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.