Newsnight Review discussed the exhibition of paintings by German artist Max Beckman at Tate Modern.

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(Edited highlights of the panel's review)

MARK LAWSON:
The paintings of Max Beckmann. This is an artist watching a society going mad, fearing he was going mad himself.

ROSIE BOYCOTT:
I think he clearly did go mad at the end. I felt this was a very, very angry man, struggling to try to make sense of a very confusing and angry world.

If you look at a painting like knight, there is this sense he has squashed his characters in a box. They are bursting to get out.

You feel that is also what is happening within him. He is bursting to get out and express himself. I was fascinated by the self-portraits. He paints many more of himself than most artists.

You follow through this face which is accepting to the world. Until you get right up to 1950s, he's furious and angry.

Even when he's with his wife, curiously with his characters, they are always looking in another direction from each other, as if there is no room in life for a relationship.

I didn't particularly like it. I thought it was fascinating and unsettling.

I didn't like the paintings where he tried to be nice. Street scenes in Frankfurt left me cold. They could have been done by anyone.

LAWSON:
We move to our second panellist.

TOM PAULIN:
I was fascinated by it.

I was looking forward to seeing it. I read a brilliant review by Michael Hoffman. I enjoyed it very much.

He is representing the awful horrors of the Weimar Republic, the chaos.

He is an anti-Nazi painter. Identifying with German and Dutch Jews. Close to the Dutch resistance and people who are fighting the Nazis . That comes through again.

There is this imprisoned texture. At the same time there is this repellent texture to the handling of the paint and the quality of the paint. This terrible north German light.

He paints Genoa like Hamburg and it looks dreadful. He is making them unpleasant. He's a historical witness.

Eventually you think, I've seen that. I've done that. When he gets to New York, he's lost it. He's time warped. He's painting a bit like Matisse. He's past the early work.

LAWSON:
The journey they are trying to show is the way he reacted to the Nazis.

ALLISON PEARSON:
I would have to say, there is no way, if you said to me, "you are going to see a German painter, lots of scenes of torture", I would have said "no, I will find something else to do."

I thought it was fantastic. The scenes of horror are horrifying, but they are painted meticulously, the night painting looks like Macbeth compressed into one room.

As you move through the exhibition, you see the man's life. The early portraits are of him looking mild, complacent, then he gets back from the First World War, where he looks mad, staring, horrified.

Then there is the great self portrait, Man in tuxedo. It is fantastic, a real survivor. We are seeing the history of him. Beckmann was a great painter of contentment and happiness.

BOYCOTT:
I came out feeling he was someone totally unresolved.

PEARSON:
He fell in love in 1925 with his second wife, and the yellow room at the centre of the exhibition is full of a beautiful portrait of his wife in a blue dress.

BOYCOTT:
When you see them together, they are staring away from each other and you have a feeling there is no relationship.

PAULIN:
Just like the early portrait was of the first wife.

BOYCOTT:
When you walk out the final door, you do not feel you know what he was trying to say and you feel he must have died frustrated and disappointed.

PEARSON:
You expect it to be full of horror, but he made the art speak and survive. There is tremendous wishfulness and hope in the art.

LAWSON:
The sheer range, the biblical tableau, the self portraits, and the night paintings, but a narcissist because his favourite frame is a full length mirror when you look at it and there are mirrors in the background.

PAULIN:
It is a German Protestant consciousness, hence all the self portraits, hence the trapped feelings inside his own head.

BOYCOTT:
He was kicked away from his own country because he did not like it, and you have a sense of a wanderer who never touched ground again.