The painter Gabriel von Max and his importance for Bavaria’s art treasure – Munich

A splendid volume, edited by Kirsten Claudia Voigt and Lothar Schirmer, was recently published with the title “Painted Animals”, in which, for example, Florian Illies about Franz Marc’s legendary painting “The Tower of the Blue Horses”, which has been lost since the Second World War, and Karin Althaus about Gabriel wrote by Max ‘”Abelard and Héloise”. This book with texts from Giorgio Agamben to Cees Noteboom to Armin Second playsfully and thoughtfully discusses numerous works of art, which as a rule the human astonishment in front of the creature, the interest in exotic species, the artistic joy in diverse forms and colors and thus the richness of the Bringing nature and its diversity to the fore. Only one outlier can be found among the often so serious artists, and that is Gabriel von Max: Here two monkeys huddled together are shown and thus human behavior patterns of love and gender roles are imitated, adapted, modified. In addition, the work gains its ironic dimension from the explicit reference to one of the most legendary, passionate and loyal lovers in cultural history and indirectly also to the book “Julie, or the New Heloise” by Jean-Jacques Rousseau: This is how you can interpret the painting as a bizarre irony of a legendary relationship or as a reference to one of the most important writings of the European Enlightenment. The painter proves to be an educated reader who tests the education of his picture viewer or even takes it on the grain.

Who was this man who was born in Prague in 1840 and died in 1915? He was a painter whose rapid rise he owed to his motifs, which not only came from the ape world. His original, sometimes bizarre subjects such as “The Anatom” from 1869 are well known. This painting was part of the collection of the Neue Pinakothek. It shows a bearded old man who – so the literature says it – is sitting on the corpse of an “unhappy girl” and pulling away the cloth that was covering her. Does he think about virgin beauty, about unhappiness despite youth, about the finitude of all human existence? This ambiguity does not hide the problematic constellation; but it is precisely this that can spark discourse and discussion. The picture was previously characterized as a “stirring piece”. That is played down in an inadmissible way. One must also realize that this almost two meter wide work was painted life-size and thus offers a merciless visualization of the dead with their viewer. That was a dimension that embodied the claim of history painting and thus that of the artist.

He was a painter prince of the dark forces and an analyst of bizarre forms of behavior

Gabriel von Max dared such aesthetic challenges, through which he could compete with other artist princes, such as Franz von Stuck and Franz von Lenbach. The fact that their city villas are now museumized and well-kept, that the Kaulbach House in Ohlstadt continues to exist, are surely a stroke of luck, owed to the respective location. But her art, less socially critical than affirmative, probably also paved the smoother path of remembrance that was bestowed on her work as well as on the studio and residential buildings. Gabriel von Max, on the other hand, was and remains, despite some courtesy and irony, an exciting and stimulating cumbersome artist between realism and symbolism, between abysmalness and irony. He was a painter prince of the dark forces and an analyst of bizarre forms of behavior. The rock-solid catalog by Karin Althaus and Helmut Friedel, which the Lenbachhaus published in 2010, worked out that he dealt with necromancy, occultism and Darwinism: to this day, it offers the best reading on the artist and a full overview of the hunger for life and the thirst for knowledge of the eccentric Artist.

Open detailed view

Anyone who went through the Neue Pinakothek, which was closed at the turn of the year 2018/2019 in preparation for the technical renovation, usually remembered later that a truly bizarre painting was there: “Monkeys as art judges”. The trivial human and a kind of animal joy in irony are intertwined here. This image can act as the key to the entire life and work of the artist. A society of monkeys has gathered in front of a painting framed in gold and is contemplating. The witty von Max applied a sticker to the painted stretcher, as was customary at the time: “No. 13, Öhlgemählde von”, and here the name of the imagined artist whose picture has catalog number 13 and therefore no lucky number is missing. One reads further: “Tristan and I”, which Isolde means, a noble patriotic or even Wagnerian motif! This is followed by the indication of the value, which amounts to 700,000 marks, which would be a gigantic price for an easel picture. This shows that Gabriel von Max is amused by the art (and probably also about the opera) business. It should only be noted here that the painter also dealt with materials such as “Tannhauser” elsewhere. In the painting itself the monkeys are amazed. They admire the work, and the fat central monkey sticks out his tongue at the viewer of the picture: He has ahead of them, and therefore us, that he can see the precious painting, he mocks it – and with it all of art and art criticism. What a timeless visual joke!

These paintings hold up a mirror to people

There was a rich tradition of monkey painting that ironicized human behavior. Artists like Nicolaes van Veerendael, David Teniers the Elder. J. or Willem van Mieris, and you can find wonderful examples of this in the recently reopened State Gallery in Neuburg an der Donau, a branch of the Alte Pinakothek. Such motifs, which were also disseminated by means of printmaking, illustrated the monkey theater of the world. The all too human animals dine, drink and smoke, they chat, communicate and dine. These paintings hold up a mirror to people, sometimes showing the comical side of stupidity, sometimes the grotesque aspects of smugness. And since this perspective is entertaining, the tradition lived on over the centuries. Gabriel von Max was well connected. In 1894 he gave one of his pictures to the most famous natural scientist at the time, alongside Charles Darwin, Ernst Haeckel from Jena, who then tried to discuss it in the most famous German newspaper Leipziger Illustrierte Zeitung. The rejection was based on the fact that the subject could be interpreted as blasphemous or Darwinist.

The chief monkey examines the plant, while the offspring are escaped or eaten in the background

The fictitious family of prehistoric men consists of three, the parents with an infant on the mother’s breast. It might remind of the Holy Family and disturb the editorial staff. Moreover, the debates about Darwin’s evolutionary history were not over. Gabriel von Max was in the middle of the discourse with this present. Another work that should be mentioned here is in private hands in Munich, “The studio visit”. The chief monkey scrutinizes the work, which is invisible to us, on the drawing board, his conspecifics look over his shoulder, sometimes supposedly knowledgeable and affected, sometimes bored or skeptical, while in the background the offspring are fled or eaten. This picture was taken in 1913, at a time when the Dresden artist group “Brücke” was falling apart and the almanac “Der Blaue Reiter” heralded the modern age and a completely different view of the exotic. Even though the eccentric Gabriel von Max may now embody an old time, his witty and subtle work was always entertaining and, in a very unique way, socially critical.