Hannes Beckmann (1909–1977) was a Bauhaus-trained German-American artist whose remarkable life connected the European avant-garde with postwar American abstraction. A student of Josef Albers, Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, he fled Nazi Germany, lived in Prague, became involved with the resistance, and was interned during the final years of the war. In 1948, with the support of Hilla von Rebay, the influential champion of non-objective art and founding director of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, Beckmann emigrated to New York and became head of the museum’s photographic department—the institution that would later become the Guggenheim Museum. His precisely constructed, optically vibrant paintings explore color, perception and movement, forming a fascinating bridge between Bauhaus experimentation and the emergence of Op Art, culminating in his inclusion in MoMA’s landmark 1965 exhibition The Responsive Eye.