Was possessed! For Makart’s whole artistic endeavour had something unconscious. One might say in a variant reading from Lessing: “If Makart had been born without a brain he would nevertheless have been a great painter.” It is as if one who lies buried in Antwerp had once more felt the instinct of production, and let himself down into the great head of the little Salzburger; and the head, being a somewhat imperfect medium, only stammered out the intentions of the sublime master. There is something remarkable in the career of this son of the poor servant, on whom fortune showered with full hands all it had to offer a child of the nineteenth century, and who in the midst of his splendour in Vienna remained always the same harmless child of nature that he had been in Munich, when, after receiving his first hundred florins, he drove in a cab the two steps from Oberpollinger to the Academy.

One must take him as he is—a product of nature. Makart was a scene painter, and that not in his scenical pictures only; but he was an inspired scene painter, of an enviable facility, who poured forth in play what others fabricate with pains. His merit it is to have announced to the Germans afresh, in an overwhelming style, that revelation of colour which had been forgotten since the Venetians and Rubens. He has not advanced the history of art, as such. What he gave had been given better before. But the history of German art in the nineteenth century has to honour in him the most perfect representative of the period in which colour-blindness was succeeded by exuberance of colour, and the cartoon style by the delight in painting.

GABRIEL MAX.
Graphische Kunst.

Beside Makart, the child of nature, Gabriel Max’s seems a calculating, tormented, unhealthy talent. In the manner in which Makart did his work there lay a certain elementary, logical necessity; in Max there is a great deal of speculation and over-refinement. Makart’s home was the town on the lagoons. Max is by education and temperament a disciple of Piloty—that is to say, a painter of disasters; by birth he was a Bohemian. And that resulted in his case in a very interesting mixture. When he exhibited his first pictures it was as if one heard a refined music after the tom-tom of Piloty. In his “Martyr on the Cross,” which appeared in the spring of 1867 in the Munich Kunstverein, he first struck that bitter-sweet, half-torturing, half-ensnaring tone in which he afterwards continued to sound. It is dawn; a soft grey light rests, beaming mildly, over the lonely Campagna. Here stands a cross on which a girl-martyr has ended her struggles. A young Roman coming home from a feast is so thrilled by the heavenly peace in the expression of the unhappy girl’s face that he lays a crown of roses at the foot of the cross, and becomes a convert to the faith for which she has suffered. The mysterious mortuary sentiment in the subject is strengthened by the almost ghostly pallor of the colouring. Everything was harmonised in white, except that one dark lock, falling across the pale forehead with great boldness, sounded like a shrill dissonance in the soft harmony, like a wild scream; it had come there apparently quite by chance, but was nevertheless calculated to a hair’s breadth. The terribly touching vision of the martyr aroused in every visitor to the Kunstverein a shudder of delight. It was even a fine variation, and one which invited pity, that the victim should not have been a hero, as in conventional catastrophes, but a soft and sweet girl, made for love and never for the cross. And it was the more absorbing, too, because it was impossible to say whether the young Roman was looking up to the beautiful woman with the desecrating sensuality of a décadent or with the fervid ecstasy of a convert. The same horrified fascination was wakened again and again in the presence of the later pictures of the painter. Almost every one contained a scene of martyrdom, in which the tormented and sinking heroine was a helpless child or a weak and defenceless woman. The passion for tragic subjects brought into full swing by the historical painters was directed in Max against the purest and tenderest, the most chaste and the most lovely. The type was always the same, with its Bohemian nose and one eye larger than the other, by which was attained a curiously visionary or hysterically enthusiastic expression. And the pictorial treatment corresponded to it: there was always a flesh-tint of poignant mortal pallor, a white clinging drapery, a black veil, a light grey background, all harmonised in one very delicate chord.

