Francesco Mazzaferro. Fortune and Legacy of Max Klinger in the XX century. Part Three

CLICK HERE FOR ITALIAN VERSION

Francesco Mazzaferro

Fortune and Legacy of Max Klinger in the XX Century

Part Three


[Original version: February 2015 - New Version: April 2019]

Fig. 5) The 16-page brochure on the retrospective of 1947 in Leipzig

Go Back to Part One

A charlatan?

In 1917 (during the First world war) Klinger celebrated his sixtieth birthday. In his honour, exhibitions were organized and volumes published (including that already mentioned by Avenarius). Some awards were assigned to him. Two years later, Painting and Drawing was republished by Insel Verlag, a historical German publisher based in Leipzig, in the context of the famous series Insel Library (Insel-Bücherei).[64]. Reprints followed - posthumously - in 1921, 1930 and 1935, always in the same series.

Having said this, however, it is clear that Klinger was the subject of increasingly contemptuous judgments. The art critic Max Friedländer, to take his defences, had to consider the insulting arguments of those who even spoke of him as a 'charlatan': [65]

"A few months ago, on February 18, Max Klinger has turned 60. This occasion to discuss publicly about him, his work and his reputation has not helped much - as much as I have been able to follow discussions - to reach the hoped clarification or even an agreed judgment on him. The pendulum swings widely, between an uncritical and exaggerated tribute, based on local and patriotic reasoning, and a sense of concern which combines hesitation and refusal. (...) Beyond beauty and ugliness, Klinger's work has become part of German culture and has found its place in the Walhalla of the German people, not too far from that of Richard Wagner. We want to distinguish in our judgment between the fame of Klinger and his work. This maestro has so completely accommodated certain prejudices, inclinations and desires of the German public that the suspicion could rise that he was prepared to satisfy their instincts, as a real charlatan. Such a suspicion is unjustified. Klinger has always been honest and sincere, and in his way even naive; his creations have emerged organically from a natural talent." [66]

Meier-Graefe’s attack

When Klinger died in 1920, something sensational and of a real bad taste happened. The art historian Meier-Graefe unleashed against him an attack of unprecedented violence, publishing a harsh criticism in the journal Ganymede that ended with the words "the only honour we can pay to such people is to bury them forever" [67]. His argument was that Klinger was (along with Böcklin and Wagner) the symbol of a culturally aggressive Pangermanism, trying to conquer the world power, in contrast to the French enlightened Diderot and D'Alembert. Those three were the "purest representatives not only of German art (deutsche Kunst), but also of German thought, that it was accentuated with the use of the adjective 'Germanic' (germanisch). This Germanism - in the absence of an European and German concordance - has turned its focus to a timeless fiction that in our country one would like to willingly call 'Romanticism' and that was a real disease, a plague." It was not romanticism itself, the 'divine romanticism', but a "new romanticism without form, a non-sense from barbarians, a pure materialism". And Meier-Graefe continued: "Wagner, Böcklin, Klinger proved that Goethe went to Italy for nothing and that our Middle Ages are so alive as in the days of Grünewald. All of us would like to be a Grünewald, a Faust, a Barbarossa. With our metaphysics you can do everything. (...) As a justification, it could be said (...) that Klinger gave greater dignity to the carnival of Böcklin." And then the attack on his graphic work: "If Klinger was a drawer, then the drawing of Dürer and Holbein, Rubens and Poussin, of Marées and Menzel was something else. (...) Nothing in Klinger war more cruelly missing than an ability to dance, to laugh or to cry through a drawing mark (...) He drew a glove: it was a glove and nothing more. The leg was one leg, the face a face. The ability to translate something bent into a glove, to get a leg from something trembling, or a face from something curly was missing completely. Absolutely not an artist. Even less an artist than Böcklin (who could have been an artist, and was an artist at least once), but in fact he was neither fish nor fowl [Zwischending], was a spare [Ersatz] and an art muddler [Kunstgewerbler]."

The relentless progression of negative judgments continues: "He was a very modest muddler. There are a few beautiful antique- frames and similar things of his youth, well-drawn, black and white, and devilishly modest. Those things he could do. In his youth he designed on the model of Goya. He produced those things by turning his finger around Goya. He made eroticism, beyond the theme some unbearably trivial, but indecent things: artificial eroticism. Like Bouguereau, he replaced the theme of the artwork for the rhythm, which was not present at all. He made such paintings that, in comparison with them, Cornelius, Kaulbach, Anton v. Werner [editor's note: all painters for whom Meier-Graefe has no consideration] would tremble. His 'Christ on Olympus' is the battle of the Marne of the German spirit. These paintings reveal a zealous reflection about the problems of life. Even his recordings are testimonials of many muses. He was a thinker. If he was an engraver, Rembrandt has never engraved. If he had been a drawer, he would have also designed, he would have painted – whether badly or well, but in some way – he would have somehow revived the surface. He did succeed neither in design nor in painting."

The article ends with an aspect that we have already met on other occasions: in spite of all his faults, even Maier-Graefe had to acknowledge that Klinger was a noble man (vornehmer Mensch): "When I visited him the last time, fifteen or twenty years ago, he asked at the end of our talk, on the 'Drama' that was in his study: 'So, you do not believe at all that I am an artist?'. When I gave him the answer he was expecting, we shacked our hands and drank a glass. I left him in a dignified and a bit sad way."

