Ayling followed his brethren of the New Tremor into the darkness sometime between 1905 and 1907 (Spare is said to have paid for his burial). Ayling’s single masterpiece, The Gathered Clan, was hung in the restored orangery at Blane in 1892. It remained in place until 1910, when it was stolen, along with nearly half the family’s valuables, by Baron Hayward’s youngest son Haxton, who slipped away with his treasures to America.29
CONSIDERING THE INFLUENCE OF DAS BEBEN
It is difficult to determine what sort of yardstick should be used to measure the role that Das Beben played in the history of nineteenth-century painting. The fact of their destruction appears conclusive, and the near complete expunging of their works from the scrutiny of history would seem to preempt the question of any lasting contribution. And yet there have been ripples, subtle echoes in the subsequent course of events in which might be detected some faint whisper of the “hot wind” of which Frith had written. Despite the group’s secretive nature and the brevity of its two short appearances on the stage of the nineteenth century, its story does intersect frequently with the lives of better-known figures.30 Clearly, the handful of artists and writers who had the luck or misfortune of beholding the work of Das Beben firsthand retained an indelible impression of the experience—though what effect these impressions were to have on later developments is hard to say. Considered in the annihilating light of events that would soon be ushered into the world with the arrival of the twentieth century, it becomes harder not to entertain the notion—if only for a moment—that perhaps Das Beben had, through some undreamt-of manner, at least partially succeeded in its goals.
One passage in Ayling’s otherwise indecipherable book offers a possibly prophetic glimpse of what was to come: “There shall be Wildness, and Colours wrested out of nature & tortured & whipped to their extremes into an extremity of Expression, and there shall be a Torment of Shapes depicted that have no names, but only Colours, and there shall be Images of pure Colour, intense and blazing Colour, Colour floating upon the Void, a blazing Light that Consumes all it touches. In all of these shapes and torments I see the hand of that demon, von Kreitz.”
1 Von Kreitz was deeply influenced by the palpable sense of foreboding that emanated from Schalken’s paintings, a quality perhaps most clearly manifested in the painter’s meisterwerke, the profoundly unsettling portrait of his first love, Rose Velderkaust. Indeed, it was in connection with Schalken’s painting that von Kreitz came to formulate the most infamous of his mysterious dictums, “That which cannot be seen, must be seen” (Das, was nicht zu sehen ist, was gesehen werden muss). This somewhat cryptic utterance was to form the central aesthetic principle of Das Beben through both of its subsequent incarnations.
2 Mitre, a painter of virtuosic but somewhat claustrophobic still-life compositions, had fallen in love with his landlady’s thirteen-year-old son; things proceeded badly and the painter was eventually beaten to death in the street.
3 The catalog from a 1988 exhibition of Moorash’s work provides the following description of the painting, which is based on Hoffmann’s tale of the same name:
What is striking, however, is not the careful rendering of detail but precisely the opposite: the furious distortion of details as they are swept up into lines of force, the deliberate and expressive blurring of form. Thus the streaming of Krespel’s hair and coat is seen in the violins, which in the dark radiance of the candlelight seem to writhe like snakes, and the ripple of the fluttering band of crepe is seen in the curve of the piano’s music rack, while the piano itself appears to be dissolving into reddish darkness. The effect is of a center of violent energy diffusing itself throughout the entire painting … Despite such distortions, the painting retains a number of illusionist features, such as definite, though at times ambiguous, perspectival lines.
4 As reported in von Kreitz’s letter of April 30, 1841, to his second wife, Theresa, who died in 1845 as the result of an accident in the artist’s studio.
5 According to Heinz Schallert’s The Art of Southern Germany (1931), in 1850 von Kreitz made his only visit to America, specifically for the purpose of seeing Moorash’s posthumous exhibition at the Fogg Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In his journals, von Kreitz wrote, in his inexact English, “I give my utter praise to Moorash. He has seen the sacred process to be in violation of the inviolable.”
