EVANGHELIA STEAD
[1] Representations of Adam and Eve plucking the apple under the Tree may powerfully involve spectators. They stand as mirror images of mankind’s first wickedness that entailed sin, banned our forebears from Paradise, and earned them a life of misery and desolation on Earth. In dealing with the Genesis scenario, early German masters marked a turn in cultural history. Many of their images count as crucial to the history of nudity in art. They set new naturalistic rules on style and promoted anatomically accurate representations of the body. Others sit at the crossroads between temptation-persuasion and resistance-lenience. Their artistic and cultural merit ambiguously involves viewers’ emotions. Indeed, their equivocal handling rather entices than advises or moralizes.
[2] Unsurprisingly (given its fascination with origins, decline, and sin), the fin de siècle also turned with characteristic brio to Adam and Eve under the Tree, a crucial scene in the Northern Renaissance, whose centrality engaged a major cultural shift involving the Renaissance idea of the body and the role of images in Protestant and Counter-Reformation debate. Scholarly investigation has dwelt on the period’s fuller perception and freer pleasures of physical beings, particularly in the visual arts, and on its enhanced knowledge of the human body (Chastel 1990; Lecercle 1987; Lecercle 1990). The role of images has also been widely studied with scholars stressing the rules and subtle nuances as artists walked a tightrope between accusations of idolatry, Calvinist iconoclasm, and the subtle use of the subliminal or affective power of images in Lutheranism (for instance Christin 1991; Koerner 2004; Hall 2011; Heal 2017).
[3] Yet, in the fin de siècle, ideas ambiguously mix with symbolism; anxiety mingles with hopes of salvation; novel means of expression such as the graphic arts contest artistic hierarchies, and compete with the supremacy of painting for recognition; technologies such as woodcuts and engravings — already a crucial promotion of reproducible media at the time of the Northern Renaissance — earn new vigour and proffer intense, sharp, even biting means of expression. Above all, fin-de-siècle anxiety appears satiated with cultural knowledge, in search of new beliefs (see for instance Jankélévitch 1950; Schulz-Buschhaus 2002; Würffel 2008). It parades at its fullest when famous scenes fuse or coalesce with instances from major Northern Renaissance artworks or nineteenth-century works of literature. Such is Max Klinger’s standalone lithograph Der Äpfelchen begehrt ihr sehr, whose mysterious title, taken from Goethe’s Faust, Part One, also concedes a comparison with early German representations of Adam and Eve plucking the apple, as we shall see in detail. Both scenes arouse spectators’ emotions, although not in the same direction, nor with the same implications. While investigating in depth the layered meaning of Klinger’s lithograph, this article offers a comparison with early German artists, particularly Cranach, from two viewpoints. The first insists on the equivocal emotions brought to the fore. The second stresses the way in which such a scene parts company in both cases with a more comprehensive iconographic cycle and earns autonomy along with additional weight. Furthermore, in Klinger’s case, the graphic arts take on sharp connotations to promote new meaning.
1 Lines from Goethe’s Faust, Part One
[4] Goethe’s Faust, Part One (1808), a major German text, powerfully addresses temptation and sin as Mephistopheles seeks to lead Faust to perdition through a series of lures. At its climax, within the orgiastic revelry of the witches’ Sabbath, a young witch and Faust chant as they dance face to face in alternating voices and twin stanzas of eight verses. In a much-read bilingual edition, whose original German faced Albert George Latham’s rhymed English translation, the passage runs as follows:
|
Faust mit der jungen tanzend.
Einst hatt’ ich einen schönen Traum; Da sah ich einen Apfelbaum, Zwey schöne Aepfel glänzten dran, Sie reizten mich, ich stieg hinan.
Die Schöne.
Der Aepfelchen begehrt ihr sehr Und schon vom Paradiese her. Von Freuden fühl’ ich mich bewegt, Daß auch mein Garten solche trägt. (Faust I. 4128–35) |
Once on a time there came to me A fair dream of an apple-tree. Whereon two beauteous apples shone. They tempted me — I clomb[1] thereon.
For apples did you ever lust From Paradise ere you were thrust, And I am overjoyed to know That such within my garden grow. (Latham trans. 1908: 196)[2] |
In 1884, almost a century after Goethe’s Faust I first astonished German and European readers, Max Klinger lifted Der Äpfelchen begehrt ihr sehr, the title for the lithograph discussed here (Singer 1909: 323), from the first line of the second stanza. Over the years, however, the lithograph has been conferred not just one, but three titles, i.e., the line from Faust, and, in an attempt to explain and expound it, another two, rather descriptive and divergent, yet complementary: Walpurgisnacht (Walpurgis Night) and Brockenszene aus Faust (Äpfel) (The Brocken scene from Faust [Apples]). Not only is this title in need of explanation, but the intricate meaning of Goethe’s passage is rarely reflected in the translations. In 1908, Albert G. Latham rendered both the inversion and emphasis of Goethe’s original, failing however to catch the emotive ambiguity of the hypocorism “little apples”: “For apples did you ever lust.” Perhaps tongue-in-cheek, Abraham Hayward had opted in 1833 for a more pedestrian and prosaic, “You are very fond of apples.” In fact, not only is the line hard to translate for a number of reasons, it is also rather obscure; and the sophisticated potency of Klinger’s lithograph benefits from its obscurity. Meaning becomes more apparent once the quote takes in the next line. In Bayard Taylor’s 1870 American translation, much praised at the time, the passage reads, “Apples have been desired by you | Since first in Paradise they grew,” and in a recent (1987) Faust translation by David Luke: “You men were always apple-mad | Adam in Eden was just as bad.”
