Max Klinger
Malerei und Zeichnung (Painting and Drawing)
Part Three: Classical Art and the Pursuit of Total Art
(Review by Francesco Mazzaferro)
[Original version: January 2015 - New Version: April 2019]
Go to Part One
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| Fig. 13) The English translation of Max Klinger's Painting and Drawing, translated by Fiona Elliot and Christopher Croft, and edited by Jonathan Watkins (Birmingham, Ikon Gallery, 2005) |
Is a total art (Gesamtkunst) still possible?
Having found out that the invention of
printing has created the conditions for a break between painting and drawing,
Klinger was uncertain whether there are still conditions for a total art. Hereafter
is what he wrote, in a tone of regret: "So we have the art of building and
of sculpture, painting and reproductive art, as well as decorative and
specialised arts. What we lack is the great, unified expression of our view of
life. We have arts, but no Art.” [94]
Therefore, he does not consider inevitable the
division between painting and drawing: it is the result of technological
phenomena, but other technologies will come and the spirit of a unique art shall
be restored, even if it will be a long and difficult path. “We daily have the
opportunity to register, in all that is written about art, complaints about the
stylelessness of our own time. In architecture, sculpture and painting we rely
on earlier, now defunct movements, and even the great innovations – iron frames
in architecture and the indubitably improved understanding of light and colour
in painting – are not sufficient for the creation of style” [95]
Moreover, total art - which had been the
hallmark of the Renaissance and of which Rococo had unsuccessfully attempted a reaffirmation - had never been lost: it was still preserved by the art of
Wagner, and had precedents in the past, even if little was left of it (of
ancient Greece, painting and music were lost; like the polychrome features of sculpture).
“This concerted interplay of all the visual arts corresponds to what Wagner was
striving for and attained in his music dramas. However we have not achieved this
yet, and what has come down to us from the great epochs of the past, has been
largely mutilated or torn apart by ages that thought differently. For us,
painting is limited to the concept 'picture'.” [96] In the past “there was only
one art. On the basis that
architecture, painting and sculpture certainly had to be interconnected, that
each needed the others in order to rise to the greatest heights, the most noble
task (…) was the transformation of space into a work of art” [97]
At the center of each total art there is
the coloristic element: “Throughout all the great epochs of art, colour had
been the element that connected the three arts – architecture, painting and sculpture.
A wide variety of circumstances contributed to the loosening and ultimate
dissolution of this relationship. One of the reasons was the renewed interest
in the supposedly colourless sculptures of Antiquity. [98] (…) The colourful
Rococo rallied the arts again, But artists’ energies were already directed too
resolutely towards individual creativity, and, their hands tied by their search
for much too much originality, they produced nothing monumental. And now it only
needed the great revolution – false Hellenism and the colourless new art,
imitating that of the ancients – for the one-time Gesamtkunst to disintegrate entirely” [99]
The role of sculpture
For Klinger, a central role for the
affirmation of total art is the use of polychrome sculpture.
“It is here, in Raumkunst – which we regard with such remarkable trepidation [100]
- should come into play. In every monumental space, we feel the need for
plastic works in the purely architectural, simpler structures of the lower
realms. These works, in the form of corroborative characters and matching
groups, form a bridge to the flights of fancy in the upper reaches of the
rooms. Since the first overall impression of such spaces is without doubt
dependent on their colour, the sculptures most definitely should not be monochrome
pieces which – due to the contrast – have the appearance of silhouettes,
completely contradicting their role and their essence. Colour must come into
its own here, too, it must define forms, articulate, speak. And it is quite
wrong to fear – in these coloured sculptures – the encroachment of Realism. Of
course, one will fall prey to Realism or aimless games with colour if these
works are not conceived in colour for coloured spaces.” [101]
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| Fig. 14) The Italian translation by Michele Dantini (Nike Editions, Segrate, 1998) |
And just to study sculpture, Klinger went
to Rome. If the sculptural production (from the New Salome, which is of 1893, and therefore is made on his return
to Leipzig) belongs to a later phase, from the experience of Roman study remains
an imprint of net classical derivation. De Chirico writes: "The sculpture
of Klinger is absolutely classic. He tried in many polychrome statues, as in
that wonderful Cassandra [editor's
note: a theme repeated several times] to rediscover the emotion of the jewel
statue, like it must have been in Greece in golden ages. (...) He tried always,
also with marble, to fix the human figure in his ghostly and eternal appearance,
to make it rise as an apparition, which is not for the fleeing moment, but
belongs to the past and the future, an already materialised and a forthcoming
apparition. " [102]
Raumkunst: the "space art" of the future, almost an installation
With the term Raumkunst, Painting and
drawing provides us the keyword to grasp the most famous and also the most
contested artwork by Klinger: the Beethoven
of 1902, a gigantic (three-meter high) statue whose first studies were started
in 1885 in Paris. It is a polychrome and multi-material group, made of Sira
marble (Greece), Pyrenean marble, Tyrolean alabaster, bronze, ivory, glass,
agate, jasper and nacre.