6 The city’s history is strongly associated with industrial development. Referred to as “the city of grids,” because of the rectilinear layout of its streets, Mannheim is the birthplace of two of the defining (and perhaps oppositional) mechanisms of modernity: the bicycle (invented by Karl Freiherr von Drais in 1871) and the first working automobile (constructed by Karl Benz in 1885).
7In a letter to a friend, Jakob Metzger, a student at the Akademie during von Kreitz’s tenure, writes of the frequently bizarre assertions to which the professor was prone:
I confess I often wonder if the man is not mad. He spouts the most absurd notions and continually makes impossible claims regarding his own abilities. Only yesterday, he flew into a rage when asked the most innocent of questions by M____, stating, “The eye is the greatest enemy of the true artist. Indeed, the most advisable course I could offer you were that you pluck those glassy, sightless orbs from your head, rather than wandering about sketching churches and hay fields. At least then you might have earned for yourself some slight chance of actually seeing.”
8 Klappenburg had abandoned his family’s Catholicism and was searching for a wider, more explanatory faith. Of the group, Klappenburg was perhaps the most devoted to von Kreitz, and was often heard to quote his master’s formulation, “The to-be-explained is always that which escapes explanation” (Die zu erklaeren ist immer, dass der Austritt erklaert).
9 In developing these principles, the group appeared to have borrowed widely from a hodgepodge of disparate philosophic and esoteric traditions, from Arthur Schopenhauer’s On the Will in Nature to the writings of the Swiss alchemist Paracelsus. Through the mastery and application of these rules, along with the development of an interior process the group’s members referred to as “true seeing,” an artist would gain the ability to generate images capable of producing profound alterations in the consciousness of the beholder—and, perhaps, in reality itself.
10 In his years of study, von Kreitz had rigorously educated himself in the nature and origins of pigments, and had used his time at the Akademie to further his research. The same Jakob Metzger who had been so unsettled by von Kreitz’s pronouncements was even more dismayed to find himself pressed into service along with the other students, who were set to grinding the shells of South American beetles in order to create a pigment similar to carmine. On other occasions the students were charged with burning great quantities of raw umber, which was subsequently reduced in a mixture of bile and acid to obtain an unappealing reddish-brown hue, while the bones of swallows were charred to ashes, exposed to the light of the waning moon, then compounded with the extracts of certain resinous plants to create an unusually impenetrable black. These inscrutable operations were always overseen by von Kreitz, who chanted out complex mathematical equations while beating time on the floor with his massive oak walking stick.
11 Around the beginning of 1855, the group appeared to have become especially fixated upon the idea that, by placing a sufficient number of such images into highly specific visual and spatial arrangements with each other, a kind of circuit would be created, allowing primordial energies to flow freely into and reshape our world—a process they referred to as “opening the way.” On the back of his painting Dweller on the Threshold (1852), Schlicke had scrawled the followi
ng:
Place the Weights, total the Angles in their proper Orbits, and let the Pictures speak, each in its own fashion; then the Veils shall be torn asunder, and the Light shall stream in, transforming all it touches.
12 Though by no means exclusively; many canvases were quite pedestrian in their depiction of various nondescript sections of Mannheim.
13 Very little is known about Ahnfeldt, a devout, uneducated carpenter from Bavaria who had begun painting a series of strange, unearthly images following the joint suicide of his son and daughter. Almost all of Ahnfeldt’s paintings had been confiscated and burnt by his local church following his death, but von Kreitz had managed to come into possession of one small canvas, the infamous Supplicant in the Red Forest, n.d., which he would allow only the innermost circle of the group to view.
14 Certainly, the centrality of the principle of “contradiction” that lay at the heart of Das Beben could be seen as a radical expansion upon the theme of psychological splitting or doubling so often associated with Romanticism. However, care must be taken to not overemphasize such connections. The aspirations of Das Beben were fundamentally different from those of other movements of the period, and in many aspects, totally unique.