Despite its virulence, the harsh criticism by Meier-Graefe did not come completely unexpected. Already in a previous book (The case Böcklin, 1905) the art critic had discussed the limits of German symbolism, giving clear signs that his negative judgment would soon be extended to Klinger. In a letter of 1910 (the letters of Meier-Graefe were published in 2001), he spoke of the "case Klinger" (and also the "case Klimt") to cite other "differences between honour and value." [68] It is even more significant that in his impressive "History of the development of modern art" in three volumes (available on the internet) he had not found any reason to mention Klinger, if not once [69].

Gustav Pauli against Klinger

The pounding continued with Gustav Pauli a year later, in 1921, coinciding with a retrospective held in Berlin and dedicated to Klinger one year after his death. Here is what he wrote to the Commission of the Kunsthalle in Hamburg. "The exhibition of Klinger had the effect of a catastrophe. In front of the large painting of Christ on Olympus, lent by the Gallery of Vienna, I asked myself, quite surprised: how can this picture - that seems to be a distant relative only to art (gleich einem Artverwandten) - have had such a resounding success only two decades ago? The example of Klinger shows us that nothing can age so quickly as a sensational success. Klinger, who was a sincere and modest man, noticed it himself." [70]

And a decade later (in 1930) Pauli gave a categorical judgment on 'Beethoven', which was located at the Museum of Fine Arts in Leipzig, always writing to the Commission of the Kunsthalle in Hamburg. "For modern times Klinger has a certain weight. He is the local saint of art and a taboo in Leipzig. Therefore, he is not discussed. This does not mean, sometimes, that he is not considered uncomfortable. His imposing sitting Beethoven is a constant source of embarrassment, since it is impossible to show it in a way that is conducive to it. Two of his sculptures have already been put in depot, or they are shown in such a dark place that you cannot but pass along them without noticing them."  [71]

Ostracism

The season of ostracism against Klinger’s work had started. An important part of the cultural establishment of the Weimar Republic turned away from him. It was the liberal intelligentsia, the segment of the German cultural world most open to the influences from France and ready to follow the path of the full integration of German art in the veins of the international avant-garde. Those were the golden years of the Weimar Republic, when it seemed that the hyper-inflation was finally something of the past and the crisis of 1929 had not yet come up. In those years, Germany was culturally at the cutting edge worldwide (think of the triumph of German cinema). Well, at that time of full splendour, Klinger was never admitted anymore to the honours of the aesthetic debate.

A particularly illustrative case is that Painting and drawing was not included in the anthology of the sources of art history in 1925 by Paul Westheim (1886-1963), which however offered a very wide anthology from Hans von Marées, Hans Thoma, Max Liebermann and Lovis Corinth - at the turn of the century - up to de Chirico, Léger, Malewitch and even Charlie Chaplin (as an exponent of the new art, i.e. cinema) in the 1920s. The absence of Klinger’s book was a sign that his aesthetic theories were no longer seen as compatible with the avant-garde.

Even more significant was what happened five years later. These were years of great instability, after the crisis of 1929. In 1933, the Nazis won the elections; from their election programs, it was clear what they thought of modern art. In their view, modern art had to be radically suppressed, because it was of 'Jewish' and 'Negroid' imprint and was therefore a ‘degeneration’ of ‘aryan art’. This thesis (propagated by Alfred Rosenberg) was the opinion of the majority of the Nazis, but not of all of them. There was an admittedly small circle of art critics close to the Nazis, who hoped to be supported by Josef Goebbels, due to his acknowledged interest as a collector of modern art (including expressionists). They believed that exactly expressionism was a German-Scandinavian form of art, which the Nazis should have taken control of, to transform Germany into the leading nation of contemporary art. That little group was purged, but the historian Max Sauerlandt held a series of lectures in Hamburg in 1933, full of praise for Hitler and Nazism, and at the same time all aiming at drawing a bold design of contemporary art in Germany and to establish Emil Nolde as the new champion of the new art of the Third Reich. In the book collecting those lessons [72] (The art of the last thirty years) the author dealt with Impressionism, Nolde, Bridge (Brücke) and New Objectivity, but did not mention once Max Klinger. Not only that. Also his correspondence, published in 2013 [73], does not mention him. So, Klinger was now a stranger not only for the liberal critique, but also for that of conservative political orientation. This is also demonstrated by the words of Ludwig Justi, the director of the National Gallery of Modern Art in Berlin, in 1931: "The burning fame of Klinger has gone off early; today, he is almost forgotten. His talent was really big, although not directed solely to painting; the engraver and sculptor let the painter lose his head, the pomposity of Wilhelmine Germany seduced him towards an excessive intensification, and he also fell in the crossfire of the Renaissance, Art Nouveau (Jugendstil) and impressionism." [74]

The silence of the postwar period in the Federal Republic of Germany

The silence on Klinger in West Germany after the Second world war is really impressive. An almost total silence. Between 1945 and 1970 no monograph on the artist was published; no wonder, then, that even Painting and drawing was not released in any new version in that period. Over twenty-five years, only seven exhibitions were devoted to him: of these, only one on Klinger’s painting and sculpture (in Wuppertal, in 1968). All other exhibitions concerned only the graphics: in Celle in 1952, in Munich in 1956, in Krefeld in 1959, in Leverkusen in 1962, in Darmstadt in 1966, and in Friedrichshafen in 1969. It should be said, however, that almost all of Klinger’s artwork that survived the war was in Saxony (i.e. in East Germany), and it was therefore impossible to show it to the public in West Germany.

The only German art critic to express an opinion on Klinger was Werner Haftmann, first in "Modern Painting in the twentieth century" (1954) and then in the monograph "Heaven on Earth" (1960), dedicated to the art of the nineteenth century. Hartmann was the main contemporary art critic of after-war Germany, the scholar who promoted the rediscovery of the so-called “degenerate art”, the interpreter of a history of German art reconciled with that of Europe (it was also great admirer of Italy and its art) , the organizer of initiatives to raise awareness of expressionism in the entire Western world and finally the key person of the German artistic culture with the organization of the first three editions of Documenta in Kassel in 1955, 1959 and 1964. Therefore, the main representative of aesthetics in Adenauer’s Germany. His judgment on Klinger was very similar to that of Julius Meier-Graefe and Gustav Pauli: a few lines to write that "an unpleasant false note pervades most of the creations of Klinger. They are seen in a too acute way and are thought in a too rich manner. (...) He overloads ethereal bodies with precious details, and seeks to combine a penetrating and indulgent naturalism with a monumental visionary. It is rare that his art goes beyond the simple search of special effects, although sometimes, indeed, his use of different techniques and materials offers an interesting contrast." [75]

It would be profoundly wrong to think that all this was random and dependent on personal aesthetic preferences only. Trying to bind to the French tradition (post-impressionism, cubism, fauvism, dada) and especially to the American one (abstract expressionism, conceptualism, avant-gardes; pop), West Germany opted decisively (not without controversy, to which we referred in previous posts on Karl Hofer and Max Pechstein) in favour of informal art. Indeed, at the top of the Cold War, the abstract pictorial language was considered as a form of absolute freedom of expression, to be opposed to the Stalinist socialist realism. The entire modern art in Germany was therefore reinterpreted according to the justification of the styles of the after-war time. The space for Max Klinger, in this reading, was very limited. The heroes of the German art among the painters of the early twentieth century became the Bridge (die Brücke), the Blue Rider (Blaue Reiter), but especially Ernst Nolde. Any elements of continuity with neo-romanticism, symbolism and the classical tradition of end century became ideologically suspicious and certainly not any more homogenous with the subsequent evolution of art.

In line with this, the anthology of the sources of the history of art by Hans Eckstein [76], published in Darmstadt in 1954, continued to ignore completely Painting and drawing of Max Klinger, as Paul Westheim had done in 1925. Two pages of Klinger were however published in an anthology of letters from artists of the five previous centuries (published in 1926 by Hermann Uhde-Bernays), an anthology that opened with Leon Battista Alberti and ended with a letter from Kandinsky to Paul Westheim. [77]

Max Klinger in the GDR and Leipzig

In 1956 the German Academy of Arts published a monograph in East Berlin [78], which drew a history of the German graphic cycle, from Klinger until the fifties. The interpretation was Marxist; the rebirth of graphical art, as the author Gerhard Pommeranz-Liedtke writes, took place in the years of Marx, as art to express the artists’ complaint against the prevailing social conditions.

Klinger is seen as the founder of a deeply German technical and artistic school. His main heir, who takes up his realistic aspects of social complaints, is Käthe Kollwitz. From her originates a realist school of socialist orientation (Lührig). Only half a page is devoted to the Bridge, while it is clear the sympathy of the author for the artists who had clear leftists or communist positions in the Weimar Republic (Baluschek, Hofer, Pechstein, Grosz, Beckmann, Nagel) and in Austria (Kubin, Kokoschka). So, Klinger was ultimately the founder of socialist art in the German Democratic Republic. 

If Klinger was already considered in 1956 as one of the founding fathers of the art in the GDR, the centre of diffusion of Klinger’s art remained in Leipzig. The history of Germany - strongly influenced by local interests in a very similar manner to what happens in Italy - did in fact cause that Klinger remained an idol in Leipzig art across decades: retrospectives dedicated to him were held in 1937 (under a clear influence of the Nazi), in 1947 (before the creation of the German Democratic Republic, under the direct administration of the Soviet military administration. The event was organized by the Council of Dresden: the German word Rat (Council) here is the translation of the Russian Soviet) and in 1957 (in Ulbricht’s GDR).

Drawing and painting was also republished by Insel Verlag in Leipzig, in 1950 and in 1978 (just as the two German States, also the publisher had been 'split'; the East German part- which published the pamphlet by Klinger - was obviously state owned). Several local art critics (Margerete Hartig, Johannes Jahn, Paul Angerholm) specialized on his artwork. Neither were few the exhibitions dedicated to him, certainly in most prestigious circumstances and locations than the ones we have listed with reference to West Germany: in Leipzig (1947, 1951, 1954, 1957, 1961); in East Berlin (1956), in Weimar (1957) and in Altenburg (1965).

Fig. 6) The 20-page brochure of the Leipzig retrospective in 1957

The catalogue of the 1957 exhibition consists only of two articles of ten pages each (the first on painting and sculpture and the second on drawing). Reading it, however, is really interesting, because it shows the complete absence (in fact, quite strange, actually) in it of every aspect of propaganda. There is no mention of historical materialism nor of class struggle; nor it is tried (differently from the already quoted monograph of the previous year) to make of Klinger a predecessor of socialist art. It is indeed admitted that the artistic merits of Klinger had faded, compared to the enthusiastic readings of the early twentieth century. That text was written in substantial continuity with the formal analysis provided by the connoisseurs of Klinger’s art in the early decades of the century, but without the ballast of a useless nationalism.

The permanence of the interest in the art and the writings of Klinger in Leipzig, however, was not only the tribute to be made to a native artist or simply a result of the continuing strong interest for his graphics within the Academy of Fine Arts, where Klinger himself had been appointed professor in 1919. The German Democratic Republic (which, according to the so-called Hallstein Doctrine, was not recognized in the West, nor by the Federal Republic of Germany nor by its allies) had an existential interest to reaffirm, also through art, its roots in German history, and therefore not to be considered (at least in the eyes of its own population) as a mere 'occupation zone' of the Soviet Union.

