Wild Apollo’s Arrows. An illustrated introduction I

I Classic / Anti-Classic

Decades before the French Revolution, a culture of intoxicating affects burst into the heyday of the Enlightenment, increasingly boosted by national-mythical and folkloristic enthusiasm. The cultural philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder compared its impact to the epidemic projectiles that marked the beginning of Homer’s battle epic Iliad. Terms such as the ‘Age of Sensitivity’ and ‘Sturm und Drang’ do not sufficiently characterize this long phase of transgression and alienation from the model of an allegedly rational antiquity.

Laocoön, a late graphic by the English painter-poet William Blake, programmatically reflects this departure from Classicism. Its clearly contoured world of shapes merges with a vague organism of writing, an auditory space of angry, tattoo-like slogans that open up a provocative, counterfactual approach to ancient history: The artistic magnum opus of Greek antiquity and the ideal of a Classicist view of art is nothing other than the copy of a Hebrew original, an adaptation of prehistoric Christian symbolism whose meaning is twisted; the serpent battle of the Trojan Apollo priest and his two sons is in truth an allegory of the Fall of Man. Blake counters the physical body cult of antiquity with the spiritualistic corpus of Christ as a collective space of imagination, in which the physical eye is nothing and vision is everything. With its anti-capitalist rage, the work from the late 1820s is already a swan song to the escapism of the high Romantic period and at the same time an outlook on the early-socialist messianism of the burgeoning workers’ movement.

The historical perspectives that Herder and Blake had on the culture of angry Apollo function as a continuous companion through the exhibition, while the students’ current commentaries engage more intensively with individual aspects. The latter ones are published in the exhibition booklet, which is also available for download.

 

II Elysium is not. The Messiah. A Heroic Poem

Paintings Gallery

Since the mid-18th century, the break with French-influenced Classicism of the Enlightenment and the absolutizing of art as a quasi-sacred and socially transformative force had been associated throughout Europe with the largely forgotten name of the Saxon poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock. With the frenetically celebrated partial publication of his grand epos The Messiah. A Heroic Poem in 1748, the young theology student rose to become the first superstar of German-language poetry. His titanic endeavour to supersede the Old Testament epos Paradise Lost by the leading English poet John Milton with a dramatization of the Christian story of salvation appealed not least to a new national and cultural self-awareness.

Klopstock as an icon of Art Religion (Kunstreligion). The engraving after a painting commissioned by the French ambassador from the Hamburg painter Hardorff in 1827, which later became part of the collection of the Musée de l’Histoire de France in Versailles, is evidence of the poet’s enduring popularity in France, even during the Restoration and the July Monarchy.

The Messiah replaced Milton’s grim puritanism with the vision of an eschatological universal salvation. The work reversed basic rules of the classical epic and wrested a modern expressive quality from the stilted German language. Instead of a dramatic narrative flow and graphic vividness, he featured introspection and exaltation as well as a difficult to comprehend, polyperspectival narrative construct that, as acosmic delirium, incessantly oscillated between different astral planes, while simultaneously remaining stuck in time like a liturgical drama. Up to its completion in 1773, the pietistic monumental opus involved the author and the readers in an almost 30-year spiritual exercise based on the possibilities of the transfer and intensification of affects. The Klopstock frenzy was omnipresent and could also be found at the centre of the manic suicidal world that his follower Johann Wolfgang von Goethe created in his debut novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). Afterwards, it was his collaborator Friedrich Schiller—in later years also a renegade of Klopstockianism—who explicitly warned against the poet’s morbid influence which was liable to corrupt the young.

However, the critique of Weimar Classicism failed to recognize the community-forging aspects of a poetry that was anything but remote from daily life and bodiless, and tended towards a ritual Gesamtkunstwerk. The flow of free rhythms was to be read aloud and experienced together—Klopstock also stood at the beginning of the modern poetry reading—and the choruses of his pieces were to be ceremoniously intoned and danced, like in a Greek tragedy. For him, musical art, especially singing, was the highest realization of an aesthetic that sought to penetrate into an emotional deep layer that visual art could not access. Who ever cried when looking at a painting or sculpture? So he obviously sought the collaboration with composers, many of whom were inspired by him. The Klopstock cult had the effect of a catalyst in the early days of Weimar Classicism and later affected Beethoven und Schubert. 150 compositions after his poems by 45 composers are known merely from the time until 1800.

