Max Klinger creates a sensation at the…

Max Klinger creates a sensation at the Berlin Academy exhibition in 1878 with two series of pen-and-ink drawings: Series upon the Theme of Christ and Fantasies upon the Finding of a Glove.

Their daring originality causes an outburst of indignation; nonetheless, the Glove series (on which Klinger's contemporary reputation is based) is bought by the Berlin National Gallery.

These ten drawings (engraved in three editions from 1881; Museum of Modern Art, Purchase Fund, New York) tell a strange parable of a hapless young man and his obsessive involvement with a woman's elbow-length glove.

These pictures were based on images which came to the twenty-one-year-old 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 anticipates the research of Freud and Krafft-Ebing 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 fulfill.

Semioticians have also seen in the symbol of the glove an example of a sliding signifier, or signifier without signified—in this case, the identity of the woman which Klinger is careful to conceal.

The plates suggest various psychological states or existential crises faced by the artist protagonist (who bears a striking resemblance to the young Klinger).

Kilinger had received some training at the Karlsruhe art school.