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Max Klinger, though twenty years younger than
Bocklin,
expressed his admiration by dedicating a sequence of prints to him.
Klinger completed
his studies in Karlsruhe, then travelled to Berlin, Munich and Brussels.
He spent three years (1883-1886) in Paris and two more in Italy before
returning to settle in his native Leipzig. There he enjoyed tremendous
prestige; his home became the centre of the city's social and artistic
life. Himself inspired by Goya, he, in his turn, exercised a beneficial
influence on Otto Greiner and Alfred Kubin.
Klinger's work revealed the
power of art to Kubin at the time of the latter's great existential
crisis; it led him to conclude that "it was worth devoting one's entire
life to such creations".
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Max Klinger
born February 18, 1857, Leipzig
died July 5, 1920, near Naumburg, Germany
German painter, sculptor, and engraver, whose art of symbol,
fantasy, and dreamlike situations belonged to the growing late
19th-century awareness of the subtleties of the mind. Klinger's
visionary art has been linked with that of Arnold Böcklin; the
expression of his vivid, frequently morbid imaginings, however,
was not noted for technical excellence. His work had a deep
influence on Giorgio de Chirico.
Klinger, who had received some training at the Karlsruhe art
school, created a sensation at the Berlin Academy exhibition in
1878 with two series of pen-and-ink drawings—Series upon the
Theme of Christ and Fantasies upon the Finding of a Glove. Their
daring originality caused an outburst of indignation;
nonetheless, the Glove series, on which Klinger's contemporary
reputation is based, was bought by the Berlin National Gallery.
These 10 drawings (engraved in three editions from 1881) tell a
strange parable of a hapless young man and his obsessive
involvement with a woman's elbow-length glove.
In 1887 The Judgment of Paris caused another storm of protest
because of its rejection of all conventional attributes and its
naively direct conception. In his painting Klinger aimed at
neither classic beauty nor modern truth but at an impressive
grimness with overtones of mysticism. His Pietà (1890) and
Christ in Olympus (1896) are also characteristic examples of his
work.
Klinger's leanings toward the gruesome and grotesque found
further expression in his series of etchings inspired by the
work of Francisco de Goya, including Deliverances of Sacrificial
Victims Told in Ovid (1879), Fantasy on Brahms (1894), Eve and
the Future (1880), A Life (1884), and Of Death (part 1, 1889;
part 2, 1898–1909). In his use of the etching needle he achieved
a unique form of expressiveness.
Klinger's late work was primarily sculpture. Interested in
materials and colour, he executed polychromed nudes possessing a
distinctly eerie quality, as well as statues made of
varicoloured materials in the manner of Greek chryselephantine
sculpture (e.g., Beethoven [1902], Salome [1893], and Cassandra
[1895]). His last project, a colossal monument to the German
composer Richard Wagner, remained unfinished at his death.
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Max Klinger
(see collection)
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Max Klinger
The Statue of Beethoven
1902
Various kinds of marble, 310 cm high
Museum der Bildenden Kiinste, Leipzig
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Max Klinger and
Otto Greiner
Two Engraved Frontispieces, one dedicated by
Klinger to Arnold Bockhn, the other by Greiner to Max Klinger, c. 1880
Klinger was a fine engraver who revered Goya and was attracted by the
fantastic.
His engravings are characterised by the development of an imaginary world
which is both realistic
and yet slightly out of kilter with reality, thus giving an impression of
the uncanny.
Klinger influenced Otto Greiner,
a less gifted student, and, above all, the astonishing Alfred Kubin.
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Max Klinger
Paraphrase on the Discovery of a Glove
1881
Series of etchings and aquatints, Staatliche
Graphische Sammlung, Munich
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1. Place; 2. Action; 3. Desires; 4. Salvage; 5. Triumph;
6. Homage; 7. Anguish; 8. Tranquillity; 9. The Seizure; 10. Love
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This remarkable series of
engravings constitutes a veritable comic-strip.
Well-dressed people roller-skate in the opening frame.
There follow visions of barely-veiled eroticism in which the glove,
saved from the ocean and borne aloft in triumph,
is finally carried off by a sardonic pterodactyl.
Klinger has cunningly drawn the frames of the broken window intact;
the reptile in flight is therefore purely imaginary.
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1. Place |
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2. Action
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3. Desires
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4. Salvage
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5. Triumph
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6. Homage
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7. Anguish
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8. Tranquillity
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9. The Seizure
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10. Love
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Franz von Stuck
(1863-1928), the son of farmers from Lower Bavaria, settled in Munich
and soon became the city's dominant artistic figure, the 'prince of
painters'. A teacher at the Academy, he counted Kandinsky, Klee and
Albers among his pupils. He himself was influenced by
Bocklin,
peopling his paintings with male and female fauns and centaurs. For a
number of years, starting in 1892, when he contributed to the creation
of the Munich Secession, he painted works of Symbolist content such as Sin
(1893,), The
Kiss of the Sphinx (1895)
or The Wild Hunt (1899).