What is surprising, though, is that despite his disparaging of the sense of sight, he also made considerable efforts to have his Messiah visualised. [1]At first, the publisher forced him to work with illustrators, but after initial negative experiences, he made the selection himself and engaged with the social function of visual art and the limits of what can be depicted. Although he considered painting an elitist feudal relict and his ideal was auteur graphics accessible for broader strata of society, he set his hopes on two leading proponents of history painting for a long time. After Angelika Kauffmann, following several attempts, capitulated in the face of the poet’s increasing demands and limitations, he gave free rein to Heinrich Füger for the illustrations. The director of the Viennese Academy regarded the grand epos as a worthy subject for completing his lifework and in 1797 created a cycle of 22 illustration sketches for the complete edition of the Messiah. In addition, he did 20 paintings with almost the same format, which he made accessible to the public for many years in the Messiah room of his studio. Only five of these paintings survived the bombings of the Second World War, some were severely damaged. Their rather sketchy character and the executions of the illustration drafts at around the same time give rise to the presumption that from the outset he had also planned an execution in a representative format that could compete with the paintings of a Milton Gallery that Heinrich Füssli had announced with a great deal of advertising in London.

The Swiss literary critic and painter-poet Füssli, who was ten years older and a student of the Zurich Milton translator and outstanding Klopstock mentor, Johann Jakob Bodmer, had retained his early enthusiasm for the poet of the Messiah after moving to London, where he advocated for his literary idol, among others things, with translation samples of his own. It was Füssli’s colleague William Blake who ultimately accepted the national challenge by the German Milton and with his image-poetic Albion cycle (1797 – ca. 1820) presented a national-mythical and depth psychological, essentially anti-puritan engagement with Milton’s Paradise Lost and the history of revelation, whose multi-voiced, oratory-like character and extreme temporal interrelations bore clear signs of the efforts to outdo the German Messiah.

Heinrich Füger’s conception of Klopstock’s Messiah, which oscillates between inwardness and Füssli-like heroism, was inspired by Richard Westall’s illustrations for Paradise Lost and Paradise Regain’d, which had been previously published in a three-volume edition of Milton’s complete poetic works.

Blake´s efforts were driven not only by the example of Füssli, who alongside poetic imitations already at an early stage dealt with illustrating the Messiah commissioned by Klopstock, but also by the cult surrounding the German opus pursued by his most important patron, the Milton biographer William Hayley. Among Klopstock’s English admirers was another close friend of Blake, the graphic artist, sculptor and spiritist John Flaxman, with whom Klopstock established contact just a few years before his death. He had identified in Flaxman’s style of emblematic brevity a quality of translation that corresponded to his own poetic ideal of omission and allusion: In a good poem, the wordless must wander about ‘like the gods in Homer’s battles, who are longed for only by a few’.[2] After he fell out with Füger because of his conventional illustrations, which did not even shy away from a theatrical depiction of God, Klopstock built his last hopes on Flaxman, albeit to no avail, for he was already overburdened with commissions.

Following Klopstock’s death in 1803, his works attracted a new kind of attention and, under the impression of the Napoleonic occupations, also took on an increased identity-forging function. In Rome, Füger’s master student Josef Abel responded to the news of Klopstock’s death by conceiving a large-scale group painting depicting the deceased poet entering Elysium, the realm of the blessed in Greek mythology. The documentary ambition of a portrait gallery of classical poetry and the obvious references to the two Roman Parnassus frescos by Raphael and Anton Raphael Mengs as the two founding documents of the Classicist painting tradition suggest that it must have been far more than an obituary, even if it’s subject was a national bard, who was venerated in an especially lasting way in the Habsburg territories of the Old Empire.