Besides the colour effects of the statue, it
must be added that the work was exhibited in the headquarters of the Vienna
Secession, along with the famous Beethoven frieze of Klimt, in the form of an ad-hoc
installation designed by Josef Hoffmann.
Raumkunst
is to signify the unity of the arts. The term Raum is difficult to translate into
Italian. It implies the concept of space: it has the same Germanic root of the English
‘room’, but it is also used to speak of the interplanetary space. Today, in
German is used as the equivalent of 'decor': a meaning that does not correspond
to the much wider sense in which is used by Klinger.
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| Figs. 15 and 16) The statue by Max Klinger at the heart of the installation by Josef Hoffmann, with friezes by Klimt (XIV exhibition of the Vienna Secession, Vienna Secession, 1902) Source: http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/dkd1902/0191?sid=793344a9dded1f519077659a8db759dd |
I am using the term 'space art', knowing
that the term was used in a completely different direction by Lucio Fontana in
mid '900. Dantini speaks of "monumental art", Fiona Elliot and
Christopher Croft have preferred to leave Raumkunst
and added in a footnote: "For Klinger the term Raumkunst, which literally means 'room art’ or 'space art' and which
cannot be adequately translated in this context, ranges in this meaning from
the painted interiors under discussion here through to the Gesamtkunstwerk which he strove for in his own work." [103] In
this sense, ‘space art’ includes all arts - painting, sculpture and
architecture - and restores, with the colour as its central element, the unit
that had been the feature of classical art and had found the ultimate
expression, albeit a limited one, in rococo. An article by Joseph August Lux of
1902 addresses the issue of Raumkunst
and offers some splendid pictures of all the works contained in the
installation. [104]
Klinger had already experienced the issue
of Raumkunst in 1883, experimenting
with the frescoes in the villa Albers, [105] where he was confronted
with the need to combine different arts in a horizontal space. It was a problem
he faced also with Christ on Olympus,
which he began in Rome in 1889, and that kept him occupied until 1898.
Hereafter is what Klinger wrote in Painting and Drawing: “The artistic – or rather, aesthetic – requirements concerning the integrity of the picture change significantly in ornamentation and Raumkunst. In both cases it is not only the individual work of art that should affect us, but also the artistic unity of the space, that is to say, the surrounding of the picture. And in both cases it is necessary that these should be an intellectual connection with the purpose and significance of the space, and since this cannot happen without reciprocal relations, the self-contained integrity of the representation is no longer at issue – insofar as the intention was not merely to create decorative landscapes or vedutas. Even when the scale is not particularly grand, in the artist’s striving to produce a unified effect, form and colouration take on less importance so that atmosphere, expression and rhythmic movement may be rendered with greater clarity and comprehensibility. The intellectual boundaries of the pictorial representation widen of their own accord. In certain cases the integration of individual decorative pictures into the architecture – their close affinity with ornamentation – propels them into allegory; an area where the ingenious representation of ideas has to be on a par with the treatment of forms, if one is to avoid monotony or the most conventional variations on well-known themes.” [106]
On the nude
What is the last element of unity of total
art? Drawing and painting - as
already mentioned - cites the colour, but the last pages of the pamphlet are
linked to the nude. It is the human figure, undressed, to be the common unit of
measurement to art and to its proportions. It is not by coincidence that even Beethoven,
in the Vienna sculpture of 1902, is portrayed naked.
It is a theme that - as noted by Marsha
Morton [107] - binds Klinger not only to
the most classical elements of artists immediately preceding him (von Mareés,
Hildebrand, Fiedler) but also to the aesthetic reflection of his French
contemporaries (Pissarro, Seurat, Cezanne). It is certain that those pages are
the direct source of inspiration of the manual "Learning to paint" by
Lovis Corinth.
“The core and the focus of all art, where
all its associations meet – the starting point for the diverse development of
the various arts – is and always has been the human being and the human body.
The representation of the human body alone can provide the foundations for a
robust development of style. Every aspect of all artistic creativity – in
sculpture as in crafts, in painting as in architecture – has the closest
relation to the human body. The form of a cup as much as the formation of a
capital is always proportionate to the human body.”[108]
“Which brings us to the question, whether
prudery nurtured the tailor or vice versa? For it must be abundantly clear to
anyone who honestly approaches the most noble task of art – the formation of
the human body – that the whole unclad body, without rags and without tatters,
is the most important prerequisites from the artistic treatment of the human
form. This is not to say that nudes should be dragged by their hair into every
situation, mindlessly and indiscriminately. But what we are saying is that we
must demand that, where the nude is logically necessary, the artist should be
permitted to portray it in its entirety without false modesty, without the
burden of making allowance for wilful, contrived bashfulness. ” [109]
Here is how Klinger discusses, not without
some embarrassment, the issue of sexuality: “Securely positioning a slim yet
weighty mass on a doubly, even triply flexible support, would be a hard enough
problem for the science of mechanics. And this is compounded in the human body
by the elevated centre of gravity in the mass to be supported combined with its
rather wide range of ready mobility. Clearly the trickiest aspects of the
construction concern the connections between the supports and the mass to be
supported. Thus every significant change in the upper parts is reflected in the
lower parts, which are in themselves essential to the security of that
movement. All the main problems concerning the construction and movement of the
human body are resolved in the pelvis and between its projecting points. Like
the construction of every individual body – be it slim or broad, be it stocky
or delicate – every movement is reflected at these points.” [110] “The
loincloth, that abhorrent, contrived scrap of material, and, all the more so,
the implausible fig leaf with which we have to hide the human body – and which
is so detrimental to its conception – tears apart the unity of the figure,
splitting it into a torso and two single legs. It takes all the
inconsequentiality of our spiritual and artistic training for us not to find
such wretched abominations offensive.” [111]
Klinger
and the temptation of symbolism in painting
The theoretical framework is therefore clear:
on the one hand painting, drawing on the other, as separate genres, which do
not allow confusion. Total art needs polychrome sculpture, and will benefit
from new technologies in the future.
