Max, Gabriel von Lot n° 6169

Death and the girl. Oil on canvas. 72 x 100 cm. Signed and dated lower left "Gab. v. Max / 1901", inscribed lower right "After Rain / Sunshine". For the painter, Darwinist and spiritualist Gabriel von Max, along with his depictions of monkeys and portraits of young women, the depiction of death is one of the central themes of his œuvre. It begins as early as 1857 with the first larger painting Richard Löwenherz tritt an die Leiche seines Vaters und sie blutet (Richard Lionheart Approaches His Father's Corpse and It Bleeds), painted at the Prague Academy and surviving only in drawings. A Martyr on the Cross, shown in 1867 at the Munich Kunstverein and eliciting tears from the public, became Max's first great success (F. Pecht: Gabriel Max. A Characteristic. In: Zeitschrift für Bildende Kunst vol. 14, 1879, p. 325 ff.). The best-known examples were The Anatomist (Neue Pinakothek Munich) in 1869, The Child Murderess (Hamburger Kunsthalle) in 1877, and Christ Awakens Jairus' Little Daughter (Montreal Museum of Fine Arts) the following year. With his paintings that appealed directly to the mind, Max was at the center of a movement that contemporaries called soul painting. Mostly contemporary historical, literary or religious sources served as inspiration. The motivic origin of the offered painting Death and the Girl, on the other hand, lies in the medieval dance of death depictions, in which the almighty death stops at no one, neither popes and kings, young and old, nor peasants and beggars. The memento mori idea was most strongly expressed in the early 17th century through the horrors of the Thirty Years' War, which eclipsed everything that had existed up to that time. In the late 19th century, plagued by terrible wars and numerous epidemics, this pictorial iconography experienced a veritable renaissance. Famous examples in the German-speaking world are Hans Thoma's Das Mädchen und der Tod (1873, Folkwang Museum Essen) or Arnold Böcklin's Die Pest (1898, Kunstmuseum Basel). While in Thoma's work the girl, lost in thought, is unaware of the danger behind her, and in Böcklin's work the scythe-wielding plague seems to fly directly toward the viewer as the next victim, the threat in Gabriel von Max's interpretation of the theme remains ambivalent. While she looks directly into the reaper's eyes, which are unrecognizable to us, with slightly open lips, smiling and with a transfigured, trusting gaze, only the small excited songbird on her finger seems aware of the danger. Further levels of meaning are created by the title "After Rain / Sunshine". The landscape is also ambivalent: is the thunderstorm still moving in or has it already left? The brilliant, luminous coloring of the lush hilly landscape seems to point more to the latter. Hope, at any rate, is offered by the Christian faith, represented by the rainbow on the horizon and the church lying in the sunlight. The church of St. Johann Baptist and Georg, situated on a hill in Holzhausen on Lake Starnberg, served as a model for von Max. Provenance: Dr. Oskar Smreker (1854-1935), Lucerne. Melanie Fuchs, married Smreker (1868-1955). Dr. Felix Smreker, Vienna. Private collection Bavaria (since late 1950s). Privately owned in Bavaria through inheritance until 2022.