Conjunctions 65: Sleights of Hand

by Sleights of Hand- The Deception Issue (retail) (epub)

  Through the precise manipulation of these elements, von Kreitz and his disciples were convinced they could produce paintings that would “unlock the doors” to hidden dimensions of being. An artist armed with such knowledge—and who was also possessed of an “indomitable will”—could create artworks that would function as a kind of gateway to regions that lay beyond human understanding, giving the artist access to the primordial forces that governed all existence.11

  In terms of subject matter, the work of Das Beben tended toward the mystical, even macabre.12 The German (as well as the later British) incarnation of the group was unquestionably influenced to some degree by artists whose names have long been associated with the darker or more mysterious aspects of existence, such as Henry Fuseli, Francisco Goya, and Gustave Doré. The work of William Blake seems to have made a significant impression on the group, particularly the poet’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell (though perhaps more in terms of Blake’s text than his imagery). Das Beben also acknowledged debts to lesser-known artists such as the aforementioned Schalken; the darkly unsettling Edmund Moorash; and mysterious, visionary outsider artist H. Friedrich Ahnfeldt.13 Interpretations of scenes from mythology, legend, and folklore were a popular motif, one perhaps epitomized by Klappenburg’s The Glance, his transfixing portrayal of Eurydice on her doomed passage from the underworld. Works such as Veertz’s Lake of the Siren and Hobemuss’s The Ivory Gate, with their disorienting perspectives and inhuman sense of scale, clearly link Das Beben (at least superficially) with the earlier Romantic movement as well as the work of various painters associated with Symbolism, among them James Ensor, Alfred Kubin, and Odilon Redon.14

  From a purely visual standpoint, the work of Das Beben does not appear to have been defined by a specific visual aesthetic. Based on the available accounts, its members’ paintings diverged wildly in appearance, formal technique, and style, from “nightmarish regions of almost palpable malevolence,” as Franz von Dingelstedt described the brownish, depopulated landscapes of Schlicke, to shattered, turbulent compositions that prefigure by many decades twentieth-century painting’s leap into abstraction.

  What the group’s paintings did share was something that was harder to articulate, but which seems to be connected with a feeling that emanated from them—a quality of atmosphere or affect that, from a conventional perspective, would be difficult to attribute to a static visual representation. Individuals as disparate in their tastes as the poet and critic Heinrich Heine and the painter Carl Gustav Carus both make note of a powerful, almost vertiginous sensation of movement in the work, along with subtle, hard-to-define distortions of perspective that combined to produce “an inexplicable cojoining of near and far.”15

  A somewhat clearer (if negatively framed) impression of Das Beben’s visual sensibility during its early years can be found in an attack on the group published in 1853. Shortly following a visit to Mannheim, Young Germany’s Heinrich Laube published a pamphlet called “The Scent of Demons” (Der Duft von Dämonen). In it, Laube writes:

  To locate “impulses” toward visionary suggestions of the unseen, and a related capacity to portray “actual movement” in the work of von Kreitz and Klappenburg is to delude oneself deliberately about the limitations of painting itself, however blurred its outlines, however murky its colorations. Chiaroscuro, which Herr Hauff’s16 beloved von Kreitz takes to such gloomy extremes, can be suggestive only up to a point and is not, cannot be, will never be a signpost to an altered form of either painting or reality.

  More negative criticism, this time from the far more conventional painter Hans Thoma, who had seen von Kreitz’s work quite early in his career, illuminates another important and curious aspect of Das Beben that cannot be overstated: the extent to which the work invited the hostility of the viewer—and apparently returned it. Of von Kreitz’s Study at Dusk (1854), Thoma observes: “At first viewing, this work appeared so delicate, so much a matter of things old and ordinary glimpsed through a typical Mannheim fog. In retrospect, the canvas produced the profoundly unsettling sensation that it was somehow laughing at me behind my back. An ugly, contemptuous jeering seemed to ring in my ears.”

  THE FIRST FIRE

  It did not take long for strange rumors about von Kreitz and his followers’ unorthodox activities to circulate throughout Mannheim. With displeasure and growing alarm, the Akademie and the local government observed that the most dubious and questionable elements of their otherwise orderly city were gathered at all hours at the Blue Goose, where they appeared to be engaged in activities that had very little to do with the visual arts.17

  Before the authorities could decide on any course of action, fate took matters into its own hands. Late one April evening in 1855, the rathskeller burst into flame. The source of the fire remains unknown, though one witness claimed it began in the inn’s meeting room, which von Kreitz and his disciples had taken to using as a kind of private salon in which to display their work. According to local accounts, a sour “vegetal” odor, mingled with the stench of rot, had permeated the area around the tavern just prior to the start of the conflagration. The fire proved stubbornly difficult to extinguish, and nearly everyone inside succumbed. If von Kreitz and his followers had indeed been granted some revelation, the cost had been punishingly high. Of the Das Beben inner circle, only von Kreitz and Klappenburg survived, and they were able to shed little light on the catastrophe. Burns and smoke inhalation had left the former student unable to communicate; he could not speak, could barely see, and the burns to his head were so severe that he had apparently been rendered deaf. Left to the care of his wealthy family, Klappenburg lingered on in a kind of half-life for several more years until his death in 1859.