[5] As they follow each other in feverish Song of Songs succession, the male and female voices delve into three stories: first, the dream Faust once had of climbing an apple tree to pick two luscious fruit; then, in two forceful verses by the young witch, the story of Man’s Fall from Paradise for lusting after apples; and third, the response, in the young witch’s voice again, igniting the man’s desire, sharpening his craving, temptation leading to yielding, and yielding to renewed temptation in an everlasting cycle. The apples in the garden do lure Faust to the young witch’s desirable body as reflects Goethe’s immediately grotesque and libidinous parody of these verses, as sung by Mephistopheles dancing with an old hag (Faust I. 4136–43, Latham trans. 1908: 196–97). The lithograph Klinger named after Goethe’s verse is then not just an image rendering a complex scene from Faust: in 1880s Germany, it strongly embraced man’s temptation and Fall (Fig. 1).
[6] Both Fall and Faust have here special effect as the verses resonate in 1884 readers’ ears, by now well familiar with Goethe’s play. The connexion between them goes far beyond their common initial “F” or a handy alliteration of monosyllables (unattainable indeed in German, where under canon the Fall would be referred to as der Sündenfall). For Faust is Man fallen from grace, Adam’s child and God’s heir who has tasted of the fruit of knowledge and found it sour. He is that mythical figure who aspires to universal learning and longs for it without ever attaining it. Yet he is rarely shown in relation to the Tree of the Knowledge of good and evil and the initial temptation scene in Goethe’s play or its apposite iconography. When, in Goethe’s Faust, Part One, the protagonist translates from the Bible, he interprets the beginning of the Gospel according to John (l. 1224 ff.) rather than Genesis. Still, in Faust, Part Two, the gardeners’ song makes explicit the invitation in one of the initial temptation settings: “Come, the ripest fruit that grows is | Here with relish to be eaten. | Let the poets rhyme of roses. | But the apple must be bitten!” (Faust II, i. 5166–69, Latham trans.). Moreover, in Faust, Part One, the protagonist’s dance with the young witch acts as the culmination of temptation, the epitome of the witches’ Sabbath and orgiastic dance, and Mephistopheles’s supreme snare. One step further, and Faust will be the devil’s prey.
[7] Klinger’s lithograph is therefore of particular interest. Recalling the initial scene of man’s expulsion from Eden, it captures Goethe’s preoccupation in Faust, Part One with the Fall. Klinger, like Goethe, powerfully relates it to a major myth of Germanic origin, as when in his 1909 pen-and-ink drawing he lifted the title, “Habe nun ach! Philosophie…” from Faust’s initial line and significantly treated the image as a dual means to launch the play itself. In the drawing, mischievous naked children lift a heavy theatre curtain to see what is beyond. On its folds, Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Paradise is depicted in dotted outline amongst animals and rich vegetation. Klinger cleverly blends Goethe’s “Prologue on the Theatre” from Faust I and Faust’s monologue in Knittelvers (which perhaps inspired the infant motif) to project them once again onto the Fall (Max Klinger: Sammlung Georg Hirzel 1993: no. 168, pl. 35; Giesen 1998: 231).
[8] The 1884 Klinger lithograph arrests us as it calls for a comparison with the early German Masters’ artistic depictions of the initial Eden scene around the Tree of Knowledge, particularly those of Cranach. By considering it as a case of a Northern Renaissance afterlife, I do not however claim any direct aesthetic influence of early German Masters on Klinger, although he was an explicit admirer of Hans Baldung Grien, Holbein, and Dürer (Streicher 1996: 230), and Holbein’s sway will later be briefly alluded to. What emerges nonetheless, and that I wish to explore here, is the way such depictions summon craving, involve the viewer, and question the very status of images. In other words, what do Klinger and the early German masters encounter when they mingle emotion with temptation and detach an image from a broader wide-ranging graphic cycle, to grant it iconic independence?
