Max Klinger and Wilhelmine Culture: On the Threshold of German Modernism by Marsha Morton (review)

Marsha Morton’s excellent monograph is the first full-length study in English on the German artist Max Klinger (1857–1920), best known for his enigmatic series A Glove (1878; etched 1881). Major exhibitions and monographs have appeared in Germany in recent years, cementing Klinger’s legacy in terms of his contributions to German symbolism and surrealism. Klinger’s profile in English-language scholarship has languished, however, partly due to a twentieth-century tendency equating modernism with abstraction, which cast Klinger’s work as too “mimetic and literary” (5)—in effect, too nineteenth century. Morton’s book remedies this, underscoring the continuing relevance of the man whom Giorgio di Chirico deemed a “forerunner of Freud” and the preeminent “modern artist.” Morton’s contribution goes further than advocacy, however; she deftly explores the question of Klinger’s modernism, and her cultural studies approach sheds new light on Klinger in the context of Wilhelmine society.

Morton focuses primarily on Klinger’s prints, from his early works in the 1870s through the 1880s (after which Klinger turned toward sculpture), with a brief epilogue treating subsequent developments (interest in Friedrich Nietzsche and the theater). She delivers not only aesthetic analysis but rich cultural history; the text is organized around major themes, including German romanticism, Darwinism, anthropology, mythology, psychology, media, and urban life. The interdisciplinary discussion skillfully recaptures “associations and meanings which viewers would have experienced” (289).

Morton swiftly repositions Klinger as not simply a precursor to modernism, but “a modernist pioneer” in his own right. Previous scholars have pressed for Klinger’s modernism in terms of influence upon later artists; a few have noted his use of montage and bricolage to critique and transform historical styles, and his interest in dreams and the occult. Morton advances this scholarship by highlighting Klinger’s understudied use of irony and demonstrating his penchant for destabilizations; he pioneered an art in which narrative structures are undone, and where both content and stylistic technique are used to generate estrangement, even physical unease. Klinger’s work is defined by ambiguity, not closure.

Morton’s second major achievement is to portray Klinger as a modernist in a sociocultural sense. His artwork reflected and explored the anxieties of Wilhelmine bourgeois society in regards to gender norms, sexual mores, and social movements. Moreover, Klinger rejected popular sentiments about the moral and material progress of civilization; his work presents a grim picture in which human pretentions to rationality, self-control, and clarity are ever undermined by animalistic drives and the specter of death. In this sense, Morton argues that Klinger was in the forefront of artists attuned to “psychological man” (4), Carl Schorske’s term to describe the fin-desiècle view of man as “dangerous and mercurial,” “a creature of feeling and instinct.”

Chapters are generally chronological, “pegged to moments when Klinger became aware of various texts or artists” (9). The first two treat Klinger’s youthful, irreverent parodies of classicism, his relationship to German romanticism, the grotesque, and the arabesque. The final two chapters focus on dreams, hypnosis, the unconscious, crime, and prostitution. At the book’s center, forming the interpretive fulcrum, are three important chapters exploring facets of primitivism in Klinger’s art. For Morton, following the work of David Pan, Klinger’s modernism is inseparable from a primitivist worldview that “emphasizes that technological progress does not change the existential situation of the modern compared to the primitive” (3). In a chapter on German anthropology, Morton shows Klinger’s receptivity (well before expressionism) to non-Western cultures and art forms. For Klinger, she argues, the traditional “differences between the primitive and civilized were now conceived to be, not erased, but coexistent and ongoing in all cultures” (166). A subsequent chapter on mythology demonstrates that primitivist ethnography transformed German artists’ approach to classical Greek and Roman mythology. In her fascinating chapter on Darwinismus, Morton helps us experience, through Klinger, the radical unease triggered...