While in the Parnassus frescos of Raphael and Mengs, Apollo as an individual figure was at the centre of the composition, Abel’s painting involved a confrontation. In the preliminary sketch (Klopstock’s Arrival in Elysium, National Gallery Prague), the tensional atmosphere of the encounter between the new arrival and Homer, the patriarch of antique poetry, is expressed better than in the damaged final version (Klopstock Among the Poets in Elysium, Belvedere,Vienna). What is decisive, however, is what the painting does notshow: its immediate future horizon alluded to by Klopstock’s forwards pressing posture, by the messianic victor’s palm and the newrevelation in his hands. His entry into Parnassus as the antique centre of Elysium will extinguish the painting’s entire classical reference system in the very next moment. ‘Elysium is not’, is stated in the Messiah. Thus, the painting is headed for its own annulment and, with regard to this implicit drasticness, was comparable to Blake’s recoding of the Laoco.n group. And even more: by evoking an art in the sublimity of the unrepresented, which, according to Klopstock, was primarily intended to serve the Christian religion, the antique idyll also proved to be a central programmatic image at the epochal threshold to Romanticism.[3] After Abel’s return to Vienna, his implicit programme was to be implemented by Füger’s next generation of students in Rome, the Brotherhood of St Luke, which opposed the Classicist orthodoxy of the Vienna Academy and had been founded by the fervent admirers of the Messiah.

The work had a further dimension, however, that correlated with Klopstock’s second demand on art of the future and was absolutely un-Nazarene. It can be discerned when reading the motif in the context of a popular series of graphics of political Elysiums, which began in 1782 with an honouring of deceased Rousseau and his elysian encounter with Plato and his Politeia and then switched to state-dynastic contexts with representations of Frederick II (Berlin 1788) and Josephs II (Vienna 1790).

The fact that Klopstock’s transfer to Elysium against this backdrop was not only on a par with imperial apotheoses, but even surpassed them with its pompous historical format, was entirely in keeping with the proud self-image with which the poet had presented himself to the imperial court during his lifetime. With his cultural-political so-called ‘Viennese Plan’, which he had addressed to the liberal Joseph II, he advocated unitary state demands and the enforcement of artistic autonomy and creative freedom. What points to the fact that Klopstock in Elysium, in times of an imminent new conception of the notion of the empire, could be understood as an appeal to the conservative successor of Joseph II, is the large number of depicted persons associated with the idea of republican liberty: Klopstock himself, who was an honorary citizen of the French National Assembly and with his political odes stood for the beginning of interventionist poetry in the German language; John Milton, the best-known apologist of freedom of speech and of the press; Pietro Metastasio, a librettist of republican opera topics; and the revolutionary Italian dramatist Vittorio Alfieri. In 1811, Füger, then the director of the imperial painting collection, was able to successfully endorse the acquisition of Abel’s programmatic painting.After the post-Napoleonic restorative turn, however, a commission to paint his large Messiah cycle did not materialise.

A subsequent Messiah cycle by the late Nazarene Leopold Kupelwieser, a close friend of Franz Schubert, was created for the private devotions of Archduke Franz Karl, who was considered very pious.

[1] On Klopstock’s relationship to the visual arts, cf.: Christian Hippe: Superiorität der Dichtung. (2011 / 2013). This dissertation argues from a philosophical and literary perspective and concentrates on the poet’s tense collaboration with his illustrators. Not only does it exclude an examination of his wider influence on visual art, but it also calls into question the relevance of such an endeavour by assuming an ‘almost negligible reference to Klopstock’ (p.24) in this field of visual art. This almost antithetical approach was not taken into account in the conception of the exhibition nor in the composition of the accompanying publications.

[2] Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock: Fon der Darstellung. Drittes Fragment (1779). In: id.: Kleine Prosaschriften. In: Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock. Werke und Briefe. Historisch-kritische Ausgabe. Abteilung Werke: IX 1. Ed. by Horst Gronemeyer et al., Hamburger Klopstock-Ausgabe. Berlin/ New York, 2019, p. 356.

[3] Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock: Eine Beurtheilung der Winkelmannischen Gedanken über die Nachahmung der Griechischen Werke in den schönen Künsten (1760). In: id., Kleine Prosaschriften, p. 149.