Francesco Mazzaferro
Fortune and Legacy of Max Klinger in the XX Century
Part One
[Original version: February 2015 - New Version: April 2019]
[Original version: February 2015 - New Version: April 2019]
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| Fig. 1) Quotations from 'Painting and drawing' in the catalogue of the XIV exhibition of the Vienna Secession (April-June 1902). See https://archive.org/details/frick-31072002491845 and http://secession.nyarc.org/omeka/items/show/55 |
I have alreadywritten in this blog about Max Klinger and his pamphlet 'Painting and drawing'. Hereafter, I intend to design a logical path allowing the reader to get an idea of the critical success of the artist and the influence (much more intense than one might believe) that he exercised not only on German art, but on the European one during of the twentieth century.
Of course, the influence of Klinger is
measurable in two respects, which are often overlapping: on the one hand, the
success (or failure) of his artistic production; on the other one, the reception
of the aesthetic theses contained in Painting
and drawing. The text was published in 1891, after a long incubation, which
had already started in 1883; it was composed as a pamphlet defending a clear-cut thesis and printed by a small
publisher in Leipzig (Reusche). It was conceived as a private edition at the
expense of the author, meant to be distributed to other artists and friends. This
happened in years when a movement of renewal of German art was launched (under the guidance of Walter Leistikow and a group of young artists), in open opposition
to the official conceptions of art by the German imperial authorities. So, a 'modern'
reading of Klinger’s views is appropriate. Painting
and drawing was re-released twice later on, in 1895 and in 1899, again by
small local publishers in Leipzig (respectively Eduard Besold and Arthur
Georgi).
The success of Klinger’s artistic
production and, in particular, of the aesthetic thesis contained in his pamphlet was fundamental to the
veritable explosion of German graphic art between 1880 and 1930. Klinger opened
the way to a half century of great graphic art that only Nazism was able to
temporarily stop. After World War II, his graphics was again a source of
inspiration, especially in Leipzig, his city, where an important contemporary
art figurative movement developed around the Academy of Fine Arts in the years
70-80 (the Leipzig School), subsequently renewed after German unification (the
New Leipzig School).
Painting
and drawing was first published, as mentioned, in
1891. The pamphlet was intended as a stimulus to the aesthetic discussion among
painters. A year later (in 1892) the Association
of the Eleven in Berlin and the Secession
of Munich (the first one in Europe) were founded. Klinger was a founding
member of the first and a corresponding member of the second. The Berlin
initiative was directed against Anton von Werner, painter and director of many
cultural institutions in Berlin, who (again in 1892) had closed after a few
days only an exhibition organized by Walter Leistikow and dedicated to Edvard
Munch. In 1898 Klinger became a member of the newly formed Berlin Secession and
the Vice-President of the German association of artists (Deutscher Künstlerbund) in 1905.
The influence on Secessionist artists
Since the beginning of his artistic
activity, the young Klinger had an obvious impact on many artists secessionist
artists of his time (Corinth, Slevogt, van Stuck and Klimt himself), but also
outside those circles. If he has theorized a clear separation between drawing
and painting, his contemporaries did not have problems to draw inspiration from
him in an eclectic way. In some cases (Lovis Corinth) influences are found both
in graphics (think, for example, the cycle "Tragic comedies" of 1894,
or the engraving "Cain" in 1895) as well as in aesthetic theory (as in the manual of Corinth entitled "Learning to paint" of 1908).
Corinth had met Klinger in the winter between 1887 and 1888 [1].
In other cases, painters took inspiration from
the graphical artworks of Klinger for their paintings (thereby breaking the genre
division between painting and drawing, theorized by the artist). For example,
the Young man on a fish by Hans Thoma
(1893) is a direct quote from Klinger’s drawing "The second future" (1880). Thoma took up the same theme in many of his paintings of the following
years.
Of course, not only the graphics, but also the
sculptures and paintings by Klinger exercised their influence. His Roman
paintings ("Crucifixion" and "Pietà" of 1890) impressed
very deeply Franz von Stuck (1863-1928), who visited him in Rome in 1892 and
painted, as a guest, in the painter's studio in Via Claudia (near the
Colosseum). In that studio von Stuck also experienced for the first time the
sculpture (the main interest of Klinger in Rome), and created The athlete [2]. 1892 was also the year
in which von Stuck founded the Munich Secession.
The two artists remained in contact along
their entire lifetime. It is to von Stuck that Klinger writes a letter on April
5, 1905, describing all the details related to the purchase contract of Villa
Romana in Florence, attaching plant and photography to the letter [3] In 1917 von
Stuck wrote the following about Klinger (who celebrated that year the sixtieth
birthday):
"To
me, Max Klinger has always been the most important and interesting of German
artists and I could not mention any work of another artist, including Böcklin,
who has had such a strong effect on me as, for example, some of his best engravings."
[4]
Speaking of Secessionist artists, we should
consider Otto Greiner, who lived most of his artistic life in Italy (where he
was better known than in Germany), working in the former studio of Klinger in
the Via Claudia, until he was expelled from the Peninsula after the Italian
intervention in the First world war. [5]
In Italy Greiner directly influenced the Roman Secession, and also the young Boccioni [6]. In Germany, however, he was so clearly identified as linked to Klinger in terms of style and aesthetics that he had repeatedly to protest his autonomous artistic identity.
The role of Munch
A perhaps underestimated aspect is the indirect
impact that Klinger exerted on German art, even before the end of the
nineteenth century, through the work of the Norwegian Edvard Munch. It is known
that the crackdown against Munch on the part of the Wilhelmine establishment
provoked an extraordinary wave of sympathy for his work among the young German
painters; Munch became the main source of inspiration of the first generation
of German Expressionism. But Munch owed a lot to Klinger. For many decades, the
indirect influence of Klinger on German avant-garde passed completely
unnoticed; Munch and Klinger were opposed to each other as representatives of
incompatible styles. And yet (as recently rediscovered) this was perhaps the
main path through which Klinger inspired indirectly some artists who were far away
from him (like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner), who instead experienced Munch’s direct
effect.
The Scandinavian connection and the role of
Munch are really interesting. In 1878, George Brandes (a literary critic and
Danish philosopher, who will be a friend and an advisor of Klinger all his life
long) reviewed the collection of etchings Paraphrase
on the glove in the Norwegian press. In 1880, the works of the twenty-three
old Klinger were exposed in two exhibitions at the Kristiania Kunstforening in Oslo (at that time the city was still called
Kristiania, and was part of Sweden) thanks to his friend Cristian Krohg
(1852-1925), fellow student of Klinger in Karlsruhe and Berlin. Krohg was the master
of Edvard Munch. In 1887 Georg Brandes included in the second version of his
book "Modern Spirits" a chapter on the thirty year old Klinger, who
was flanked by figures such as John Stuart Mill, Henrik Ibsen, Gustave
Flaubert, Ernest Renan and others. [7] On
Klinger, Brandes wrote (with positive connotations):
"He
seems to have no national feeling" since "he is likewise deeply
influenced by the Spanish Goya and the German Böcklin; with the exception of Gussow
and Menzel, he appreciates only French art, and rarely has a modern German book
in his hands (...) but often books of modern French authors as Zola and the
Goncourt brothers. And yet, he is so deeply national. In him lurks something
archaically German, something of the metaphysical fantasy of Jean Paul and E.T.
Hoffmann (of which he is a great admirer), something of the interiority and the
deep sense of the beauty of Schubert, whom he plays and loves." [8]
In 1888 Christian Krohg dedicated to Max
Klinger his novel "The Duel", actually a paraphrase of their literary
friendship. [9] Today’s criticism has
now proven that this intense interchange between Klinger, Krohg and Brandes
created all the conditions to make sure the young Munch would be inspired by
the former in the choice of themes and some iconographic elements.
In a letter of 8 February 1893 to the
Danish painter Johan Rohde, sent from Berlin to inform him on the state of the
art in Germany (where he had moved), Munch writes:
"If
the state of the art in Germany is really horrifying, I would still say one
thing. Germany has, to its credit, that it has produced artists that dominate
all others with great distance and stand out supremely, such as Böcklin, whom I
think is overtaking all other painters today, and also Max Klinger, Thoma,
Wagner among musicians, and Nietzsche among philosophers. France has indeed
such an art that outclasses German art, but no artist that exceeds those just mentioned.