After the war, moreover, the Expressionists (as explained by Christian Saehrendt [79]) were for many decades largely boycotted in East Germany, as an expression of a middle-class 'formalist' art, whose main representatives had not been able to resist the Nazi pressure and which was in any case not in line with Socialist Realism. So, in many ways, the eyes with which German art was considered in the early twentieth century were much more traditional in East than in West Germany. To legitimize this approach, there was no hesitation in the GDR to review the entire German art and even to theorize the primacy of the "classic" Dürer on the "expressionist" Grünewald. GDR art critics tried to create a direct link between the art of the GDR and the masters of the nineteenth century (von Menzel, Leibl). Besides, the academics of Leipzig saw in Max Klinger the initiator of a modern school of socially engaged art graphics inspired by Renaissance. Thus, a style (the "Leipzig School") was created in the last 1960s, which rejected the informal art of West Germany, condemned its enthusiasm for the Expressionists, and tried to take root on the path of the most classic-oriented German artists of the early twentieth century, trying to create a "moderate" modernity.

That this was not only a parochial reflection was proven by the fact that Painting and Drawing was included in 1969 in the Soviet anthology of art history sources [80], recognizing to the author a role of patriarch of German literature of artists on art, along with Hans von Marées, Adolf von Hildebrand, Max Liebermann, Lovis Corinth, Käthe Kollwitz, Ernst Barlach, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Emil Nolde, Franz Marc, Vasily Kandinsky (for Germany) and Ferdinand Hodler and Paul Klee (for Switzerland). Four dense pages of the introductory part of the writing of Klinger were included, along with a commentary that framed Klinger within German symbolism and recognized him an influence on Russian art well before the Soviet Union. Seen from Moscow, the reputation of Klinger was therefore unchanged, perhaps because the socialist aesthetic guidelines were much more related to classical and figurative schemes than American ones.

The success of Klinger in the DDR of the 70s and 80s

The exhibition in Leipzig in 1970 [81], fifty years after his death, was conceived by authorities as the most important exhibition dedicated to the artist after the celebrations of 1937. That event had been entirely devoted by the Nazis to the 'Germanization' of Klinger’s art and had served as a pretext for the removal of so-called 'degenerate art' from the Museum of Fine Arts in the city (because of lack of space). The retrospectives of 1947 and 1957 had kept high the flag of Klinger in Leipzig. However, not only no proper catalogue (only two brochures) had been published in those two events, but a comprehensive review of Klinger’s art based on Marxist criteria was still failing.

Fig. 7) The catalogue of the exhibition in Leipzig in 1970

In the words of director Gerhard Winkler, the ambition was therefore to offer an interpretation of the art of Klinger who was not exclusively tied to local interests, but could also avoid the trap of the so-called 'subjectivism', i.e. the continuous "change between overvaluation and undervaluation, a typical feature of late-bourgeois art criticism, mirroring realities devastated by antagonistic contradictions. In this way, the critical texts serve to create confusion among the spectators, in order to incite erroneous judgments and arouse adverse instincts against the whole art".[82] Thus, the catalogue re-interpreted the whole story of the art criticism of Klinger as a plot of Wilhelmine Berlin that (after the unification of 1871) had given itself "heroic ideals typical of the Prussian-German mania for pump and representation." [83] This goal of official art in Bismarckian and Wilhelmine Germany represented a break from the best elements of German history, and in particular from the ideals of classical humanism which had influenced Klinger and that had fuelled the revolution of 1848. That break from best practices was embodied in an alliance between big capital and the imperial regent house. Klinger therefore decided to cease contacts with academicism of the time. However, he had no other intellectual resources to resolve those contradictions, but what the philosophical nihilism of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer offered him. Staying within the bourgeois way of thinking, he tried to resolve the contradiction through the duality between painting and drawing, the first related to reality (to be) and the second to the utopian bourgeois thought (having to be). His direct revolutionary value was to break the bourgeois taboo that deprived graphic art of the full dignity of art [84], and in particular "the negation of aesthetic-dogmatic standards in 'Drawing and painting'." [85] The attempt to make "the growing contradictions of social relations" and the concept of "total art" (Gesamtkunst) mutually compatible "mingled elements of the crisis of the late-bourgeois culture with elements of a democratic culture in development." [86]

The catalogue of the 1970 exhibition in Leipzig therefore offered - for the first time - an integral Marxist interpretation of Painting and drawing (interpretation which not only was extraneous to the brochure of 1957, but was not even included in the Soviet anthology in 1969).

  

As an evidence of the success that the text of Klinger continued to have in the German Democratic Republic, the publisher Reclam in Leipzig (once again, we are faced with a publisher who was split following the Cold War; the eastern one is the nationalized part of the brand) printed in 1985 and 1987 an edition that brought together the text of "Painting and Drawing", the diary and also a selection of letters from the artist. [87] It must be said that (unlike the catalogue of 1970) the curator Anneliese Hübscher did not exceed with the ideological interpretations. Her own was certainly a good introduction.

Leipzig itself was experiencing a new artistic season: in the 70s and 80s the group of painters and teachers within the Academy of Fine Arts of the city brought the Leipzig School (of course with the consent and support of the regime) to have great fame even outside the GDR; that movement of modern art, clearly of a figurative nature, became famous all over the world. The iconographic direct link with Klinger, but also with the New Objectivity and Surrealism art movements confirmed and indeed reinforced the idea that Leipzig was the birthplace of a new form of artistic modernity, of a classical orientation. Today all museums of reunified Germany expose Mattheuer, Rink, Tübke, Rauch and other painters of the School as part of a common heritage of Germany.