2 Early German Depictions of Adam and Eve
[9] In La parole d’Adam, le corps d’Ève (Adam’s Word, Eve’s Body: 2007), Lise Wajeman has shown that Adam and Eve picking the fruit under the Tree became a major iconographic theme in sixteenth-century painting and graphic art for both North German masters (Albrecht Dürer, Hans Baldung Grien and Lucas Cranach the Elder) as well as Italian painters around Raphaël and Titian. One important feature of such representations is that the scene becomes independent from other considerations (representational, thematic, pedagogical, etc.) previously determinant and all-embracing, to stand alone, even symbolise something completely different. Wajeman highlights the fact that the temptation instant in Paradise freed itself from its original context, that is, from comprehensive iconographic cycles, such as Adam and Eve’s own complete story, the life of Christ, or the story of humanity from creation to life on earth (2007: 28–29). It became a self-sufficient and separate pictorial theme, in which the two Biblical ancestors feature per se in autonomous works of art. The first of these are Dürer’s paired oil-on-panel paintings Adam and Eve of 1507 as well as his 1504 engraving of the same subject. By no coincidence, Dürer’s renderings of the first-engendered man and woman are also the first full-size nudes in German painting. They led to further full-size representations of the Biblical progenitors by Hans Baldung Grien, and particularly Lucas Cranach the Elder, in a bonanza of some sixty versions.[3]
[10] As Wajeman shows, depiction of the Fall leads to the advent of sexuality, the nascence of woman in her specificity and sexualization, and the representation of erotic desire in painted and graphic works. Indeed, the Fall may be seen as the very moment and reason by which the initial androgyny split into two and bore Woman in her biological particularity. Originally, the protoplasts have no idea they are naked and different (Genesis 3:7). In Christian tradition, Original Sin (as it is referred to) precedes sexual awareness. Wajeman claims however that its depiction may be more seductive than morally persuasive, more enticing than didactic (2007: 38–40, 231, 241). Since the Protestant Reformation, such images are objects of discourse and debate, and questions about the depiction of Original Sin prove vital. The effectiveness of a painting may have perverse outcomes. As artists eroticize the theme to represent temptation, emotion integrates the iconographic programme. What part does desire play in these panels? Is it instructive, informative, and edifying, or rather attractive, appealing, tantalizing? In his Enchiridion, Luther considered images as a subordinate tool. In Wajeman’s words: “the image must help the believer memorize the word but certainly do not trigger emotions” (2007: 231). Cranach’s engravings for Luther’s Bible (Falk ed. 1980: no. 1 (279); Campbell ed. 2007: 115) never display the seductiveness and daring painterly treatment of his Adam and Eve panels, although visual stimulation was important and did awake affects (Heal 2017: 113). Inversely, Cranach’s multiple painted versions are radically different (Wajeman 2007: 231). They induce the spectator himself/herself into temptation, in such a way that they make his/her own sense of guilt more closely associated with Original Sin.
[11] Desire depicted in the Fall may thus work as an alluring tool, contrary to the role assigned to images by Luther. Cranach the Elder and his Workshop often painted for a court audience which they sought to please rather than instruct, argues Wajeman. From 1508 to 1550 Cranach’s numerous depictions of Adam and Eve in the temptation scene (Friedländer & Rosenberg 1978: 43–44, 112–14, 191–99, 356–57, 431–32)[4] pose as pictorial implementations of form meant to gratify, even thrill — hardly a preoccupation with images’ efficiency or their moral message (Wajeman 2007: 38).
[12] Building on this, let us look closer at three paintings by Lucas Cranach the Elder, all displayed at the Cranach Digital archive (https://lucascranach.org/home): in an early version now in the Warsaw National Museum (c. 1510 or 1512), a surprised Adam lifts his head towards the Tree.[5] An extensive snake writhes towards a youthful lissom Eve who, apple in hand, looks at us forcefully, offering a roundish fruit coloured as her ruddy lips. In the Dresden Gemäldegalerie painting (1531), Eve, who has just culled twin fruits, still listens to the serpent’s whisper, while casting an alluring glance towards the viewer.[6] With left leg and thigh forward, her body propels an enviable belly and pubic hair dawning behind dark leaves, while Adam stares at her apprehensively. The protoplasts now feature individually on separate panels. In the Pasadena Norton Simon Museum diptych of very close date (c. 1530), Eve, again with fruit in her right hand, gestures invitingly towards her breasts.[7] Her body curves inwards with the same disturbing effect for the viewer, and one of her buttocks is now in view, while Adam looks at her bewildered, scratching his skull through wild locks. Arguably, these paintings work increasingly by pairing opposites: Adam incarnates warning and caution, whilst Eve prompts coveting and desire. Between the two, spectators’ conflicting feelings and sensations work overtime.[8]
3 Craving in Klinger
[13] Klinger’s graphic work has seldom been compared to Northern Renaissance iconography and, to my knowledge, only from a formal point of view (Kühn 1907: 40). His veneration of Northern masters is acknowledged (Streicher 1996: 230) and to relate his writings on the graphic arts to the importance of engraving and woodcuts in the Northern Renaissance would stand to reason. However, I rather dwell here to the affecting, even disturbing part, of his graphic art. The emotions it arouses may compare to Renaissance ambiguous feelings, steered by Cranach’s paintings of the Temptation scene, and compel the viewer diversely. Furthermore, the sharp meaning Klinger confers to this part of his oeuvre reads as a modernization of media in a Bible-forsaken fallen world, yet still with a stern message to drive home.
[14] Emotion and desire in Klinger’s lithograph start with the title, Goethe’s very verse Der Äpfelchen begehrt ihr sehr. Of evocative sense in German, begehren may simply express a wish, as in Was ist Ihr Begehr? (“What can I do for you?”), and Goethe has used it in that sense as the Grimm brothers’ Wörterbuch shows. But it also connotes a craving, longing or hankering, implying sexual arousal. It is the very verb signalling what is forbidden in one of the ten biblical Commandments: du sollst nicht begehren deines Nächsten Weib (“thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife”) (King James Version, Ex 20:17). In Goethe’s line, emotion is further stressed by the inversion between object and verb, the object of desire being first in the order of speech, and by the hypocorism Äpfelchen, instead of Äpfel, the diminutive signalling predilection. It is such a craving that the best translations of these lines render: “For apples did you ever lust | From Paradise ere you were thrust,” by Albert G. Latham (1908); “Apples have been desired by you | Since first in Paradise they grew,” by Bayard Taylor (1870); or perhaps modestly, “You men were always apple-mad | Adam in Eden was just as bad,” by David Luke, in the most modern rendering (1987). In Klinger’s lithograph however, the tantalizing verse is nearly hidden in the upper part of the image, densely woven into the foliage of the tree, while the word “Äpfel” looms as temptation incarnate. Formed of a chain of intertwined writhing snakes, “Äpfel” hangs off a branch of the apple tree, in itself a gigantic fruit (Fig. 1a, detail).
[15] Klinger’s intricate lithograph draws us in as it rejects us in its independence. In Goethe’s line, “Der Äpfelchen begehrt ihr sehr,” the young witch uses a polite form (second person plural) to address and seduce Faust. Ambiguously masked in small capitals, the same line, as title atop Klinger’s print (see Fig. 1a, detail), uses ihr to address in the plural a broader community as well as the individual viewer with familiarity. All of us, not just Faust, are cornered for hankering after apples. We are all apple-mad. Cranach’s treatment of temptation correspondingly involved spectators, the seduction stemming from the image overriding persuasion.
[16] The lithograph’s relation to the German Masters’ treatment of the temptation scene is equally stressed by its own self-sufficiency and self-determination. It is indeed autonomous in two ways: it has freed itself from the graphic cycle, Ein Leben (“A Life”), to which it belonged originally (see below); and, even more importantly, as a new freestanding Faust interpretation, it counters the period’s prolific Faust iconography, which early on standardized and heavily historicized Goethe’s play, turning it into a national, even nationalistic, and jingoistic symbol (Tille 1901; Forster-Hahn 1987 and 1990; Giesen 1998: 196–227). Grand editions illustrated throughout or monumental and ponderous tomes by the likes of Engelbert Seibertz, August von Kreling, and Alexander Liezen-Mayer were mainly historicist in style, although nuances are due (Stead 2020). In opposition to such regular, indeed hackneyed, Faust iconography of the time, the lithograph stands as a single and singular interpretation of Goethe’s tragedy.
[17] Indeed, Klinger originally conceived it as part of Ein Leben: Opus VIII (1884), one of his richest and longest graphic cycles, extensively studied by Anja Wenn who has rightly highlighted the historical context, studied the symbolic figure of the prostitute within gender roles and the sexual morals of the bourgeoisie, and shown Klinger’s diverse sources from Christian iconography to trivial images and contemporary literature (Wenn 2006). In comparing Klinger to Cranach, however, my approach to the lithograph opens a new research path and differs from hers but for a few consensual details. Ein Leben is composed of fifteen etchings and dedicated to the Danish writer and critic Georg Brandes, theoretician of the so-called “Modernist Breakthrough” in Scandinavian culture and a leading Nietzschean proselytiser. The artist worked on Ein Leben from 1880 to 1884, drawing on the figure of the streetwalker in nineteenth-century art and literature, as Wenn has shown (2006: 249–92). Critics have often drawn a parallel with a much-discussed painting by the Norwegian artist and writer Christian Krohg, one of Klinger’s personal friends, and his novel Albertine, both however of later date. The painting, Albertine i politilægens venteværelse (“Albertine in the Police Doctor’s Waiting-Room”), shows a poorly dressed Albertine amongst gaudy courtesans queuing for a regular health check at police headquarters. In the novel, Albertine, a poor seamstress in Christiania, seduced and raped by a police officer, ends up as a prostitute, severely judged by public hypocrisy and doomed to public shame. Considered scandalous, Krohg’s novel was seized in 1886, and the author fined (Petri 1996: 110; Wenn 2007). In Klinger’s cycle, Ein Leben, the anonymous heroine meets not only with public reprobation but also with untimely death and utter destruction, a dramatized return to nonexistence as shows the last plate, Ins Nichts zurück (“Back into Nothingness”), projecting her naked body into a black void under Death’s very scythe. In Ein Leben, Klinger grimly meditated on female fate, fragility and demise in a modern world, and on Original Sin as in the first plate, Prefacio I, to which I shall turn shortly (Fig. 5).
[18] At a certain point, Der Äpfelchen begehrt ihr sehr was envisaged by the artist as a title page to Ein Leben, composed of nine plates only, as shows an impression on orange-red paper mounted on cardboard with printer’s and contents’ indications (Fig. 2). Klinger ultimately abandoned the idea, perhaps because it competes with the very first plate, Prefacio I, discussed below. Der Äpfelchen begehrt ihr sehr therefore stands in his oeuvre as an independent graphic work. Although critics have stressed the fact that Klinger’s prints in cycles are singular images, each having their own worth, a general perception of prevailing composition relates the plates in each engraved set (Neuerburg 1976: 31–37; Roch 1976: 209–18). Yet, Ein Leben as background stresses all the more this print’s singularity: it is not only a fully-fledged graphic work, deliberately removed by the artist from his cyclical oeuvre, but also springs from lithography, a technique which differs from etching.
