Hannes BECKMANN (1909 - 1977), Gentle Glow, 1968

oil, canvas pasted on board, 54.6 x 54.6 cm;
signed, dated and described on the reverse: `"Gentle Glow" | canvas on
Masonite | oil 1968 | Hannes Beckmann.

At the age of 20, Beckmann began his artistic path at the Bauhaus School
Dachau. It was there that he met Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky,
whose work influenced his artistic pursuits.
In the late 1940s, he emigrated permanently to the United States, where he
he became curator of the photography department at the Museum of Non-Objective
Painting (known today as the Guggenheim Museum) and a teacher of
art successively at Cooper Union, Yale and Dartmouth. It was during this period that the
Beckmann's first op-art canvases.
The featured painting is an outstanding example of op art, which in the 1960s
1960s became one of the most popular trends in world art.
Op-art based on optical properties and mathematics, cutting off the
away from the creator's personal emotions was a return to the assumptions of art
elevated by Beckmann from his years at the Bauhaus.