Armour, either in the form of plates of metal or chain mail with its many interlocked rings, is the primary attribute and symbol of the warrior. As such, several of the classical deities are often depicted wearing armour.

Peter Paul Rubens painted The Triumph of Victory in about 1614 for the Antwerp Guild of St George, its organisation of archers. Mars in his short suit of black armour dominates, his bloody sword resting on the thigh of Victoria, the personification of victory. She reaches over to place a wreath of oak or laurel on Mars, and holds a staff in her left hand. At the right, Mars is being passed the bundle of crossbow bolts that make up the attribute of Concord. Under the feet of Mars are the bodies of Rebellion, in the foreground, who still holds his torch, and Discord, on whose cheek a snake is crawling. The bound figure resting against the left knee of Mars is Barbarism.

Jacob Jordaens’ finished version of an original sketch by Rubens now known as The Golden Apple of Discord (1633) shows the wedding feast of the deities where Eris (Discord) makes her gift of the golden apple to set up the Judgement of Paris, leading to the Trojan War. At the left, Athena/Minerva, wearing her plumed helmet and a suit of ornate plate armour, reaches forward for that apple.

Just to confuse, the Roman goddess of war, Bellona (Greek Enyo), is also shown in or with armour by convention.

Peter Paul Rubens’ undated Portrait of Marie de’ Medici as Bellona shows her in the midst of cannon, arms and armour, with an exuberantly decorated helmet, a sceptre and a statue of a winged woman.

Armour inevitably plays a role in some of the events reported during the war against Troy. After his close friend Patroclus had been killed while wearing the armour of Achilles, he demanded a fresh suit made by Vulcan/Hephaestus before he would return to engage in battle.

Anthony van Dyck’s Thetis Receiving the Weapons of Achilles from Hephaestus from about 1630-32 shows the scene when Thetis is collecting her son’s new armour from Hephaestus, at the left.

Benjamin West’s Thetis Bringing the Armour to Achilles from 1804 shows the Greek warrior being presented with the armour and helmet by his mother Thetis.

When Achilles is killed in battle, in accordance with warrior tradition, his armour was handed on to the next in line, who could have been either Ajax or Odysseus.

Leonaert Bramer’s small painting on copper of The Quarrel between Ajax and Odysseus was made between about 1625-30. The pair stand in their armour, next to tents pitched at the foot of Troy’s mighty walls. At their feet is the armour of Achilles, and all around them are Greek warriors, some in exotic dress to suggest more distant origins.

Armour also leaked through into Christian religious paintings.

Lucas Cranach the Younger sets The Conversion of Saul (1549) in mediaeval northern Europe, with Paul and his party riding knightly chargers in their armour. Paul’s horse has fallen to the ground, with Paul still in the saddle rather than prostrate on the ground. Paul holds his hands up and looks to the heavens, where the figure of Christ is seen in a break in the clouds at the top left corner.

It was the young French martyr Joan of Arc, though, who is most often depicted wearing armour.

JAD Ingres painted Joan of Arc at the Coronation of Charles VII, in Reims Cathedral (1854). She stands close to the crown, resplendent in full armour and holding a standard, the two-pointed oriflamme embroidered for her by the women of Orléans, in her right hand.

The second scene in Jules Eugène Lenepveu’s Joan of Arc Murals (1886-90) shows Joan leading the French forces against the English, who were laying siege to the French city of Orléans. There had been controversy in Joan’s trial as to whether she had used weapons against the English; Lenepveu hedges here, showing her holding a sword in her right hand, but brandishing the Dauphin’s standard to rally the French, in the role that she described of herself. She’s wearing a suit of plate armour, which she was provided with in preparation for this operation. As this would have been designed to fit a man, this was part of the case against her for ‘cross-dressing’ in men’s clothes.

Lovis Corinth is one of several major painters who acquired themselves a suit of armour. This featured in two symbolic paintings made before and after the First World War.

When war broke out on 28 July 1914, Lovis Corinth and most of the other artists in Berlin shared an enthusiastic patriotism that initially gave them a buoyant optimism. He expressed this openly in his In Defence of Weapons from 1915.

Armour Parts in the Studio is Corinth’s summary of Germany’s defeat in 1918. The suit of armour is now empty, broken apart, and cast on the floor of his studio.

A century ago today, on 17 July 1925, the great German artist Lovis Corinth died. To complete this series commemorating his career and art, I show a selection of the best of his narrative paintings. Some modern art historians claim that narrative painting died during the nineteenth century, but that certainly didn’t apply to Corinth.

Corinth’s first really successful narrative paintings were the two that he made in 1890, showing the Old Testament story of Susanna and the Elders, a subject he returned to as late as 1923. Identical in their composition, they have an unusual setting, as this scene of the two elders acting as voyeurs is more commonly shown in Susanna’s garden, or even woodland, as described in the original story.

Towards the end of his time in Munich, Corinth painted this first version of another famous story, this time the temptations that Saint Anthony was reported to have undergone. This is more typical of Corinth’s mature work, with many figures crammed into the composition in a raucous and highly expressive human circus. Although painterly in parts, he is careful to depict fine detail in the joint of meat being held by Saint Anthony, and the saint’s amazing face.

Corinth’s narrative paintings reached their peak at the time that he moved to Berlin, in this second version of Salome. Not only was it highly influential on a wide range of other artists and their arts, but its use of gaze is remarkably subtle and its success based on being implicit rather than explicit.

Corinth wasn’t as restrained when he tackled the story from Homer’s Odyssey of Ulysses Fighting the Beggar. He packs a crowd in, gives every one of them a unique and intriguing facial expression, then pits Ulysses against the beggar in almost comic combat. Note too how his figures are becoming looser.

If Corinth’s first Temptation of Saint Anthony showed a human circus, the rest of the animals and performers came for this his second. Those figures are also becoming significantly more painterly, and the Queen of Sheba has similarities with his earlier figure of Salome.

Of all his narrative paintings, his Homeric Laughter must be the most complex. It refers to a story within the story of Homer’s Odyssey, told by the bard Demodocus to cheer Odysseus up when he is being entertained by King Alcinous on the island of the Phaeacians. It’s another raucous spectacle, in which we join the other gods in seeing Mars and Venus caught red-faced making love.

Corinth returned to narrative after his stroke, painting The Blinded Samson with its obvious autobiographical references. Samson’s body is painted more roughly, although the artist has taken care to give form to the drops of blood running down Samson’s cheeks. This version of Samson contrasts with his others in showing the man alone.

Less than two years after his stroke, Corinth returned with another elaborate and wild painting, this time depicting the story of Ariadne on Naxos. This is another highlight of Corinth’s career, particularly as it condenses several different moments in time into its single image, using multiplex narrative; that might have been fairly commonplace during the Renaissance, but was exceptional for the early twentieth century. It works wonderfully.

Late during the First World War, Corinth moved on from crowded and vivacious narrative paintings, and became more autobiographical again. The huge and stark figure of Cain heaping rocks onto the body of his brother Abel fits with Corinth’s growing horror and despair as the war drew on.

Corinth’s last painting of Susanna and the Elders is a remarkable contrast with his first, from over thirty years earlier. He still avoids a pastoral or garden setting, and his figures are now fading forms in patches of colour and texture.

For what must have been his last great narrative painting, Corinth looked to the events leading up to the fall of Troy, in particular The Trojan Horse. The great walls and towers of the city appear as a mirage, their forms indistinct from the dawn sky. Although roughly painted using coarse marks, the soldiers and the horse itself are more distinct in the foreground.

Corinth’s style evolved through his career, but he also continued to paint stories right up to the last. Together, they form one of the most sustained and brilliant series of narrative paintings of any artist since Rembrandt.

References

Wikipedia.

Lemoine S et al. (2008) Lovis Corinth, Musée d’Orsay & RMN. ISBN 978 2 711 85400 4. (In French.)

From the start of his career, Lovis Corinth was a great admirer of the paintings of Rembrandt, and like him he painted a series of self-portraits reflecting changes in his life. This penultimate article in the series to commemorate his death a century ago looks at a selection of those. These should cast light on whether his style changed dramatically over the course of his career, and what effects his stroke at the end of 1911 may have had on that style.

His earliest self-portrait is typical of his initial detailed realist style, although he didn’t show the meticulous detail in his hair or beard, for instance, that was more popular earlier in the nineteenth century.

By his later years in Munich, the skin of his face has become more painterly, and non-flesh surfaces such as his shirt and the landscape background, as well as the skull, have obviously visible brushstrokes. A simple self-portrait was also not enough: he posed beside a skeleton, drawing the comparison between his living, fleshy face, and the fleshless skull next to it.

His move from Munich, where he already had a reputation for drinking and social life, to Berlin brought him love and inspiration from his fiancée then wife Charlotte Berend, but intensified his work, social life, and drinking. His depiction of flesh has a rougher facture, and most of the passages in this work appear to have been sketched in quickly.

These changes are even more evident in this wild and ribald double portrait with his wife, posing appropriately as Bacchantes. His chest and left arm now have stark dark brushstrokes giving the flesh a texture rather than form.

Before his stroke, and the outbreak of the First World War, he posed as the standard-bearer to a mediaeval knight, his head held high with pride for Prussia. The flesh of his face now appears rough-hewn, particularly over surfaces that would normally be shown smooth and blended, such as the forehead. Bright patches on the suit of armour are shown with coarse daubs of white paint.

After his stroke, and just as the First World War was about to start, there has been little roughening in his facture. His face, though, looks more worried, and his previous pride appears to have been quashed.

By the end of the war, when he was 60, he had aged markedly, with receding hair and gaunt cheeks. Although his face and hand are as sketchy as before, his hair and left ear have been rendered more roughly still.

When he was out in the country sun at the family’s chalet by Walchensee, he painted his clothing and the landscape extremely roughly. He looks his years, but if anything appears more healthy and relaxed than when he was confined to Berlin.

His last self-portrait shows age catching up with him, and has even rougher facture. His forehead is now a field of daubs of different colours, applied coarsely. His hair consists of gestural marks seemingly made in haste.

Although there’s a clear trend towards a rough facture over the years, I can’t see any particular watershed either following his stroke or at another time that suggests sudden change. Can you?

References

Wikipedia.

Lemoine S et al. (2008) Lovis Corinth, Musée d’Orsay & RMN. ISBN 978 2 711 85400 4. (In French.)

During the 1920s, in the last years of his career, Lovis Corinth’s paintings reached a new peak, both in their quantity and their innovative exploration of colour and texture.

Although Corinth was clearly relishing this intensity, his Large Self-portrait in Front of Walchensee (1924) shows his race against the effects of age.

The Trojan Horse (1924) is Corinth’s last major painting from classical myth, showing the wooden horse made by the Greeks in order to gain access to the city of Troy, so they could sack and destroy it. The lofty towers and impregnable walls of the city are in the background. The select group of Greek soldiers who undertook this commando raid have already been concealed inside the horse, and those around it are probably Trojans, sent out from the city to check it out before it was taken inside.

Although there are suggestions as to an allegorical relationship between this painting and the First World War, Troy had been a hot topic in Berlin since the excavations at Hisarlık in Turkey in the late nineteenth century by Heinrich Schliemann and Wilhelm Dörpfeld.

Corinth also painted for fun: this superb depiction of a Königsberger Marzipantorte (Royal Marzipan Cake) (1924) must have been completed at great speed before his family consumed his model.

The Jochberg at Walchensee (1924) shows this 5,141 foot (1,567 metre) mountain dividing the Walchensee from the Kochelsee.

Walchensee, Vegetable Garden (1924) was painted away from his normal vantage point above the lake, to include the colours and textures of this vegetable patch.

Walchensee (1924) is a watercolour sketch reportedly painted on vellum.

Carmencita, Portrait of Charlotte Berend-Corinth in Spanish Dress (1924) probably doesn’t refer directly to the famous Spanish dancer Carmen Dauset Moreno, who had died in 1910. Charlotte Corinth, or Berend-Corinth, had continued painting in the early twentieth century, and joined the Berlin Secession in 1912. She also painted actively when at their chalet. In 1933, she emigrated to the USA, where she produced the first catalogue raisonné of her husband’s paintings. She died in 1967, so I am unable to show any of her paintings.

Corinth painted members of his family more often at this time, as he probably suspected he was reaching the end of his artistic career. In Wilhelmine in a Yellow Hat (1924) his shy daughter is starting to show some of her mother’s vivacity.

Thomas in Armour (1925) shows Corinth’s older child, then 21, wearing the suit of armour that had appeared in several of Corinth’s paintings over the years, in a visual record of his son’s transition into adult life.

Corinth painted Ecce Homo at Easter, 1925, as an act of meditation to mark the festival. It shows the moment that Pilate presents Christ to the hostile crowd, just before the Crucifixion. Christ has been scourged, bound, and crowned with thorns, and Pilate’s words are quoted from the Vulgate translation, meaning behold, the man. In keeping with his earlier contemporary interpretations of the scenes of the Passion, Pilate (left) is shown as an older man in a white coat, and the soldier (right) wears a suit of armour.

Corinth completed this in four days. This was bought for the Nationalgalerie in Berlin in 1929, but in 1937 was condemned by the Nazi party as being ‘degenerate art’. Thankfully, it escaped destruction when it was bought by the art museum in Basel in 1939.

The Beautiful Woman Imperia was one of the last paintings that Corinth completed in the late spring of 1925, and his final fleshly work. It’s based on Balzac’s anthology of tales Cent Contes Drolatiques from 1832-37. This shows the courtesan Imperia, naked in front of a priest, in surroundings suggesting contemporary decadent cabarets, or a far older ‘perfumed room’.

Corinth’s Last Self-Portrait, painted just two months before his death in 1925, is unusual in showing him with his reflection in a mirror. He is now balding rapidly, his cheeks sunken, and his eyes are bloodshot and tired. That summer he travelled to the Netherlands to view Old Masters, including Rembrandt and Frans Hals. He developed pneumonia, and died at Zandvoort on 17 July, four days before his sixty-eighth birthday.

He had painted more than a thousand works in oil, and hundreds of watercolours. He also made more than a thousand prints, an area of his work that I haven’t touched on. Ironically, it was the rise of the Nazi party from 1933 that prevented him from achieving the international recognition his work deserved.

References

Wikipedia.

Lemoine S et al. (2008) Lovis Corinth, Musée d’Orsay & RMN. ISBN 978 2 711 85400 4. (In French.)
Czymmek G et al. (2010) German Impressionist Landscape Painting, Liebermann-Corinth-Slevogt, Arnoldsche. ISBN 978 3 89790 321 0.

In the autumn of 1919, Lovis Corinth and his family had moved into their chalet at Urfeld, on the shore of Walchensee (Lake Walchen), to the south of Munich. From then until Corinth’s death, they divided their time between the bustle of Berlin and their garden of Eden by the lake and the mountains.

Corinth combined his new enthusiasm for painting floral arrangements with a gentle portrait of his eleven year-old daughter in Flowers and Daughter Wilhelmine (1920). The flowers shown are dominated by amaryllis, arums, and lilacs, and its composition reflects Wilhelmine’s shyness.

During the final six years of his life, Corinth must have painted more than sixty views around their chalet in Bavaria, of which I can only show a small selection. Like many others, Landscape at the Walchensee with Larch (1920) was painted from an observation point on a hill across from their chalet. This painting was bizarrely classified as being ‘degenerate art’ by the Nazis in 1937.

The local terrain produces some deceptive appearances, but many of Corinth’s late landscapes have marked tilting in their horizontals, and Walchensee by Moonlight (1920) even shows the same leftward lean in its verticals. This had been prominent in the earliest of his paintings in 1912, following his stroke. Here it probably reflects his shift of emphasis from form to areas of colour, particularly the impasto reflections of the moon on the lake’s still surface.

In 1921, Corinth was awarded an honorary doctorate and made a professor of arts by the University of Königsberg, where he had started his training.

Walchensee, Landscape with Cow (c 1921) is another view painted from his ‘pulpit’ vantage point across from the chalet.

Throughout his career, Corinth had made loose watercolour sketches, usually as preparatory studies for finished oil paintings. Now he started painting watercolour landscapes, such as his Walchensee, Evening Air (1921), capturing the colours of dusk.

Pink Clouds, Walchensee (1921) is another watercolour showing the rich colours of land and sky as the sun sets.

In 1922, his work led the German pavilion at the Venice Biennale, with a total of thirty of his paintings on display.

Red Christ (1922) is the last, most striking and original of all his many scenes of the Crucifixion. Although thoroughly modern in its approach and facture, he chose a traditional wood panel as its support, in keeping with older religious works. The red of Christ’s blood, spurting from the wound made by a spear, and oozing from his other cuts, is exaggerated by the red of the clouds and the sun’s rays.

Easter at Walchensee was painted from their chalet in 1922, as the winter snow was melting on the tops of the hills.

Corinth also painted some watercolours indoors. His Flower Vase on a Table (1922) has patches of pure, high-chroma colour for the flowers and the armchair at the right, and few suggestions of form.

During this period of frenetic painting, Corinth appeared at first to flourish in the sunshine and fresh air. His Self-portrait in a Straw Hat from 1923 shows him looking in rude health.

Susanna and the Elders (1923) revisits the Old Testament story from the book of Daniel, which had brought him early success in 1890. The two versions he had painted then followed tradition, and show the naked Susanna being spied on by two elders, who then tried to blackmail her. Here he shows the three figures talking, as the elders put their proposition to Susanna.

Back in his ‘pulpit’ above the lake, Tree at Walchensee (1923) has the most rectilinear form of all his views of Walchensee, set by the horizontal snow-line and the trunk of the tree.

Walchensee in Winter (1923) is another evocative snowscape.

Chrysanthemums II (1923) is my favourite of his late floral works, as the texture of the paint matches the fine petals perfectly.

References

Wikipedia.

Lemoine S et al. (2008) Lovis Corinth, Musée d’Orsay & RMN. ISBN 978 2 711 85400 4. (In French.)
Czymmek G et al. (2010) German Impressionist Landscape Painting, Liebermann-Corinth-Slevogt, Arnoldsche. ISBN 978 3 89790 321 0.

When the First World War broke out on 28 July 1914, Lovis Corinth and his family had only just come to terms with his stroke in 1911, then found themselves living in a country at war. He and most of the other artists in Berlin shared an enthusiastic patriotism that initially gave them a buoyant optimism.

This patriotism was expressed openly in paintings like Corinth’s In Defence of Weapons from 1915. The same suit of armour in which he had posed proudly for his self-portrait prior to his stroke now saw service in the cause of his country.

But both Corinth and his wife were growing older and more tired. Portrait of Charlotte Berend-Corinth (1915) shows a very different woman from the younger mother of a few years earlier. Her brow is now knitted, and her joyous smile gone.

The answer, for Corinth and his family, was to get out of Berlin and enjoy the countryside. In the summer they travelled to Lake Müritz (1915) in Mecklenburg, and Corinth started painting more landscapes again.

He also continued to paint still lifes, such as this wonderful Still Life with Pagoda (1916), with its curious combination of Asian and crustacean objects.

Every year from 1916 to 1918, Corinth returned to his home village Tapiau and the nearby city of Königsberg where he had started his professional career, to see the terrible effects of the war on the people. In 1917, he was honoured by their citizens in recognition of his achievements. A substantial one-man exhibition of his paintings was also held in Mannheim and Hanover that year.

Cain (1917) is probably Corinth’s most significant work from the war years, and continued his series of stories from the Old Testament. He shows Cain finishing off his brother Abel, burying his dying body. Cain looks up to the heavens as he places another large rock on his brother, and threatening black birds fly around.

This stark and powerful painting may also reflect Corinth’s own feelings of his battle following his stroke, and those invoked when the US first entered the war that year, as its remorseless slaughter continued.

Götz von Berlichingen (1917) shows the historical character of Gottfried ‘Götz’ von Berlichingen (1480-1562), a colourful Imperial Knight and mercenary. After he lost his right arm in 1504, he had metal prosthetic hands made for him, that were capable of holding objects as fine as a quill. His swashbuckling autobiography was turned into a play by Goethe in 1773, and a notorious quotation from that led to his name becoming a euphemism for the phrase ‘he can lick my arse/ass’.

Corinth celebrated his sixtieth birthday in 1918, and was made a professor in the Academy of Arts of Berlin. However, with the end of the war and its unprecedented carnage, disaster for Germany, and the revolution, Corinth slid into depression.

Armour Parts in the Studio (1918) is his summary of the situation. The suit of armour is now empty, broken apart, and cast on the floor of his studio.

He still managed some fleshly paintings, such as this Girl in Front of a Mirror (1918).

His self-portraits show clearly the effects of war and age. In Self-Portrait in a White Coat (1918) he’s visibly more gaunt. He is shown painting with his left hand, and has used the open sleeve to stow some brushes for ready use.

Just a year later, his Self-Portrait at the Easel (1919) reveals a still older man, looking directly at the viewer, grappling with the changing times.

Magdalen with Pearls in her Hair (1919), one of Corinth’s few works now in the UK (in the Tate Gallery), is one of several he made of Mary Magdalen, a popular subject for religious paintings. This follows the established tradition of showing her as a composite, based mainly on Mary of Magdala who was cleansed by Christ, witnessed the Crucifixion, and was the first to see him resurrected. Apocryphal traditions held that she was a reformed prostitute, and most depictions of Mary tread a fine line between the fleshly and spiritual.

This is Corinth’s most intense and dramatic depiction of Mary, her age getting the better of her body, and her eyes puffy from weeping. She’s shown with a skull to symbolise mortality, and with pearls in her hair to suggest the contradiction of her infamous past and as a halo for her later devotion to Christ.

Corinth also kept up his floral paintings, here with Roses (1919).

In the summer of 1918, Corinth and his family had first visited Urfeld, on the shore of Walchensee (Lake Walchen), to the south of Munich. They fell in love with the countryside there, and the following year bought some land on which Charlotte arranged for a simple chalet to be built. In the coming years, the Walchensee was to prove Corinth’s salvation, and the motif for at least sixty landscape paintings.

In September of 1919, their new chalet was ready, and the Corinths moved in to watch the onset of autumn. Walchensee, Blue Landscape (1919) appears to have been painted quite early, before the first substantial fall of snow.

October Snow at Walchensee (1919) shows an initial gentle touch of snow as autumn becomes fully established.

Later in the season, when the ground was well-covered with snow, Corinth painted it in Walchensee, Snowscape (1919).

References

Wikipedia.

Lemoine S et al. (2008) Lovis Corinth, Musée d’Orsay & RMN. ISBN 978 2 711 85400 4. (In French.)
Czymmek G et al. (2010) German Impressionist Landscape Painting, Liebermann-Corinth-Slevogt, Arnoldsche. ISBN 978 3 89790 321 0.

By the beginning of 1913, Lovis Corinth had essentially overcome the consequences of his stroke in late 1911. His painting style had moved on, although not because of any residual physical limitations, and he and his family were starting to build a new lifestyle that would hopefully preserve his health better. Key to that was getting away more from Berlin.

By 1913, in his Self-portrait with Tyrolean Hat, he appears to be on holiday in the South Tyrol, marked by his headgear and the inscription at the right. However, his face has become more gaunt and worried. Although he appears to be holding his brush in his right hand, it’s actually clasping several brushes and his palette, indicating that he was painting with his left hand. If painted from a mirror image, of course, the handedness could be reversed. There doesn’t appear to have been any significant change in his brushwork.

Corinth dons his suit of armour again for his 1914 Self-portrait in Armour, holding a pole in his left hand, assuming the image isn’t mirrored. This is an excellent comparator against his 1911 portrait: there has been little if any change in facture, but his face has changed, and there is still worry in his expression. His chin is no longer raised in pride, but he stares straight ahead with determination.

