"A painter's painter, he eschewed identification with a particular school or style. His oeuvre is a celebration of painting's grand traditions - the still life, the portrait, history painting, and allegorical and mythological subjects - articulated in a visual style that has often been described as Expressionist. But while his frenetic brushwork and highly complex, metaphysical iconography have much in common with German Expressionism, Beckmann's paintings never succumbed to the Modernist tendency to render the world abstractly. In his 1938 lecture "On My Painting," Beckmann explained: 'I hardly need to abstract things, for each object is unreal enough already, so unreal that I can only make it real by means of painting.'...