15 Heine claimed that the work of the Das Beben painters generated the terrible sensation that the images were invisibly in motion. As reported in his Table Talk, Vol. I, the poet felt himself initially fascinated, then repelled by this phenomenon: “With Professor von Kreitz and his slavish followers, I grew increasingly dismayed. Behind this appalling illusion of movement, I feared to discover the snake’s head of actual movement.”
Of von Kreitz’s work, Carus, a former student of Caspar David Friedrich, writes: “[the paintings] spoke always of the dream-darkness that is ever to be found lurking within the structures of the prosaic, the postman’s blue uniform, the shop’s many-colored jars, the rain-slick’d cobbles at night, the bobolink’s fixed eye. It is here we find evidence of the instability of the general.”
16 Apparently a reference to poet and novelist Wilhelm Hauff.
17 The proprietor of the city’s oldest bookstore told an acquaintance, who had passed the story along to his priest, that while browsing his shelves of ancient writings, a fresh-faced, arrogant young student named Klappenburg had boasted that Professor von Kreitz was providing instruction in the works of Cornelius Agrippa—in particular, Of Magical Ceremonies, published in 1565. “And why is he doing that?” asked the bookseller. Klappenburg replied, “To glance behind the veil. To arouse the tremor.” “For what purpose?” inquired the bookseller. “Afterwards, bookseller, nothing shall remain the same,” answered Klappenburg. “That, I promise you. Nothing, not in any realm.” [Otto Kleinhans, Written on Sand: A Bookseller’s Melancholy Journey (Mannheim: privately printed, 1873).]
18 Von Kreitz appears to have had a powerful effect on the Symbolist painter, who encountered several of the “Disconsolations” during a brief stay on the Baltic coast while serving in the Franco-Prussian War. The lingering effect of these dark, troubling canvases may have played a role in Redon’s increasing interest with dreamlike subject matter. A description of Redon’s work in Joris-Karl Huysmans’ À rebours provides some suggestion, perhaps, of the nature of this influence:
Those were the pictures bearing the signature: Odilon Redon. They held, between their gold-edged frames of unpolished pearwood, undreamed-of images: a Merovingian-type head, resting upon a cup; a bearded man, reminiscent both of a Buddhist priest and a public orator, touching an enormous cannon-ball with his finger; a spider with a human face lodged in the centre of its body. Then there were charcoal sketches which delved even deeper into the terrors of fever-ridden dreams. Here, on an enormous die, a melancholy eyelid winked; over there stretched dry and arid landscapes, calcinated plains, heaving and quaking ground, where volcanoes erupted into rebellious clouds, under foul and murky skies; sometimes the subjects seemed to have been taken from the nightmarish dreams of science, and hark back to prehistoric times; monstrous flora bloomed on the rocks; everywhere, in among the erratic blocks and glacial mud, were figures whose simian appearance—heavy jawbone, protruding brows, receding forehead, and flattened skull top—recalled the ancestral head, the head of the first Quaternary Period, the head of man when he was still fructivorous and without speech, the contemporary of the mammoth, of the rhinoceros with septate nostrils, and of the giant bear. These drawings defied classification; unheeding, for the most part, of the limitations of painting, they ushered in a very special type of the fantastic, one born of sickness and delirium.
19 Allegedly, the infamous sixteenth-century mathematician and alchemist John Dee, along with his assistant Edward Kelley (who claimed to communicate with angels), had enjoyed the patronage of the Hayward family when the pair returned to England after years of wandering Europe.
