The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Max Beckmann · Abfahrt · a triptych in oil on canvas, three hinged panels of one height, the two wings narrower than the centre · in each wing a narrow, shallow, closed room packed to the frame with bound, maimed and inverted bodies; in the centre a boat on deep blue water under open sky, carrying a crowned king with a net of fish, a queen holding a child and a hooded figure seen from behind · begun in Frankfurt in 1932 and finished in Berlin, 1932 to 1935 · the Museum of Modern Art, New York · the three panels scored as one work, Beckmann’s first completed triptych; the nine he completed afterward are context
Mode
The altarpiece turned to a secular passion: an allegory of the modern state built in the hinged form the churches made for the sacred
Mythos
The voyage out of the world: a boat of the dead and of rescue, a fisher king, a queen carrying a child, a holy family as emigrants, set between two chambers of torment
Phase
Begun in Frankfurt in 1932, finished in Berlin by 1935, unseen in Germany in its first years; in public view in New York since 1942
Presentation
Three panels of oil on canvas, one height, two narrower wings hinged on a wider centre; closed interiors on either side, open sea and sky between
Register
Dread in the wings, hot colour pressed by black contour; release in the centre, given first as a field of blue; the cabaret and the gospel on one stage
Scale
Two rooms, one sea, a crowd of bodies on either side and a family of three in the middle
Governing Proposition
Two narrow panels hold two rooms without windows. In them people are bound, maimed and hung head down, packed so tight that the frame cuts them, among ordinary objects. Between the rooms, on a wider panel, there is open daylight: a boat on deep blue water, a crowned king with a net of fish, a queen holding a child, a hooded figure with its back to us. The painter took the altarpiece, whose wings once closed over a sacred centre, and turned it to a secular passion painted in Germany between 1932 and 1935. Its wager is that the form itself can say what the time was: cruelty is administered in closed rooms by men in shirt sleeves, and the only way out of them is a departure by sea, into a light the rooms do not have.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Max Beckmann began the work in Frankfurt in 1932 and finished it in Berlin; it is dated 1932 to 1935. Its German title is Abfahrt. It was his first completed triptych, and the form became his principal instrument for the rest of his life: nine more followed, from Temptation of 1936 to The Argonauts of 1950. It hangs in the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
There are three panels of oil on canvas, all of one height, hinged together. The two wings are narrower than the centre. Each wing is a narrow, shallow, closed room, with figures packed to the frame. The centre is an open sea and sky, with a boat across the lower field. It holds the only open air in the work.
The unit weighed is the triptych, scored as one work in three hinged parts, with no panel scored apart. The parts weighed most are the centre panel with the boat and the left wing with its scene of torture. The nine later triptychs are context and are not scored. The painter refused to explain the work in print, and the page gives no key he did not give: it reads what the panels show.
Movement II
The left wing is a cramped interior of torment. Bodies are bound, maimed, hung head down, forced into spaces too small for them; the colour is hot and closed, reds, ochres and greens, and a heavy black contour presses every form against the frame. The right wing is a second closed interior, as crowded, and as bound. Neither room has a window.
What the rooms disclose can be stated: cruelty in the modern state is administered in closed rooms, at close quarters, among ordinary objects, by men in shirt sleeves, and the bound and the binders share one cramped space. Painted in Germany between 1932 and 1935, the work shows torture as domestic furniture before the regime had shown its camps to the world. It is a meaning, not a mood, and it holds.
The disclosure is also coded. The bound pairs, the props and the emblems in the rooms form a private iconography whose terms the painter withheld, and the eye at times reads symbols where it should be struck. One can say plainly what the wings show; what each figure stands for is open, and has stayed open. The rooms are crowded by design, no room and no exit, but some of their figures could be other figures, and the lexicon is laid in piece by piece.
Movement III
The centre opens on deep, saturated blue water under a bright sky. A boat crosses the lower field. In it stand a crowned king with a net of fish, a queen holding a child, and a hooded figure seen from behind; at the side is a helmeted or masked figure. The light is open daylight, and after either room the release is given first as colour: the blue arrives before any meaning does.