[19] Klinger’s singular gesture demonstrates fin-de-siècle emancipation, even brazenness, regarding Goethe’s Faust. It also anticipates two major German artists, who would similarly interpret crucial moments from the tragedy through standalone yet outstanding graphic works: the single Gretchen etching of 1899 by Käthe Kollwitz (Knesebeck 45 IV), and Emil Nolde’s free-standing Faust lithograph from 1911 (Stead 2019), both differ in subject matter from Klinger, yet are aligned in the significant aesthetic choice of an independent, solitary work of art. However, as in their cases, Klinger’s single print for Faust has particular implications.
[20] Klinger’s attraction to Goethe’s play is documented from 1880, though it likely started earlier. In a 7 July 1880 letter, the artist breaks to his mother confidential news regarding a Faust II illustration project for publisher Theodor Stroefer, to be announced shortly (Leipzig, Museum der bildenden Künste, 7.VII.1880, Briefkopie Nr. 78). Stroefer had already issued in association with Georg Kirchner in New York a first grand Faust I six years earlier involving three artists (Faust 1874; Stead 2020: 371–72). In November 1880, a further letter to Georg Brandes confirms the Stroefer commission. Although a Klinger draft for the title page is known, and several other drawings are said to exist (Klinger 1925: ill. 89; Max Klinger: Sammlung Georg Hirzel 1993: no. 11), the Faust II illustration project came to nothing. Klinger’s letter to his mother stated “to be sure, not in such a large format, for which I fret not at all” (“allerdings nicht in so grossem Format, worüber ich mich durchaus nicht gräme”).[9] In his letter to Brandes, he had significantly added: “I’m almost ashamed of this ‘bulk work’. Illustration is like certain machines: if you put a finger in, it rips off your whole arm” (“Ich schäme mich fast dieser ‘Viel-Arbeit.’ Die Illustration ist wie gewisse Maschinen: thut man den finger daran, so nimmt’s den ganzen Arm mit weg,” Klinger 1924: 36). His lack of sympathy for fully illustrated and monumental Faust editions may explain why the project never came about. Instead, he produced at the time singular images, three in all: a drawing, an etching, and the lithograph to which our discussion now turns.
4 Abrasive Art
[21] Rather than using paint alone, Klinger used a variety of graphic techniques on a single subject which highlight the value he would attach to Griffelkunst (“stylus art”) in the 1890s. Indeed, in 1891 he published at his own expense the influential Malerei und Zeichnung (“Painting and Drawing”) in which the word, “stylus,” (Griffel) epitomized “the tool common to all techniques of reproduction and a symbolic term for the quill pen or pencil” (Klinger 2005: 7; Klinger 1985: 20). With seven editions until 1919, the essay was regularly read by German artists and motivated their practice, although its scope was wider, as Marsha Morton has shown (Morton 1995; Streicher 1996; Scheffler 1996). Klinger advocated full artistic status for all art in black and white, that is, drawings, etchings, engravings, and lithographs, on a par with painting and spatial art (Raumkunst). He intended to reveal the rich potential of such techniques that “uncovered sources of poetry (Poesie), passion (Leidenschaft) and spiritual enrichment (geistigen Vertiefung),” since these were “rarely, if ever, accessible to painting and its sister arts” (Klinger 2005: 9; Klinger 1985: 21). Painting, specified Klinger, was the very expression of “the coloured, bodily world in a harmonious manner” (2005: 13; 1985: 26), in fact “the most perfect expression of the joy of life” (2005: 19; 1985: 32–33). In strong opposition, Griffelkunst freed the artist’s inner impulse and intensity (2005: 12; 1985: 24–25).
[22] Both Klinger’s Griffel-principle and essay read as a manifesto overturning Lessing’s Laocoon theories, twice nominally challenged. Instead, Griffelkunst welcomed “all those aspects where an insistence on extreme emotions (höchsten Affekten), on things ugly (Häßlichen), gruesome (Grauen-) or repulsive (Ekelerregenden) would be unnatural and unbearable in the long run” (Klinger 2005: 19; Klinger 1985: 33). Stylus art brought to the fore what painting silenced, insisted Klinger, namely the powerful impressions of the darker side of life overwhelming the artist. Das Unschöne, opposing the beautiful, was an art of the unpleasant and bitter, the hostile and ugly, even the foul, all the while giving rein to subjectivity to the point of irony, satire or criticism, but crucially emancipating the imagination (2005: 19–21; 1985: 33–35). What is more, such an aggressive conception of art joined the fin-de-siècle sponsoring of engraving as a relentless, (literally) biting technique and medium (Stead 2002). The Griffel — stylus, graver, burin, engraving needle or tip, dry point, quill pen or pencil — literally provided the artist’s hand and gestures with talons or claws (Griffe). In a nutshell, to render Goethe’s Faust through Griffelkunst is in my estimation Klinger’s provocative response to persistent stereotypes in Faustian iconography and a vindication of the artist’s stronger emotions, that painting would hush or beautify through splendour of form and colour. By cutting and scoring the metal plate, gouging and scraping the stone, innovation expressed sharp artistic interpretations. Klinger’s three graphic works after Faust explore novel ideas. All three solicit the viewer’s feelings with respect to the proposed depiction.
