Travel is a fundamental experience of human existence. For Max Beckmann it was of existential importance both in a symbolic, but also in a deeply personal sense. In the 1920s, he regularly traveled to the noble health resorts and palace hotels on the Dutch, Italian, and French coasts. His defamation as a "degenerate" artist by the Nazi regime, however, forced him to retreat, first from Frankfurt to Berlin and subsequently into exile in Amsterdam. His emigration to the United States marked the culmination of a life entwined with the longing to travel as well as uprooting, transit and exile. Max Beckmann. DEPARTURE assembles an outstanding selection of artworks and initiates a dialogue with hitherto unseen objects and materials from the Max Beckmann Archive. It shows Beckmann’s relationship to film and literature as a producer of images of aspirations and longing resonating with notions of identity and home.

Text by: Sarah Louisa Henn, James Arthur, Ulrike Draesner, Françoise Forster-Hahn, Maike Grün, Florian Illies, Dževad Karahasan, Sibylle Lewitscharoff, Paul Nizon, Nina Peter, Eva Reich, Uljana Wolf, Christiane Zeiller, Hanns Zischler et al.
Designed by: Martha Stutteregger