The slow rediscovery of Painting and drawing and of the art of Klinger in West Germany...

On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the death, a retrospective was dedicated to Klinger in Bremen. The Kunsthalle in that town possessed a complete copy of the graphic collection of Kingler. This was the reason why it seemed natural to keep the exposure there. The exhibition [88] was an opportunity to rediscover the artist.

"To rehabilitate Max Klinger?" So the president and the director of the Bremen Kunsthalle opened their brief introduction to the catalogue of 1970 (76 pages). "Some will object strongly against this intention: conceptual and pale art, of the intellectual middle-class of the nineteenth century, to which we gladly shift full responsibility for the disaster and of the most suspicious aspects of our time, to make sure we do not have to search it among us. The world of plushies of our grandparents. Never again." [89] Yet - the two wrote - the reasons, albeit very modest, for an opening to Klinger’s art existed indeed. In fact, despite all that bad you could say of his paintings and sculptures, Klinger had been the leader of a long line of engravers, and – with the cycle Dramas – had transmitted to some of them also a social awareness, particularly to Käthe Kollwitz. A similar ‘social’ reasoning was included in the 1956 monograph in East Berlin; Bremen, on the other side, was considered as the most leftist German Land (State) in the Federal Republic of Germany. The catalogue of Bremen was conceived as a first attempt to provide the West German public with all the critical tools for understanding Klinger’s aesthetics: 10 pages of texts selected from his writings (letters, diary, painting and drawing) and as many pages of critical anthology of writings dedicated to him, between 1897 and 1915. The selected pages from Painting and drawing were all dedicated to graphics.

If you browse the catalogues published in West Germany after the one in 1970, you can immediately recognize the process of slow rediscovery that accompanied the figure of Klinger. You experience a strange feeling. It is like listening to different versions of the same symphony by Mahler, every time performed by an orchestra with a different and important director.

Between 1970 and 1984 different exhibitions devoted to Klinger were held in the Federal Republic (Bielefeld in 1976, Munich in 1980 and Kiel in 1983, as well as a retrospective in Vienna in 1981), but the real divide that marks a different approach to the artist is the exhibition of Hildesheim in 1984 [90]. It was in the catalogue of Hildesheim that was included the first modern West German edition of Painting and drawing, accompanied by the laudation of de Chirico on Klinger in 1920 and a large anthology (around 100 pages) of writings by critics, organized in the chronological sense, from 1882 to 1978. It was in fact a critical volume to rebuild the entire critical path to which the art of Klinger had undergone over the century.

… and in united Germany

The exhibition held at the Städel [91] in Frankfurt in 1992, after Germany’s unification, marks the full return of Klinger in the main course of German art of the late nineteenth century. The catalogue contains three essays on the monuments which Klinger dedicated to Beethoven, Brahms and Wagner (the latter never executed, also because of a certain megalomania of the project) and focuses on the close relationship between art and music, typical of the whole German art of the time (think of Anselm Feuerbach for previous generations and of Paul Klee for the following) but also a distinctive mark of the personality of Klinger, not surprisingly an excellent pianist.

Fig. 8) Il catalogo della mostra allo Städel nel 1992

Fifteen years later, in 2007, with the celebration of one hundred and fifty years after his birth, the focus shifts from Klinger as an artist linked to the culture of late-romanticism to Klinger as the inspirer of modern art (both the one contemporary to him as well as the one following one) in an explicit and implicit relationships of contiguity and continuity of style and aesthetics.

In Karlsruhe [92] - where Klinger had studied - an exhibition of his graphic was held, with a section on the artists he had inspired: the image of the artist moved from the innovator of Wilhelmine Germany to the inspirer of the Weimar Republic. It is especially in Leipzig [93], once again, that a new large exhibition was dedicated, always in 2007, to the theme of the inheritance of the art of Klinger, with thematic sections dedicated to his relationship with Max Beckmann, Salvador Dalí, Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Otto Greiner, Georg Kolbe, Alfred Kubin, Edvard Munch, Max Pechstein, Alberto Savinio and Heinrich Vogelers. Linguistically, the title of the exhibition contains an untranslatable pun in Italian: Klinger’s "Folgen", to which the exhibition was dedicated, can be both the following 'effects' of his work over time as well as his 'series' of graphics. The exhibition was replicated in Hamburg a few months later. It is the impressive catalogue in Leipzig / Hamburg to have most strongly influenced the drafting of these pages.

'Painting and drawing' outside Germany

In 1996 was published the first Italian translation of Painting and drawing, by Giuseppe Scattone, on the occasion of a major retrospective exhibition in Ferrara [94]. The exhibition, curated by Beatrice Buscaroli, focused on the relationship of Klinger with German culture of end century and in particular with music. Particular attention was also paid to the relationship of Klinger with the so-called 'German Romans', both those of a previous generation both his contemporaries, from Anselm Feuerbach to von Marées, from Hildebrand to Fiedler, from Böcklin to Stauffer-Bern.

The conclusion of Ms Buscaroli Fabbri was that the reception of Klinger by de Chirico and Max Ernst, Dalí and Munch was not the result of a conscious desire by Klinger to "open a bridge to the future, to Modern, against which Klinger warned", but the outcome of an elective affinity, a metaphysical and timeless interest, the result of an abstraction rather than of a stylistic continuity.[95] It is a thesis also dear to one of the major scholars of Klinger, Renate Hartleb, who developed it in numerous studies, setting caveats to the theory of continuity between Klinger, the surrealists and the Leipzig school; she too has contributed to the rich catalogue of the Ferrara exhibition. But it is not the thesis that I followed.

