Etcher of the Id

By ROBERT HUGHES

A man tosses in nightmare; waves swill against his mattress, accusing figures and monsters jostle in the water, and a gigantic buttoned glove flops like a squid against the bedroom wall. A skeleton lies across a railroad track, two bony ringers stuck between fleshless lips to whistle an approaching train to its accident. Cliffs become gloomy torsos, a lobster floats in air. The images seem like snippets from a surrealist collage by Max Ernst. In fact, they filled the graphic work of a 19th century German academician named Max Klinger.

Unheralded Prophet. Klinger died in 1920, after a career of prolonged and dull success. The paintings from which he earned a handsome living were promptly forgotten, and his strange etchings, too. But with the renewed scholarly interest in 19th century German art, and in the sources of that anonymous stuff called "modernism," it was natural that Klinger should be exhumed. This job, and more, has been done by an elegantly compact show of Klinger graphics assembled by Jan von Adlmann for the Wichita Art Museum, where it opened this month before traveling to Berkeley and Harvard.

To treat Klinger simply as a prophet of Surrealism--which Von Adlmann sensibly does not do--would be to miss the peculiar value of his art. The Surrealists were able to build their Tower of Babel on the work of Freud. But as far as is known, Klinger had never heard of the Viennese doctor. Born in Leipzig in 1857, and brought up in the correct milieu of provincial German society, he MIherited no work plans for dealing with his own unconscious images. He simply laid them out, naked or veiled with classical mythology. At the same time, Klinger was aware of a split between his official paintings and his more private graphics. He explained this to himself as part of the nature of the media.

The painter, he held, "prefers to beautify." But the draftsman, who works with the more wiry stuff of line, "practices a form of criticism with his scratching." The man with the pen "looks perpetually at the unfilled holes, the yearned for and the barely attainable; his is a personal coming to terms with a world of irreconcilable powers. The painter bodies forth optimism ... the draftsman cannot escape his more negative vision, beyond appearances." So Klinger the painter moved sedately between a professorship in Leipzig and his country vineyard, turning out the portraits and allegories his patrons sought, and ignoring the obsessions which Klinger the draftsman could not deny himself.

Two themes in particular haunted him: fetishism and an erotic consciousness of death. Nowhere did he express this desire to tie love and death together more succinctly than in an etching of 1884 called Finis. It is the last plate in an ironical series on the life of a "fallen woman," throughout which Klinger essayed some bitter jabs at the prevailing Victorian hypocrisies about virginity and whoredom. The luckless and persecuted heroine, freed from life, is carried away by an angel, or maybe an ideal lover, sprawled on his wings as on a feather bed. "We flee the shadow of death, not death itself, for it is the ultimate goal of our fondest wishes," Klinger wrote elsewhere.

Alarming Glove. Klinger's fetishism dominates his strangest and best known series of etchings: a fantasy which begins innocently enough with the artist picking up a girl's glove at a roller-skating rink, and follows the glove through a fabulous series of dream vicissitudes. The artist competes for this odd love-object against a baleful, glove-napping reptile--which, in The Abduction, sprouts wings like a pterodactyl and lurches off into the night sky with its prey. Such etchings, in their impassioned and somewhat poker-faced grotesqueries, are reminiscent of Goya, who gave visual substance to those monsters that wake when reason dreams. But Goya's repertory contains no more alarming beast than this.

It is on the resonance of his imagery that Klinger's work depends for its enduring value. His handling of tone (and thus of space) tended to be weak, and his drawing was often coarse and perfunctory. His strength was neurosis, and the best of his etchings, with their strangely modern battles of id and antimacassar, are illustrations of a Freudian maxim: civilization is repression.

Robert Hughes

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