Painted at the start of the First World War, his armour here is probably a response to that, and to the universal call to arms. Corinth had a great admiration for Otto von Bismarck.

Self-portrait in the Studio (1914) is the last in this series of self-portraits, and shows him painting with the brush held in his left hand, although this would be reversed if the image was mirrored. He appears older, more anxious, perhaps even stressed, as he looks directly at the viewer. Again, there’s little apparent change in his brushwork from 1911.

At some stage, perhaps during the winter of 1912-13, Corinth and his wife stayed in the French resort of Menton (1913), where he painted this excellent and detailed view. Although clearly dated, his verticals are once again leaning towards the left, as they had been soon after his stroke.

His flattening of perspective is well illustrated in Skittle Alley (1913). This shows an outdoor skittle alley close to a building that is presumably behind the viewer. In the foreground is a table laid up for a meal, to the left of which is a chair. A man, his back to the viewer, is just about to bowl at the skittles shown at the far end of a level alley, cut through the wood.

With its high vanishing point, the alley seems shallow and much higher at its far end, and could easily be seen as rising at an angle of over 45 degrees. The distant landscape seen through the gap at the end of the alley has no aerial perspective, providing no clues as to its distance. Corinth has depicted this as if everything from the alley beyond is on a flat plane, like a theatrical scenery painting, parallel to the picture plane, and only slightly deeper than the table and chair.

This is believed to have been painted when Corinth had been invited to the property of Carl von Glantz, a friend of one of his students, at Mecklembourg. It’s reminiscent of Dutch paintings of the seventeenth century showing similar games taking place outdoors.

He continued to paint still lifes, such as this Cat’s Breakfast (1913); some of these became so loose as to show only the most basic forms of the objects.

Contrary to claims that this change in style was driven by the results of his stroke, Corinth still painted more detailed figurative works, such as this Bacchante (1913), using tempera rather than oils. Its brushwork and finish is surprisingly close to his earlier figurative paintings from Berlin, although once again the strokes in the background are slanted as if made using his right hand.

Corinth was also quick to return to major mythical paintings, some of which were undertaken as wall decoration for the Villa Katzenbogen, including his grand Odysseus in the Battle with the Suitors (1913). This shows the conclusion of the Odyssey, in which its hero slaughters all his wife Penelope’s suitors, on his return home to Ithaca.

Ariadne on Naxos is one of Corinth’s most sophisticated mythical paintings, and was inspired by the first version of Richard Strauss’s opera Ariadne auf Naxos. This was first performed in Stuttgart in October 1912, and Corinth probably attended its Munich premiere on 30 January 1913. Wikipedia’s masterly single-sentence summary of the opera reads: “The opera’s unusual combination of elements of low commedia dell’arte with those of high opera seria points up one of the work’s principal themes: the competition between high and low art for the public’s attention.”

At the left and in the foreground, Ariadne lies in erotic langour on Theseus’ left thigh. He wears an exuberant helmet, and appears to be shouting angrily and anxiously towards the other figures to the right.

The group in the middle and right is centred on Dionysus, who clutches his characteristic staff in his left hand, and with his right hand holds the reins to the leopard and tiger drawing his chariot. Leading those animals is a small boy, and to the left of the chariot is a young bacchante. Behind them is an older couple of rather worn-out bacchantes. Crossing the sky in an arc are many putti, their hands linked together.

Corinth has combined two separate events in the story into a single image: Ariadne’s eventually broken relationship with Theseus, and her subsequently successful affair with Dionysus. This is multiplex narrative, more typical of narrative paintings of the early Renaissance, and exceptionally unusual for the early twentieth century.

On Christmas Eve at the end of 1913, he painted this delightful scene of their two young children enjoying their Christmas Decorations. Charlotte, the artist’s wife, is seen at the left edge disguised as Father Christmas. Their son Thomas stands with his back to the viewer in front of a nativity scene close to his mother. Daughter Wilhelmine is at the right edge, inspecting one of the presents. Corinth uses high chroma traditionally associated with Christmas to enrich the scene.

The following year, Corinth returned to the Mediterranean coast, this time to Liguria in northern Italy, where he painted the Sea at La Spezia (1914). Not as dramatic as his earlier painting at Bordighera, his waves are still rough strokes, and the sea rich in its colours.

Resorts along the French and Italian Rivieras were enjoying a wave of popularity and rapid growth captured in New Buildings in Monte Carlo (1914).

One of his few religious paintings of this time is his second version of Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife, from 1914. Its story is drawn from the book of Genesis, during the period in which Joseph was in Egypt after he had been sold into slavery by his brothers. Rising to become the head of Potiphar’s household, Potiphar’s wife takes a fancy to him, but Joseph resists her attempts at seduction. She then falsely accuses him of attempting to rape her, resulting in Joseph being thrown into prison.

Corinth shows the most popular scene depicted in paintings, in which Potiphar’s wife is trying to seduce Joseph.

Having survived his stroke and moved his style on, Corinth was now moving into the next phase of his career when, on 28 July 1914, the Austro-Hungarian Empire declared war on Serbia. Germany invaded Belgium and Luxembourg, and the First World War had begun.

References

Wikipedia.

Lemoine S et al. (2008) Lovis Corinth, Musée d’Orsay & RMN. ISBN 978 2 711 85400 4. (In French.)
Czymmek G et al. (2010) German Impressionist Landscape Painting, Liebermann-Corinth-Slevogt, Arnoldsche. ISBN 978 3 89790 321 0.

In December 1911, when he was 53 and at the peak of his career, Lovis Corinth suffered a major stroke. When he regained consciousness, he couldn’t even recognise his wife Charlotte, and his left arm and leg were paralysed. As he had painted his entire professional career with his left hand, it looked as if that career might have come to an abrupt and unexpected end.

(There is some uncertainty over which hand Corinth had painted with prior to this catastrophe, and which side was paralysed as a result. Although the consensus appears to be that he had painted with his left hand, and that was his paralysed side, some sources claim the opposite.)

Thankfully he made a rapid recovery over the following weeks. His left arm remained weak for some time, and he needed a stick when walking, but by February 1912 he had completed his first self-portrait since his stroke, and was painting actively again.

Corinth’s paintings changed visibly after his stroke. There is controversy among commentators as to how much of this change was the result of its effects, and how much his launch into Expressionist style was intentional on his part. Another question is whether any residual weakness or impaired hand-eye co-ordination might have brought other changes to his technique. Did he, for example, have to learn to paint using his right hand as compensation? Visual evidence can be gained from comparison of self-portraits shortly before and after his stroke.

One of his last completed prior to his stroke, Self-portrait as a Flag-Bearer (1911), shows a proud artist, posing in a suit of armour, a standard borne behind him. His pose is reminiscent of Rembrandt’s self-portrait of 1636, and reflects his perception of his role in the Secession, and the Secession’s importance in the history of art. His brushwork is rough and painterly throughout, even over his face, and the background is sketched in gesturally.

Self-portrait with a Panama Hat was painted in 1912, during his recovery, and differs little in its facture. His facial expression and bearing have changed totally, though, his eyes staring through his struggle, in concerned contemplation.

Once Corinth was fit enough after his stroke, he and Charlotte travelled for three months of convalescence on the French Riviera at Bordighera.

Balcony Scene in Bordighera (1912) shows Charlotte with a miniature parasol to shelter her from the dazzling sun, on the balcony of their accommodation there. His rough facture has extended more generally from his nudes and sketches, marking his move to Expressionism.

There are also some interesting traits in his brushwork that (at least partly) reflect his recovering condition. Verticals, indeed the whole painting, tend to lean to the left, in opposition to the diagonal strokes used to form the sky, which are more typical of someone painting with their right hand. His previously quite rigorous perspective projection has been largely lost, although he maintains an approximate vanishing point at the right of the base of Charlotte’s neck. He has employed aerial perspective, but the painting lacks the effect of depth seen in his earlier work.

Indoors, he painted an Italian Woman in a Yellow Chair (1912). There has been speculation as to whether this wasn’t a local Italian model, but Charlotte. The hat does seem to have been his wife’s, and appears in a sketch of her that he made at about the same time.

Storm off Cape Ampelio (1912) shows rough seas at the cape close to Bordighera. Its brushwork has great vigour, and captures the violent surges that occur when incident and reflected waves meet. Again its verticals are leaning to the left.

His first major painting following his stroke returned to the theme of Samson. This autobiographical portrait of The Blinded Samson (1912) expressed his feelings about his own battle against the sequelae of his stroke.

In the Samson story, it shows the once-mighty man reduced to a feeble prisoner, forced to grope his way around. No doubt Corinth didn’t intend referring to the conclusion of Samson’s story: with the aid of God, he pulled down the two central columns of the Philistines’ temple to Dagon, and brought the whole building down on top of its occupants.

Although rough in its facture, Corinth has now restored his verticals and clearly got the better of any residual mechanical problems in painting.

This wonderful Portrait of the Sculptor Nikolaus Friedrich (1912) at work wasn’t the first Corinth had painted, as he had made one previously in 1904, when the sculptor was young and muscular. Eight years later he’s seen in the midst of a broad and representative range of his work. Friedrich died two years later, when he was only 48.

At the Mirror (1912) is an ingenious painting using the woman’s reflection to make clear the struggle that Corinth, seen only in the reflection, had gone through to paint his images. Instead of providing the viewer with a faithful and detailed reflection, that image is even more loosely painted, rendering their faces barely recognisable.

View of the Jetties in Hamburg (1912) shows the continuing looseness of his facture. Its verticals are more consistent and vertical than in his paintings in Bordighera, and his brushstrokes are varied in orientation.

In the first year since his stroke, Corinth’s painting had come a long way. What he must have feared would be career-ending was not. The event may have accelerated his move to Expressionist style, but it doesn’t seem to have driven or determined it.

References

Wikipedia.

Lemoine S et al. (2008) Lovis Corinth, Musée d’Orsay & RMN. ISBN 978 2 711 85400 4. (In French.)
Czymmek G et al. (2010) German Impressionist Landscape Painting, Liebermann-Corinth-Slevogt, Arnoldsche. ISBN 978 3 89790 321 0.

In 1909, when Lovis Corinth was fifty-one, he had painted his wife Charlotte and their two young children, as they were enjoying everything that Berlin had to offer the successful artist. He had worked hard, and by the end of 1911 had painted more than three hundred substantial works in oils.

He seized this moment during The Model’s Break in 1909 to capture a more informal and natural full-length portrait of her. This is a not uncommon ruse resulting in some fine paintings by others, and works well for Corinth. This was exhibited in the 1913 exhibition of the Berlin Secession.

He painted the occasional urban landscape of the city too, such as this wintry Ice Rink in the Berlin Tiergarten (1909), where Berliners are skating on one of the frozen lakes in the park’s zoo.

Corinth continued to explore Christ’s Passion in real terms, in his Christ Carrying the Cross (1909). Although this contains most of the usual elements seen in traditional depictions, his language is contemporary, almost secular. Two men, one of them apparently African, are helping Christ bear his exhausting load, while a couple of soldiers are whipping him on and threatening him with their spears. A third soldier is controlling the crowd at the upper left, and behind is a mounted soldier and one of the disciples.

Homeric Laughter (1909) is one of Corinth’s more complex paintings of classical myth. He provides a good clue as to its interpretation in the inscription, which rendered from the original into English reads:
unquenchable laughter arose among the blessed gods as they saw the craft of wise Hephaestus
together with the citation of Homer’s Odyssey book 8 line 326.

This refers to a section in which Odysseus is being entertained by King Alcinous, after meeting Nausicaä on the island of the Phaeacians. To cheer Odysseus up, the bard Demodocus tells a tale of the illicit love affair between Ares/Mars (god of war) and Aphrodite/Venus (goddess of love), that has featured extensively in art.

One day Hephaistos/Vulcan catches the couple making love in his marriage bed, and throws a fine but unbreakable net over them. Hephaistos then summons the other gods, who come and roar with laughter at the ensnared couple.

In this first version, Corinth shows Aphrodite recumbent on the bed, shielding her eyes from the crowd around her. Ares is struggling in frustration with the net securing the couple. Hephaistos, clad in black with his tools slung around his waist, is talking to Poseidon (wearing a crown) with Dionysos/Bacchus behind him (clutching a champagne glass). At the right edge is Hermes/Mercury, with his winged helmet. Sundry putti are playing with Ares’ armour, and an arc of them adorns the sky.

Corinth also painted a second version, which he etched in 1920 to make prints.

Morning Sun (1910) is a wonderfully painterly oil sketch of Charlotte enjoying the sunshine in bed.

Contrasting with that is this more formal Portrait of Charlotte Corinth in a Brown Blouse from 1910.

Earlier in his career, Corinth doesn’t appear to have painted many floral or other still lifes, but after 1900 he seems to have been more attracted to them. Roses (1910) strikes a perfect balance between botanical detail in their blooms, and looseness in the foliage and background.

Over these years, Corinth and his family travelled, here to a Terrace in Klobenstein, The Tirol (1910). Klobenstein or Collalbo is a mountain resort at an altitude of just over 1,000 metres in the South Tirol, in Italy. This painting shows the Hamburg businessman and art collector Henry B Simms (1861-1922) on holiday there during the summer. Simms was a keen collector of Corinth’s work, and later also became an early purchaser of Picasso’s works. The children shown are almost certainly his, and Corinth painted a more formal portrait of him in the same year.

Woman with a Fishtank (1911) shows Charlotte in their flat on Klopstockstraße in Berlin. The aquarium, full of goldfish, is surrounded by quite a jungle of indoor plants, her little corner of vegetation within their city flat. According to her later memoirs, Corinth took just four days to complete this painting.

Corinth’s celebration of his fifty-third birthday on 21st July was more restrained than his fiftieth, but he seems to have enjoyed painting a Large Still Life with Figure (1911), featuring Charlotte in a surprising outfit. They must have enjoyed quite a banquet afterwards, judging by the dead game on the table.

Carl Hagenbeck in his Zoo (1911) is one of his more unusual portraits, painted not of the splendid walrus, but of Carl Hagenbeck (1844-1913), a merchant of wild animals. Hagenbeck was the originator of the modern zoo with its ‘open’ and naturalistic enclosures, and established the most successful private zoo in Germany at Stellingen just outside Hamburg. He died a couple of years after this portrait, when he was bitten by one of his snakes.

At this time Corinth also seems to have done a good trade in more conventional portraits, such as this Portrait of Frau Kaumann (1911) in richly dappled light.

Then in December 1911, Corinth suffered a major stroke: his left side, both arm and leg, were paralysed. Corinth had painted his entire professional career with his left hand, and was only 53.

References

Wikipedia.

Lemoine S et al. (2008) Lovis Corinth, Musée d’Orsay & RMN. ISBN 978 2 711 85400 4. (In French.)
Czymmek G et al. (2010) German Impressionist Landscape Painting, Liebermann-Corinth-Slevogt, Arnoldsche. ISBN 978 3 89790 321 0.

Lovis Corinth’s art and career reached their peak once he had joined the Berlin Secession, and in the Spring of 1903 had married his former student Charlotte Berend. Although their early family and social life had reduced the number of paintings he produced, their quality remained consistently high, and he was living up to his reputation as ‘the painter of flesh’.

The Childhood of Zeus (1905-6) shows Zeus, senior god in the Greek pantheon, as a young boy at its centre. According to various myths, he was the son of the Titans Cronus and Rhea. Cronus swallowed his other children, so to save Zeus from the same fate, Rhea gave birth to him in Crete, and handed Cronus a rock disguised as a baby, which he promptly swallowed.

Rhea then hid Zeus in a cave, where he was raised by one or more of a long list of surrogates, including Gaia, a goat, a nymph, and others, several of which appear in this raucous painting. Corinth adds Dionysus to provide an abundant supply of nourishing grapes, and lend a little ironic humour.

