Max Beckmann at the Berlinische Galerie

The miserable fervour of Beckmann’s work hints at an artist revolted by the 1930s’ cruel new world

But the painter who really captures this avant-garde energy is Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. His “Nollendorfplatz” (1912) uses lemon and lime, offset by blues and greys, to distil the busy street junction down to an encounter between one central building, its walls bulging surreally into the crossroads, and two buses nose-to-nose on the other side. The result is a fizzy convulsion of metropolitan drama that suggests a city on the edge of a perilous yet thrilling new identity.

For Beckmann, the trauma of war and his work as a medical orderly led to a nervous breakdown; he resettled in Frankfurt although he continued to travel to Berlin. Two sequences of lithographs, “Hell” (1918-19) and “Trip to Berlin” (1922), show an artist who has changed utterly. Gone are his smudged contours and elaborate strokes. In their place are jagged puzzles of men and women — in coffee-houses, strip clubs and, in the image that also inspired his seminal oil painting “Die Nacht” (1918), an anonymous carnival of sadism — who appear both suffocated by proximity and yet oblivious to each other’s presence.

Beckmann’s postwar style ostensibly chimed with the latest wave of Expressionism known as Neue Sachlichkeit, or New Objectivity. But the dark mischief of that movement, which used caricature to document Weimar’s misdeeds, had little to do with the thunder-black impulse that animated Beckmann’s new work. The graphic shamelessness of “Die Nacht” — unfortunately not included in this show — reinvents the stiff, tortured bodies of Germany’s Gothic past with a modern idiom of misery that borrows much from Picasso’s early Cubism.

Here, the most haunting testament to his catastrophic mindset is “Women’s Bath” (1919). Beckmann piles his stumpy, corpse-grey swimmers into an inhospitable, orange-lit sauna. This graceless coven are the daughters not of the innocent French sea-nymphs of Renoir and Cézanne but of Picasso’s Demoiselles, an implacable froideur stamped into their DNA.

Clearly, Beckmann’s dark side fed off Weimar Berlin’s decadent undercurrents. Yet he spent most of the next decade in Frankfurt and Paris, returning to Berlin in 1933, after Hitler was appointed chancellor. By then he had been dismissed from his teaching post at Frankfurt’s Städelschule. Soon, the room devoted to his work in Berlin’s Nationalgalerie was dismantled. He had become a “degenerate” artist.

Beckmann responded by hiding his messages of doom in metaphysical wrappings. The washed-out tones and skewed, uncanny perspective of an empty park — “View from Rupenhorn on the Havel” (1936) — hints at the deathly isolation enveloping a once vibrant culture. Painted in 1935, “The Organ Grinder” centres on a pyramid of static, disconnected figures, their theatrical costumes giving them the air of a commedia dell’arte troupe reimagined by Brecht: its miserable fervour hints at an artist revolted by this cruel new world.

At the end of the show, a series of self-portraits in radically different styles offer insights into this most protean of artists. Most revealing is “Self-portrait with a Champagne Glass” (1919). Beckmann has caught himself in close-up, with jaundiced brow and hungry eyes, a cynical, Neue Sachlichkeit predator. Beckmann died in 1950, in New York, having moved to the US in 1947 after spending the second world war in Amsterdam. This show never quite succeeds in tying him irrevocably to the city that was so often his home, yet it is a valuable snapshot of the German art scene at its most brilliant and ultimately embattled.