Kessler, Charles S. Max Beckmanns Triptychs.

Massachusetts: Harvard University

Press, 1970.
Departure, Beckmann's first painting in triptych form, was begun in May 1932. Within a
short time the Nazis came to power, and Beckmann, having been forced to resign his
teaching position at the Stadel Art School in Frankfurt, moved to Berlin. The painter had
been living in Frankfurt since 1915, where he had risen to a position of dignity and
prestige as one of the city's leading artists. His work had been shown in many European
cities and in America. During the middle 'twenties Beckmann had been featured in
important exhibitions in Mannheim and Berlin, and he had been honored with large
retrospective exhibitions-one in Mannheim in 1928, another in Basel and Zurich in 1930.
Important art critics and museum directors were among his friends, and he enjoyed the
patronage of collectors such as Baron Rudolph von Simolin, Reinhard Piper, and Lilly
von Schnitzler, "whose house in Frankfurt was one of the last grand salons for the
gathering of noted writers, philosophers, and artists."
Even in the early years of his career before World War I, Beckmann had received
considerable acclaim, but during the postwar period he acquired a national as well as
international reputation, and by the end of the 'twenties his standing in the German art
world seemed quite secure. Stephan Lackner, a staunch friend and supporter of the
artist, has recalled that at this time "he was a much-discussed and widely acknowledged
master. Many German museums were acquiring his paintings, and the Berlin National
Gallery had a special room dedicated to his work. As a professor at the Frankfurt Art
School he was venerated by his pupils; he was lionized by literary circles and by
Frankfurt's 'high society.'" A self-important as well as self-conscious individual,
Beckmann greatly enjoyed playing the formidable personage at social gatherings.
Lackner gives a vivid account of Beckmann's attitude and appearance in society: "In life
as in his figure compositions, he liked sharply defined, widely divergent types. For a
party to be well 'composed' for him, it had to contain one old-fashioned, debonair
aristocrat, two or three spectacularly beautiful women, some business-like, energetic
bourgeois, a vivacious, swarthy and somewhat mysterious art dealer and several slim,
intellectual, adoring youngsters. . . He himself certainly looked like his self-portraits: a
more-than-life-size figure with a massive rocklike head reminiscent of an archaic idol, an
athletic, well-shaped body which, at that time, was clothed with easy elegance; he had a
cold aura of distinction and distance around him . . . One had the impression: Here is a
man on the heights of life, at the pinnacle of his artistic and personal powers."
But Beckmann was fundamentally sensitive and anxious underneath the egocentric
callousness and tough cynicism that he cultivated as a protection against the world.
Alfred Neumeyer has written of Beckmann's "tender nervous (as well as brutal) nature."
So too has Perry Rathbone, who like Neumeyer knew Beckmann toward the end of his
career, after his move to the United States in 1947: "His countenance with its intellectual
brow, its wide, downturned mouth, was deeply serious, but his eyes were soft and
kindly . . . Max Beckmann was a proud man . . . whose self-created image was one of

