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| DEATH:
1906 BÖKLIN |
| ^
Died on 16 January 1906: Arnold Böcklin,
Swiss Symbolist painter born on 16 October 1827. — Arnold Böcklin's allegorical and fantastical paintings, many based on mythical creatures, anticipated 20th-century surrealism. His early style consisted of idealized classical landscapes. In the 1870s, he turned to fantastic scenes from German legends, paralleling the use by Richard Wagner of similar subjects in opera. His later works, such as The Island of the Dead (in five versions, from 1880), became increasingly dreamlike and nightmarish. — Arnold Böcklin was born in Basle, Switzerland. The son of a merchant, he overcame his father's opposition thanks to the poet Wilhelm Wackernagel and was able to devote himself to art. In 1845 he attended the Düsseldorf Academy of Art, where his teacher was Johann Wilhelm Schirmer, known for his heroic-panoramic style of painting. Between 1847 and 1848 he travelled to Brussels, Antwerp, Switzerland and Paris. From the autumn of 1848 he worked in Basle, moving to Rome in 1850. In Rome he studied the work of the ancients and found the inspiration for many important works. In 1853 he married Angela Pascucci, a young Italian girl from Rome. There followed a somewhat obscure period, ending when he was appointed to the post of Professor at the Academy of Weimar in 1860. Two years later he returned to Rome to visit Naples and Pompeii and the frescos he discovered had a lasting influence on his technique and his future artistic production. In autumn 1866 he started work on the fresco that was to decorate the main staircase of the Museum of Basle. The period that followed was particularly productive and his style improved enormously in terms of color, form and inspiration. From 1874-84 he lived in Florence, surrounded by disciples. During this period he produced his most controversial works, such as The Island of the Dead (1880) and The Sacred Wood (1882). In 1895 he moved to his villa at San Domenico, near Fiesole. It was here that he lived the last years of his life, continuing to paint until his death on January 16th 1901. Art historians have always found it difficult to classify this original, proud, somewhat eccentric painter who, like Da Vinci, experimented in his garden with human flight. He disliked giving titles to his pictures and declared that he painted in order to make people dream: "Just as it is poetry's task to express feelings, painting must provoke them too. A picture must give the spectator as much food for thought as a poem and must make the same kind of impression as a piece of music. Who would ever have been able to anticipate the effect of music before having heard it? Painting should pervade the soul in the same way, and as long as it does not do this it is nothing more than a brainless handicraft. There is no end to the poetry of the beautiful." — Böcklin was an energetic figure devoid of the languid melancholy of 'decadence'. Italy's light and aura of antiquity were decisive in his early development; his paintings quickly came to be populated with mythological figures, with centaurs and naiads. Not until his fiftieth year did he begin to paint the powerfully atmospheric works associated with his name today. "Among the most famous of these is the painting known as The Isle of the Dead (1880, 111x155cm), which Böcklin himself entitled 'a tranquil place'. It was clearly important to him; he made five different versions of the composition. The new title was suggested by the white-draped coffin on the boat, the funerary presence of the cypresses, and the overwhelming impression of immobility and silence. The white figure vividly lit by a setting sun is contrasted with the dark, vertical forms of the trees, impervious to the slanting rays of the sun. Like a dream, the painting condenses a number of contradictory sensations and emotions. "Böcklin's choice of imagery is not coincidental. A young widow had asked him for an 'image to dream by', and the funereal serenity perhaps echoes something of the artist's own emotions about death. At the age of twenty-five, during one of his stays in Rome, he had married the daughter of a pontifical guard who bore him eleven children between 1855 and 1876; five of them died in infancy, and the Böcklin family was twice (in 1855 and 1873) forced to flee cholera epidemics. Böcklin's art reveals a robust temperament. He showed no reticence towards the new technologies then sweeping the continent. He devoted time to the invention of a flying machine, negotiating with businessmen for its manufacture. His Germanic feeling for nature was expressed, in canonic Romantic fashion, in such paintings as The Sacred Wood (1882), but its most striking expression is The Silence of the Forest (1885) in which a bizarre unicorn, part cow, part camel, emerges from a forest, bearing an equally enigmatic woman on its back. |
| — LINKS — Self portrait with Death — Children Carving May Flutes (1865) — War (1896) War (1896, 100x69cm) _ This allegory of war is inspired by St John's vision of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. — Plague _ The Plague (1898, 149x105cm) _ This painting was unfinished. The artist and his family twice had to flee cholera epidemics. — Amaryllis (1866, 138x100cm) — Battle of the Centaurs (1873) — Medusa (1878) — The Isle of the Dead (1880, 111x155cm) _ The Island of the Dead, Böcklin's most celebrated picture, was the final expression of a theme which had haunted him for many years, that of a lonely villa by the sea. He painted no less than five versions, of which another is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. It shows the artist in his most strictly Symbolist vein, selecting and recomposing elements from nature to evoke a particular mood, in this case one of withdrawal and disassociation with the world. For Böcklin it was simply 'a picture for dreaming over'. It was his dealer, Fritz Gurlitt, who gave it the title by which it became well known. —another The Isle of the Dead (1886) — Villa by the Sea (1877, 108x156cm) — The Adventurer (1882) — The Sanctuary of Hercules (1884) — Vita somnium breve (1888, 180x114cm) _ In the heart of nature at springtime, by a fountain inscribed with the words Life is but a dream, three couples are seen at different times of life: infancy, maturity and old age. (Death raising a cudgel behind a seated old man). — Vision at Sea (1896, 41x144cm) _ In 1894 Böcklin settled in Florence, buying a villa at San Domenico, which he decorated the following year with the help of one of his four painter sons. This painting is one of three overdoors which Böcklin painted for the villa. It summons up the Wagnerian world of the Flying Dutchman, with its distant silhouetted ship and suggestions of wraithlike figures round an abandoned and drifting boat, 'almost grey on grey, wonderfully ghostly in its handling', as Böcklin's biographer Schmid remarked. There are also similarities with Burne-Jones, especially his large canvas The Sirens of 1875. — Venus Genitrix (1895, 115x170cm) — Putto and Butterfly (1895, 18x14cm) — Sea Idyll (1887) — Girl and Boy Picking Flowers |
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