The form is the altarpiece. In the old church the wings closed over a sacred centre; here the torments stand where the donors and martyrs stood, and a holy family takes the middle. The centre builds the voyage: the boat of the dead and of rescue, the fisher king, the queen with the child, a mother and son carried over the water out of the world. A holy family as emigrants is the figure the whole work is built for.
The myth is syncretic and partly private, the painter’s own reading of gnosis, of the sea and of the masks, so that some of its figures are summoned rather than fully made. The centre’s figures are hieratic and still: its elevation is one held note rather than a rising, and its claim is a hope rather than a truth. Whether the boat carries the family into exile, into death or back to some first home, the work does not say.
Movement IV
The knowledge of the work is the relation between confinement and release, and the triptych is its instrument. Two closed panels, interiors without a window, are hinged on an open one with a horizon. In the old form the wings could close over the centre; here closing them would shut freedom back inside the rooms. The narrower wings flank and press on the wider centre, and each return from a wing to the sea repeats the departure.
Within the panels the form says it again. The wings’ figures are jammed against the frame, cut by it, upside down within it; the centre’s figures sit in space, with sea behind them. One law governs both: everything is contoured, flattened and placed for meaning, the torments and the release built of the same black line and the same clotted colour, so that the sea is a made thing like the rooms and not a window on nature. The figures are stacked in shallow depth like a relief, inverted and cut without loss of clarity.
The making has its costs. Some drawing is summary, hands and faces simplified to stiffness in places; the centre’s figures are monumental but wooden; the wings’ surfaces are less worked than the strongest of the painter’s later single canvases. The panels’ scales of figure and space differ in ways the work does not wholly resolve. The contour and the colour, which carry the meaning, are commanded; the rest is held to them.
Movement V
The inheritance was the medieval and Netherlandish altarpiece, the German Expressionist figure, the cold contour of Neue Sachlichkeit and the painter’s own crowded allegories of the 1920s. The triptych was taken out of the church and made the vehicle of a secular, political allegory, at a cost: Beckmann lost his post at the Städel school in 1933, the regime hung him among the degenerate in 1937, and the work was painted in Berlin with no prospect of being shown. The turn was prepared by his own work of the 1920s, and the departure from the field is narrower than the danger it was made in.
The work showed that a large allegorical figure painting in an archaic religious form could carry the most immediate political matter, against abstraction and against the illustrative realism of the regimes. The modern secular triptych owes it much, through Beckmann’s nine later triptychs first. In the United States, where it has hung since 1942 and the painter taught from 1947, its weight on figurative painting is real but diffuse; Francis Bacon’s debt to Beckmann is argued and not proved. No school followed it.
After about ninety years the three panels stand together, whole, and the cabaret props of Weimar have outlived Weimar and the regime the rooms foresaw. Among neighbours it stands level with Bacon’s Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion at 8.5, the other modern triptych of cruelty, which presses harder on the field; below The Scream at 8.7; and well below Guernica at 9.1, whose disclosure is public, and the hinged forms it inherits, The Isenheim Altarpiece at 9.1 and The Garden of Earthly Delights at 9.0. The boat is still putting out between the rooms.
Act III · The Twelve
The test is subtractive, and the triptych answers it first in its frame. Take away either wing and the centre loses what it departs from: the boat becomes a regatta. Take away the centre and the wings are a chamber of horrors with no outside. The three panels are required by one another, and that requirement is the work’s argument. The centre is bare and close to necessity: king, queen, child, hooded figure, net, sea. Inside the wings the test gives somewhat. The crowding is meaning, no room and no exit, but particular figures and props could be altered or one removed and the room would stand with less evidence rather than broken. The wings’ symbolism is partly additive, a private lexicon laid in piece by piece.