seriousness, masculine courage, and strength. Yet Beckmann's appearance somehow

belied the true state of his constitution. He was a man made sleepless by the
subconscious projection of his anxieties and fantasies. He told me he had been plagued
by wakefulness for twenty-five years. Insomnia had left its mark; his was the face of a
tired man, a man with a burden." Although back in the early 'thirties Beckmann was
undoubtedly less tired than during the period of his friendship with Rathbone, there is no
reason to suppose that he was any the less ridden by anxiety, especially because of the
ominous political situation in Germany, which was having immediate repercussions on
his career and personal welfare. In connection with a later, less serious ordeal in 1949,
when Beckmann was obliged to leave a temporary teaching position and move on to a
new post, Rathbone attests to his hypernervous response to uncertainty and points to
the situation out of which this condition arose: "I recognized that all decisions of a vital
kind, especially those that involved his bodily or personal existence, were never easy for
Beckmann, and they could be agonizing. I was struck in fact by the tension that built up
within him over any impending new experience . . . He never developed any ease of life
and rarely knew solid contentment. Ever since the traumatic experience of the first
World War the element of anxiety in his nature continued to deepen."
Like all Germans of his generation, Beckmann was deeply affected by World War I. It is
a matter of record that he was both stimulated and psychologically wounded by the
horrors he witnessed while serving as a member of the German army field hospital
corps in 1914-1915. A significant parallel may be drawn between those years and
1932-1933, both of which were times of personal crisis for him. The later crisis, when
the artist's career was set back by the rising Nazi tide and he felt compelled to move
away from the town that had been his home for seventeen years, may not have been as
severe as that of 1915, when seriously ill, he was invalided out of the army. But the
disturbances of the time and the accompanying threat to Beckmann's personal welfare
and security would in all probability have been sufficient to reactivate the nervous
anxieties and fantasies that had overtaken him on the occasion of the earlier
breakdown. His retreat into the realm of mythology, as well as his return to an imagery
of horror - both of which tendencies are found in Departure - appear to be related to
both the national political crisis and to the personal crisis that accompanied it.
The story of German politics in the fateful year before President Hindenburg finally
named Hitler as chancellor is one of sordid plotting, frantic electioneering, and
unprecedented violence in the streets. National elections were called on four occasions.
During these contests the Nazis introduced new and revolutionary propaganda
techniques. "They plastered the walls of the cities and towns with a million screeching
colored posters, distributed eight million pamphlets and twelve million extra copies of
their party newspapers, staged three thousand meetings a day and, for the first time in a
German election, made good use of films and gramophone records, the latter spouting
forth from loudspeakers on trucks." The Storm Troopers, "now 400,000 strong,"
threatened to take power by force and institute a reign of terror. Suppressed in April, the
Nazi private army was as free as ever just two months later, when the ban was lifted by
Franz von Papen. "A wave of political violence and murder such as even Germany had
not previously seen immediately followed."

It was at precisely this moment that Beckmann conceived his first triptych. In turning to
the form, the artist may have been harking back to the example of Hans von Marees,
whose grand-style idealism had been an inspiration to him in his student days.
However, Departure can be most meaningfully compared to late Gothic representations
of martyrdom and salvation. When the triptych was first shown in America, a critic rightly
observed that the painting affirmed Beckmann's Gothic inheritance. "In its daemonic
'Walpurgisnacht' quality his work has affinities with Hans Baldung and in its violence it
suggests the Calvaries of a Cranach or a Maleszkircher."
The Gothic spirit inherent in Departure is most strikingly evident in the contrast between
the serene otherworldliness of the center section and the violence of the wings. The
latter depict dark nightmarish scenes of brutality and degradation. On one side a stocky
man in a striped polo shirt holds aloft a bludgeon-like bag of fish, as though about to
"execute" a partially clothed woman who kneels at his feet with her arms bound stiffly
above her head. She bends over a round, green object that has been thought to be a
glass globe. A newspaper - one can easily read "ZEITU[NG]" - lies on the floor
immediately to the right of the woman and the strange green object. Directly beyond the
brutal executioner looms the strictly frontal form of a naked, gagged, and mutilated man
of corpselike paleness, whose bloody stumps of arms are tied above his head to a
stumpy column. another male figure stands in a waste barrel with his hands shackled
together behind his back. He faces directly into a column. Between a third column and
the inner edge of the panel, part of a dark, barred window can be seen. The low ceiling
and otherwise constricted space of the room, together with the presence of bars,
suggests a prison or a torture chamber, while the barbarous, closely spaced columns
are suggestive of a pagan temple. Next to the man in the polo shirt is a still-life display
of immense fruit. The fruit lies on a circular tabletop, which in turn rests like a stage
property upon a little cart or wheeled truck. It has been suggested that this conspicuous
still-life arrangement could be an allusion to an artist's studio; it is perhaps equally
significant that fruit is traditionally associated with luxury and pleasure.
Opposite this image of sadism and debasement, the right panel presents a scene
which, if less violent, is equally charged with an atmosphere of degradation and
suffering. On the stage of a dimly lit theater appear a strange couple. The woman is
clothed in a queer white garment - apparently her nightdress - which reaches to the floor
but leaves one side of her body exposed. She carries an old-fashioned kerosene lamp;
however, her face and shoulders are in deep shadow. Trussed to her body is the
inverted and rigid form of a man dressed only in a short-sleeved, yellow-green shirt.
This unhappy couple is escorted by a blindfolded figure in an usher's uniform. Under his
arm he carries a long fish, a symbol frequently met in Beckmann's paintings after the
mid 1920's. Occupying the stage with these figures is a small naked child - Selz calls
him "a horrible dwarf-like Eros" - who makes a gesture of shame or revulsion. Out front
in the pit a man in a curious costume beats a big bass drum. His ermine-collared coat
and trinket-laden cap recall the wily French King Louis XI. Finally, through a narrow gap
to one side of the backdrop at the rear of the stage, shadowy little figures can be seen
peering down from balustraded stairs or galleries.