Goethe’s Gretchen made the beginning. In the Zwinger she lifted up her eyes in frightened anguish to the countenance of the Madonna. She sat in her cell, her face altered by madness and lit up with a wild laughter, and in a reverie passed her hand through Faust’s locks. Or as a phantom she wandered in the Walpurgis night, in her long, flowing shroud, with a blood-red stripe round her throat. This picture, exhibited with electric light, was especially effective. Max had brought into the earnest corpse-like eyes an expression that was terribly demoniacal, and had been attained to the same degree by no earlier illustrator of Faust. A raven, pecking at the lost ring, was her ghostly escort.

Max showed great invention in hitting upon such things. Bürger’s Pfarrertochter von Taubenhain gave him the material for his “Child-murderess”—a young girl who, by the bank of a lonely pool, overgrown with reeds, stabs her child to the heart with a needle, and in a sudden rush of maternal love presses a kiss on the stiff little body before committing it to the water. Here the sombre, disconsolate character of the landscape accorded finely with the action, and the pale body of the child made an exceedingly bright, pungent spot of colour on the dark-green rushes. “The Lion’s Bride” illustrated Chamisso’s ballad of the jealous lion who killed his mistress before her wedding, because he would not give her over to another. Majestically he lies behind her, with one paw on the arm of the slain, and the other struck into her thigh. The stones of the floor are reddened with her blood. But far more frequently than blood Max employed the tints of corruption, the true nature morte. In its colour-values and subtle shades the dead human body, just at the point where corruption begins, was better suited to the painter’s pallid scale of colour than the light and brutally effective red of freshly poured-out blood. Among these paintings of mortification must be reckoned “Ahasuerus by the Body of a Child” and “The Anatomist”; the latter meditatively regards at the dissecting-table the corpse, covered with white linen, of a young girl who has committed suicide. In his “Raising of Jairus’s Daughter” the effect of mortification was most cleverly heightened by a small detail, which made an extraordinary impression: this was a fly on the naked arm of the girl, put there to remind the spectator of the unconsciousness of the body.

Seemann, Leipzig.
MAX.A NUN IN THE CLOISTER GARDEN.

The secrets of death are always certain of their effect on the nerves; but by means of the broken hearts of women, with annihilated hopes and agonised hysterical sufferings, he succeeded again in calling forth a bitter-sweet sympathy. “Mary Magdalene” and “The Maid of Orleans” were the masterpieces of this group. The underlying idea of the picture “Light” is that a blind young Christian girl, at the portal of the Roman catacombs, offers lamps to the entering Christians for the illumination of their dark way. The blind woman as the giver of light! Even in his youth, with cruel irony, he had had sung by a blind quartet the song, “Du hast die schönsten Augen.” A touch of Delaroche is in the other young martyr, who, between the bloodthirsty beasts of the Roman circus, looks up amazed to the rows of spectators, from the midst of which a young Roman has flung her a rose as a last greeting. In the next moment she will be lying on the earth torn to shreds by the beasts.

As he succeeded here in giving a presentiment of the horrible, so in another group of pictures Max attained a yet more demoniacal charm by the ghostly. He had early made himself familiar with Schopenhauer and Buddha and the Indian fakirs; the mystical and spiritualistic movement had just at that time been set going by the writings of Carl Du Prels. Justinus Kerner and the prophetess of Prevorst were the order of the day. Max became the painter of hypnotism and spiritualism. “The Spirit’s Greeting” made a special sensation: the young girl at the piano, in this picture, is interrupted in her playing by the touch of a materialised ghostly hand, which stretches towards her from a soft cloudy mist. The mixture of horror, joy, devotion, and ecstasy in the face of the young player was very effective. In order to render effects of the kind he made extensive studies from the hypnotised model, and in this way he sometimes reached an extraordinary intensity of expression. He took a decided position with regard to another question which at the time was very acute—vivisection. This he did in the picture of the man of science from whom an allegorical female figure, “The Genius of Pity,” takes away a little dog doomed to be dissected, showing by a pair of scales that the human heart has more weight than the human understanding.