. . . The surrealistic nature of the picture is enhanced by the impossibility of the image from an aeronautic as well as a zoological point of view.
Likewise, another image of the young man twisting in bed in the midst of a nightmare, his pillow propped up against a Herculean glove while the ocean pounds against the bed and strange sea creatures and a drowning man wash up against his sheets while a pair of hands reach for the man or the glove (fig.9) what is noteworthy is that the obsession of the artist is clear in the work, is in a way the defining characteristic of the work, and the theme of haunting, repetition, and fetishism needs no explication. We can easily place Klinger en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Klinger in the 1880s when hysteria was being discussed, when Krafft-Ebing’s catalogue of sexual fetishes and obsession comes to print, and the young Freud was beginning his work with Breuer. But unlike those artists in Zola’s work, Klinger is neither mad nor suicidal. His working in series is not seen as a symptom; rather it is the obsessive content of his work that is valued for being so provocative. Unfortunately for the theorists who see obsession as leading to madness, Klinger enjoyed the most bourgeois of lives. Far from going insane, he lived rather conventionally, spending his time between Berlin and a country retreat. ~ Page 189
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Dinesh said:
Likewise, another image of the young man twisting in bed in the midst of a nightmare, his pillow propped up against a Herculean glove while the ocean pounds against the bed and strange sea creatures and a drowning man wash up against his sheets while a pair of hands reach for the man or the glove (fig.9) what is noteworthy is that the obsession of the artist is clear in the work, is in a way the defining characteristic of the work, and the theme of haunting, repetition, and fetishism needs no explication. We can easily place Klinger en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Klinger in the 1880s when hysteria was being discussed, when Krafft-Ebing’s catalogue of sexual fetishes and obsession comes to print, and the young Freud was beginning his work with Breuer. But unlike those artists in Zola’s work, Klinger is neither mad nor suicidal. His working in series is not seen as a symptom; rather it is the obsessive content of his work that is valued for being so provocative. Unfortunately for the theorists who see obsession as leading to madness, Klinger enjoyed the most bourgeois of lives. Far from going insane, he lived rather conventionally, spending his time between Berlin and a country retreat. ~ Page 189
Dinesh said: