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.

Classical Modernism is an inexhaustible source of inspiration for the generations of artists that followed. This catalogue sheds new light on the relationship between modern and contemporary art across the generations and across the genres, through the encounter between the artists featured in two outstanding collections. In the early twentieth century the avant-garde prepared the way for a free treatment of colour, line and space and created new community models. Many contemporary artists have studied the legacy of modernism and pose new questions concerning the treatment of body, gender and identity. The new presentation of the modern art collection in the Pinakothek der Moderne shows these new ideas in cooperation with the Sammlung Goetz. Works of art from both collections as well as the Stiftung Ann und Jürgen Wilde enter into a new kind of dialogue. Artists: Francis Bacon, Max Beckmann, Huma Bhabha, Louise Bourgeois, Max Ernst, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Rodney Graham, Florence Henri, Wassily Kandinsky, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Kathe Kollwitz, Jonathan Lasker, Sarah Lucas, Franz Marc, Henri Matisse, Paulina Olowska, Pablo Picasso, Thomas Schütte, Kiki Smith and Wolfgang Tillmans et. al.