5 Stirring Viewers’ Emotions in the Fin de siècle
[23] As shown, Klinger’s lithograph addresses both Faust and the viewer with an oppressing message implying man’s Fall. In an analogous way, the artist’s drawing Mephisto in Fausts Mantel sitzend (“Mephisto sitting in Faust’s Cloak,” Fig. 3), dating from ca. 1880, turns dryly on the spectator as commentators have noted (Danzker and Falk eds. 1996: 172). In Goethe’s play, Mephistopheles disguised as Faust in the doctor’s very clothes, sardonically indoctrinates a naïve young student, credulous of all that he says (l. 1868ff.). In a splendid 1828 lithograph of this rarely illustrated scene, Eugène Delacroix had exemplified the student’s candour and gullibility in his naïve looks, gawky posture, and clumsy conduct, while Faust, watching Mephistopheles’s deviousness through half-drawn curtains, reveals the masquerade, based on pretence and manoeuvre. Textually speaking, Faust is not present and Delacroix, by the character’s posture and presence through a half-drawn curtain, hints at the scene’s veiled meaning.[10] For all its intricacy, Delacroix’s depiction remains close to Goethe’s text. For his part, Klinger challenges everyone. Confined to Faust’s desk, in Renaissance attire and an unmistakably close historical setting, his Mephisto (a modern curtailing of the traditional Mephistopheles) is a scheming arguer, smiling deceitfully as he fixes each one of us. The student has disappeared. We are the only ones left to follow his circuitous speech, expressively embodied in agile fingers. The walled-in character of Klinger’s invention is a mythical figure lecturing from a remote past. He was early compared to Holbein’s portrait of Erasmus (Kühn 1907: 40). The substance of his homily is inscribed by Klinger in the lower border of the drawing: “Scientes bonum et malum eritis sicut Deus” (“In knowing good and evil you will be like Gods”). In Goethe’s Faust, Mephistopheles inscribes this guiding line in the naïve student’s autograph book (l. 2048). In Klinger’s drawing, the devil directs it to us via the artist’s agency. All we recognize the key biblical phrase alluding to Man’s temptation and Fall in Eden (Genesis 3:5).
[24] Klinger’s 1880 etching, half entitled in French, half in German, Lecture nocturne (Mephisto in der Studierstube) (“Nocturnal Reading [Mephisto in the Study]”), is yet another exercise in Griffelkunst drawing in the viewer. Sharply lit from the left, Mephistopheles looks at us harshly, his claws leafing through the pages of a book as if he ruled over the world, the written word, and the meaning of life (Fig. 4). The oblong form of this print and its illumination cut a novel window-like image in fin-de-siècle iconography. It reads as if Faust translating the beginning of John’s Gospel in the Bible had been again swapped for Mephisto mastering the Western world’s library through this sole book, and silently tackling the viewer through his piercing glance. The residual curtain or drape on the left may again allude to the student scene, encompassing once more any viewer. Both Der Äpfelchen begehrt ihr sehr and the graphic cycle Ein Leben adopt the same stance and, in engaging with biblical temptation, sharply tackle the spectator.
[25] Klinger’s Prefacio I, the opening plate of the cycle Ein Leben, displays a naked Eve meditating against a huge leafy tree (Fig. 5). A motto taken from Luther’s own version of the Bible is explicitly referenced on the print, yet, with two significant omissions. Instead of reading, as in Scripture,
Da sprach die Schlange zum Weibe: Ihr werdet mitnichten des Todes sterben; sondern Gott weiß, daß, welches Tages ihr davon eßt, so werden eure Augen aufgetan, und werdet sein wie Gott und wissen, was gut und böse ist. (Lutherbibel, 1 Mose III:4–5)
And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. (Gen 3:4–5)
Klinger’s motto runs:
[…] Ihr werdet mitnichten des Todes sterben; sondern […] eure Augen werden aufgetan
Ye shall not surely die; for your eyes shall be opened
The Biblical subject is explicit, even though the serpent is hard to find. Ambiguous forms lurk in the dappled shadow of the tree and its elongated branches, suggesting that the scriptural “subtler than any other beast of the field” (listiger als alle Tiere auf dem Felden, Lutherbibel, 1 Mose III:1) approaches Eve to deliver his devious message. Yet, the female figure has turned to eye us. Similarly, the words, inscribed in red, are directed by the graphic cycle itself to any viewer of Klinger’s engravings, while “Augen” (“eyes”) draws instantly attention thanks to its ornate capital. “Ye shall not surely die” is sarcastic since this is precisely the fate awaiting the heroine in Ein Leben. Further, “For your eyes shall be opened,” points forcefully to the part played by the graphic cycle as Griffelkunst itself: it opens the viewer’s eyes to shocking truths such as the fate of the fallen woman, victim of public hypocrisy in the contemporary world. Such a dimension is also present in the Äpfel lithograph and may be the reason it was removed from the series.
[26] Yet Klinger’s lithograph is even more complex. While it reinvents the famous Renaissance temptation scene, it also qualifies as an up-to-date interpretation of Goethe’s Faust, superimposing Eden and Walpurgisnacht. The witches’ revel has become the scene of continuing and universal temptation. Instead of Faust in historicist costume dancing with the young witch as in stale iconography of the time, the lithograph stages a ballerina offering two apples to a dark masculine figure in a modern-day suit, leaning against a tree trunk. The massive male figure has been regarded as Klinger’s self-portrait or a likeness of Georg Brandes, to whom Ein Leben is dedicated, which may well be the case (Wenn 2006: 190; Hartleb in Gleisberg, ed. 1992: 282). But this does not preclude the anonymous dark male from standing for everyman, for whom were intended the lines, “For apples did you ever lust | From Paradise ere you were thrust.”
[27] From a formal point of view, noted by critics, the ballerina’s plunging neckline recalls two plates from Ein Leben, in which the woman’s attire exposes breasts and shoulders: the scene of two rivals’ fight to death for her, and the spot-lit ballerina dancing for a darkly covetous audience.[11] Still, in the lithograph, she offers not her enticing globes, but two pasty apples, metaphor of her wasted, indeed overripe bosom, tried by the law of sexual temptation and condemned to prostitution.
[28] The image seems to hark back to Parisian fin-de-siècle imagery, for instance, Henri Gray’s The Apple Vendor (La Marchande de pommes), cover to the 30 November 1884 issue of Le Courrier français (Fig. 6). Klinger was indeed living between Berlin and Paris in 1883–84. A 13 May 1884 letter to Georg Brandes shows he was alert and reactive to contemporary French literature (Klinger 1985: 103–04). He could not have missed images such as Gray’s, brazenly posturing at kiosks, due to Le Courrier français’s bold public presence and advertising. Gray’s risqué drawing allegorizes hustling in the French capital with the young female’s body touted as merchandise. The apples fuse with her round orbs to be sold, as the inscription on the vast platter states, “Apples to sell” (“Pommes à vendre”), while the caption drives the point: “You may taste…” (“On peut goûter…”). Gray’s cheeky image emblematizes a metaphor repeatedly used in French literature at the time. A poetry collection by Georges de Porto-Riche was entitled Eve’s Apples (Pommes d’Ève) in 1874. Ten years later (1884), the anonymous Pommes d’Ève: douze contes en chemise par une jolie fille (Eve’s Apples: Twelve Tales in Undergarment by a Pretty Girl), sports on its colourful cover another young lady in stirring attire, lithely perched on an apple-tree branch, and engrossed in reading a volume of naughty stories. It was issued by the Monnier publishers, specializing in suggestive literature.
[29] In Klinger’s version, however, the once delicious fruit has become the vile bidding of a dancer with hollow sunken eyes and an almost grimacing face, perhaps an image of death, while a dim female figure, approaching from a distance, qualifies as Gretchen’s spectral appearance. Temptation and Fall merge in a grim representation of a world where sin and death loom large. In Goethe’s Faust, Gretchen’s spectre at the witches’ revel reveals her future conviction and untimely end. The verdict that sentences her to death is yet another incidence of the dire fate of women who have given in. Gretchen’s fate meets that of the anonymous protagonist in Ein Leben, which explains why the lithograph was at some point intended as a title to the series.
[30] Yet the lithograph, withdrawn from the cycle, features as independent print. It also stands on its own as a complex, ironical reflection on both Goethe’s Faust and the Fall. The Walpurgis night has become the allegorical scene of everyman’s temptation. Its landscape is overrun with snakes. A massive serpent crawls along the man’s body, a distant tree is covered in snakes, and the word Äpfel itself is formed of numerous serpents’ twisting spirals and coils. This is not just le ver dans le fruit (the worm in the fruit) after the French expression denoting a corrupt, infected situation or sullied circumstance. The fruit itself is worm-like, the serpent’s offspring, an evil spawn. The lithograph summons desire to elude it.
[31] The gigantic Äpfel itself is a complex emblem between text and image (Fig. 1a, detail). One of the snakes forming it lolls out its tongue as if attempting speech. Two of them closely watch the man against the tree, but one, observing the dancing ballerina, perhaps faces us, the viewer, peering closer to decipher the script. Coded or veiled, the quote from Goethe’s Faust is hidden in the foliage, while the serpent-word, another imposture, speaks to us, parading as title. Its pretence is perhaps the first word of a language the lithograph is teaching us, as we learn to decrypt a new idiom blending allegory, a novel understanding of Goethe’s Faust, and a modern meditation on man’s Fall. The image powerfully arouses spectators’ emotions deeply rooted in childhood as well, relating to the first words children utter as they learn their letters. A compelling reading experience as it brings the viewer close to the image and incites him to decipher it, Klinger’s lithograph initiates him to writing and reading anew. “Äpfel” is not just any term in a new language. Buried in the tree’s foliage, it looms as the initial word fallen from Paradise into the failed world of sin where letters are painfully spelled as bread is earned by the sweat of one’s brow. Pictorial ABCs had spread in Germany from the 1860s, teaching children to read by combining word and image. Klinger’s lithograph might also be the first plate of such an alphabet: “A” for “Äpfel” meant for adult children as a complex image in a fallen world.
