Film & Kunst: "Max Beckmann - Departure"

Cinema Quadrat and Kunsthalle Mannheim show a documentary film about the artist Max Beckmann:

MAX BECKMANN - DEPARTURE
DEU 2013. D: Michael Trabitzsch. Documentary. 97 min. FSK: 6

The film follows Beckmann's life as a painter chronologically from the first to the last painting and shows the many, often involuntary stages of his life in Europe and the USA. Enriched with quotes from his diaries and interviews with museum experts, the film traces the enigmatic pictorial inventions of one of the great masters of the 20th century. Max Beckmann himself considered only Picasso to be his equal. Beckmann's impressive triptychs are at the center of the interrogation of his works. In the early 1930s, he used them to find his own individual artistic way of juxtaposing narrative and mystery, expression and parable in a form of three-panel paintings that had existed since the Middle Ages. Above all, the triptych "Departure", begun in 1932, with its disturbing scenes of torture, casts a foreboding look ahead to the terrible threat of the National Socialist regime of violence to which Max Beckmann, like so many of his fellow German artists, was exposed. And yet Max Beckmann, who spent years of hunger in exile in Amsterdam from 1937, said "Gestaltung ist Errettung" - "to create is to be saved".

Introduction: Christiane Wichmann, M.A., Kunsthalle Mannheim