Hannes Beckmann

Born in Stuttgart, Germany, Hannes Beckmann studied at the Bauhuas, Dessau in 192, under Wassily Kandinsky and Josef Albers.

In 1932, he continued to study photography in Vienna, and in 1938, he left to Prague where he worked as a photographer. In 1944 he was imprisoned in a concentration camp until the end of the war. In 1948, Beckmann moved to the United States where he became head of the photography department of the Guggenheim Museum, and in 1952, he taught at the Cooper Union Art School in New York.

Beckmann is best known for painting-non objective and op art imagery. His paintings are characterized as being concerned with light and space, a theme of perception that could also be identified in the photograph offered here, a study of the distinct and elegant form of a pair of spectacles, here slightly abstracted as seen in layered light and shadow.