In the Sign of the Superman

The aggressive sensuality of Corinth's bacchanalia can be related to the Nietzschean theory of instinctual man,^[77] which inspired belief in the supremacy of instinct over reason. This theory also lay behind Stuck's famous drawing of the mythological goat-god that appeared on the cover of the first issue of Pan in April 1895. Announcing the advent of a new man who will rise above bourgeois conventions, this issue also printed several excerpts from Nietzsche's Also Sprach Zarathustra . Since the original Pan circle—founded in 1892 in the Berlin café Zum schwarzen Ferkel—included both Otto Erich Hartleben and Walter Leistikow, Corinth may well have been aware of this belief in a restorative vitalism as early as 1893. He may also have known of the "classical" Fasching parties that Stefan George and Karl Wolfskehl staged in the early 1890s in Wolfskehl's Munich apartment. George would dress up as Julius Caesar or Dante, and Wolfskehl himself once appeared as Dionysus. Perhaps Corinth even met George, who is said to have had frequent contact in 1894 with Thomas Theodor Heine, Hermann Schlittgen, and Otto Eckmann.^[78] Be that as it may, Corinth's bacchanalia are a far cry from George's and Wolfskehl's "almost pedantically pedagogic . . . demonstrations of the Nietzschean idea of creative inspiration through Bacchic ecstasy."^[79] Like Stuck's equally drastic exaggerations, which elicited from Julius Meier-Graefe the observation that this painter" makes sphinxes out of waitresses and waitresses out of sphinxes,"^[80] they belong to the less lofty ambience of the Munich Artists' Association's costume parties like the one organized for February 15, 1898, when under the motto "In Arcadia" the entire Bavarian court theater was transformed into the setting for a "classical carnival." For the stage Lenbach had designed a series of temple fronts behind which emerged the Athenian Acropolis. A statue of Dionysus standing inside a rose arbor occupied a prominent place in the fore-

ground, in conspicuous contrast with a replica of Phidias's Athena Promachos at the far back of the stage. The costumes, while intended to be archaeologically correct, looked comically out of date on the decidedly unclassical wearers.^[81] Indeed, an account of the revelers' entrance parade into the theater captures just as fittingly the spirit of Corinth's paintings: "First there came bacchants and satyrs, a prankish lot, red-nosed and big-bellied old men with wine jugs and pouches, followed by cloven-footed, bleating fellows in goat skins. Slowly the procession dispersed . . . to the beer bar to imbibe nectar in a form the Isar-Athenian is most at home with."^[82]

Also Nietzschean in inspiration is the unusual pencil and watercolor drawing It Is Your Destiny (Fig. 63), whose awkward title derives from the opening line of a poem Max Halbe dedicated to Corinth in 1895:

It is your destiny to wander the earth;
The good fortune of others is denied you.
Headlong you shall wander, seeking,
A restless guest at the richest table.

Whether you roam west or east,
You shall suffer the world's misery.
And though you wander north and south,
You will flourish nowhere.

You are condemned to search the earth;
The good fortune of others is denied you.
The peace of others gives you no rest.
You are a fugitive, a wanderer, a warrior.^[83]

Halbe, who describes Corinth in his memoirs as an autodidact, alludes in the poem to what he believed to be Corinth's ultimate goal: the realization of his inner self.^[84] The young knight in the drawing, dressed in shining armor, is indeed an idealized self-portrait. Flanked by a sensuous female holding a wineglass adorned with grape leaves and a shrouded old woman with a crown of thorns in one hand and a branch of laurel in the other, the armed hero—like Hercules at the crossroads—must choose between a life of ease and pleasure and the arduous path of virtue rewarded by fame. Naturally, like Hercules, the knight makes the right choice. By allowing his alter ego to reach for the crown of thorns, Corinth metaphorically drew a parallel between his struggle for fulfillment and the Passion of Christ, suggesting that he saw his search as his own via crucis —a notion encountered elsewhere in European

Figure 63
Lovis Corinth, It Is Your Destiny , c. 1895. Pencil and watercolor, 42.5 × 56.0 cm.
Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich.

painting at the turn of the century, most notably in the work of Gauguin, James Ensor, and Emile Bernard. By inscribing the opening words of Halbe's poem below the upper margin of the drawing and the two concluding lines along the bottom of the sheet, Corinth emphasized the warrior's unceasing, lonely struggle.

The idea of both the poem and the drawing can be traced to the contemporary fascination with the Übermensch , to borrow Nietzsche's term, whose virtues were especially those of the warrior and soldier. Indeed, the words of Halbe's poem echo the lofty tones of Zarathustra: "To you I do not recommend peace but conquest. Let your work be struggle. Let your peace be victory."^[85] Corinth's own life-long esteem for Nietzsche apparently first developed in the circle of Max Halbe, for whom the philosopher was a favorite author.^[86] As noted previously, Eckmann, Corinth's "spiritus rector," had also read Nietzsche, as had Hartleben and Wedekind. Any one of these men could have called Corinth's attention to the introductory studies on Nietzsche that

had been published in 1890 in Die Freie Bühne by the young Hungarian Joseph Diner, proclaiming Nietzsche the prophet of a new individualism. In a number of articles in Die Gegenwart and Kunstwart as well as in a widely read essay, Friedrich Nietzsche: Seine Persönlichkeit und sein System (Leipzig, 1890), Ola Hanson, the Swedish critic and novelist, further expounded Nietzsche's idea regarding the individual's right to personal fulfillment. The cult of the individual and the emphasis on personal success and achievement in German culture after 1871, combined with a yearning for a new primitivism and the liberation of human passions, also largely account for the success of Julius Langbehn's book Rembrandt als Erzieher , sixty thousand copies of which were printed at the time of its initial publication in 1890, followed by forty subsequent printings in the next two years alone.^[87]

From a stylistic point of view, Corinth's Munich drawing is again highly eclectic. The dense mosaic-like background and the ornamental plant motifs derive from Strathmann and Eckmann, while the hieratic composition owes something to Jan Toorop's drawing The Three Brides (1893; Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Otterloo), exhibited in 1893 at the Glass Palace in Munich and reproduced in October of that year in Die Kunst für Alle . Toorop, too, had made use of stylized forms for expressive and symbolic effects, contrasting forces of good and evil: in his drawing the celestial bride of Christ, holding a stalk of lilies, is on the left; the human virginal bride, surrounded by roses, is in the center; Satan's bride, whose attributes include a collar of skulls and a bowl of blood, stands on the right.