Max Beckmann : Self-Portrait in Words : Selected Writings and Statements, 1903-1950by Max Beckmann, Barbara Copeland Buenger (Translator), Reinhold Heller (Translator)
German expressionist painter Max Beckmann, whose paintings were influenced by horrific scenes he witnessed as a medical orderly in World War I, was eventually labeled a "degenerate artist" by the Nazis and forced to flee his homeland. In this collection of essays, speeches, and letters, Beckmann emerges as a deeply intelligent  and sensitive observer of the world. Of particular note are writings from the battlefields of 1915, and some of his instructional comments to students from his time  spent teaching in the United States in the late 1940s.
Max Beckmann (Modern Masters Series, Vol. 19) by Peter H. Selz
Born in Leipzig in 1884, Beckmann achieved early success as an artist, but it was only after his contact with the wounded and dying during WWI that he began to produce the emotionally charged paintings for which he is best known today. These anxious, violent scenes, with distorted, angular figures, intense colors and compressed space, caused the Nazis to label him a degenerate artist, and in 1937 he moved to Amsterdam. In 1947, he came to the United States, where he taught at Washington University in St. Louis and at the Brooklyn Museum Art School. He died in New York City in 1950.
Max Beckmann and the Self (Pegasus Library) by Wendy Beckett, Sister Wendy Beckett