Score: 8.4 / 10
What can be stated holds: cruelty in the modern state is administered in closed rooms, at close quarters, among ordinary objects, by men in shirt sleeves; the bound and the binders share one cramped space; and the only release is a departure by sea, into a light the rooms do not have. Painted in Germany between 1932 and 1935, the work shows torture as domestic furniture before the regime had shown its camps to the world. That is a meaning, not a mood. What holds it below the gate is that the disclosure is coded: the bound figures and the emblems among them form a private iconography whose terms the painter withheld, and the centre’s release is myth rather than knowledge. The shortfall is in articulation, not in the medium.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Two registers are reached. The wings give the dreadful: bodies forced into spaces too small for them, a body inverted, a body maimed, colour hot and closed, black contour pressing every form against the frame. The centre gives transport: the blue of the sea opening after the closed rooms, the boat cutting across it, the light on the queen and child. The structure makes the transport recur, for each return from a wing to the centre repeats the release. What limits the axis: the centre’s figures are hieratic and still, so its elevation is one held note rather than a rising, and the wings’ terror is at times damped by their own puzzle, the eye reading symbols where it should be struck. High and frequent, not at the top.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The myth is built, in two layers. The form is the altarpiece: the triptych, whose wings in the old church closed over a sacred centre, is turned to a secular passion, with torments where donors and martyrs stood and a holy family in the middle. The centre builds the voyage: the boat of the dead and of rescue, the fisher king with his net, the queen with the child, a mother and son carried over the water out of the world. These figures are load-bearing, not allusive: the departure is the structure, and they are what it is built for. The particular holds as well, in liveries, props and the furniture of Weimar. Short of the top because the myth is syncretic and partly private, so that some deep figures are summoned rather than constructed.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The inheritance: the medieval and Netherlandish altarpiece of Bosch and Grünewald, the German Expressionist figure, the hard, cold contour of Neue Sachlichkeit, and Beckmann’s own large, crowded allegories of the 1920s. The departure: the triptych taken out of the church and made the vehicle of a modern, secular, political allegory, private myth in place of shared scripture, a form the century had left to religious commissions and a few Symbolists made the painter’s principal instrument for the rest of his life. The stake was real: he lost his post at the Städel school in 1933, and in 1937 the regime hung him among the degenerate. Below the gate because the swerve is from his own path more than from the field’s, and the means, contour, compression and colour, were already his.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Change the form and almost everything the work knows changes. Its knowledge is the relation between confinement and release, and the triptych is its instrument: two closed panels, interiors without a window, hinged on an open one with a horizon. In the old form the wings could close over the centre; here closing them would shut freedom back inside the rooms. The narrower wings flank and press on the wider centre. Within the panels the form carries the meaning again: the wings’ figures are jammed against the frame, cut by it, upside down within it, while the centre’s figures sit in space with sea behind them. Make it one canvas and the departure is an incident; make it three pictures and the passage is lost. Short of the top because some of what the wings know rests on symbols that could be other symbols.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Evidence over promise: about ninety years of return, and the work has not closed. What the bound pairs mean, the living tied to the dead or the self to its past; whether the centre is a flight into exile, a death or a gnostic return; who the hooded figure is; how much is politics and how much private metaphysics; whether the painter’s refusal to explain was principle or protection. Readings have moved from the political, a forecast of Nazi terror, to the mythic and back. The formal depth holds too: the three spaces, the contour and the colour reward close looking. Held below the top because the questions are mostly iconographic, keys to a lock, and the yield is narrower than that of the works that stand highest.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The field: European painting of the early 1930s, German painting under the coming dictatorship, and the modern figure in an age of abstraction. The intrinsic force is real: the work showed that a large allegorical figure painting, in an archaic religious form, could carry the most immediate political and existential matter, against abstraction and against the illustrative realism of the regimes. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the modern secular triptych owes it much, beginning with the nine Beckmann completed after it; Francis Bacon’s debt to him in particular is argued and not proved, and is discounted; in the United States, where the work hung from 1942 and the painter taught from 1947, its weight on figurative painters is real but diffuse. No school followed it, and its reach is named rather than wide.