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.