III
Max Klinger
Max Klinger is one of the most interesting and representative figures in the art of Germany to-day. Essentially German in manner of thought and feeling, he has brought into the stiff formality of early nineteenth century German painting and sculpture a plasticity of mind and an elevation of purpose and idea that suggest (as most that is excellent in Germany does suggest) the influence of Goethe. In his restless interrogation of all the forms of representative art, his work in the mass shows a curious mingling of fantasy, imagination, brusque realism, antique austerity, and modern science. The enhancing of the sense of life is, however, always the first thought with him, and lies at the root of his method of introducing color into sculpture, not by the means of a deadening pigment but by the use of marbles of deep tints and positive hues, and of translucent stones. As an artist, his chief distinction is this unremitting intention to convey in one way or another the sense of the vitalizing principle in animate objects. We may say of him that his drawing is sometimes poor, that his imagination may be clumsy and infelicitous, that his treatment of a subject is frequently coarse and even crude, but we cannot deny that out of his etchings and paintings, and out of his great strange sculptured figures looks the spirit of life, more often defiant than noble, more often capricious than beautiful, but not to be mistaken, and the rarest phenomenon in the art product of his native country. He unites, too, a profound respect for the art of antiquity with a stout modern sentiment, a union that gives to his better work both dignity and force. What he seems to lack is the one impalpable, delicate, elusive quality that makes for our enjoyment of so many imperfect productions, and the lack of which does so much to blind us to excellence in other directions—the quality of charm, which in the main depends upon the possession by the artist of taste.
Max Klinger was born in Leipzig on the eighteenth of February, 1857. His father was a man of artistic predilections, and in easy circumstances, so that the choice of a bread-winning profession for the son was not of first importance. As Klinger's talent showed itself at a very early age, it was promptly decided that he should be an artist. He left school at the age of sixteen, and went to Karlsruhe, where Gussow was beginning to gather about him a large number of pupils. In 1875 he followed Gussow to Berlin, where he came also under the influence of Menzel. Gussow's teaching was all in the line of individualism and naturalism. He led his pupils straight to nature for their model, and encouraged them to paint only what they themselves saw and felt. For this grounding in the representation of plain facts Klinger has been grateful in his maturer years, and looks back to his first master with admiration and respect as having early armed him against his tendency toward fantasy and idealism. His early style in the innumerable drawings of his youth is thin and weak, without a sign of the bold originality characterizing his recent work, and he obviously needed all the support he could get from frank and sustained observation of nature. His first oil-painting, exhibited in Berlin in 1878, showed the result of Gussow's influence in its solidity and practical directness of appeal, but a number of etchings, executed that year and the next—forerunners of the important later series—indicate the natural bent of the young artist's mind toward symbolic forms and unhackneyed subjects.
About the art of drawing as distinguished from that of painting he has his own opinions, expressed with emphasis in an essay called Malerei und Zeichnung. Drawing, etching, lithography and wood-engraving he considers preeminently adapted to convey purely imaginative thoughts such as would lose a part of their evanescent suggestiveness by translation into the more definite medium of oil-color, and he holds Griffelkunst, or the art of the point in as high estimation as any other art for the interpretation of ideas appropriate to it, an opinion not now as unusual as when he first announced it to his countrymen. For about five years after the close of his student period, he occupied himself chiefly with etchings, turning out between 1879 and 1883 no fewer than nine of the elaborate "cycles" which are so expressive of his method of thought, and of the best qualities of his workmanship. In these cycles he delights in following a development not unlike that of a musical theme, beginning with a prelude and carrying the idea through manifold variations to its final expression. His curious history of the finding of a glove which passes through different symbolic forms of individuality in the dreams of a lover, is a fair example of his eccentric and somewhat lumbering humor in the use of a symbol in his earlier years. His etchings for Ovid's Metamorphoses show the same violent grasp of the lighter side of his subject, but in his landscape etchings of 1881 we have ample opportunity to see what he could do with a conventionally charming subject treated with conventional sentiment and without symbolic intention. The moonlight scene which he calls Mondnacht, has all the subtle exquisite feeling for harmony and tone to be gained from a Whistler nocturne. The dim light on the buildings, the soft sweep of the clouds across the dark sky, the impalpable rendering, the grave and deep beauty of the scene combine to express the essence of night and its mystery. The oil-painting Abend, of 1882, also bears eloquent testimony to Klinger's power to evoke purely pictorial images of great loveliness.
In 1882, after about a year of study in Munich, he painted the important frescoes for the Steglitz Villa, in which the influence of Boecklin played freely. It was in Paris, however, where he studied between 1883 and 1885, that Klinger received his strongest and most definite impulse toward painting. His Judgment of Paris revealed the fact that the young painter had come into possession of himself, and could be depended upon for qualities demanding constraint and a measure of severity. In choosing a legend of antiquity for the subject of his picture, he may have felt a psychological obligation to obey the greater influences of the antique tradition. At all events he rather suddenly developed a style of great maturity and firmness. From Paris he went back to Berlin, but in 1889 he started for Rome, where he spent four profitable years. The fruit of this Roman period has continued to ripen up to the present time, although since 1893 Klinger has made his home in Leipzig, his wanderjahre apparently over and done with. He not only painted in Rome a Pietà, a Crucifixion, and a number of pictures in which problems of open-air painting are attacked, but he conceived there the powerful series of etchings on the subject of death, and there he made his first attempts in colored sculpture. From his earliest years, the image of death had often solicited him, and some of his interpretations are filled with dignity and pathos. In the slender, rigid figure on a white draped bed, from the etching cycle entitled Eine Liebe, there is the suggestion of a classic tomb, severe and impressive in outline, while nothing could be more poignant than the emotional appeal of the Mutter und Kind in the second death series. To turn from these to the two religious paintings executed in Rome, is to realize that eccentric as Klinger often is, both in choice of subject and treatment, his attitude toward the mysteries and problems of man's existence is that of a serious thinker with a strong artistic talent, but a still stronger intelligence. It is not, however, until we reach the period which he devotes to sculpture, that we find in his art the quality of nobility, a certain breadth, which in spite of innovations in execution and almost trivial symbolic detail, impresses upon his conceptions the classic mark.
He began his studies for his great polychromatic statue of Beethoven as early as 1886, fifteen years before its completion. In 1892 it was reported in Rome that he had turned to sculpture as a new field in which to prove himself a master, and his first exhibited figure placed him above the rank of the amateur. He threw himself into his new work with his usual energy, making himself familiar with the technicalities of marble cutting in order to follow the execution with intelligence at every stage. He sought for his material with unwearying zest, taking long journeys into Italy, Greece and the Pyrenees to procure marble with the soft, worn, rich quality produced by exposure to the weather; with this he combined onyx and brilliant stones, bronze, ivory and gold, always with the intention of creating an impression of life in addition to producing a decorative result. His strong decorative instinct comes to his aid, however, in avoiding the incoherence that would seem inevitable from the mixture of so many and such diverse materials, and the equally strong intellectual motive always obvious in his work also tends to hold it together in a more or less dignified unity. The Cassandra, his second colored statue, finished in Leipzig in 1895, and now in possession of the Leipzig Museum, is especially free from eccentricity and caprice. The beautiful Greek head, with its deep-set eyes and delicate mouth, is expressive of intense but normal feeling. The flesh is represented by warm-toned marble, the hair is brownish-red, the garment is of alabaster, yellowish-red with violet tones, and the figure stands on a pedestal of Pyranean marble. In color effect, however, the Beethoven is the most striking. In Les Maîtres Contemporains, M. Paul Mongré thus describes it: