Dance of Death (Lovis Corinth)
The Dance of Death is a collection of etchings that the German artist Lovis Corinth published as a portfolio at Euphorion Verlag in 1922. In six pictures Corinth dealt with death and its effect on people. The published portfolio contained only five different pictures, the etching Tod bei Strucks was replaced by the version Tod und Paar after seven proofs and the etching plate was destroyed.
Description of the pictures
All etchings were created as drypoint etchings on Japanese paper and have a size of 24 × 17.6 centimeters. In the first picture, Death and the Artist , he also combines the drypoint technique with the vernis-mou etching , as recommended by the artist Hermann Struck , who is portrayed in two pictures in the series . The sheets are signed by hand at the lower right in pencil or red-brown colored pencil.
Death and artist
The first picture in the portfolio, entitled Death and the Artist, is a self-portrait of Lovis Corinth, in which he is making an etching with an eraser. In this work, death looks over his shoulder in the form of a rather shadowy skull and at the same time grabs his arm with one hand. Corinth wears a wristwatch on his left wrist, which replaces the hourglass used in classic dance of death pictures and indicates the artist's expiring lifetime. The artist's facial expression looks desperate, heightened by the shadows that darken one half of the face and the shoulder.
The skeleton grasping the shoulder raises questions about a possible intention. “Does death claim his rights from the artist while he is still working? Or is the artist spurred on by the certainty of approaching death to greater achievements? "
Death and youth
In Death and Youth , Corinth portrays his son Thomas Corinth, who is standing next to a skeleton and shaking hands with it. Dealing with the skeleton is playful, the boy is neither afraid nor desperate, he just seems to be interested in the skeleton. The skeleton itself looks less like death than a model for anatomy lessons and thus represents a parallel to the self-portrait with a skeleton that Corinth made of himself in 1896. The bright depiction of the etching contrasts with all the other pictures in the portfolio and also underlines the carefree nature of the scene.
Death and old man
The death and old appear thematically and atmospherically as opposed to death and youth. This sheet probably depicts the father of the artist Franz Heinrich Corinth, who died in 1899. This occupies the center of the picture and looks anxiously at the skeleton towering in the foreground. Death doesn't look at the man, his gaze goes straight ahead and ignores the old man's fear. The gloomy atmosphere is reinforced by the shadow, which takes up almost the entire picture and darkens it, and also fragments the body of the old man.
Death and woman
The picture Death and Wife shows an unclothed woman who is holding a skeleton in an intimate embrace. Up to the thighs it is covered by a bedspread, which can be recognized by the folds. The woman's gaze is dreamy and wistful, the skull of death half hidden by her face. It shows the wife of the artist Charlotte Berend-Corinth and, as in the first picture of the series, Death and Artist , her husband, she wears a wristwatch in this picture to demonstrate the passage of time.
The image is interpreted in such a way that the wife faces death neither in fear nor expectation. Instead, she expects her death and that of her husband, who is already depicted as a skeleton in the picture, and is not opposed to him. The atmosphere of the picture is ambivalent, dark areas represent pessimistic shadows, while lighter areas should radiate optimism.
Death at Strucks
In two pictures in the series, Lovis Corinth depicted the befriended couple Hermann and Mally Struck, who are juxtaposed with death. Hermann Struck was Corinth's teacher in etching and brought him closer to graphic work in order to distract him from his failures. At the same time, as a Jew , he was a source of information for Corinth on questions about the Old Testament of the Bible that arose while working on historical and biblical images. Corinth wrote about Hermann Struck:
- “Struck is an enthusiastic, passionate graphic artist. If he smells a sense of graphics in someone, he literally forces him into this art. His restless energy has conquered me too, and he has regained my skills for the needle. He even dedicated me a beautiful diamond that I only knew from hearsay until then. "
In the picture, Hermann and Mally Struck are sitting together at the table with an open book in front of them. Death hovers over the two as a shadowy skull; they look away from the approaching death, but show no fear or dismay. Rather, they await death with relaxed calm as they hold hands and read the book, probably the Bible.
Today the picture only exists in seven copies, all of which were test prints for the folder Totentanz . These prints were enclosed with the first seven copies of the portfolio, which appeared in 1922, after which the printing plate was destroyed at Corinth's request. In the subsequent editions he replaced this picture with a second version, the picture Death and Couple.
Death and couple
The second version also depicts the couple Hermann and Mally Struck. Unlike the earlier version, Tod bei Strucks , this time both of them look death straight in the eye in the form of a massive boneless man with a hat. As in the first picture, the two of them hold hands and in this way give each other courage. Accordingly, they are not afraid of the unavoidable death, but expectant. Death holds an hourglass in his hand and thus reminds of the passing of life, as happens in two other pictures in this series through the wristwatch.
Origin and embedding in the work of Corinth
Lovis Corinth took up the traditionally very widespread motif of the dance of death ( Danse macabre ) in his portfolio , which in painting goes back well into the early Middle Ages. Normally, pairs of living people and skeletons are shown in these pictures, more rarely only skeletons that are dancing. They represent an allegory of the transience of life, which is represented by the skeleton ( memento mori ). A central content is the message that death makes no distinction between young and old people or between different social classes, accordingly all people are always addressed in the dance of death. In Corinth's portfolio this is symbolized by the different people who are confronted with death.
This tradition is broken in Corinth's Dance of Death. The pictures here also depict people and skeletons, mostly only present in the form of vague skulls, but in most of the pictures these do not come into direct action with the people, but appear in the background as threatening shadows. An exception to this is Death and Youth , in which a young man playfully handles a prepared skeleton. In this picture there is a clear parallel to the self-portrait with a skeleton that Corinth painted in 1896, on which he was shown next to a skeleton suspended from a stand.
credentials
- ↑ Hermann Struck: The art of etching. 1st edition Berlin 1908.
- ↑ Schuster et al. 1996; Page 372
- ↑ according to Schuster et al. 1996; Page 373
- ^ Lovis Corinth: Collected Writings. How I learned to erase. Berlin (Fritz Gurlitt) 1920; page 8
literature
- Peter-Klaus Schuster , Christoph Vitali, Barbara Butts (Eds.): Lovis Corinth . Prestel Munich 1996. ( ISBN 3-7913-1645-1 )