The brutal, bizarre scenes of the two side panels are staged within equally cramped and
confining interior settings: a seedy, tarnished theater balancing an unholy temple of
depravity. In strong contrast to the violence and oppressiveness of these scenes, the
central panel, dominated by broad expanses of clear primary colors, shows a group of
heroic figures standing calmly in a small boat upon the open sea. A family of three - a
sort of Holy Family - appears between two majestic figures, one draped in red, the other
in blue. The figure in red is a savage hooded being who grasps a huge fish with both
hands. His companion is a crowned Christ-like personage , who holds a fully laden net
in his left hand while making a blessing with his right.
In a letter dated September 30,1963, Mrs. Beckmann expresses her opinion that "the
best and most authentic explanation" of the meaning of Departure is the one given by
Perry Rathbone in his Introduction to the catalogue of the 1948 Beckmann
retrospective. Mr. Rathbone states: " The side panels symbolize, on the left, man's
brutality to man in the form of a callous executioner and his victims; on the right, the
unbearable tragedy that Nature itself inflicts on human life as symbolized by the mad
hallucinations of a woman encumbered by the lifeless form of a man . . . Out of this
earthly night of torment and mental anguish, the figures of the central panel emerge into
the clear light of redemption and release, embarked for Eternity."
The contrast that Rathbone observed between the "majestic optimism" of the central
panel and the "earthly night" of the wings led one of Beckmann's patrons, Lilly von
Schnitzler, to try to persuade the artist to sell the center panel separately, as she did not
wish to own the remainder of the triptych. The following dialogue ensued in Beckmann's
studio on the Graf Spee Strasse in Berlin in February 1937:
"You want to buy the centerpiece, Lilly, but you can't have that alone, the three belong
together - the center is the end of the tragedy, but the meaning can only be understood
by the three parts together."
"Well, can you explain what the meaning of these terrible, savage panels right and left
is? I like the peace, the serenity in the figures, in the composition, the marvellous
colours of the centerpiece, but the two others are a nightmare which I could not face
daily in my living-room."
Beckmann smiled half ironically half enigmatically: "Life is what you see right and left.
Life is torture, pain of every kind - physical and mental - men and women are subjected
to it equally. On the right wing you can see yourself trying to find your way in the
darkness, lighting the hall and staircase with a miserable lamp, dragging along tied to
you as a part of yourself, the corpse of your memories, of your wrongs and failures, the
murder everyone commits (Beckmann meant spiritually) at some time of his life - you
can never free yourself of your past, you have to carry that corpse while Life plays the
drum ."
"And in the center?"