  As for von Kreitz, no records have come to light regarding his whereabouts and activities in the eight years that followed the destruction of the rathskeller. It is as though he vanished, like a disagreeable dream, into thin air.

  INTERLUDE: KRANKHELM ISLAND

  Von Kreitz does not reappear again until 1863, when he turns up on a remote, desolate spit of land in the Baltic Sea known as Krankhelm Island. On Krankhelm, he seems to have maintained a long period of relative anonymity and near total solitude. His once commanding appearance was a memory; the fire had left him badly scarred on his face, chest, and legs, and he was barely able to stand upright. Damage to his lungs and vocal cords had reduced his voice to a harsh, ugly whisper. A bent, wizened, somewhat grotesque figure who was widely shunned by the locals, von Kreitz nevertheless retained some vestiges of his old glamor: Occasionally, some member of the press would arrive on Krankhelm to seek out the infamous founder of “The Tremor” in the hopes of securing a lurid tale for his or her readership. Von Kreitz’s isolation was also alleviated by periodic visits from scholars of the esoteric who came in search of his private library, a collection of hundreds of volumes of hermetic lore that he had somehow amassed in the years following the disaster in Mannheim. Many of these books were highly obscure works of occult philosophy and alchemy of which only a few copies were known to exist.

  Von Kreitz had also resumed painting, producing during his years on the island a series of small, intensely dark canvases that he referred to as “Disconsolations.” These works, which the painter Odilon Redon would later describe as “more absences than paintings,”18 were highly sought after by a tiny handful of aficionados—composed for the most part of the same individuals who came to consult von Kreitz’s unique archive. Visitors to Krankhelm were obliged to take a small, dismal ferry to the island, hire a wagon driver with a cart, and traverse ten miles of rocky terrain to the artist’s studio, where their
host’s greeting was invariably unwelcoming.

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  DAS BEBEN: THE PAINTINGS

  With the exception of Hugo Ayling’s The Gathered Clan, all of the work of Das Beben has been lost or destroyed. In an effort to provide some living sense of the work, we have created this brief “exhibition” of several representative paintings by members of the movement, cobbling together the limited and incomplete references to these works uncovered by our research to create coherent descriptions in the manner of a museum presentation. While these descriptions are extrapolations, and necessarily take a degree of creative license, it is hoped that they will provide a window into the unique visual qualities of the work of these unorthodox artists.

  Busso Hobemuss

  German, 1829–1855

  The Ivory Gate

  Circa 1855

  Oil on canvas

  The only member of Das Beben’s first incarnation who was a native of Mannheim, Hobemuss had demonstrated little inclination or aptitude for the visual arts until his teens, when, acting on a schoolmate’s dare, he entered and won a drawing contest sponsored by the Hartt Gymnasium, his secondary school. His entry, A Castle in the Clouds Is a Haven to All, was reproduced in the local paper, Der Morganweb, in February 1846, where it attracted the attention of an administrator at the Schmidt-Bauern Kunstakademie. Invited to submit a portfolio to the school, Hobemuss produced a set of drawings that, like Castle in the Clouds, were intricately detailed renderings of vaguely fantastical cities and landscapes. At the Akademie, Hobemuss displayed a talent for visual precision and accuracy, but the conservative atmosphere of the school seemed to inhibit many of the visionary qualities of his work until he entered von Kreitz’s tutelage.

  As part of Das Beben, Hobemuss’s style underwent a profound transformation, becoming more loose and gestural, even violent, in its handling of paint. As his work developed, Hobemuss began to represent boundaries between objects and space in increasingly unconventional ways, sometimes solely through subtle variations in the texture of the paint itself. His subject matter moved from fairly conventional studies of landscape and architecture into images of towering, cyclopean structures that defy any clear sense of time or scale. In The Ivory Gate (1853), a vertiginous massing of luminous, geometrical solids threatens to metastasize from the picture plane; the painting fractures perspective to such a degree that we seem to be inside its surface rather than in front of it.

  Franz Veertz

  German, 1825–1855

  Earth’s Siege

  1853

  Oil on board

  Franz Veertz possessed a dark, somewhat Byronic sensibility that no doubt played a role in his fascination with von Kreitz and Das Beben. Born to the merchant class in Cologne, Veertz had been raised by his widowed grandmother following the death of his parents in a shipwreck. A natural swordsman, he was leader of the fencing team while a student at Cologne’s Catholic Gymnasium, where a pair of dueling scars enhanced his saturnine features and earned him the nickname “The Prussian.” Seemingly destined for a military career, Veertz chose to delay his entrance into the army in order to study painting alongside a boyhood friend, Moritz Waldmüller, who would later become the founder of a little-known spiritualist movement in Vienna.

  Das Beben’s link to the Romantic movement of the early nineteenth century is seen perhaps most clearly in Veertz’s work; Edmund Burke’s influential 1757 treatise on the sublime had left a strong impression on the young painter, whose early output consisted of sensual, almost shocking depictions of physical transformation inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses, along with phantasmagoric scenes of storm-wracked landscapes. Earth’s Siege (1853) demonstrates the hallucinatory intensity the painter was eventually able to achieve through the marriage of lurid subject matter with an obsessive control of composition. The painting is remarkable for the unnaturally regular alternation of light and dark across its surface; every visual element, from the turbulent masses of flame-edged black clouds to the painfully contorted trees, seems to form part of a single, underlying pattern that hovers just at the edge of recognition. The effect creates the curious impression that another image entirely is cleverly camouflaged within the painting—though of what precisely is unclear. “It sets the head spinning and the eyes aching,” wrote Hans Thoma. “I cannot bear to look, and yet cannot seem to tear my gaze away.”

  Lutz Schlicke

  German, 1827–1855

  Above Bismarck Square

  1853

  Oil on board

  The abhorrent paintings of Lutz Schlicke are among the most disturbing works produced by the Mannheim group, though it is difficult to say what makes them so. Schlicke was born in Munich, the son of Gruner Schlicke, a well-known illustrator of broadsides and posters, and his wife, Magda, a fortepiano instructor and amateur mathematician. Though apparently a happy child who often served as a model for his father’s advertisements, Schlicke seemed to age prematurely as he entered his teens, becoming increasingly moody and taciturn. Given to sarcasm on the rare occasions in which he spoke at all, he proved an unpopular student at the Akademie, where he was fond of studies depicting complex mechanical contrivances. Schlicke was particularly fascinated with unconventional spatial geometries and how they might be represented on a two-dimensional surface.

  In both style and affect, Schlicke’s work seems to prophesize the arrival of surrealism over a half century later. His paintings are almost entirely devoid of human figures, or any living beings whatsoever. His listless depictions of nondescript spaces in and around Mannheim (expanses of featureless brick walls were a favorite subject) are rendered in a uniformly burnt palette from which all vitality seems to have been drained. Though empty of life, there is an almost unbearable feeling of claustrophobia in Schlicke’s work. His deserted squares and oddly flattened intersections feel airless, as though located miles below the earth’s surface.

  Above Bismarck Square shows a slightly elevated view of a residential section of Mannheim in the vicinity of the titular landmark. As is typical of Schlicke’s compositions, there is a subtly disorienting quality to the perspective, as though multiple angles of view have been seamlessly fused. The city appears dead, like some sprawling, uninhabited mausoleum: “A world not simply abandoned by humanity,” Heinrich Heine wrote of the work, “but rather one in which nothing human has ever existed.” Despite the deserted aspect of the scene, the painting conveys the unwelcome impression that concealed among the flatly rendered rooftops and avenues, some unspeakable presence is about to emerge into view. This sensation was so strong that apparently not even the other members of Das Beben seemed able to tolerate the painting: “Dear Lutz, you’ve certainly outdone yourself this time,” Klappenburg is reported to have told Schlicke. “Whatever sort of pet you’ve tucked away back there, I should hope to be elsewhere when it grows tired of hiding!”

  Klaus-Maria Klappenburg

  German, 1827–1859

  The Fruits of Wrath

  Circa 1854

  Oil on linen mounted on board

  Klaus-Maria Klappenburg was perhaps the most virtuosic painter of the Mannheim group. His canvases demonstrate an effortless grasp of the capabilities of the medium; in his casual mastery of technique, he seems to reveal a kind of mocking contempt for the viewer. Arrogant, reckless, possessed of almost effeminate beauty, Klappenburg was the only son of a wealthy manufacturer from Baden-Baden. He was expelled from a series of expensive boarding schools before being at last sent to Mannheim, where his exasperated parents
had remanded him under the care of his uncle, a former Prussian general, in the hopes of imparting some discipline (a plan that failed spectacularly). But beneath Klappenburg’s dissolute habits and fondness for cruel pranks lay a deeply troubled spirit. Subject to frequent, incapacitating attacks of melancholy, Klappenburg had attempted suicide on his thirteenth birthday by the grave of his sister Margrette, who died as an infant.

  Klappenburg’s earliest work is marked by a fixation with morbid states of being, rendered all the more harrowing by his dazzling command of lighting effects and the uncanny ability to convey extremes of emotion. His painting The Visit, which Klappenburg painted when he was only eighteen, had been inspired by John Polidori’s The Vampyre; his presentation of this work at the Kunstakademie caused several students to collapse in terror, earned him a severe reprimand—and drew the approving eye of von Kreitz. The Fruits of Wrath, perhaps one of Klappenburg’s most accomplished paintings, displays none of the showy theatricality of his earlier work; by 1854 he had become highly focused, even somber, in his relentless quest for mastery of True Seeing. A highly interpretive portrayal of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, The Fruits of Wrath represents Klappenburg’s increasing descent into pure abstraction: Here, the destructive energy of vast, cosmic forces is manifested within the paint itself, which seems to burn with a sulfurous glare. There is no image in the proper sense, only massed, fractured lines of force that create a sense of intolerable pressure in the beholder’s vision.