Write me a bit about Gauguin, and the other paintings that have recently been
exposed." [10]
On the occasion of an exhibition devoted to
Klinger in Hildesheim in 1984, an anthology of critical opinions has been
inserted in the catalogue [11]. It is a selection from the writings on Klinger published
in Germany since the beginning of the new century (an impressive series of
articles, essays and books). These are the fantasy titles that the curator of
the catalogue drew from the texts: "A true representative of the
aristocracy of the spirit" (Max Schmid, 1899), "It's one of those
sovereigns" (Georg Treu, 1900), "He is a king who erected a votive
image to his God "(Ludwig Hevesi, 1902), "The art of the temple" (Karl Krauss, 1902), "A genius in motion" (Elsa Asenijeff,
1902), "A precious cultural factor of national and global significance" (Franz Servaes, 1902). In 1901, as already shown, Klinger was invited to
exhibit his works in a room for him of the Vienna Secession [12], dedicated to
the late Segantini. The Secession exhibition saw him as a star alongside Rodin.
In the following year, Klinger’s
participation to the secessionist exhibition in Vienna with his Beethoven also marked the final
affirmation of Painting and drawing,
with the inclusion of some of its pages devoted to Raumkunst (art space) in the exhibition catalogue. The same pages
were published in the journal "Kunst
für alle", widely known around the German world. One year after, the
pamphlet was again released for the fourth time in a few years, this time by the
publisher Georg Thieme, the brother of Ulrich Thieme (co-author of the bible of
biographical dictionaries of the artists, the Thieme-Becker). It was a quantum
leap. It was now a work with national circulation.
The fame of Painting and drawing crossed German borders. In 1908, the text was translated into Russian and Polish. Little is known of the Russian translation [13] by an anonymous translator, printed with the title Живопись и Рисунокъ (Zhivopis and Risunok), apparently in a few copies only, by a not better identified Publisher St. Petersburg (Издательство Санкт-Петербург). It is very significant that this information is not included in any German work I consulted and even not in the vast bibliography devoted to the artist in 2008. [14] Yet, the impact of Russian art Klinger era was not at all minor, as evidenced by the fact that the main Russian art critic of those years, Sergey Makovsky (1877-1962), had devoted a chapter to Klinger, entitled "Death and Beauty", in his book "Pages of art criticism." [15] Obviously Makovsky cites and comments on Painting and drawing.
As for the Polish translation [16], it was produced in Lviv (the then capital of the Austro-Hungarian Galicia) by Ignacy Tadeusz Marian Drexler (1878-1930), a professor at the local polytechnic, architect, urban planner and historian, author of many books (especially on architecture). He himself took care of printing the translation. As in the case of the Russian version, this information is not provided in the various essays and bibliographies on Klinger I have consulted. An overall reflection on the influence of Klinger on contemporary Polish art (in particular, on the art of secessionist "Młoda Polska", the Young Poland), is missing. For sure, that influence was visible in the case of reference artists as Jacek Malczewski. Klinger also had regular contacts with the leading intellectual of the group, Zenon Przesmycki. We know, moreover, that the art historian and collector Feliks Jasienski owned a rich collection of works of Klinger, and that his collection was exposed to the public on numerous occasions in Lviv, but also in Krakow and Warsaw, in the early 1900s [17]. Jasienski also had an extensive correspondence with Klinger and wrote on him a series of articles on Chimera, the magazine of reference for "Młoda Polska" between 1901 and 1907. On Klinger he also wrote in French, in the collection of essays "Manggha. Promenades à travers les mondes, art et les idées" of 1901. [18]
In the same region, it must be finally recalled
the influence of Klinger on the main Lithuanian painter (and composer),
Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875 -1911). On him the Lithuanian artist
wrote: "He is a serious, but difficult painter." [19]
He had known his work in Warsaw and Munich. In an essay
on "The fantastic art of Čiurlionis" the art critic Stasys Goštautas
takes for granted that the Lithuanian artist had read Painting and drawing.
