Max Beckman – Departure. 1932-35
https://www.wikiart.org/en/max-beckmann/departure-1935
The triptych is traditionally the art of the altarpiece, and it enables an artist to present a complex world view that can be difficult to depict in a single image. How can an artist depict the extremities of light and dark or good and evil and contradictory world views side by side. How can the pain, lostness and brokenness of humanity be reconciled with the peace and harmony of nature.
it is no coincidence that it was to Grunewald that the German painter Max Beckman turned to for inspiration during period of social and political turmoil that engulfed Germany in the first half of the twentieth century. Beckman was haunted and broken by his experiences in the First World War when he served as a medical orderly, and he turned to mediaeval German art to try to make sense of a world that did not make sense.
Grunewald – Isenheim Alter piece -1512-16
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isenheim_Altarpiece#/media/File:Grunewald_Isenheim1.jpg
Beckman’s mantra that ‘there is no utopia without reality ‘found full expression in his tryptic ‘Departure” which forms a secular altarpiece. Painted in 1932/33 this tryptic plunge’s into the depths that European society was drowning in and somehow throws us a lifeline in the form of the central panel where a woman sails off into mythical infinity. The love expressed in the figures of the central panel is in stark contrast to the brutal violence that the figures on the two end panels are inflicting on each other, as they are locked into a never-ending theatrical spiral of self-inflicted brutality, torture, bondage ,violence and abuse for which there appears to be know way out. Yet in the central panel Beckman shows us the way in the horizon that points to infinity and the hope of a better future. Beckman says the central panel does not make sense unless seen in the context of the other two panels.
In departure he shows us that an artist can depict a world that is held in a state of perpetual antitheses is. Though opposites repel they hold each other in balance, good and evil, light and dark, nature and culture. Beckman shows that through the device of the triptych the big narratives about the meaning of life can be balanced even if they are full of contradiction, by bringing the chaos and madness of the world and uniting it with the peace, order, love and harmony of the natural world .
Beckman taught me that it is ok for my work to be full of contradictions and opposites because that is the very subject matter. Its ok to paint my peaceful sunsets and free flying birds next to images of human decay and death because every second of every day all these things are going on .The large 9/11 crucifixion tryptic I created helped to heal the chasm in my own worldview where in my mind good and bad, light and dark where set were set against each other in a perpetual war. A shift in my thinking started to take root where seeming opposites were now unified into a more holistic vision.
Beckman’s dictum that ‘There is no utopia without reality ‘became the motto I hung over the door of my studio.