Sin is probably his best-known work; its notoriety today may be gauged
from the fact that a reproduction of it hangs in the bar of the "Mexiko"
station of the Berlin metro. In a procedure not unusual for von
Stuck,
the moralising subject - yet another femme fatale - is the pretext for a
handsome nude. The splendid body is caught in a loop of light, while the
woman's dark eyes scrutinise the viewer from a pool of shadow; she is
wrapped in the coil of an enormous snake whose snarling gaze has a
disagreeable intensity. The painting's "moral" is simplistic at best,
but the design and unaffectedly academic execution are impressive.
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Franz von Stuck
(see collection)
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Franz von Stuck
Water and Fire
1913
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Franz von Stuck
The Kiss of the Sphinx
1895
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Carlos Schwabe (1866-1929) was the most "international" of the artists
quoted in this chapter: a Swiss citizen, born in Germany, he spent most
of his life in France and regularly took part in the Rose+Croix Salon,
for which he designed the first poster in 1892. He displays
admirable craft in his water-colours, but when he touches upon religious
and edifying subjects his excessive sweetness of tone is typical of the
sentimental and commercial "religious art" of the period.
Throughout the period which concerns us, the power of Germany was on the
rise and that of Austria was waning. Beset with irreconcilable conflicts
born of the aspirations of its peoples, the Austrian Empire descended
into instability. The resulting cultural climate received its definitive
portrayal in Robert Musil's Man without Qualities. The lack of all
coherent policy accompanied the collapse of political will in an
atmosphere that favoured world's end expectations; Hermann Broch
described it as a "Joyful Apocalypse". Once the war had finally come,
this same Apocalypse, no longer joyful, was described by the formidable
critic, Karl Kraus, in a collage play entitled The Last Days of Mankind.
And they were indeed the last days of a way of life. But the period with
which we are concerned is the entertainment before the storm. It is, to
adopt another metaphor, the sanatorium of Thomas Mann's The Magic
Mountain; the visiting Hans Castorp is caught up in the sanatorium for
seven years and freed from the enchantment only by the outbreak of war.
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Carlos Schwabe
(see collection) |
Carlos Schwabe
The Grave-Digger's Death
1895 |
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Carlos Schwabe
The Wave |
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Gustav
Klimt (1862-1918)
first made himself known by the decorations he executed (with his
brother and their art school companion F. Matsch), for numerous theatres
and above all (on his own this time) for the Kunsthistorisches Museum in
Vienna, where he completed, in a coolly photographic style, the work
begun by Makart. At the age of thirty he moved into his own studio and
turned to easel painting. At thirty-five he was one of the founders of
the Vienna Secession; he withdrew eight years later, dismayed by the
increasingly strong trend towards naturalism.
The coruscating sensuality of
Klimt's work might seem in perfect accord
with a society which recognized itself in those frivolous apotheoses of
happiness and well-being, the operettas of Johann Strauss and Franz
Lehar. Nothing could be further from the truth. Far from being
acknowledged as the representative artist of his age,
Klimt was the
target of violent criticism; his work was sometimes displayed behind a
screen to avoid corrupting the sensibilities of the young. His work is
deceptive. Today we see in it the Byzantine luxuriance of form, the
vivid juxtaposition of colours derived from the Austrian rococo -
aspects so markedly different from the clinical abruptness of
Egon
Schiele. But we see it with expectations generated by epochs of which
his own age was ignorant.
For the sumptuous surface of
Klimt's work is by no means carefree. Its
decorative tracery expresses a constant tension between ecstasy and
terror, life and death. Even the portraits, with their timeless aspect,
may be perceived as defying fate. Sleep, Hope (a pregnant woman
surrounded by baleful faces) and Death are subjects no less
characteristic than the Kiss. Yet life's seductions are still more
potent in the vicinity of death, and
Klimt's works, though they do not
explicitly speak of impending doom, constitute a sort of testament in
which the desires and anxieties of an age, its aspiration to happiness
and to eternity, receive definitive expression. For the striking
two-dimensionality with which
Klimt surrounds his figures evokes the
gold ground of Byzantine art, a ground that, in negating space, may be
regarded as negating time - and thus creating a figure of eternity. Yet
in Klimt's painting, it is not the austere foursquare figures of
Byzantine art that confront us, but ecstatically intertwined bodies
whose flesh seems the more real for their iconi-cal setting of gold.
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See on the next page:
Gustav Klimt
"All Art is Erotic"
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Gustav Klimt
Danae
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