" The King and Queen, Man and Woman, are taken to another shore by a boatsman
whom they do not know, he wears a mask, it is the mysterious figure taking us to a
mysterious land."
"Does it mean Acheron, is the water the river Styx, does it mean that they are dead,
being taken to Hades - or to some kind of resurrection?"
"Do we know? - The King and the Queen have freed themselves, freed themselves of
the tortures of life - they have overcome them. The Queen carries the greatest treasure
- Freedom - as her child in her lap. Freedom is the one thing that matters - it is the
departure, the new start."
In this exchange between Beckmann and his patron, it is a fair question whether the
word "freedom" carries any political significance. Inasmuch as Departure was painted at
just the time the Nazis came to power, some American critics have seen in the horror of
the side panels an outspoken reference to the sinister course of events at the beginning
of the Hitler era. Bernard Myers is one who interprets the triptych in terms of explicit
social commentary. According to Myers, these panels "symbolized the cruelty of the
Nazi torturer on the left-hand side and the madness and despair of the era at the right."
Perry Rathbone, who obtained information in consultation with the artist himself,
describes the situation more exactly when he writes: "The rise of National Socialism and
the sinister shadow it cast before it, shocked Beckmann into a larger realization of
life . . . Beckmann was determined that his art should defy the political atmosphere
generated by the Nazi revolution. The inner conflict that now possessed him first found
release in the great triptych, Departure." Although Rathbone suggests that the meaning
of the triptych is more religious than political, he also notes that Beckmann thought it
best to hide the finished painting in an attic, and "lest its provocative content arouse the
suspicions of the Nazis, he labeled the back of the canvas, 'Scenes from Shakespeare's
Tempest.'"
Does Departure actually contain political overtones or explicit topical allusions? It does,
I believe, express an attitude toward politics in general, one that hovers between disgust
and bemused fascination with power. Earlier, Beckmann had been outspoken in his
condemnation of the Weimar Republic. Stephan Lackner has recalled that, in the preNazi years when he and Beckmann were both living in Frankfurt, the painter was "full of
misgivings about Germany's social structure. After the First World War and through the
inflation period he was one of the harshest critics of the economic and moral
depression." During the Nazi period, however, and on the occasion of the New
Burlington exhibition in London honoring German artists defamed by the 1937
"Degenerate Art" exhibition in Munich, Beckmann spoke as one completely
disinterested in politics. "Painting . . . absorbs the whole man, body and soul - thus, I
have passed blindly many things which belong to real and political life." This is an odd
statement for one who has been called "the eye of the epoch."
At the same time Beckmann declared that "the greatest danger which threatens
mankind is collectivism. Everywhere attempts are being made to lower the happiness
and the way of living of mankind to the level of termites. I am against these attempts