In 1906, he took his wife Charlotte to his home village of Tapiau and the city of Königsberg where he had started his training and career, and the following year they travelled to Florence, where he copied frescos using pastels.

Following his earlier paintings of the Deposition, Corinth came even closer to harsh reality in The Great Martyrdom from 1907. He takes the example of an ordinary man being crucified, then secularises the image and places it in a vivid context, making clear the vicious inhumanity of crucifixion.

In The Capture of Samson (1907), Corinth revisited another of his favourite subjects, whom he had painted in 1893 in company with Delila, and again in 1899 in a related scene of his capture. Here, with some simple props including an eclectic and anachronistic range of headgear, he shows the chaotic brawl that resulted in Samson’s bondage. Corinth places himself as one of Samson’s captors in the left foreground, and Delila kneels, naked, at the top centre.

From 1907, he led formal teaching sessions in life classes in Berlin.

To celebrate his fiftieth birthday in 1908, Corinth painted several canvases, including Nakedness reflecting his fleshly reputation. This was completed over a few days at the end of March that year, and the following month was delivered to the Secession’s exhibition, where it was well received.

Bacchante Couple (1908) is another self-portrait with Charlotte, with the couple apparently enjoying their wild lifestyle at the time. This may have been another birthday celebration.

Female Half-Nude by a Window (1908) is one of the popular sub-genre of ‘woman at the window’ scenes, and a less roughly hewn nude shown in delicate lighting.

Corinth’s second painting of The Temptation of St Anthony after Gustave Flaubert from 1908, shown below, demonstrates how his style had changed over a period of just a decade, compared with his first painting (above) from 1897 when he was in Munich.

This second version is based on Flaubert’s account La Tentation de Saint-Antoine, and focusses on a scene in which the Queen of Sheba appears in the saint’s visions. Shown with her is a train consisting of an elephant, camels, and naked women riding piebald horses. This new Saint Anthony is far younger, and surrounded by this outlandish circus of people and animals. In his left hand he holds a heavy chain, and there’s a skull in his right hand.

According to later recollections of the artist’s son Thomas, Corinth painted this from professional models in his studio on Berlin’s Handelstraße. Charlotte modelled only for the arm and hand of the Queen of Sheba. Together with Nakedness, this must have been completed by the end of March 1908, and was shown at the Secession’s exhibition from April to June. It was also among Corinth’s works representing Germany at the thirteenth Venice Biennale in 1922, and was the basis for an etching he made in 1919.

Self-portrait, Painting shows the artist at work in 1909 when he was 51. He has signed his name using Greek letters, and on the right side has inscribed aetatis suae LI, meaning his age 51.

Another of his most popular paintings from this period is his group portrait of The Artist and his Family (1909). All dressed up for what may have been intended to be a more formal group portrait, Charlotte sits calmly cradling daughter Wilhelmine, then just five months old, as the artist seems to be struggling to paint them. Their son Thomas, aged five years, stands on a desk so he can rest his hand on mother’s shoulder. I suspect this was aided by a photograph.

References

Wikipedia.

Lemoine S et al. (2008) Lovis Corinth, Musée d’Orsay & RMN. ISBN 978 2 711 85400 4. (In French.)
Czymmek G et al. (2010) German Impressionist Landscape Painting, Liebermann-Corinth-Slevogt, Arnoldsche. ISBN 978 3 89790 321 0.

With his move to Berlin and the success of his painting of Salome, Lovis Corinth was reaching the peak of his career. Corinth formally joined the Berlin Secession in 1901, and quickly found himself involved with its direction. He relished his new-found reputation as ‘the painter of flesh’, and was now at the centre of Germany’s vibrant city of modern arts.

In 1902, he opened a painting school for women, and among his first pupils was Charlotte Berend (1880-1967), then just twenty-one and the daughter of a rich textile merchant.

The Family of the Painter Fritz Rumpf (1901) is a wonderfully informal family portrait, sadly omitting Fritz Rumpf (1856-1927) altogether, but Corinth painted him separately. The mother, at the right, is Margarethe née Gatterer, and all six of their children are included.

In the summer of 1902, Corinth painted Charlotte Berend for the first time, and the couple travelled to Pomerania together. That autumn they became engaged. By this time, Charlotte had already become Corinth’s muse and preferred model, as she was to remain for the rest of his life. That year, Corinth also visited Paris, Anvers, and the Netherlands.

Self portrait with Charlotte Berend-Corinth (1902) is his earliest double portrait with his fiancée. Its original title in German means self-portrait with his wife and a champagne glass although the glass that he’s holding clearly doesn’t contain champagne. This refers to Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait with Saskia (The Prodigal Son) (1636), below, in which Saskia is sat on Rembrandt’s lap, and he raises a large fluted glass of beer in his right hand. Charlotte, in the role of Saskia, looks quiet and calm, against Corinth/Rembrandt’s alcohol-fuelled mirth.

Swimming in Horst – Ostsee (1902) shows swimmers in the Baltic Sea at what was then known as Horst, and is now the Polish resort of Niechorze.

Presumably Paddling (1902) shows Charlotte’s turn to take to the waters there.

Charlotte Berend and Lovis Corinth married in the spring of 1903. He was 44, she was only 22. In the autumn of the following year, their first child, Thomas, was born, and in 1909 their daughter Wilhelmina.

Self-portrait with Model (1903) is the couple’s second joint portrait, and the first after their marriage. This time her pose refers to the classical images of muses by Rubens and Ingres, alluding to the story of Pygmalion.

Corinth appears to have painted with his left hand, so this image hasn’t been painted directly from a mirror, but he may well have used photographs instead.

Max Reinhardt moved to Berlin at the same time as Corinth, and in 1902 his Little Theatre staged what I think was the German premiere of Oscar Wilde’s play Salome. Richard Strauss saw the play there, and it inspired him to write his opera of the same name the following summer.

Corinth painted this wonderful portrait of its star and title role, Gertrud Eysoldt as Salome (1903). This makes an interesting contrast with his 1900 painting of the story. Although during this period he painted fewer mythical and other narrative works, the next painting is one of his most vivid stories.

Ulysses Fighting the Beggar (1903) shows a story from book 18 of Homer’s Odyssey, before the slaughter of the suitors (painted much earlier by Gustave Moreau, but never completed).

Odysseus/Ulysses has finally returned to his home city of Ithaca and is now determined to kill the many suitors to his wife Penelope. As he plans this, he goes around disguised as a beggar. This fragment of the elaborate story starts with the arrival of a real beggar named Arnaeus or Irus, who most unwisely picks a fight with Odysseus, who promptly floors the beggar, and stops just short of killing him.

Corinth captures the fight as Odysseus (centre) is getting the better of Irus (left of centre), with various suitors and bystanders watching. Although painted loosely, the artist has taken care to give each face its own expression, ranging from amusement to apprehension. The end result is a raucous collage of human emotion.

Corinth seems not to have taken this study of abduction, Frauenraub (1904), any further, and I don’t know its narrative context.

Landscapes are relatively infrequent over these years, but I could not resist including this delightful Blooming Farm Garden from 1904.

Corinth’s reputation as ‘the painter of flesh’ was maintained by two groups of nudes. The Harem (1904) uses an ever-popular ‘oriental’ setting for its abundance of female flesh, but has some distinctive touches too. The cat sat in the foreground ignores, in the way that only cats can, some sort of horseplay taking place behind, while a guard looks as bored as the cat. This isn’t the sumptuous silk and divan lounge shown in the nineteenth century, though. Indeed, it all looks rather tawdry.

In complete contrast, Charlotte Berend in a Deck Chair (1904) is a tender and intimate sketch of his wife relaxing away from their son, her wedding ring prominent on her left hand.

References

Wikipedia.

Lemoine S et al. (2008) Lovis Corinth, Musée d’Orsay & RMN. ISBN 978 2 711 85400 4. (In French.)
Czymmek G et al. (2010) German Impressionist Landscape Painting, Liebermann-Corinth-Slevogt, Arnoldsche. ISBN 978 3 89790 321 0.

Lovis Corinth didn’t just spend his years in Munich drinking red wine and champagne, but experimented in his painting and evolved his mature style. In 1897, he moved studio within Munich, and started making increasingly frequent visits to Berlin, where he was able to obtain lucrative commissions for portraits. Corinth was among the founding members of the Berlin Secession in 1898, and by 1900 was renting a studio in Berlin. In the autumn of 1901, he closed his studio in Munich and moved fully to Berlin.

He had no shortage of attractive young women, like Ellÿ (1898), to paint, but he pressed on with his campaign to improve his style and technique.

Reclining Nude (1899) is usually considered to mark the peak of Corinth’s nudes, and was painted during one of his visits to Berlin. Its brushwork is so painterly that it has sometimes been mistakenly supposed that it was made well into the twentieth century, but is now securely dated to the end of his time in Munich.

Morning (1900) shows another very modern nude in personal and intimate surroundings.

In Max Halbe’s Garden (1899) shows a group of friends in an informal setting, chatting as they eat fruit next to the washing line. Max Halbe (1865-1944) was a German playwright with a growing reputation at the time, and is seen to the right of centre, with his wife at the right.

Portrait of Mother Rosenhagen (1899) most probably shows the mother of one of Corinth’s friends in Munich.

In addition to single-person portraits, Corinth was commissioned to paint a few group portraits, including this of The Lodge Brothers from 1898-99. He modelled this after Rembrandt’s smaller group portraits, placing the Master of the Lodge in the centre, where his gaunt face stares up to the heavens.

In these last few years in Munich, Corinth worked on a series of two paintings exploring the story of Salome and John the Baptist’s execution. He seems to have started this work with a drawing in 1897, which eventually led to one of his greatest paintings.

The original narrative is biblical, and straightforward: the unnamed daughter of Herodias (subsequently identified as Salome) performed a dance at a birthday feast thrown by King Herod. The dance so pleased Herod that he offered her anything that she wanted, up to half his kingdom. She asked not for riches, but for the head of Saint John the Baptist, the earthly messenger sent to announce the birth and ministry of Jesus Christ. Herod reluctantly agreed, John was beheaded in prison, and his head brought to her on a plate, which the dancer gave to her mother.

A popular story for religious paintings, Corinth decided to paint a scene close to that most commonly chosen, in which John’s head has been brought to Salome on a platter. This contrasts with the choices made by Gustave Moreau almost twenty-five years earlier.

The basic cast and arrangement of figures is the same in each version: the severed head of John the Baptist is at the centre, Salome leaning over and touching it with her right hand. Behind her are two women. The receptacle containing John’s head is itself on the head of a slave, who kneels at the feet of the executioner, who stands holding the bloodied sword in his right hand, facing Salome. To the lower right, three other figures are partly cropped out: the feet of John’s dead body, and another slave bent over them to look at the head of an older man.

Corinth’s first painting of Salome from 1899 shows the dancer dressed as a tart, her breasts hanging loose, her face sneering down at John’s face with contempt as she touches it. The young woman at the top right laughs as she looks towards the left, apparently detached from the gruesome scene in front of her. No gazes meet, thus the figures do not integrate into a whole.

His second Salome from the following year is less roughly worked and more finished to show finer detail. Although its figures haven’t moved, subtle changes have transformed the painting and its reading.

Salome has a more neutral facial expression, and is staring intently at the lower abdomen of the executioner. Her right hand is stretching open the left eye of John’s head, which appears to be staring up at her. The executioner and the young woman at the top right are laughing at one another, but the third woman beside her has a serious, almost sad expression, as she stands holding a large peacock fan. Visible at the top of her clothing, directly below her chin, is the small image of a human skull.

Corinth has also added detail to the cropped figures at the lower right. John’s legs are spattered with his blood, and possibly bear wounds or sores from his imprisonment. The two figures there are engaged in eye-to-eye contact, and there is also a profusion of hands there, as the older man appears to be raising John’s right arm.

The chain of gaze here is central to the painting’s narrative: John’s eye stares at Salome, who stares at the executioner’s crotch, who laughs at the young woman at the top right, who laughs back at him. Watching sombre and detached from behind is the figure of death.

Oscar Wilde’s one-act play Salome had been first published in French in 1891, and was soon translated into English and German. Banned from public performance in Britain, it received its premier in Paris in 1896, but wasn’t performed in public in England until 1931. Wilde had been influenced by Gustave Moreau’s paintings of Salome, and in turn influenced both Corinth’s paintings and Richard Strauss’s later opera (1905).

In Salome’s words at the end of Wilde’s play (he calls John the Baptist Jokanaan):
But, wherefore dost thou not look at me Jokanaan? Thine eyes that were so terrible, so full of rage and scorn, are shut now. Wherefore are they shut? Open thine eyes! Lift up thine eyelids, Jokanaan! Wherefore dost thou not look at me? Art thou afraid of me, Jokanaan, that thou wilt not look at me?
If thou hadst looked at me thou hadst loved me. Well I know that thou wouldst have loved me, and the mystery of love is greater that the mystery of death.

At the centre of Wilde’s play is the perversion of lust and desire in Salome, captured so well by Corinth in the chain of gaze.

This second painting was rejected by the Munich Secession, but welcomed by the Berlin Secession. As a result, Corinth was dubbed ‘the painter of flesh’, establishing his reputation and securing his future in Berlin.

References

Wikipedia.

Lemoine S et al. (2008) Lovis Corinth, Musée d’Orsay & RMN. ISBN 978 2 711 85400 4. (In French.)
Czymmek G et al. (2010) German Impressionist Landscape Painting, Liebermann-Corinth-Slevogt, Arnoldsche. ISBN 978 3 89790 321 0.

By 1890, Lovis Corinth was financially independent, had his own studio in Königsberg, the city near his home village, and was starting to become a successful artist. His Pietà from 1889, which was sadly destroyed in 1945, received an honourable mention at the Paris Salon of 1890; encouraged by that and the greater prospects of working in what was then the arts capital of Germany, he moved to Munich in 1891.

Corinth set up his studio in what was at the time the most bohemian and artistic district of Munich, and painted this quick sketch of the View from the Studio, Schwabing (1891). He realised that his progressive style of painting was at variance with both the Munich Academy and the critics, and in 1892 he took part in the foundation of the Munich Secession to bring change. The following year he co-founded the Free Association (Freie Vereinigung). He also expanded his skills, started etching in 1891, and lithography in 1894.

Much of his painting during his nine years in Munich was experimental, although modern critics accuse him of spending more time drinking copious quantities of red wine and champagne.

He painted this Self-portrait with Skeleton in his Munich studio in 1896, and shows in his face the effects of his high life in Munich.

In the 1890s he started to take landscape painting more seriously, including this Landscape with a Large Raven painted in the late autumn of 1893. As in Vincent van Gogh’s late landscapes, ravens, crows, and other similar black birds are taken as harbingers of death. In this otherwise deserted countryside, with the winter drawing close, this painting could be read as indicating Corinth’s bleak melancholy. Although he certainly suffered feelings of mortality and had episodes of depression, those aren’t part of the received image of his social life, nor of many of his paintings.

This shows the beautiful fishermen’s Cemetery in Nidden (1893) on the Kurische Nehrung, a long sand spit near the southern border of Lithuania, on the shore of the Baltic not far from Königsberg. During the 1890s, Corinth travelled from Munich to visit his home village, and went as far afield as Italy.

Like some of the Masters before him, most notably Rembrandt, he painted a series of studies In the Slaughterhouse (1893). As the son of a tanner, Corinth was familiar with such scenes.

The Deposition (Descent from the Cross) (1895) was one of his major paintings from this time in Munich, and won a gold medal when exhibited in the Glaspalast in Munich that year. It shows the traditional station of the cross commemorating the lowering of the dead body of Christ from the cross, attended by Joseph of Arimathea and Mary Magdalene.

