Max Klinger
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Max Klinger (February 18, 1857 - July 5, 1920) was a German Symbolist painter, sculptor and printmaker.
Klinger was born in Leipzig and studied in Karlsruhe. An admirer of the etchings of Menzel and Goya, he shortly became a skilled and imaginative engraver in his own right.
His best known work is a series of ten etchings entitled Paraphrases about the Finding of a Glove (printed 1881). These pictures were based on images which came to Klinger in dreams after finding a glove at an ice-skating rink. In the leitmotic device of a glove—belonging to a woman whose face we never see—Klinger anticipated the research of Freud and Kraft-Ebbing on fetish objects.
Klinger traveled extensively around the art centres of Europe for years before returning to Leipzig in 1893. From 1897 he mostly concentrated on sculpture; his marble statue of Beethoven was an integral part of the Vienna Secession exhibit of 1902.
Klinger was cited by many artists (notably Giorgio de Chirico) as being a major link between the Symbolist movement of the 19th century and the start of the metaphysical and Surrealist movements of the 20th century.