Did Max Klinger always stick to this
categorization? No, he did not. The theoretical framework was first put into
writing in the Journal in 1883. But the young artist wanted to reserve himself
some room for freedom.
An example: according to the pamphlet,
symbolism applies to drawing and total art, not to painting as such: “It is
therefore essential in pictorial representation to avoid embellishments of an
excessively fanciful [das
Überphantastische], or allegorical or novelistic kind, which could lead the
beholder to speculations that go beyond the picture. The self-sufficient calm
that epitomises great art is what draws us to the works of all the masters of
painting. Such calm can only be achieved through perfection in the
representation of forms, colours, expression, and atmosphere. Any fantastical
aspects that may be aspired to in a picture must never interfere with these
four conditions; even in cases where the artist resorts to reshaping Nature,
the impression of viability and coherence must be maintained, however unusual
the circumstances. [112]
Examples of "fantastic" painting by
Klinger are numerous. It is no coincidence that the artist is known in history more
as symbolist than a naturalist painter. The painting "Legation" where wading-birds make a visit to a beautiful
undressed girl, lying naked on the beach, combines naturalism and symbolism. At
the end of his essay, Marsha Morton regrets that the painter has not been able
to restrain himself, lacking consistency [113]. After all, he had fun, and the
verve of the painter often prevailed on the theoretical thinking.
NOTES
[94] Klinger, Max – Painting and
Drawing (quoted), p. 33
[95] Klinger, Max –
Painting and Drawing (quoted), p. 46
[96] Klinger, Max – Painting and Drawing
(quoted), pp. 16-17
[97] Klinger, Max – Painting and
drawing (quoted), p. 31
[98] Klinger, Max – Painting and
Drawing (quoted), p. 32
[99] Klinger, Max – Painting and
Drawing (quoted), p. 32
[100] The German text "dem wir so
merkwürdig zaudernd genenüberstehen" is translated in a negative sense in
Italian ("vis-à-vis which we have
so many reserves") and positive in English ("which we regard with such
remarkable trepidation”). The main problem is the translation of the word
"merkwürdig" which literally means "noteworthy"
(remarkable) but in modern German is now almost only used in a negative sense
(‘strange, odd’). Not necessarily so, however, a hundred years ago: therefore
the sense might indeed be positive.
[101] Klinger, Max – Painting and
Drawing (quoted), p. 16
[102] De Chirico,
Giorgio - Max Klinger in: Klinger, Max – Painting and Drawing, edited by Michele
Dantini with an essay by Giorgio de Chirico, Milan, Nike, 1988, p. 129. The quotation is on page 104.
[103] Klinger, Max – Painting and
Drawing, (quoted) 2005, pp. 13
[104] Lux, Joseph August, Klinger's Beethoven und die
moderne Raum-Kunst, in: Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration 10, no. 1 (1902), pp. 475-482.
[105] Streicher, Elizabeth - Max
Klinger's Malerei und Zeichnung: The Critical Reception of the Prints and Their
Text, in: Studies in the History of Art, Vol. 53, Symposium Papers XXXI:
Imagining Modern German Culture: 1889–1910 (1996), pp. 228-249. See:
http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/42622157?sid=21105582739343&uid=3737864&uid=70&uid=2134&uid=4&uid=2 (quotation at p. 231)
[106] Klinger, Max – Painting and
Drawing, (citato) 2005, pp. 14-15
[107] Morton, Marsha – “Malerei und
Zeichnung”: The History and Context of Max Klinger’s Guide to the Arts, in:
Zeitschrift fü Kunstgeschichte, Year 85, Vol. IV (1995), p. 548
[108] Klinger, Max – Painting and
Drawing, (quoted) 2005, p. 33
[109] Klinger, Max – Painting and
Drawing, (quoted) 2005, p. 34
[110] Klinger, Max – Painting and
Drawing, (quoted) 2005, p. 35
[111] Klinger, Max – Painting and
Drawing, (quoted) 2005, p. 36
[112] Klinger, Max – Painting and
Drawing, (quoted) 2005, p. 14
[113] Morton, Marsha – “Malerei und Zeichnung”(quoted),
p. 568
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