Returning to Germany, a few museum
directors may better exemplify the admiration nurtured in those years vis-à-vis
Klinger than Alfred Lichtwark (1852-1914), who was one of the leading art
critics in Northern Germany [20]. Commenting on the monument to Beethoven,
which had been transferred from Vienna to Dusseldorf (waiting for the final
transport to Leipzig), he wrote in 1903: "It is as if this kind of art had
absolutely never existed before." [21]
In 1909, he added on the New Salome: "With this work Klinger won a new
territory for sculpture, that of colour. (...) I am sure that the next generations
of sculptors will make a pilgrimage to see this sculpture." [22] Lichtwark,
director of the Kunsthalle in
Hamburg, had been one of the greatest connoisseurs of Klinger’s art since 1878,
and had contributed to the study and knowledge of all his graphics cycles, of
the decorations in the Villa Albers and his statues. He had met Klinger in
person in Berlin in 1881 and had gone to see him in Rome in 1888. He had
purchased 235 sheets of graphics for the Hamburg museum, becoming a major
source of income of the artist. In 1894 he organized a major exhibition on him in
Hamburg, and in 1897, on the occasion of the death of Brahms, he had
commissioned the statue of the musician for the local academy of music, on the
model of the statue that Rodin had created for Balzac a few months before, in
1898. Interestingly, however, Lichtwark (a great admirer of Klinger) showed a
total lack of understanding for the work of Munch. |
| Fig. 2) 'Painting and drawing': the 1908 Russian edition |
On the death of Lichtwark in 1914, his
successor at the Hamburg Kunsthalle,
Gustav Pauli (1866-1938), completely reversed the scale of preferences: Munch
was immediately contrasted with and preferred to Klinger. Gustav Pauli had
already distinguished himself in the German art landscape, acquiring for the
first time a van Gogh painting for a public museum, the Bremen Kunsthalle, in
1911. To protest against this purchase, the painter Carl Vinnen had launched a
manifesto in defence of German art (A
protest of German painters) [23]. We have already noted in previous posts
that Klinger - although mentioned many times in the manifesto of Vinnen as
champion of Germanic art – did not sign it and tried to remain apart from the
controversy.
Times were changing, and Klinger did not
collect anymore unanimous support. In fact, the art historian Julius Meier-Graefe
(1867-1935) had already written, in 1905, a book against Böcklin [24] (who had
died five years before) and against German symbolism; in that book, he had made
it clear to consider Klinger as part of a detestable artistic triad (Böcklin,
Wagner, Klinger) expressing the worst of the German (neo-romantic) artistic
tradition, which in his view had to be strictly rejected in favour of the
French tradition.
End of Part One
Go to Part Two
NOTES
[1] Eine Liebe: Max Klinger und die Folgen (A love – Max Klinger and
the series), catalogue edited by Hans-Werner Schmidt and Hubertus Gaẞner,
Museum of Fina Arts of Leipzig, 11 March – 24 June 2007; Hamburg Kunsthalle, 11
October 2007 – 13 January 2008, Christof Kerber Publishers, Bielefeld –
Leipzig, 2007, 352 pages.
[2] To the exchanges between von Stuck and Klinger is
devoted: Heilmann, Angela - Zur Rezeption
des plastischen Frühwerks von Franz von Stuck (On the reception of the
early plastic by Franz von Stuck), in: Festschrift für J.A. Schmoll genannt
Eisenwerth, Munich 2005. See: http://www.kunstlexikonsaar.de/fileadmin/ifak_kunst/images/kunstwissenschaft/schmoll/15_heilmann.pdf
[3] Briefe von Max Klinger aus den Jahren 1874 bis
1919 (Letters of Max Klinger from 1874 to 1919), edited by Hans Wolfgang
Singer, Leipzig, Verlag E. A. Seemann, 1924, pp. 232. The
quoted letter to von Stuck is number 108, at pages 160-162.
[4] Max Klinger, Die druckgraphischen Folgen (The
graphic series), Catalogue of the exhibition at the Staatliche Kunsthalle in
Karlsruhe, 27 January – 9 April 2007, Edition Braus, Heidelberg 2007, 184
pages. The quote is at page 152
[5] The expulsion from Italy with his
(Italian) wife was an event that marked him deeply: back in Germany, he continued
to paint en plein air, but with a
different climate, he almost immediately became ill and died of fulminant
pneumonia in Munich in 1916.