20 It has been speculated that the woman depicted in Franz von Stuck’s infamous painting The Sin was Octavia Shell. The painter almost certainly met von Kreitz, and perhaps Hugo Ayling, while on a brief, little-noted excursion to England in his twenty-first year (the same year in which he was admitted to the School of Applied Arts in Karlsruhe); the incident is mentioned in the third chapter of an unfinished and untitled autobiography:
To celebrate my birthday, I went (with my mother’s blessing) across the sea to England, then directly to London and the Trismegistus Bookstore. It was on my second day of haunting the Tris (as it was known to its habitués) that at last I encountered the object of my voyage, the strange and terrible figure of Master von Kreitz, of whom I had heard such extraordinary things. He was a man who seemed ever just at the point of uttering some truth that would shock one to one’s core. That afternoon, as he thrust at me book after book (shamefully, none of which I could read), the Master inserted his ruined visage into a space two inches before mine and hissed, “Do you not yet understand that what is not painted has more spiritual significance than what is? That we have it in our power to bring forth a new reality?” Before I could respond (before I had time in which to tell him an untruth), he produced a sketchbook of extraordinary size and gave me to gaze upon some half dozen of its pages. Their contents have marked me all of my life. Henceforth, I knew that one of Art’s essential burdens has always been the depiction if not the enacting of the ever-shifting, ever-ungrounded, ambiguous contest between darkness and light, the greater strength being always that in which darkness can be seen to subsume the light. This was the case when I brought forth The Wild Chase, Lucifer, and, in a portrait of a woman known to us both, The Sin.” [Franz von Stuck, unfinished autobiography, trans. P. Straub (unpublished, n.d.).]
21 Unlike such groups as the Golden Dawn, Gather, Wren, and Shell appeared much more interested in the applied study of those forms of ceremonial magic described in such medieval texts as The Lesser Key of Solomon.
22 Despite Ayling’s expulsion from the Royal Academy for unspecified charges of “decadence,” Frith had been so impressed with the young man’s painting and skill that he readily took Ayling on as an apprentice. Within a year, however, Ayling was spending more and more of his time at Blane, arriving at Frith’s studio disheveled and distracted, his clothing in disarray, his manner slyly insubordinate. In an unpublished fourth volume of journals, Frith records both his unalloyed admiration for Ayling’s artistic abilities and his growing dismay at the evidence of his assistant’s gathering dissipation:
I cared not that he had been expelled from the Academy, and even less for his inversion. From the first, Ayling demonstrated great technical skill in the delicacy and shading of his brushwork, and within months I had entrusted him with much more than the backgrounds and passage-work o
f his initial tasks. With Ayling’s loyal and oft-inspired assistance, I found myself capable of taking on a greater number of commissions and fulfilling these with greater speed. Upon occasion, I am unashamed to admit, I was in fact ravished by the apprentice’s work. At several moments, I felt I had more to learn from him than the reverse. Only when [Ayling] began to spend every weekend at Blane did I begin to sense the dread presence of the inadmissible whispering within my studio’s walls. [William Powell Frith, Memoirs, Fourth Volume (unpublished manuscript in the collection of Houghton Library, Harvard University, n.d.).]
23 It was after viewing Ayling’s then work in progress, The Gathered Clan, that Frith was finally forced to dismiss his apprentice:
I found myself for a moment unable to breathe before the queer monstrosity [The Gathered Clan], so greatly did I suffer the sensation that its surface did in some impossible fashion contain movement. I never before in my life endured so pronounced a sensation of wrongness before a work of art. Though it ostensibly depicts a handsome English family, servants, and their hangers-on, the true subject of the painting seemed something altogether other: I sensed the approach of a hot wind from some nameless region of torment and despair.
24 For von Kreitz, the appearance of Jack the Ripper in London’s East End constituted some mysterious sign for which he had apparently been waiting. The arrival of the Ripper was a clear indication, von Kreitz told the younger painters, that the grand fabric of the conventional world was slipping and losing coherence. “The Ripper,” von Kreitz whispered, “is the palm leaf to our new Jerusalem, the mule on which we shall ride into the transfigured City.”
Conjunctions 65: Sleights of Hand Page 42