Max Klinger, German 1857–1920, 'Action (Handlung)'

In the face of encroaching modernity, symbolists took refuge in highly internal and esoteric imagery to express personal dreams, psychological states and emotions — particularly their anxieties.

Glancing around the prints in the small exhibition room, I can see these guys had girl troubles.

Félicien Rops, with his pornographic and decadent themes, presents an easy case. Dancing Death depicts a dancing woman, ironically dressed in only a sheer, flouncing skirt, heels, full-length gloves, and an ostentatious hat. Back turned to the viewer, the dancer reveals her emaciated and withered haunches, the strong etch marks emphasizing protruding ribs and puckered skin. She flirtatiously glances over her shoulder to reveal…a skull. Yawn. Marrying female sexuality with death isn’t all that new, even by 19th century standards.

But I’m rather fascinated with the centerpiece of the show, Max Klinger’s Paraphrase About the Finding of a Glove. Ten frames in sequence, the graphic narrative illustrates a man and his often tempestuous and finally impotent response to a found glove, presumably belonging to a woman he adores from afar. At points vainly chasing after the glove or losing it, or seemingly tormented by it when faced with its immediate reality, one can palpably feel the man’s Prufrockian yearning and fear — his inability to bring the moment to its crisis, as it were.

Charles Meryon, French 1821–1868, 'The Admiralty, Paris (Le Ministère de la Marine),' 1865–1866

Much has been written about the narrative’s anticipation of Freud’s fetishism theory, but I think there is something more at play than a simple transposition of affection. A tension exists between the chase and elusion, the object and the desirer, with the passive and the aggressive personalities becoming interchangeable. Not merely a fetish for the beloved in absentia, the glove actively pursues him as well, making its slow, arduous journey back to him after being carried away on a stormy sea.

Whether triumphantly riding a giant clam or reaching out to him in a surreal nightmare scene, the animate glove arouses a disturbing sense of the uncanny in a one-two punch. Firstly, it simply shouldn’t be alive. The mundane becomes bizarre and thus creepy as hell — like Bruce Campbell’s disembodied hand from Evil Dead II. Secondly, the repetition of the glove in the seventh panel, Anxieties, adds to the supernatural dimension. Not only does it float to the disturbed sleeper with a flood of sea monsters, who also mirror the glove’s gesture, but a monumental glove lies behind his head, an oppressive, perplexing headboard.

Far from being a love token, the glove inspires repulsion as much as desire. In the Freudian sense, the uncanny effects projected onto the lady’s item perhaps reveal repressed impulses on the part of the man — sexual taboos that can only go unspoken.

Max Klinger, German 1857–1920, 'Abduction (Entfuhrung)'

In the end, both figures are beset by complete impotency. The consummation can never take place, symbolically or concretely. The viewer never actually sees him make physical contact with the glove, nor the glove with him. Upon first retrieving it, he sits in the corner of his room, face held in grief, while it lies at his feet. In another panel, the devotional object, after returning from the sea, sits passively on a table in a relatively sterile show room.

Finally, the viewer finds the glove discarded and alone except for a dragonfly-winged Eros, who gives an almost dismissive backward glance. The shot of love either missed the mark or deflated any potential.

“Waking Dreams: Max Klinger and the Symbolist Prin”t will be on view until July 5, 2008.  For more information, visit the Legion of Honor website.

Top Image: Max Klinger, German 1857–1920, Triumph, plate 5 in the portfolio A Glove (Ein Handschuh)