with all the strength of my being." He also made cynical reference to politics as "an odd
game, not without danger I have been told, but certainly sometimes amusing."
Beckmann's attitude toward politics was clearly not one of indifference, but he held
himself aloof from political polemics as such. It would seem that Departure is therefore
the expression more of anxiety and foreboding than of protest. Beckmann himself
denied that the painting made any direct political comment: "It is to be said that
Departurebears no tendentious meaning - it could well be applied to all times." It would
nevertheless be misleading to assume no connection between the nightmare elements
in the triptych and the civil chaos and violence that erupted as the Weimar Republic was
crumbling. As an expression of brutality and demonic force versus paralysis and
impotence, Departure is profoundly true to the emotional climate of Germany in the
early 1930's.
The nearest thing to an explicit political symbol inDeparture is the drummer in the
costume of Louis XI. (The crowned figure in the central panel belongs to a realm aloof
from politics.) In view of the constant party agitation and electioneering - parades,
rallies, street demonstrations - plaguing Germany in those days, the drummer with a
broadside pasted to his drum is surely a reference to rabble-rousing political activity,
perhaps even to the noisiest and most conspicuous party, the Nazis. With his scrawny
body and sunken features, the drummer somewhat resembles Joseph Goebbels. In a
wider context, the heavy throb of a big drum might suggest the same irrational life force
that drives the executioner on the left. Drummer and executioner, in fact, are formally
linked by means of the parallel position and similar shape of the objects they carry:
drumstick and bulbous-headed weapon.
Clifford Amyx has suggested that the horror in the left wing of Departure may constitute
a comment upon the fate of art in an atmosphere of political brutality and social
disintegration. Noting the presence of the still-life "prop" and " the fact that the figure
wielding a weapon of brutality is dressed as an artist himself might be dressed," Amyx
points to "the possibility that the artist himself may be an instrument of brutality" through
his "submission to any contemporary brutality." The massive body, squarish head, and
stiffly heroic pose of the man in the striped shirt suggest that Beckmann may have put
himself in the grim role of the executioner.
The question arises of how to evaluate Beckmann's expressions of force and violence.
They are a recurrent element in his work, suggesting that he was as much fascinated as
repelled by them. When he wrote in 1938 of resisting intimidation by the horror of the
world, he voiced an attitude of mystical fatalism. "Everything is ordered and correct and
must fulfill its destiny in order to attain perfection." The notion that everything, including
the horror, is ordered and correct reminds one of Nietzsche's advice that history is to be
accepted with a Dionysian outlook that submits joyously to tragedy. In Beckmann there
is the same implication that tragedy and horror are not to be externally denied but may,
through an inward force of ego, be surpassed. Knowing that Beckmann held this view,
we are probably not far wrong in assuming that the executioner has semi-heroic status
as an active natural force.

Perhaps this brutal figure should also be regarded as an expression of compulsive

defiance as well as of wanton assertiveness. Perry Rathbone refers to an inner conflict
and a determination on Beckmann's part to defy the "political atmosphere generated by
the Nazi revolution." After Hitler had become chancellor, all of the arts and the mass
media were quickly put under nearly absolute state control. Not only did the new federal
bureaus for culture determine which artists should be permitted a public career, but the
official threat of the Arbeitsverbot (Work Prohibition) might be invoked to stop a painter
even from working in private. What such a threat would have meant to Beckmann may
be judged from a statement of his in 1915, when military service had made painting all
but impossible: "I am often amused over my idiotically tenacious will to life and art. I
take care of myself with a vengeance like a loving mother - I must live and I will live. I
have never, God knows, stooped to court success, but I would wind myself through all
the sewers of the world, through all humiliation and dishonor, in order to paint. That I
must do. All the form conceptions that dwell within me must be released to the last drop;
then it will be a pleasure to get rid of these confounded torments."
Beckmann was acutely aware of the evil inherent in violent impulses and unrestrained
will, but he appears to have been even more horrified by power" less inaction and loss
of self. In contrast to the heroic stance of the executioner, the condition of the mutilated
man with raised arms, suggesting an attitude of punishment or surrender, or of the
junked man in the barrel , is utterly debasing. The taut, frozen immobility of the inverted
man in the opposite panel is a living death. He is lost, damned, nullified. However, there
is something heroic and defiant in his rigid perpendicularity; like a sentient corpse, he is
the martyred counterpart of the artist-executioner, in whose ambiguous forcefulness one
may see a parallel with Picasso's bulls and minotaurs. That the bullish man in the
striped shirt is also an expression of aggressive male sexuality may be assumed from
his relation to the other figures and from the fact that the bludgeon he wields is a bag of
fish on a stick.
The sexual significance of the fish in Beckmann's symbolism is inescapable in paintings
such as The Big Codfish (1929) or The Fisherwomen (1948). But to him the fish was
more than a phallic symbol. H. W. Janson puts it well when he comments that for
Beckmann the fish was the "primeval symbol of male creative force and spirituality." The
Jungian critic Armin Kesser gives a similar interpretation: "The symbol of the fish
expresses perhaps not only fertility, lucky destiny, creativity, but at the same time one's
own soul, Christ and the redemption." The meaning of the fish in Beckmann's art varies
somewhat according to the context, suggesting raw lust in one place, fruitfulness or
productivity in another. In the most general and inclusive terms, it appears to be
Beckmann's symbol for the life force, considered not only as a biological, but as a
spiritual impulse eternally driving all incarnate beings. The fish carried by the blindfolded
usher in the right wing ofDeparture would appear to represent the biological fate that
bound two human beings together in an unhappy relationship and engendered a third.
The wings of Departure present a pair of tragic alternatives: man bound to woman as
her inverted and negated mate, and woman as the object of a sadistic sacrifice by man.
As Clifford Amyx observes: "Their roles are 'reversed' in the dominance of man in one

