Max Beckmann could be described as a "loner in the Blue Land". There had been a special relationship between Beckmann and the Bavarian Oberland since 1925, when he married "Quappi", the daughter of the Munich painter prince Friedrich August von Kaulbach, whose real name was Mathilde. His father-in-law had a summer studio and hunting lodge in Murnau's neighboring town of Ohlstadt, where Beckmann occasionally stayed. Beckmann had already had a public, sometimes polemical debate with Franz Marc in the magazine PAN in 1912. Based on their different assessments of the roles of Pablo Picasso and Paul Gauguin as successors to Paul Cézanne in the development of modern painting, Max Beckmann based the quality of painting on sensual but external appearance values such as the "peach-colored shimmer of skin" or the "softness of flesh" and "spatial depth", while Franz Marc cited "the inner greatness of a work" as a criterion. For Marc, the composition of a picture is crucial, for Max Beckmann it is the painterly style, the "artistic sensuality, (...) which lies not only in the surface but also in the depth...". This determines the value of a picture. In 1934, twenty-two years after the exchange of blows with Franz Marc, Beckmann, now 50 years old, is confronted with far greater problems. Having just been highly praised, his art is rejected by the Nazi leadership after 1933. In 1933 he is dismissed without notice from his position as professor at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, his works are confiscated as "degenerate" art and the Beckmann Hall in the National Gallery in Berlin is closed down. During this difficult time, Max Beckmann repeatedly retreats to Ohlstadt with Quappi.