After graduating from the Dresden Academy in 1906, Pechstein joined the art group Die Brücke, founded a year earlier by Heckel, Schmidt-Rottluff, Kirchner and Beyl. Also in 1906, he received the Grand Prize of the State of Saxony, the equivalent of the Prix de Rome, which allowed him to make the first of three trips to Italy. On the way back in 1907, the year of the great Cézanne retrospective, he detoured through Paris and spent nine months there. Max Pechstein admired Van Gogh and Gauguin, whose use of colour had a profound influence on the Fauves and Expressionists. But he also learned from Cézanne, as illustrated by the Red Tea Set, and he occasionally emulated Matisse’s simplification.
In 1908, Pechstein left for Berlin, where Heckel and Kirchner soon joined him. He founded the New Secession in 1910, with Georg Tappert and Emil Nolde, and enrolled most of the Brücke and Blaue Reiter artists in the association. In 1912, he participated in the second exhibition of the Blaue Reiter in Munich and the first exhibition of the Sturm group. He left Die Brücke shortly before it disbanded in 1913
Following Gauguin’s example, he travelled to Polynesia in 1914. Though mobilised in 1916, he nonetheless managed to co-found the Novembergruppe, a leftist, revolutionary art group with which he hoped to advance his plan for reforming German art while associating it for the first time with a political agenda.
He became a professor at the Prussian Academy of Arts 1923, but suffered badly after the Nazis came to power in 1933: his art, like that of the other Expressionists, was denounced as "degenerate" and banned from exhibitions. Dismissed from his position at the Berlin Academy, he was reinstated only after the end of the war.
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