method on them, in addition to his neurological studies. The artist's canvas - a 1964 painting entitled "Inca" - was included in the now iconic exhibition The Responsive Eye at MoMA, which featured the most important op-artists of the time, led by Josef Albers, Julian Stanczak, Richard Anuszkiewicz and Tadasky.