The second Italian translation by Michele Dantini, printed by Nike publishers along with a nice essay by the curator and the laudation of De Chirico [96], is of 1998; this is the edition from which I drew all the quotes in Italian in previous posts.

In 2005 was also curated the first English edition, "Painting and Drawing", edited by Fiona Elliot and Christopher Croft, and printed by Ikon publishers in Birmingham, during an exhibition at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham [97]. 

There are no other modern editions in other languages; the Polish and Russian translations of 1908 are unavailable.

Last but not least, let me quote the catalogue of the recent exhibition on Klinger in my original hometown Bologna, in 2014, which - with an essay by Paola Giovanardi Rossi on Klinger as the inspirer of European art between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – agrees with the now largely widespread assessment that the artist was not only a man of his time, but also a bridge between classic and modern. The authoress (besides being also a collector of Klinger) is a well-known psychiatrist, and the essay opens new avenues of interpretation of the dreamily dimension of Klinger’s art, taking into account that the years of the publication of Drawing and painting were also those of the birth of modern psychology in the German world, and in particular of the dissemination of Freud’s theories. [98]

Fig. 9) The catalogue of the exhibition in Bologna in 2014

The ultimate reasons of a revival

Today Klinger’s art is extremely successful. The artist is certainly no longer considered on par with Michelangelo (as suggested the flatterers of the early twentieth century), but is also not anymore a pariah, as happened to him for decades after the war (with the exception of the German Democratic Republic).

This series of posts about fortune and legacy of Klinger has allowed in particular documenting the historical vicissitudes of his writing Painting and Drawing. Born as a youth reflection in 1891, with the aim of allowing the conquest of new spaces of freedom to the artists of the time, the pamphlet was a great success and was republished many times. He proposed to reconcile different views of art (French naturalism and neo-German idealism); he promoted the idea of 'art space' (Raumkunst) as an attempt to make a synthesis of opposed artistic genres through the use of colour as unifying element; and he placed at the centre of modernity the attempt to recover total art, through the relationship with classical art. Outside Germany, it was a reference text in the Scandinavian and Slavic worlds.

The greatest success was registered in the German-speaking world, in Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, around the early years of the twentieth century, when the aesthetic theories of Klinger - either explicitly (through Kollwitz; Kubin; Kolbe) or implicitly (with the Bridge; Max Beckmann; the surrealists) or again indirectly (via Edvard Munch) - contributed to the birth of decades of graphic art of the highest quality and artistic meaning. The text of the pamphlet was included in one of the most widespread series for the general public. It was therefore a ‘must-read’ text.

Honours and official celebrations for Klinger had their climax with the sixtieth birthday in 1917, but his supporters made the mistake of dragging more and more his work in a national-Germanistic corner where the pamphlet (conceived in Paris and written in Rome) was never conceived. Klinger was called the most German of German artists (by Lovis Corinth, in 1914, in the middle of a nationalist atmosphere shortly before the beginning of the First World War). Moreover, many of the monographs dedicated to him followed an open anti-French track. In this way, the will of the artist (with the creation of Villa Romana in Florence) was however betrayed. He wanted to ensure that new young German artists would compare themselves with the art of Italian Renaissance, and its universal value.

The aesthetic solution proposed by Klinger (with the definition of different fields for painting and drawing), had however soon to cope with the challenge of new, different aesthetic intuitions of the young German artists, marking clear generational divides. Contemporaneous perceived the impossibility to fill the gap that divided Klinger and Expressionists. A more balanced attitude would undoubtedly have shown the common elements, especially in graphics. Today, the re-reading of those experiences also emphasizes the elements of continuity.

Klinger's death marks a demarcation point: the attacks by Julius Meier Grafe in 1920 (according to which the only thing to be done was bury hastily Klinger and his art with him) and those by Pauli led the liberal intelligentsia, in the golden years of the Weimar Republic, to decree his removal from the artistic and cultural scene of the time: Klinger soon disappeared from the most important anthologies on the sources of the history of art.

Over the years, a substantial oblivion took shape, with the main exception of the hometown Leipzig. There, retrospectives were held about the artist in 1937 (under the Nazi regime; it was the opportunity to remove the so-called art 'degenerate' from the museum, because of lack of space), in 1947 (under the control of the Soviet military administration) and in 1957 (as part of the regime events organised by the GDR). In Leipzig, Painting and drawing continued to be published (but disappeared from the book market of the Federal Republic of Germany).

While in western Germany Klinger was often regarded as a 'charlatan', in eastern Germany was a clear point of reference. A total difference of aesthetic preferences also explains the different positions between West and East.

On the one hand, the Federal Republic of Germany had transformed Weimar expressionism into its flag, and had stressed both its contiguity with the European contemporary art as well as its influence on the American art of the following decades. In Germany at the time of European unification, moreover, Klinger was seen as a synonym of anti-French aesthetic resentments, and thus as completely unpresentable. On the other hand, in the German Democratic Republic expressionism was considered a formalist degeneration, while Klinger assured two strategic objectives: to ensure continuity to the art of the GDR with its German roots and show that even the neo-classicism of socialist realism had German roots.

Painting and drawing, a text stigmatized as conservative and nationalist aesthetics in Bonn, became one reference writing for Communist aesthetics in East Berlin. The art of Klinger continued, however, also to orient directly the circles of Leipzig, being a source of reflection on the relationship with classical art and on nude, and an inspiration to moderate forms of modernity. Decades of painting of the Leipzig School, now recognized as a common heritage of united Germany, can be also explained by Klinger’s role as founder of a local art style, especially in graphic arts.