panel, woman in the other, and there is nothing in either panel to suggest that their
relationships are natural." Amyx has drawn attention to the fact that Beckmann's
Journey on Fishes (1934) dramatizes in explicit terms the fate of a couple in bondage
similar to the one in the right panel ofDeparture. In this sadly beautiful work, which
belongs to the same period as the triptych, the couple are plummeting through space,
bound to two huge fish that dive vertically down like agents of doom. The man goes
head foremost, the woman rides on his back. She is poised, aloof, resigned. He holds
his crossed arms over his face as though he were plunging to perdition. "Placed against
sea and sky, in a universal 'fate' . . . they represent themselves to each other through
cold black masks."
One may reasonably suspect a substratum of deeply felt personal emotion in
Beckmann's psychological "dramas," but whatever the biographical significance of the
ill-fated couple in the right wing of Departure, Beckmann surely intended a more
universal commentary on the relation of the sexes. If the blindfolded usher with the fish
is interpreted as an agent of destiny - Beckmann himself spoke of "liftboys" as modern
messengers of fate - the couple acquire a kind of mythic grandeur. It comes as an
added stroke of ironic enrichment that the three figures (attendant, doomed man and
woman) echo two sublime themes from the art of the past: the Expulsion from Eden,
with the attendant now driving the sinners forth with a fish instead of a sword, and
Orpheus and Eurydice guided from the Underworld by Hermes. The portal-like backdrop
then becomes an ambiguous gate symbol appropriate to either Eden or Hades. To
suggest both lost innocence and lost love might have been very much to Beckmann's
purpose.
In the side panels of Departure, Beckmann thus expressed his apocalyptic sense of the
horror of life and his vitalist stance of outfacing horror in the manner of a Nietzschean
superman. As the newspaper in the left panel indicates - with the visible first syllable of
Zeitung making explicit reference to time (Zen') - the horror and depravity of the side
panels belong to the world in time, the world of events, or as Beckmann would say, "the
world of political reality." Opposed to "this earthly night" is the world of "spiritual life" in
the center, where a mythic company floats peacefully on the wide blue sea of eternity.
The world of spirit, in contrast to the tight confinement of the scenes in the wings,
partakes of open space, with the elements in tranquility. The figures are larger in scale
than those in the wings, and they are seen in more natural perspective against the
stabilizing line of a level horizon. Colors are brighter and more intense; purity is implicit
in the normative primaries, red and blue.
The dominating figures are the crowned fisherman and the mysterious "hooded" man
with the enormous fish. The Christ-like figure holding the net confers beatitude on the
little band of voyagers with the familiar Christian gesture, but his semidraped form gives
a somewhat pagan impression as well. The other figure, with his ominous mask, gold
arm band, and horn-shaped red sash, is a savage, rather frightening being, though
generally presumed benign in the context. This masked figure, like the big fish he holds,
appears to represent the blind demonic energy of life, the elemental life will. He stands
by an oar, suggesting that his is a propellant role. At the same time, Amyx was probably

