Studio: international art (5.1895)

Max Klinger

from disappointment and neglect into fame, as out
of a mine into the broad light of day. To discuss
one who is still with us, of whom we hope that he
has not yet said half of what he has to say, is
always perilous, doubly so when we have but a few
pages at our disposal, where a volume would hardly
suffice.

Klinger has lived and laboured in Leipsic,
Berlin, Brussels, Munich, Paris, Rome; he has
seen much and many sides of the world. Member
of a well-to-do family, he has moved in " society."
On the other hand, there was a time when he was
forced to earn his bread, and under such adverse
circumstances that he almost succumbed. His
health failed, he was too proud to write, and only
through a doctor did his mother hear of the
desperate situation he was in, just in time to bring
him to the fresh air and wholesome rest which
restored his physical and mental health. The de-
velopment of his mind progressed upon the same
lines, side by side with his chequered out-of-doors
life. In this he likewise passed through periods of
beneficent, tranquillising rest as well as through the
suffering and despair of passionate struggles. The
time is fortunately past when artists looked to the
Venus of Milo or the Iliad, rather than to the life
around them, for inspiration. In Klinger's etcher's
studio—a little top-story room, its window opening
upon a beautiful bit of wood-landscape—we find
upon the homely bookshelf, Zola, Flaubert, Mau-
passant, the Goncourts ; Tolstoi and Dostojewski,
Ibsen, Kielland and Hauptmann—men who have
lived with us, fought the same fight against numb-
ing tradition in art, in science, in morals, in the
life we are engaged in at this moment; men whose
intellectual milieu is that of the closing century.
It is with them that we must rank Klinger—they
are his brethren, not his models. He, too, has
lain many and many an hour awake in the dark,
musing over things as they are, dreaming of them
as they ought to be, as they will be some day, we
hope. His vehicle of communication was not the
black and white of printers' type, it was the black
and white of pen and point.

Klinger began as a draughtsman and etcher, and
in this line his greatest achievements, until recently
at least, are to be found. That he meant to produce
something more than simply a pleasure for the eye,
is proved by the fact of his publishing his plates in
series, all connected by a train of thought, the latter
being hinted at in the title.

There is a set of six plates called Eve and the
Future; the first, entitled Eve, discovers Adam
and Eve in an idyllic glade. Adam, at a distance,
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lies lazily and carelessly in the grass ; Eve, in the
foreground, has just passed her hand over her
luxuriant hair, a picture of innocent and naive
beauty. The second plate, First Future, shows
us a narrow gorge, at the end of which there
looms up a huge tiger, shutting off all escape as it
were. The third plate, called The Serpent, shows
Eve raised on tiptoe in order to look at her own
features, reflected in the glass which the serpent
holds. The Second Future discovers a beast some-
what like an enormous leech, swimming in a sea
of blood, and carrying upon its back a man with
claws and with a harpoon in his hands. The fifth
plate, Adam, represents the expulsion from Para-
dise. Klinger made three etchings of this before
he was satisfied with the effect. The fascinating
landscape and the disposition of the main group
—Adam carrying Eve bodily out of Paradise—
are the same in all three plates. Adam, however,
varies. At first his expression is one of tender
concern, as if his own grief were quite forgotten
in the misery of his beloved fellow-sufferer. In
the final plate his face bears a look of sullen
defiance, as of one who deems his lot unjust, or of
one who hates her, the cause of mischief and of
labour. The last picture shows us Death as a
skeleton, trampling upon a crowd of human heads
that shriek in agony as he rams them down.
There is a partition along one side of this crowd,
and beyond it a deprecatory mystic hand waves
in communication with this suffering multitude.

So much for a brief description of the six sub-
jects, which bear no other titles or explanatory
letterpress than that which has been given. After
we have enjoyed them as beautiful etchings, we may
try to fathom their meaning. Eating the fruit of
the tree of knowledge, Eve's sin, is, according to
the third plate, the curiosity of man to see and
know himself, to explain the mystery of his being.
The Future that this transgression called down
upon mankind was, according to the Bible, the
misery of death. In its first form this Future
presented itself as the battle of man with the
elements and forces of Nature, here typified by the
wild beast; the tiger. This brute force was in a
way overcome by civilisation, to be followed by the
death-terror that man inflicts upon man, by murder
and war; the Second Future is typified by a man
with the claws of a vulture holding a formidable
weapon, and riding in a sea of blood. After Death
had exercised its terror in these various forms upon
the body of man, it fell upon his mind and filled it
with agony. What had been to man at worst but
a short pain Christianity changed into a dreadful