6 To Conclude
[32] Klinger’s lithograph introduces us to the artist’s meditation on the fate, fragility, and demise of females in a modern world, yet brings to mind the independence that representations of the Fall gained in a remote Renaissance past. It recalls Cranach the Elder’s ambiguous paintings with enticing Eve’s stirring complex emotions. As a stern modern alternative, Klinger’s lithograph also has strong emotional, representational, and critical value. Its iconographical autonomy reimagines the hackneyed reading of Goethe’s Faust, Part One, dulled at the time by heavily historicist editions, which had buried the tragedy’s sharp message under nationalistic or jingoistic treatments. As a stage of fin-de-siècle temptation, it brings to prominence Faust’s dance with the young witch as the ultimate trial before his Fall. As a composition reinventing a famous Renaissance scene frequently depicted by Cranach the Elder, it stands at the meeting point of a knot of questions involving Goethe’s Faust. Untying them implicates a reinterpretation of the Bible through elliptic quotations and truncated texts as well as fin-de-siècle boulevard iconography. As a modern image in a fallen world, the witches’ Sabbath by Klinger enhances past images’ evocative potency in early German visual culture, amplifying their capacities to provoke sensory confusion and ambiguity. Pretexting temptation of eye and viewer, it introduces them to an opaque and ambivalent vocabulary whose first word should be read serpent-fashion.
[33] While the discussion on moral meaning and sensuality is present in Klinger studies (Simons and Heinje 1976) and the religious implications of his art a frequent subject, particularly in relation to his painting Christus im Olymp (1897), comparisons tend to address his relationship either to Antiquity or contemporaneous artists. Investigation of his Griffelkunst may open further paths into his rapport with early German masters as an evocative chapter of Renaissance afterlife within modernity. He himself considered the Reformation as a unique moment for the expression of artistic individuality, granted by what he called “the newly opened Bible” (die neugeöffnete Bibel) and the “new techniques of engraving and woodcut” (2005: 32; 1985: 47). His standalone lithograph reveals how one of his images on humanity’s origin and Fall, analogous to choices observable in Cranach’s appealing depictions, may be curved to reflect dire fin-de-siècle truths and thoughts as in a glass darkly.
NOTES
[1] Clomb, archaic past and past participle of climb.
[2] Albert George Latham (1864–1940) was the first Professor of Modern Languages at Newcastle University. His often reprinted translation of Goethe’s Faust for Everyman’s Library (1908) was the one most English-speaking readers in the first half of the twentieth century would have been familiar with.
[3] Wajeman records “more than thirty depictions of the temptation scene” by Cranach (2007: 38) on the basis of (Friedländer & Rosenberg 1978). However, the online Cranach wiki offers nearly the double:
https://cranach.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/wiki/index.php/CorpusCranach:Adam_und_Eva#CC-BAT-010-047.
See also (Campbell ed. 2007).
[4] Supplementary paintings are listed as entry subunits in this reference catalogue.
[5] See https://lucascranach.org/en/PL_MNW_MOb588/.
[6] See https://lucascranach.org/en/DE_SKD_GG1911/ and https://lucascranach.org/en/DE_SKD_GG1912/.
[7] See https://lucascranach.org/en/US_NSF_M-1971-1-Pa/ and https://lucascranach.org/en/US_NSF_M-1971-1-Pb/.
[8] The paintings correspond to Friedländer & Rosenberg, no. 44 (Warsaw, Muzeum Narodowe), 198D (Dresden), and 195 (Pasadena).
[9] Leipzig, Museum der bildenden Künste, 7.VII.1880 (Briefkopie Nr. 78). My transcription differs in some details from lines quoted in (Danzker and Falk eds. 1996: 172, no. 8).
[10] See https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k134831w.
[11] Rivalen, etching, 264 x 166 (Singer 133); Für Alle, etching, 285 x 202 (Singer 134) (Hartleb in Gleisberg, ed. 1992: 282).
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BIOGRAPHY
Evanghelia Stead, UVSQ-Paris Saclay
Evanghelia Stead is Professor of Comparative Literature and Print Culture at the UVSQ-Paris Saclay, also a linguist and literary translator. She has been Visiting Professor at Marburg (2008) and Verona (2011) Universities, EURIAS fellow at FRIAS (Freiburg-im Breisgau) in 2014–15, and from 2004, has been running the TIGRE seminar on illustration and print culture at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris. Amongst her books: La Chair du livre. Matérialité, imaginaire et poétique du livre fin-de-siècle (2012, repr. 2013); the edited collection, Reading Books and Prints as Cultural Objects (2018); two co-edited collections on periodicals, L’Europe des revues (1880-1920). Estampes, photographies, illustrations (2008, repr. 2011), and L’Europe des revues II (1860-1930). Réseaux et circulations des modèles (2018), as well as the monograph, Sisyphe heureux. Les revues littéraires et artistiques, méthodes et approaches (2020). She is currently working on the reception of Goethe’s Faust I in print culture.