Dali House

Painted in 1889, “Monkeys as Critics” — sometimes called “Monkeys as Judges of Art” and “The Jury of Apes” — is the best-known descendant from the evolutionary brush of the Czech Gabriel Cornelius Ritter von Max (1840-1915), and how could it not be? It’s adorable and, if you think artists take themselves too seriously, it’s also hilarious.

But Max also painted this:

This is “The Ecstatic Virgin Anna Katharina Emmerich”, done four years earlier. Von Max had monkeys, but Sister Anna had better visions. Von Max got to her long before popes and movie stars began paying heed to Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich (1774-1824).

Anne’s dirt-poor farmer parents sold her off at age 12 and she toiled for other folks until she escaped to the convent 16 years later. There she began experiencing mystical visions that came with massive headaches, as if a crown of thorns was in place. This continued after Napoleon’s kid brother, the King of Westphalia, closed the convent and she found herself doling out miracles of faith and health to her fellow downtrodden. In 1813 the stigmata that appeared on Anne’s hands and feet convinced an episcopal commission that she was indeed divine.

“The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ according to the Meditations of Anne Catherine Emmerich”, published in 1833 and parlayed in part into Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ”, contained, among many other revelations about the New Testament, a description of Ephesus, a city that had yet to be excavated, which helped archaeologists discover the house of the Virgin Mary. Pope John Paul II beatified Anne in 2004, though not for her Dolorous Passion, which proved theologically problematic.

Not for von Max, a mystic to the marrow.

Gabriel Max, as he’s usually referred to, was born a sculptor’s son in Prague but was schooled in Vienna, where his curriculum included somnambulism and hypnotism, and in Munich, where he eventually became a professor of art history. He acquired the “von” and “Ritter” in his name in 1900, when he was ennobled in recognition of his achievement in art. “Ritter” is akin to a knight.

From romanticist fairytale illustrations and Christian and historical genre scenes he draped his palette in sombre tones, after the Unglücksmalerei example of his instructor at the Munich Academy, Karl Theodor von Piloty.

By the time of 1867’s “The Martyr Crucified”, he’d moved on. Shown here is “Christian Martyr on the Cross (St Julia)” at the Neue Pinakothek in Munich, which is dated 1865. I’m not sure if these aren’t one and the same painting, with somone making an error in the date. Regardless, there was less melancholy in the hues, and more of the illumination of the spirit, as Max embraced theosophy. The straightforward narrative gave way to psychology. This became the basis for the not entirely aesthetically charged secessionist art of Munich and Vienna.

In “Light”, at the Odessa Museum of Western and Eastern Art in Ukraine, a blind girl greets visitors to the Christian catacombs to give them oil lamps. The museum’s website says “the girl personifies a source of spiritual light which, in the artist’s conception, is the Christian faith”, and yet also notes her expression of “submission and resignation”.

I dare say the two interpretations fit each other poorly. To what is she resigned — a dull job? And the figure in the doorway, shrouded in shadow, would be an usual portrayal of a Christian pilgrim. Surely the comment being made here is about something deeper.

Theosophy exalts Jesus along with the other great prophets, but goes much deeper into the spirit than Christianity. Professor Max was a serious student of the earthly sciences as well as the metaphysical. He gathered prehistoric ethnological and anthropological artefacts, and did so conscientiously enough that his collection is now in Mannheim’s Stadtischen Reiss Museum.

Below is the quite astounding “The Anatomist” from 1869, also at the Neue Pinakothek, as is “The Jury of Apes”.

A frightening image. He’s a medical man, fine, but he’s certainly taking a casual approach to examining the deceased. And surely she’s too young and beautiful to die. Perhaps he’s not just having a peek — perhaps he’s actually wondering how he can ever conquer so powerful a nemesis as death.

Please note the simian skull on the good doctor’s desk. Yes, here come the monkeys.

“Ape with Flowers at the Window”, left, and “Sour Experience” were painted at Max’s summer retreat on Starnberger Lake in Bavaria, 14 miles from north to south and a popular getaway for the Munich crowd. I don’t know where his cottage was in Ambach on the eastern shore, but it would have been somewhere in the Google Earth image below. Helena Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott of the Theosophical Society came to visit him here in 1882. Max was a Fellow of the society.

Not far away is the town of Berg, where Bavaria’s deposed Swan King, Ludwig II, somehow managed to drown in the knee-deep water of the lakeside in 1886. A memorial cross juts from the wet to mark the scene of his strange demise.

At his summer home Max kept a menagerie of apes and monkeys, and when he painted them he would give them human characteristics, long before poker-playing dogs formed the culmination of kitsch. How did he get them to pose? He didn’t. He photographed them and then worked from the snapshots.

“Monkeys as Critics” made its public debut at the first Munich Annual Exhibition in 1889, a salon whose founding Max had opposed. The work that the apes are assessing in the picture is a rendition of Tristan and Isolde, as identified by a label on the back of the canvas. Lovers about to pay the ultimate price for their mutual interest.

In an engaging essay on the painting, Eugene Gorny cites a book by Maria Makela in which she claims Max only hung this work after the jury had made its selections for the prizes, and that he was showing his disdain for its decisions, which favoured the younger artists’ “lighter palette and looser technique”. She thus concludes that he was mocking the jurors as unintelligent. Max was rewarded for his show of disrespect with a second-class gold medal, not bad for a late entry.

Gorny takes the analysis much further, getting very, very serious about it, as artists and art critics are wont to do, but he makes some excellent points. He calls “Monkeys as Critics” a “symbolical depiction of the situation of incomprehension” and, noting that the monkey in the middle (as it were) is staring at the viewer, wonders if this is how God sees his own creation — a mob of unimpressed critics saying, “Is that all there is?”

On Gorny’s webpage it’s also pointed out that Watteau used to paint monkeys as well, and that an earlier painter, the Frenchman Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps (1803-60), practically made a career out of depicting apes as dentists or barbers or musicians or, in the case of “The Experts” from 1837, shown here … as art critics. And this one’s in the Metropolitan Museum of Art!

Decamps has visited dali House before, by the way: See “The Monkey Painter” here.