The Plot Thickens: Storytelling in European Print Series

Max Klinger

German, 1857–1920

A Glove (Ein Handschuh), 1880–1881
Portfolio of seven etchings and three aquatint etchings on wove paper, fifth edition, 1924

Purchase with funds from the Lawrence and Alfred Fox Foundation for the Ralph K. Uhry Collection, 1977.7 A–J

Max Klinger’s pictorial telling of the adventures of a glove does not follow a continuous plot line. Rather, individual events are strung together loosely like episodes in a dream, without clear causal or temporal transitions between them.

Inspired by a personal experience of picking up a lady’s dropped glove, Klinger in 1878 produced a series of ten drawings depicting fantasies of what might happen to such a glove and its finder. Two years later, he translated the drawings into a portfolio of etchings and published it in 1881. The portfolio went through several subsequent editions. The prints shown here are from the fifth edition, published in 1924 by the artist’s widow and heir.

Klinger’s fantasies on the fate of the glove range from the amusing to the erotic and the nightmarish. The dreamlike and subjective quality of his imagery reflects the ideas of the symbolist movement in literature and art, which favored pure subjectivity over rationality and references to the inner world of emotions over naturalistic depictions of the physical world.

Just as there is no narrative continuity between the depicted events, so there is no stylistic consistency among the prints. Klinger used the versatile media of line etching and aquatint to create different moods, alternating eerie, shadow-filled scenes with brilliantly bright ones.

James Jacques Joseph Tissot

French, 1836–1902

The Prodigal Son, 1881
Portfolio of five drypoints and aquatints on paper

Purchase for the Ralph K. Uhry Collection, 74.36 A–E

Over the course of his career, James Tissot depicted the Parable of the Prodigal Son several times: in oil paintings, watercolors, and this series of etchings. The story, from the Christian Bible, is that of a young man who leaves his prosperous family to roam foreign lands and, in the pursuit of excitement and pleasure, squanders his fortune. Eventually destitute and reduced to begging, he returns home, where he is warmly received.

In his series of prints, Tissot transposed the biblical story into modern times and places. In fact, he may have thought of it in terms of his own life: Tissot had left his native French city of Nantes and for many years lived the bohemian highlife in London before eventually returning home and to his strong Catholic faith.

The etching techniques of aquatint and drypoint used to produce these prints are perfectly suited to Tissot’s realistic style. Of all printmaking techniques, their combined effect is closest to that of painting, yielding a great richness of tones and lines that imitate different textures and lighting effects. Tissot deployed them with great skill to evoke the story’s varied settings, from the furnishings of a prosperous English middle-class home to the exotic decor of a Japanese tea house.

James Ensor

Belgian, 1860–1949

The Deadly Sins, 1888
Portfolio of eight etchings

Purchase with funds from the Lawrence and Alfred Fox Foundation for the Ralph K. Uhry Collection, 72.8 A–E

In 1904, James Ensor published an album of prints titled The Deadly Sins (Les Péchés capitaux). By way of updating the traditional principles of Christian morality, in Ensor’s version the vices are perpetrated by contemporary figures acting in contemporary contexts, although small skeletons or devils mock their obscene behavior. In addition to depictions of each of the seven vices—gluttony, sloth, pride, anger, avarice, envy, and lust—the album contains a frontispiece, in which a winged skeleton hovers menacingly above seven hideous figures, allegories of the sins ridiculed in the subsequent scenes.

The series of prints was not created all at once. Lust  was the first etching to be created, in 1888, Sloth in 1902, and the remaining in 1904. In The Deadly Sins, Ensor elaborated on the grotesque and at times funny iconography that he had developed since 1886–1889. A far cry from his earlier realistic portraits and still lifes, monsters, devils, skeletons, mops, and carnival characters close in on the sinners.

Ensor used etching to reproduce his characteristic drawing style. Lines are wavy and nervous, as if made by a trembling hand. This intense, inelegant manner contributes to the grotesque appearance of his characters. They are as deformed outside as they are corrupted inside.

Oskar Kokoschka

Austrian, 1886–1980

King Lear, 1963
Sixteen lithographs on paper

Gift of Dr. Sherman N. Leis through the Ackerman Foundation, 1979.61 A–P

William Shakespeare’s tragedy King Lear tells the tale of a king who bequeaths his power and land to two of his three daughters, Goneril and Regan, after they extravagantly and obsequiously declare their love for him. He disinherits his third daughter, Cordelia, because she does not flatter him in the same way. When Lear realizes that the two preferred daughters do not really love and respect him, he becomes furious to the point of madness. Lear eventually is reconciled to Cordelia, but tragic fate prevails, and both die.

In 1963, Oskar Kokoschka, one of the leading exponents of Expressionism, drew a series of sixteen lithographs to illustrate a new, limited edition of the play. The full-page images were interspersed with the text, appearing approximately every sixteen to twenty pages. The set shown here is number 273 of the limited edition of 275.

Lithography can closely imitate pencil or crayon drawings and is the perfect vehicle for Kokoschka’s vehement gestural style. Given his Expressionist beginning and the artistic freedom that often comes with enduring professional success, it is not surprising that some of Kokoschka’s King Lear illustrations verge on the abstract, conveying drama and action through gesture and rapid facture rather than through detailed descriptions of characters and settings.

Hans Friedrich Grohs

German, 1892–1981

Die Siebenhardenbeliebung, 1921–1922
Five woodcut prints

Gift of Nelson Brackin, 2005.332.1–5

The Siebenhardenbeliebung is the name of the oldest written document classifying North Frisian law. It was drafted in 1426 by representatives of the seven principal administrative districts of North Frisia, a coastal region on the North Sea—today mostly in Germany and partly in Denmark—that the kings of Denmark and the dukes of Schleswig were claiming and fighting over. Its twenty-three articles cover criminal, property, and inheritance rights.

As a native of northern Germany, the artist Hans Grohs nurtured a life-long interest and nationalistic pride in the history of this region and repeatedly treated it in series of prints, similar to the one exhibited here.

Grohs was a practitioner of German Expressionism, an early twentieth-century art movement that emphasized the artist’s inner feelings and ideas over replicating reality. In the graphic arts, the woodcut was the Expressionists’ favored medium. For one, they associated it with a particularly German tradition that harked back to the great Renaissance master Albrecht Dürer; but they also found it eminently suitable for their powerfully direct, expressive imagery, with which they defied the (overly) refined conventions of academic art. In Grohs’s Siebenhardenbeliebung, the angular roughness of the woodcut accords especially well with the more violent—to the modern sensibility, primitive—aspects of early law.