[6] Carrera, Manuel -
Otto Greiner pittore. Una fonte per Sartorio e Boccioni (Otto Greiner as a painter. A source for Sartorio and Boccioni), in
Contemporanea. Scritti di storia dell’arte per Jolanda Nigro Covre, a cura di
Ilaria Schiaffini e Claudio Zambianchi, Roma, Campisano Editore, 1913. See: https://www.academia.edu/4952636/Otto_Greiner_pittore._Una_fonte_per_Sartorio_e_Boccioni
[7] Morton,
Marsha - Max Klinger and Wilhelmine culture: on the threshold of German
modernism, Ashgate, 2014, pp. 414 (See page 1)
[8] Max Klinger, Wege zum Gesamtkunstwerk (Paths towards the total artwork), with
contributions by Manfred Boetzkes, Dieter Gleisberg, Ekkehart Mai, Hans-Gerorg
Pfeifer, Ulrike Lanner-Steiner, Hellmuth Christian Wolff and an ample critical
anthology on Klinger. Total reproduction of the text Painting and drawing by Max Klinger (1891) Max Kinger by Giorgio de
Chirico (1920), Exhibition at the Roemer- und Pelizaeus-Museum, Hildesheim, 4 August–
4 November 1984, 299 pages. The quote is at page 93
[10] Lange, Marit Ingeborg - The Young
Munch: Max Klinger’s Impact on his Imagery, in: Kunst og kultur (Art and culture), Number 3, 2007, pages 161-173. The
quote is at page 166. See: http://www.idunn.no/kk/2007/03/the_young_munch_max_klingers_impact_on_his_imagery
[11] Max Klinger, Wege
zum Gesamtkunstwerk (quoted)
[13] Клингер Макс - Живопись и рисунок. — СПб., 1908. — С.
18
[14] Bibliography included in Max
Klinger. Wege zur Neubewertung. Schriften des
Freundeskreises Max Klinger e.V. Band 1, (Paths towards a reassessment. Writings of the
circle of friends of Max Klinger), edited by Pavla Langer, Zita Á. Pataki e
Thomas Pöpper, Leipzig, Zöllner, Plöttner Verlag, 2008
[15] Маковский, Сергей Константинович - Страницы художественной критики", 1906. The chapter on Klinger is
published in: http://www.nietzsche.ru/influence/art/klinger/
[16] Klinger, Max - Malarstwo i rysunek, translation by Ignacy Tadeusz Marian Drexler, Leopoli, 1908, 38 pagine
[17] Kluczewska-Wójcik, Agnieszka e
Orla-Bukowska, Annamaria - The Klinger Collection of Feliks Manggha-Jasieński,
in: Print Quarterly, Vol. 23, No. 3 (Settembre 2006), pp. 264-287 See: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41826600
[18] The reference in the title is
just to the Japanese manga. Jasienski (a multifaceted figure) was a great lover
of Japanese drawings, and signed with the pseudonym Manggh.
[19] Čiurlionis, Mikalojus
Konstantinas - Apie muziką ir dailę (On
Music and painting), Vilnius, 1960, page 178. Quoted in: Goštautas, Stasys – The
Fantastic Art of Čiurlonis, in: Lituanus – Lithuanian Quarterly Journal of Arts
and Sciences, Volume 29, No.2 - Summer 1983. See: http://www.lituanus.org/1983_2/83_2_05.htm#ref
[20] Roettig, Petra – Zeit und Ruhm – Max Klinger und Alfred Lichwark (Time and Fame), in
Eine Liebe: Max Klinger und die Folgen, (citato) , pp. 62-66
[21] Max Klinger, Wege
zum Gesamtkunstwerk (quoted), 1984, p.112-113
[22] Alfred Lichtwark, Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft Hamburgischer Kunstfreude (Yearbook of
the Hamburg Society of the friends of art), Volume XV, Hamburg, 1909 (page 80).
Quoted in Roettig, Petra – Zeit und Ruhm – Max Klinger und Alfred Lichtwark, in
Eine Liebe: Max Klinger und die Folgen, (citato) , pp. 62
[23] Ein Protest deutscher Künstler
(A protest of German
artists), with introduction by Carl Vinnen, Jena, Engen Diederichs, 1911. See
[24] Meier-Graefe, Julius - Der Fall Böcklin und die Lehre von den Einheiten (The Böcklin case
and the doctrine of units), Stuttgart, Julius Hoffmann Verlag, 1905. See:
[25] Max Klinger, Wege
zum Gesamtkunstwerk (quoted), 1984, p.120-122
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