Max Klinger

Max Klinger was a German Symbolist painter, sculptor, printmaker, and writer. Klinger was born in Leipzig and studied in Karlsruhe. An admirer of the etchings of Menzel and Goya, he shortly became a skilled and imaginative engraver in his own right. He began creating sculptures in the early 1880s. From 1883-1893 he lived in Rome, and became increasingly influenced by the Italian Renaissance and antiquity. His best known work is a series of ten etchings entitled Paraphrases about the Finding of a Glove . These pictures were based on images which came to Klinger in dreams after finding a glove... at an ice-skating rink. In the leitmotivic device of a glove—belonging to a woman whose face we never see—Klinger anticipated the research of Freud and Kraft-Ebbing on fetish objects. In this case, the glove becomes a symbol for the artist's romantic yearnings, finding itself, in each plate, in different dramatic situations, and performing the role that we might expect the figure of the beloved herself to fulfil.
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