One element that helped the revival of Klinger in West Germany was the clearly positive judgment that Giorgio de Chirico gave about him in 1920, defining Max Klinger as the modern painter par excellence, on the same year as the terrible harsh criticism by Meier-Graefe. Other factors helped: among them, the many reminiscences of Klinger among the surrealists, the end of the Cold War, and the reunification of Germany.

There is however a fundamental element which may help to explain why the passion for Klinger was reborn. It is the new interest in visual arts which spread within the artistic avant-gardes since the eighties (including the Leipzig School). Every judgment passed on past art is necessarily also a meditation on the contemporary one. An exhibition at the Städel in Frankfurt on figurative painting in West Germany in the eighties is announced for this summer [99].

Seen in this perspective, the ostracism against Klinger in West Germany during the 1950-1960s was first and foremost the almost obvious expression of the identification of modern art with the infringement of all the schemes canonical classics. In the sixties and seventies, it was perhaps incomprehensible that our society might prefer, only soon later, that art would establish again a visual reference to reality.

Perhaps, the progressive return to the figurative world - in recent decades – has been more a sign of uncertainty, crisis and lack of confidence, than an affirmation of traditional values. Abstraction was originally linked to the idea of spirituality in art, and thus to a strong faith in the destiny of the world. At a time when the great ideologies were failing, and new problems were revealed to be of extremely difficult solution, our world has perhaps felt the need to return to the people as the main object of its own paintings. It is the same reason why it can be reassuring for us to look in the mirror every day. And then, in a situation of existential crisis, it was useful to rediscover the art and the aesthetic thought of Max Klinger.

NOTES

[64] The publishing company Insel - founded in Leipzig in 1901 - and the book series ‘Insel Library’ still exist, as part of the group Suhrkamp since 1960 (now in serious difficulties as a result of the crisis of German publishing). Of Insel, after the after-war division of Germany, there were a Eastern nationalized branch in Leipzig, and one Western branch, first in Wiesbaden and then in Frankfurt.

[65] Friedländer, Max – Max Klingers Radierungen (The etchings of Max Klinger), in Kunst und Künstler, Vol. 15, 1917, pp. 305-307 (See: http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/kk1917/0327?sid=ca00987ba8452b7368e0e12d1d5be48a)

[66] Max Klinger. Wege zum Gesamtkunstwerk (Paths towards total art works). With contributions by Manfred Boetzkes, Dieter Gleisberg, Ekkehart Mai, Hans-Georg Pfeifer, Ulrike Planner-Steiner, Hellmuth Christian Wolff a comprehensive anthology of criticism on Klinger. Completely printed are: Max Klinger: Malerei und Zeichnung (1891) und Giorgio De Chirico: Max Klinger (1920), Hildesheim, Philipp von Zabern, 1984. Quotation at page 129.

[67] Klinger, Max - Wege zum Gesamtkunstwerk… (quoted). The complete text is at pages 150-151. 

[68] Meier-Graefe, Julius – Kunst ist nicht für Kunstgeschichte da. Briefe und Dokumente (Art is not there for art history. Letters and documents), Göttingen, Wallstein Verlag, 2001, 573 pages. The quotation is at pages 103.

[69] Meier-Greafe, Julius - Entwicklungsgeschichte der Modernen Kunst (History of development of modern art), Piper Verlag, (3 Volumes, 1904, 1914 e 1924) See: 

First tome: https://archive.org/stream/entwicklungsgesc01meieuoft#page/n5/mode/2up 

Second tome: https://archive.org/details/entwicklungsgesc02meieuoft. 

Third tome: https://archive.org/details/entwickl03meie 

[70] Roettig, Petra – Zeit und Ruhm – Max Klinger und AlfredLichtwark (Time and fame - Max Klinger and Alfred Lichtwark), in: Eine Liebe: Max Klinger und die Folgen (A love – Max Klinger and its follow-up), catalogue curated by Hans-Werner Schmidt and Hubertus Gaẞner, Museum of Fine Arts in Leipzig, 11 March – 24 June 2007; Hamburg Kunsthalle, 11 October 2007 – 13 January 2008, Christof Kerber publishers, Bielefeld – Lipsia, 2007, pages 62-65. The text of October 5, 1921 is a correspondence by Gustav Pauli to the Commission of the Hamburg Kunsthalle. It is not published (see note 35).

[71] Roettig, Petra – Zeit und Ruhm – Max Klinger und Alfred Lichtwark, (quoted). The text of May 17, 1930 is a correspondence by Gustav Pauli to the Commission of the Hamburg Kunsthalle. It is not published (see note 36).

[72] Sauerlandt, Max – Die Kunst der letzten 30 Jahre (The art of the last 30 years), Berlin, Rembrandt Verlag, 1935, 270 pages. The book was immediately seized by nazi authorities. The text was published again in 1948 by the Hermann Laatzen Verlag of Hamburg, after having eliminated all passages on nazism.

[73] Sauerlandt, Max - Ethos des Kunsturteils. Korrespondenz 1908-1933 (The ethos of art assessment. Correspondence 1908-1933), Hamburg, Hoffmann und Campe, 2013, 464 pages

[74] Justi, Ludwig – Von Runge bis Thoma (From Runge to Thoma), Berlin, 1932 (pages 203-205). See: Max Klinger. Wege zum Gesamtkunstwerk… (quoted), p. 159

[75] Haftmann, Werner – Das irdische Paradies. Kunst im neunzehnten Jahrhundert (Heaven on Earth. Art in the nineteenth century), Munich, 1960, pages 223 and ff. See: Max Klinger. Wege zum Gesamtkunstwerk… (quoted), p. 178.