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric at about ninety years. Form: whole, the three panels together, no part known to be lost or replaced, and no restoration is credited or charged. Presence: unseen in Germany in its first years, then in public view in New York since 1942 and among the most shown modern figure paintings there; presence earns at most a tenth and is not counted as proof. Fabric: oil on canvas, with no damage known. The surface is fixed in part to its moment, the cabaret props and liveries of Weimar, and it has outlived that moment and the regime it foresaw; the meaning has not dated. The usual figure for its span, and not above it.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Judged as command of oil painting on a large scale, to the anchors used for any medium. Load-bearing where achieved: the black contour, heavy and continuous, binding colour into hard forms and making the wings’ crowding legible; the colour, hot reds, ochres and greens in the rooms against the ultramarine of the centre, so that the release is first of all chromatic; the compression of space, figures stacked in shallow depth like a relief, inverted and cut without loss of clarity; three fields designed to one height, read across and back. The costs are charged: some drawing is summary, hands and faces simplified to stiffness in places; the centre’s figures are monumental but wooden; the wings’ surfaces are less worked than the strongest of the painter’s later single canvases.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: an inverted, bound body in the left wing and the open blue of the sea in the centre. They obey one law. Everything is contoured, flattened and placed for meaning, the torments and the release built of the same black line and the same clotted colour, so that the open sea is a made thing like the rooms and not a window on nature. The same law governs the props and the royal figures; the cabaret and the gospel share one stage, and the contrast between wings and centre is the law, not a break in it. Short of the top because the law is the painter’s manner as much as the work’s: the private symbols obey it by being painted in it while their meanings follow no single key, and the panels’ scales of figure and space differ in ways the work does not wholly resolve.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The orders held: the state, as torture and confinement; the body, bound, maimed and inverted; the couple and the family, in the bound pairs and in the king, queen and child; labour, faintly, in the fisher’s net and the torturers’ work; the sacred, in the altarpiece form and the holy family; the natural order, in the sea and sky; history, the German 1930s, foreseen; art and spectacle, in the cabaret props. They are joined by one movement, from confinement to departure, not listed. What holds the axis lowest is the means of holding: much is carried by emblem, one figure standing for an order rather than the order being shown, and three painted panels cannot unfold the state or labour as a novel or a cycle can. A high figure for a single painted work.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.5 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.0, then The Living Form at 8.8 and The Made at 8.7. Three panels whole after about ninety years, outliving the Weimar furniture they are painted with and the regime they foresaw; a form in which the hinge is the argument, two closed rooms pressed against an open sea that the old altarpiece could have shut inside them; and a black contour and a colour that carry the meaning, the release given first as blue.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.8: the state, the body, the family, the sacred, the sea and the German 1930s held in one movement, but much of it by emblem, and three panels cannot unfold the state or labour. Then Pressure on Tradition at 8.2: real force, a reach that is named rather than wide. Then The Unconcealment and The Swerve at 8.3: a disclosure coded in a withheld iconography, and a turn prepared by the painter’s own earlier work.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.4 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.8, The Made at 8.7, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on three of five: The Imperishable at 9.0 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.3, The Swerve at 8.3 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.2 fall short of it: the disclosure is coded in an iconography the painter withheld and its centre states a hope rather than a truth, the swerve is from the painter’s own path more than from the field’s, and the reach is diffuse, with no school following. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.2, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.8. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 101.8, an average of 8.483 that displays 8.5, in Tier IV, half a point above the 8.0 at which it begins and short of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the object, from reproductions and from the literature. The composition is known in its large lines and the centre panel well; the figures of the two wings are known less exactly, and they are described here only as far as they are certain. The work scored is the triptych: Max Beckmann, Departure (Abfahrt), oil on canvas, three hinged panels of one height, the wings narrower than the centre, begun in Frankfurt in 1932 and finished in Berlin, 1932 to 1935, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, scored as one work with no panel scored apart. Its form is whole; its condition is weighed on The Imperishable alone. The nine later triptychs, from Temptation (1936) to The Argonauts (1950), are context and are not scored. No words are quoted: the painter refused to explain the work in print, and no statement of his about it is given. Francis Bacon’s debt to Beckmann is stated as argued and is not credited to the work. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the panels’ dimensions, the date of the last work on them, how and from whom the museum acquired the work, the particular figures and objects of each wing, any letter in which the painter glossed the panels, and any cover title under which the work may have been kept in Germany.