right to associate this disguised being with the "ego" or "self," which Beckmann
characterized as "the great veiled mystery of the world."
The Christ-like fisher king , on the other hand, is lord and keeper of the world of spiritual
life. Holding a full net rather than a scepter, he expresses welling fecundity in the
context of human (or divine) control, thereby symbolizing culture and creativity. His
disciplined, authoritative bearing suggests that he personifies the sublimating power of
mind and imagination, the reflective consciousness that transmutes the experience of
the senses and lifts the will to a higher plane. He is the redeemer of reality. There is
something akin to Freudianism in such conceptions, but their source for Beckmann
would have been Schopenhauer, who saw reality as reducible to the senselessly
striving and self-devouring energy of the "will," and the reflective intelligence that can
redeem life in a meaningless universe by elevating and transfiguring that will into
"idea" (Vorstellung, perhaps better translated as "image" or "representation").
Clifford Amyx has observed that the hooded figure and the crowned fisherman
"inevitably recall those figures in [T. S.] Eliot's [The] Waste Land, the Hooded Man and
theFisher King." But Beckmann's fisher king is not a vegetation god. He is not a symbol
of reproductive nature, but of freedom from the tortures of life. His is a spiritual fertility.
He is full-bodied and vigorous, as Amyx himself points out, whereas the Fisher King of
the poem and the legend was a mutilated or impotent figure. He contrasts with the
inverted man in Departure, who does have a wound between his shoulder blades, and
with the gagged man, whose mutilated condition suggests impotence. In The Waste
Land, according to another authority, "the Fisher King's role is to represent man's fate
as it originates in sex but cannot transcend it; without this transcendence . . . he is
doomed to death." The Christ-like king in Departure represents precisely this
transcendence. In The Waste Land it is the "hooded figure" who is associated with the
resurrected Christ, whereas in Departure the masked man is a demonic elemental force
of nature, a kind of savage virility symbol.
Between the majestic king with the full net and the savage oarsman with the mask paired by Beckmann as necessary contraries - a dignified Holy Family may be seen.
Beckmann referred to the woman with the child as the "Queen," saying that she carries
freedom, the new beginning, as her child in her lap. It is clear that the artist was
speaking, not of political, but of spiritual freedom - the freedom of a fresh start in a new
existence. The queen is easily identified with the artist's second wife "Quappi," whose
portrait he painted many times. In the present context she represents fruitfulness and
the blessedness of the creative principle. The inconspicuous "Joseph" may be seen as
a vague father-figure, benign but overshadowed. The true father is the fisherman king,
ruler of the spacious realm of spirit and imagination.
Thus, the essential opposition in Departure is that of worldly bondage to metaphysical
release, of life or history to imagination and art. To use the terminology of
Schopenhauer, the world as idea is shown as a moral refuge from the horrors of the
world as will. The contrast between open and enclosed space dramatizes the Erlosung
or "deliverance." Referring to Departure as an expression of mystical redemption,

Beckmann wrote: "Departure, yes departure, from the illusions of life toward the
essential realities that lie hidden beyond." Yet the so-called "illusions of life" are
presented with a vividness equal to that of the "essential realities." Nonetheless, a
transformation is felt in the passage from the imagery of the side panels to that of the
central one. Looking from the executioner to the parallel but magnified figure of the
fisherman king, one sees brute force transmuted into heroic and authoritative vitality.
Looking from the woman with the lamp and exposed breast to the similarly frontal figure
of the queen, one sees lust transfigured into creative fulfillment. In the convergence,
crossing, and confrontation implicit in these relationships, one senses a sublimating
union. Like Nietzsche, Beckmann believed in the need to span good and evil, but in
Departure he expressed a sort of neo-Platonic idealism that would make "good" the
central and essential reality, whatever the status of its opposite. The work may in the
final analysis be another celebration of the marriage of heaven and hell, but in this
instance at least, one is left in no doubt that heaven is fair and hell is dark, and although
the two may have been married a long time, they are still not compatible.