Arnold Böcklin. A Retrospective
Kunstmuseum Basel
19 May – 26 August 2001
Arnold Böcklin (Basel 1827-Fiesole 1901) ranks among the most important painters of the 19th century. One hundred years after his death and over twenty years after the last major exhibition devoted exclusively to him, the Kunstmuseum Basel presents a retrospective of his paintings. It offers a representative selection of 90 pictures from major public and private collections tracing Arnold Böcklin’s development from Late Romanticism to Symbolism. In accordance with present-day interest, the focus is on his imaginatively idiosyncratic imagery, which continues to fascinate and irritate. Various treatments of specific subjects shed light on his struggle to give compelling form to his visions.
Arnold Böcklin led an unsettled life. After spending his youth in Basel and then studying with Schirmer at the art academy in Düsseldorf, he moved about a great deal, accompanied after 1853 by his Roman wife, Angela, and their steadily growing family. Among the milestones along the way: his native city, Rome, Munich, Weimar, Florence, Zurich and San Domenico near Fiesole.
Going out from pure landscape, which he studied in natural surroundings, first in Switzerland and, from 1850, in the Campagna di Roma, Arnold Böcklin gradually introduced the nature gods of antiquity into his motifs. Nymphs, lascivious Satyrs and stealthy or sleeping Pans haunt the undergrowth beneath high trees, personifying the loneliness of these places. Ludwig I’s purchase of the painting Pan in the Bulrushes for the Neue Pinakothek in Munich in 1859 constituted Böcklin’s first marked success and brought him a professorship at the academy of art in Weimar. As he began taking inspiration for his portraits - most of them painted on commission - from Venetian models, figures assumed mounting importance in his work. Back in Rome in 1862, his encounter with Pompeiian painting proved formative; among other things, it prompted Arnold Böcklin to start experimenting with painting techniques, to lighten up his palette and venture a new freedom of expression. Soon his imagery grew more subjective yet. Böcklin had already produced variations on a theme earlier in his career; in the House by the Sea (first and second versions in 1864/65, others in 1877/78), he embeds the motif of longing in a variety of moody landscapes. After some unpleasant experiences with his frescoes at the Old Museum in Basel, Arnold Böcklin returned to Munich in 1871. There, under the influence of the Franco-Prussian war, he completed his (1872/72), brilliantly recasting the mythological scene as a symbol of conflict. With The Death of Cleopatra (1872), he attained a new dimension of psychological insight into a traditional subject. Seascapes like Triton and Nereid (1873/74) combine unparalleled depictions of the roiling, foaming deep with a cast of fabulous creatures borrowed from myth, fable and fairy-tale - creatures with a dual nature, a trait he appreciated equally on land. Depicting these characters realistically, in typical social situations, he shifts them to a different level of reality, thereby granting them universal validity. (first version 1880) - three of its five versions united for the first time in this exhibition - remains Böcklin’s best-known work; it captures the spirit of a whole era. In his treatment of (1882), a classical subject is imbued with radically contemporary meaning: the sculptural figure of the solitary hero, who stands turned away from the viewer, would become an icon of the Pittura Metafisica and Surrealism.
In the 1870s, Arnold Böcklin began using purer, brighter colours and clearer, more transparent forms. Compositions of fairy-tale like density show musical figures - decked-out Pans, beautifully dressed girls, diaphanously veiled women - discovering spring, enjoying the evening and mourning the coming of autumn. On the Isle of the Living (1888) the artist unites the sexes and in Vita somnium breve (1888), the ages of man. In a self-portrait of 1872 - one of six assembled in the exhibition - the painter depicts himself in Basel’s Dance Macabre tradition, in the company of Death playing the fiddle. In 1898 he portrays Death as the terrible Master of the Plague, and in his last painting, completed in 1900, Melancholy gazes into a black mirror.
Increasingly blending atmospheric landscapes and allegorically generalised figures, Arnold Böcklin emerged as one of the leading Symbolists of the German-speaking world and a formative influence on Jugendstil. As a result of the imaginative idiosyncrasy, openness and evocative power of his visions, his work generated everything from criticism and distortion to fanatical admiration, and left its mark on generations to come. Arnold Böcklin wanted viewers to be "gripped” by the subject matter and emotional intensity of his canvases. A hundred years after his death, many of his paintings continue to fulfil that hope.
KUNSTMUSEUM BASEL
