Max Klinger~~ 1857-1920~~ Laborare est Orare

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Born into bourgeois comfort, Max Klinger maintained ties with his wealthy family throughout his life. Indeed, their money allowed him to live in comfort and focus on his very personal art without financial worries. There were certain themes that literally gripped him: the dark and unknowable horror of death, the eternal beauty of Nature, sexual taboo and anxiety, the sublimity of love and its sometimes destructive results. His life was art and he began making remarkable and highly sophisticated work when he was in his early twenties. He possessed a gift not only of draftsmanship, but of deep inner thought. He had the rare ability to express his ideas with mysterious, visual poetry.

He said his ideas came to him in the morning, before waking completely. He wasn’t interested in explaining the strange and oblique content of his work. His art was highly personal and very emotional, influenced by Francisco de Goya, Arnold Böcklin and Gustave Doré. Some of it is clearly about his inner world. In his most famous series of prints called “A Glove,” he portrays himself as the story’s protagonist; a lovelorn, bashful young man who finds a woman’s glove on the ground, but is too shy to return it to the owner. The images show him in tormented anguish, dreaming of an unreachable love. Some of his work was about social issues and yet others were about unfathomable questions regarding life and death. Running throughout his work was a skillful mastery of process and deep desire to express profound ideas.

Klinger began his career mainly as a print-maker. He used etching, a method where a drawing is scratched onto a metal plate and aquatint, a fluid, watercolor-like technique using acid. He would first make the elaborate drawings, then transfer them onto the plates for printing. He believed black and white was the best medium to portray the dream world of the inner mind and the dark side of life. Color he considered best for showing the beauty of nature. Klinger didn’t like or appreciate the expressionist art that was emerging during his later years. Like some trail-blazers, he wasn’t supportive of the new and shocking innovations of younger artists. In spite of this, his work clearly influenced many of them, like Giorgio deChirco, Käthe Kollwitz, Max Ernst and Edvard Munch. He himself had raised eyebrows with work that was traditional in technique but controversial in subject matter. Like Charles Dickens, Klinger questioned the bourgeois social mores of the time and made pointed visual commentary on subjects that ranged from prostitution and unwanted pregnancy to domestic abuse.

Besides print-making, Klinger explored his favorite themes in oil paint and sculpture, all with equal facility. He used color in his sculptural works, an idea he borrowed from the ancient art he studied during the many years he lived in Rome. Klinger read a lot of classic literature and loved modern realists like Émile Zola and Gustave Flaubert. He also read Marx and Darwin and was influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer. He often used myths and legends in his work. He did a series called “Rescue of Ovidian Victims” in which he changed the outcomes of Ovid’s stories, but did not necessarily give them happy endings. He was very moved by music— it was important to his work and the way he worked. He loved the emotionality of Beethoven and Schumann and made artworks to compliment the songs of his good friend and admirer Johannes Brahms. Klinger was a loyal friend who dedicated much of his art to fellow artists to show his gratitude.

Klinger had an overriding philosophy that art should be far-reaching in scope. A highpoint of his career was the unveiling of his “Beethoven” sculpture in 1902 at the 14th Vienna Secession. It is not merely a sculpture, but an environment created  to express the power and emotion of Beethoven’s vision. He portrayed Beethoven as a god from antiquity, something more than human. He worked on it for twenty years— it was a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art. In keeping with his philosophy about color as opposed to black and white, Klinger’s sculpture and paintings are not as personal or intense as his etchings— they evoke more grandeur, sensuality and his love of classicism.

 The details of Klinger’s personal life have not been well documented, except for what can be read into the work he left behind. “A Glove” seems to conjure a painfully shy and romantic young man, agonizing over an unrequited or perhaps unspoken love. In one print of the series, a weird lizard-bird holding the glove in its beak crashes through a window, someone’s hands reaching out after it. In another, a man in bed writhes in the grip of a nightmare, while horrifying creatures and an enormous glove assail him.  Klinger was a bachelor until age forty-one, when he began an enduring romantic relationship with the author Elsa Asenijeff that lasted almost twenty years. They had a daughter, Dèsirée, in 1900. Klinger painted and sculpted his partner numerous times, including a bawdy engraved bookplate of the two of them frolicking naked on a beach, Asenijeff holding the fallen Klinger by his beard. 

Although he did eventually enjoy success after the 1890’s, Klinger’s work was misunderstood and criticized throughout much of his career. Had he not come from a wealthy family, it’s unlikely he would have created such a body of rich and personal work. Neglected after death, it wasn't until the 1970’s that Klinger’s art was appreciated again. Whether he depicted social issues or fantastic flights of fancy, his work was truly progressive, unique and utterly personal. He could sneer at human folly and feel the deepest empathy, too. His obsessions with the life of humankind filled pages of prints and canvases. In these works we see his soul, his true self. 

©2016 Alice DuBois

For More Information See:

• "Max Klinger" By Jonathan Watkins and Jeanette Stoschek, Ikon Gallery, 2005
• "Graphic Works Of Max Klinger" by Kirk Varnedoe and Elizabeth Streicher, Dover Publications, 1977
• "The Grove Dictionary Of Art" Vol. 18, Oxford University Press, 1996. Entry by Annegret Friedrich