[76] Künstler über Kunst. Briefe und Aufzeichnungen von Malern, Bildhauern, Architekten, ausgewählt und kommentiert von Hans Eckstein (Artists on art. Letters and records), Darmstadt, Im Stichnote Verlag, 1954, 278 pages.

[77] Künstlerbriefe über Kunst. Bekenntnisse von Malern, Architekten und Bildhauern aus fünf Jahrhunderten (Artists‘ letters on art. Confessions of painters, architects and sculptors from five centuries), edited by Hermann Uhde-Bernays, Frankfurt am Main, Zürich, Wien, Büchergilde Gutenberg, 1962, 712 pages.

[78] Pommeranz-Liedtke, Gerhard – Der Graphische Zyklus vom Max Klinger bis zur Gegenwart. Ein Beitrag zur Entwicklung der deutschen Graphik von 1880 bis 1995 (The graphic cycle from Max Klinger to the present. A contribution to the development of German graphic between 1880 and 1995), Deutsche Akademie der Künste, Berlin, 1956, 227 pages

[79] Saehrendt, Christian – „Die Brücke“ zwischen Staatskunst und Verfemung. Expressionistische Kunst als Politikum in der Weimarer Republik, im „Dritten Reich“ und im Kalten Krieg („The Bridge“ between state art and proscription. Expressionist art as political issue in the Weimar Republic, in the ‘Third Reich’ and in cold war“), Stuttgart, Franz Steiner Verlag, 2005

[80] On this impressive work, see my previous post: 

http://letteraturaartistica.blogspot.de/2014/10/francesco-mazzaferro-i-maestri-dellarte.html.

[81] Max Klinger. Ausstellung zum 50. Todestag des Künstler vom 4. Juli bis 20. September 1970 (Max Klinger. Exhibition in occasion of the 50th anniversary of the death of the artist, from 4 July to 20 September), Leipzig, VEB Interdruck, 124 pages plus 84 black and white pictures outside the text.

[82] Max Klinger. Ausstellung zum 50. Todestag des Künstler (quoted), p. 6

[83] Max Klinger. Ausstellung zum 50. Todestag des Künstler (quoted), p. 7

[84] Max Klinger. Ausstellung zum 50. Todestag des Künstler (quoted), p. 10

[85] Max Klinger. Ausstellung zum 50. Todestag des Künstler (quoted), p. 11

[86] Max Klinger. Ausstellung zum 50. Todestag des Künstler (quoted), p. 10

[87] Klinger, Max – Malerei und Zeichnung, Tagebuchaufzeichnungen und Briefe (Painting and drawing. Illustrated diaries and letters), Curated by Anneliese Hübscher with 40 Reproductions of Grafics by Max Klinger, Leipzig, Verlag Philipp Reclam jun. Leipzig 1985, German Democratic Republic.

[88] Max Klinger zum 50. Todestag, Das Druckgraphische Werk (Max Klinger on the 50th anniversary from the death. The graphic art work), Exhibition at the Kunsthalle of Bremen, 20^th September until 25^th October 1970, 76 pages.

[89] Max Klinger zum 50. Todestag (quoted) p. 3

[90] Max Klinger, Wege zum Gesamtkunstwerk (Paths towards the total art work), with contributions of Manfred Boetzkes, Dieter Gleisberg, Ekkehart Mai, Hans-Gerorg Pfeifer, Ulrike Lanner-Steiner, Hellmuth Christian Wolff and an ample critical anthology on Klinger. Complete reproduction of Max Klinger, Malerei und Zeichung (1891) and Giorgio de Chirico, Max Klinger (1920), Exhibition at the Roemer- und Pelizaeus-Museum, Hildesheim, 4 August – 4 November 1984, 299 pages

[91] Max Klinger 1857-1920. Catalogue of the exhibition at the Städel Gallery, 12 February – 7 June 1992, edited by Dieter Gleisberg, 386 pages

[92] Max Klinger, Die druckgraphischen Folgen (The graphic series), Catalogue of the exhibition at the Staatliche Kunsthalle by Karlsruhe, 27 January – 9 April 2007, Edition Braus, Heidelberg 2007, 184 pages.

[93] Eine Liebe: Max Klinger und die Folgen (A love – Max Klinger and his follow-up), catalogue edited by Hans-Werner Schmidt and Hubertus Gaẞner, Museum of the Fine Arts in Leipzig, 11 March – 24 June 2007; Hamburg Kunsthalle, 11 Octobre 2007 – 13 January 2008, Christof Kerber publishers, Bielefeld – Lipsia, 2007, 352 pages

[94] http://www.palazzodiamanti.it/1012/max-klinger

[95] Max Klinger, edited by Beatrice Buscaroli Fabbri. Essays and fiches by Beatrice Buscaroli Fabbri, Marisa Volpi, Renate Hartleb, Andreas Stolzenburg, Susanne Petri, Karl-Heinz Mehnert, Dietulf Sander. And with the text: Max Klinger, Painting and drawing, Ferrara Arte Editore, 1996, 372 pages, completely illustrated in black and white with 89 colour pictures. Quotations at page 5 and page 45.

[96] Klinger, Max – Pittura e disegno (quoted), 1988

[97] Klinger, Max – Painting and Drawing, Birmingham, Ikon, 2005, 37 pages

[98] Max Klinger. L’inconscio della realtà. Incisioni dalla Collezione Paola Giovanardi Rossi (The unconscious of reality. Engravings from the collection by Paola Giovanardi Rossi), edited by Paola Giovanardi Rossi and Francesco Poli, Catalogue of the exhibition at Palazzo Fava, Bologna, 25 September – 14 December 2014, Bononia University Press, 2014, 141 pages

[99] See http://www.staedelmuseum.de/en/exhibitions/80ies