It was already clear during the phone call that Diana Sandmann wasn’t making herself small. “Make a reservation for three people,” she said, although there would be two people going to Café Roma. “Then we have enough space.” Short silence on the line. “Besides, I’ll bring my dog.”
There are two Christmas trees in front of Café Roma, snow is falling and there is a festive atmosphere. Then Diana Sandmann snows in. She carries her dog in her arms. “That’s Polina,” she says, and she immediately supplies the dog breed: “a bichon frisé.” The bitch looks neat. Sandmann says she takes her to the dog groomer several times a year. Then she puts a towel for Polina on the corner seat. The bitch sits down.
Diana Sandmann was a sports photographer and – from 1977 to 1988 – the girlfriend of Franz Beckenbauer. She still has contact with Beckenbauer, she assures, since the pandemic “but unfortunately only by phone”. Today Sandmann is a painter and it was agreed that this would be the main topic to talk about. Although, “today Sandmann is a painter”, that’s wrong. It would be more correct: Today she is a painter who also puts on exhibitions and sells the pictures. She always painted.
Sandmann grew up in Bogenhausen, the family lived in Holbeinstrasse. When four-year-old Diana asked who this Holbein was, she was shown pictures by the painter and is said to have said: “Oh, I don’t want to paint that darkly, but I would like to have a street named after me.” Sandman grins. She still likes the story to this day.
She painted and drew, and it suited her that her parents were friends with artists whose studios she frequented; and that her father, an architect, had his office in the old building on Holbeinstrasse. There she found drawing material.
Diana Sandmann suddenly laughs. Another anecdote occurred to her. She has a lot of interesting memories, and she’s good at recalling them. Only sometimes, when you want to know the year, for example, does she say: “I don’t know that!” She is probably not even aware of this sharpness.
Back to the anecdote: “My father had an application for a project on the table,” says Sandmann. “A drawing that was ready to be handed in.” You can guess what was to come. “I sneaked into my office from my child’s room, sat down on the drawing table on which there were ink glasses and generously painted the plans with ink and chalk.” Of course, the application could not be submitted.
When it came time to choose a career, Sandmann – like many young women at the time – wanted to “make the dream job of a stewardess”. But the husband objected. “I married my childhood sweetheart very young and he didn’t want me to work.” That’s how it was for many women in the 1960s and 1970s. Konstantin Thoeren, her husband, came from the film industry; his mother was the theater and film actress Erica Beer.
They divorced after seven years, and Sandmann took a job at the sports press agency Werek. After just three days, her boss Werner Rzehaczek asked if she “could go behind the gate and take pictures” because some photographers were unavailable. Sandmann did that – and her first picture immediately became sports photo of the month. “I caught fire,” she says, “I did an internship at Rzehaczek as a sports photographer and then went to the games.” Of course she was often with FC Bayern.
Another picture of her became world famous: she photographed the short, polyglot Bayern coach Dettmar Cramer as Napoleon. “The Evening News wanted that,” says Sandmann, “but Cramer turned it down five times. That’s when Rzehaczek said to me: If someone can do it, it’s you.” Cramer actually said yes.
Sandmann used the store at the Gärtnerplatztheater to get Cramer a uniform, put it in the trunk of her car, drove to the Olympic Stadium, took pictures of the “bad-tempered”, disguised coach and, like Cramer, was surprised at the effect they had. “The media reported about it all over the world,” she says. “No matter where he went, he was always confronted with this photo.” Cramer didn’t like being Napoleon. “He was mad at me for years, but not angry,” says Sandmann. “He was a gentleman, a charming gentleman.”
Diana Sandmann orders her second mint tea. That means: She only wants hot water to be refilled in the cup. “The mint is still in there,” she says to the waitress. If you do it that way, it’s more sustainable.
In 1977, Sandmann moved to America with Beckenbauer, and from then on the libero played for Cosmos New York. Diana Sandmann went to a private painting school there. You met world stars. After a fight by Muhammad Ali, Beckenbauer was allowed into his dressing room. “Ali could hardly move, he just put his fist on Franz’s chin for fun.” Sandmann took the photo.
They returned to Germany in the early 1980s and separated in 1988. Diana Sandmann was no longer a sports photographer, although she is still a big football fan today. She now worked as an alternative practitioner for psychotherapy, trained in astrology and later as a grief teacher.
An hour has passed. Actually, this conversation should have been about something else for a long time. “Didn’t we want to talk about me as a painter?” asks Sandmann. Yes, of course, but that with psychotherapy, with astrology, with grief education, that has to be discussed at least briefly, right? She agrees. Well, Sandmann had a psychotherapy practice in Schwabing with a colleague for more than twelve years. She is no longer “active” today, she says, but she still takes care of some old clients when they need something.
And what about astrology?
She talks about it in detail, and the following remains: For Sandmann, when looking at people in psychology, the star constellation under which they were born also plays a role. “CG Jung and Alfred Adler were also astrologers,” she says. One thinks briefly about what Beckenbauer would probably say about it. But of course you don’t ask for it.
She still works as a bereavement counselor today, she does it on a voluntary basis. “I go to families with terminally ill children and accompany them on site,” says Sandmann. Yes, that’s tough, but it’s “very intensive and in-depth, wonderful work”. She can learn a lot from the children. When she had an exhibition at the Munich bank in Schwabing in 2021, a check for 7,000 euros was handed over to the outpatient children’s hospice in Munich. The bank had raised the money through its crowdfunding platform.
With which one finally ended up in painting. Diana Sandmann has been organizing exhibitions since 1993, she sells pictures and has a studio on a farm in the Tölzer Land. Where exactly, she doesn’t want to say. Otherwise people would come by, she says. By the way, she named the roosters there Pablo (after Picasso) and Gustav (after Klimt). Unfortunately, Pablo had a heart attack after a year.
Her style is expressive and narrative, she explains. “Expressive means that color comes before form. Color is my elixir. It is the focus of my painting.” The American Expressionists, such as de Kooning, would have inspired her. In 1993 Sandmann was doing anatomical life drawing in Tuscany, and the director of the summer academy, Emö Simonyi, recommended painting with egg-oil-tempera to her. From then on she no longer worked with paint from a tube, but mixed it herself. “Just rubbing the pigments is a meditative process for me, which I love so much,” she says. “For me, the colors with this technique have a special radiance and vibrancy.”
And the narrative in your pictures?
“My painting moves from the representational to the abstract,” explains Sandmann. “She’s mostly narrative.” She has been painting in red overalls since the 1990s. This work smock appears again and again in her pictures. He tells stories. “During the 2006 World Cup I immortalized him in a series of pictures hanging in the goal net,” she says. “And when my former studio in Untergiesing was terminated in 2019, I put him on a chair in the Giesinger Rosengarten. I called the exhibit Pause”.