This work is a thoroughly modern approach to its traditional theme, in its framing, composition, and faces. Its close-in cropped view suggests the influence of photography, and the faces shown appear contemporary and not in the least historic. These combine to give it the immediacy of a current event, rather than something that happened almost two millennia ago. Corinth returned to the subject of the Deposition, and the theme of the Crucifixion, in many of his later paintings.

Autumn Flowers (1895) is a delightful full-figure portrait of a girl, her dress held out in front of her to carry her collection of flowers, which also decorate her hair and the background.

A Forest. Flooding on Lake Starnberg (1896) was one of the landscapes that he painted in the countryside near Dachau, and shows a flooded stand of birch trees at the edge of the lake, probably in the spring.

Bacchanale (1896) is the first of his series of paintings of the wild and licentious antics of worshippers of Bacchus. These provided the opportunity for him to compose some of his many studies of nudes into grander paintings, although this one is non-narrative.

He returned to the theme of meat and animal carcasses in his Butchers in Schäftlarn on the Isar (1897), painted in this Bavarian town not far from Munich.

He painted this portrait of Fräulein Heck (in a Boat on the Starnberger See) (1897) on this picturesque lake near Dachau. This form of portrait, of a woman carrying a parasol in a boat, was popular at the time.

Corinth continued to paint figure studies, such as his Nude Woman (1897), for their value in his more substantial figurative works.

The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1897) visits another traditional religious theme, well-known for encouraging inventive and sometimes highly imaginative paintings. As with his earlier Deposition, Corinth shows the saint surrounded by modern temptations, in a real style. There’s a wealth of detail here, from the bright eyes of the owl in the top left corner, down to the sinister flick of the snake’s tongue at the lower right, demonstrating the history painter’s eye for detail and Corinth’s own Symbolist leanings in narrative.

The Witches (1897) is more subtle than it looks, as this isn’t a depiction of sensuous rites taking place in a coven. Instead, the women are preparing a younger woman to attend a masked ball. Their subject has just got out of the wooden tub in the foreground, has been dried off, and is about to don the fine clothes laid over the chair at the left, including the black mask.

Although Corinth undoubtedly drank more than his fair share of red wine and champagne while painting in Munich, his technique and style were maturing fast. The best of his paintings from this period are the equal of better-known works from later in his career. The stage was set for his first truly momentous painting.

References

Wikipedia.

Lemoine S et al. (2008) Lovis Corinth, Musée d’Orsay & RMN. ISBN 978 2 711 85400 4. (In French.)
Czymmek G et al. (2010) German Impressionist Landscape Painting, Liebermann-Corinth-Slevogt, Arnoldsche. ISBN 978 3 89790 321 0.

Almost a century ago, on 17 July 1925, one of the greatest German painters of modern times died. From the early 1880s until then, Lovis Corinth painted prolifically in every genre from classical myths to landscapes. At the height of his career in December 1911 he almost died as the result of a major stroke, but with the devoted support of his wife he learned to paint again. In this series I look at a selection of his paintings, and how they changed over the course of more than forty years.

He was born Franz Heinrich Louis Corinth in the village of Tapiau, in what was then the northern part of East Prussia, and is now the town of Gvardeysk near Kaliningrad, Russia. He was schooled in the city of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad), and soon resolved to be an artist. He started attending the Academy of Fine Arts in Königsberg in 1876, where he decided that he wanted to be a history painter, and concentrated on painting the figure.

On the advice of his teachers in Königsberg, Corinth moved to Munich in the spring of 1880, where he initially studied with Franz von Defregger. At that time, Munich almost rivalled Paris as a progressive centre for the arts, and had been the preference of William Merritt Chase, who had left Munich only two years previously. Corinth learned both traditional and modern techniques of oil painting in the studio of Ludwig von Löfftz, where he concentrated on painting from life.

Even his earliest figures, such as his Crucified Thief from 1883, were powerful, and showed influence from the Dutch Masters.

Like William Merritt Chase, Corinth was particularly fond of the work of Van Dyck and Frans Hals, as revealed in his portrait of Laughing Girl (1883).

Black Othello (1884) was probably his first success, and was exhibited to acclaim in Königsberg. That same year another of his paintings won a bronze medal in London, and was exhibited at the Salon in Paris the following year.

Corinth completed his training in Munich in 1884, and moved to Antwerp for a few months, before he settled in Paris that autumn. There he enrolled in the Académie Julian, where he studied under Bouguereau and Robert-Fleury, and concentrated on female nudes and building his repertoire of mythological scenes. He was influenced by the 1885 retrospective exhibition of the works of Jules Bastien-Lepage, who had died suddenly in 1884, and that aided a move towards greater naturalism.

Examples of his paintings from life from his time in Paris include his study of a Nude Girl (1886) above, and below of a Sitting Female Nude from the same year.

In 1886 he visited Germany, and painted some landscapes and portraits en plein air on the Baltic coast near Kiel. When he returned to Paris that autumn, he was becoming increasingly frustrated by his inability to achieve success at the Salon. He only had two paintings accepted there, in 1885 and 1887, and neither had achieved critical success or a medal. He left Paris, and joined the Nasser Lappen (‘Wet Rags’) group in Berlin for a while, trying to progress his history painting. It was then that he painted his first self-portrait.

This Self Portrait of 1887 shows Corinth at the age of twenty-nine in Berlin.

In 1888, he returned to Königsberg, adopted the name of Lovis Corinth, and started to find form at last. Woman Reading shows his early style maturing well, with its subtle use of light.

His father, who had been a successful tanner, fell ill, prompting Corinth’s sensitive painting of his final illness in Father, Franz Heinrich Corinth, in Hospital (1888). After his father died early the following year, Corinth became financially independent, and set up a proper studio in Königsberg at last.

He painted portraits, including this of Franz Lilienthal (1889), another East Prussian student at the Académie Julian. That same year he was inspired by an exhibition of the work of contemporary German painters including von Lenbach, Böcklin and von Uhde, as a result of which he finally obtained an honourable mention at the Salon in 1890.

That year he painted one of his most accomplished early portraits, Innocentia (1890), and made his first attempts at a history painting of a popular narrative.

Corinth painted two versions of Susanna Bathing (Susanna and the Elders) in 1890: that above, now in the Museum Folkwang, and that below, thought to be in a private collection.

The story of Susanna (or Shoshana) and the Elders is told in the Old Testament book of Daniel, chapter 13, and centres on voyeurism, blackmail, and justice. Susanna was a beautiful married woman who was bathing in her garden one afternoon, having dismissed her servants. Two lustful elders spied on her, and as she returned to her house they stopped her, and threatened that, unless she agreed to have sex with them, they would claim that she had met her lover in the garden. Being virtuous, Susanna refused their blackmail, and was promptly arrested, charged with promiscuity, and awaited her execution.

The young prophet Daniel interrupted the process, demanding that the elders should be properly questioned before such a severe penalty was applied. When questioned individually, the two elders gave different accounts, most notably in the type of tree under which Susanna allegedly met her lover. The accusations were thus revealed to be false, Susanna was acquitted of the charge, and the two elders were executed instead.

From the early Renaissance, this has been a popular story in painting, almost universally depicted as a nude bather being spied on by two nasty old men. As narrative, this is weak, as the crux is the conflicting evidence of the elders, which is much harder to paint, and is usually just an excuse to paint a female nude with some gratuitous anti-semitism.

Corinth shows what had become a fairly traditional version, in which Susanna is seen in the flesh but not under any tree in the garden: she is instead being spied on from behind a curtain, with only one of the two elders clearly visible.

Of his two versions, that in the Museum Folkwang appears the less finished, but both emphasise Susanna’s nakedness with her clothes, and add refinements by way of her discarded jewellery and a flower from her hair. Her figure reflects the effort that Corinth had put into life studies, and makes his simple composition successful.

References

Wikipedia.

Lemoine S et al. (2008) Lovis Corinth, Musée d’Orsay & RMN. ISBN 978 2 711 85400 4. (In French.)
Czymmek G et al. (2010) German Impressionist Landscape Painting, Liebermann-Corinth-Slevogt, Arnoldsche. ISBN 978 3 89790 321 0.