Max Beckmann “never busied himself with barricades” — or so he claimed. The German painter and printmaker insisted he was apolitical. “I have only tried to realize my conception of the world as intensely as possible,” he explained in 1938 from exile in Amsterdam. “Painting is a very difficult thing. It absorbs the whole man, body and soul — thus I have passed blindly many things which belong to real and political life.”

Passing blindly by was an objective he maintained throughout his tumultuous career. But as a new retrospective at Frankfurt’s Städel Museum shows too well, it was one that he never quite fulfilled. Long cast as interwar Germany’s foremost exponent of despair, Beckmann’s particular style is better understood as a product of a distinctly spiritual foreboding that could never escape politics.

Born into a middle-class family in Leipzig in 1894, Beckmann had a typical bourgeois upbringing until age ten, when his father died. After art school in Weimar and a spell in Paris, he established his practice in Berlin. Here, he found early success under the influence of the Berlin Secessionists, who rebelled against the restrictions on artistic production imposed by Kaiser Wilhelm II. It should have served as an early warning that there is no such thing as the apolitical artist. As well as large theatrical scenes, he honed his skills as a draftsman. Though his prints are renowned for their pioneering and experimental compositions, Beckmann was not a formal innovator. He used the traditional mediums pioneered in Germany in earlier centuries: drypoint etchings, lithographs, and a small number of woodcuts.