“Dezember” (Monkey at the cocklestove)

Details

Provenienz:
Privatbesitz, Süddeutschland, von den Urgroßeltern des jetzigen Besitzers beim Künstler direkt erworben, seitdem im Familienbesitz.

Description

The small painting is entitled “December” and it is immediately recognisable why: a baboon nestles against a green tiled stove, seeking warmth like humans in December. Gabriel von Max depicts all of this with loose, broad brushstrokes that, like the light reflected by the fur and the stove, emphasise the momentary nature of the situation, the moment of observation. Even if it is only a moment that Gabriel von Max captures, it is not without profundity: the baboon has its gaze directed downwards, but it has no goal – it looks into the void and holds a white carnation. Could the white carnation, which in Christian iconography symbolises purity and untouchedness, in combination with the baboon’s melancholy gaze mean a look back to the past, to something original and innocent that has been lost and will not return? There is indeed a hint of farewell in the baboon’s gaze, but we don’t know.
In his humanisation of the monkey, Max shows himself to be a supporter of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, which finally put creationism to bed. His emotionally charged “portraits” of apes testify to Gabriel von Max’s deep interest in the nature of man, to whom he holds up not a mirror but an ape. The anthropologist and Darwinist Max celebrated great success with his audience as a “painter of souls” with such pictures of apes showing human emotions, studying the human anatomy, rising up as art judges or coming together to contemplate art. Since his first painting of a dead monkey entitled “Schmerzvergessen” (Forgotten Pain) from 1871, Max had developed a strong anthropological interest in its development and origin, which led him to the existential questions of becoming human and existence. One such “existential figure” is the portrait of our monkey, whose melancholy gaze wanders into the distance. Set apart from the green of the stove that stood in the living room of Max’s now dilapidated villa in Ammerland, in the portrait of the monkey he develops a contemplative intensity that seems to pose the question of the what: Who am I, where do I come from?
His monkey paintings are, as it were, parables of human existence. He used a small herd of monkeys as inspiration and visual material for these existential explorations – at times 14 monkeys populated his estate – which he had bred for study purposes. From the 1890s onwards, Max created numerous such small-format monkey paintings – our painting was not created until after 1900, when Max was ennobled – which he painted directly for the art market or for collectors. He used these sales to finance the development of his collection of around 60,000 zoological and ethnographic relics, including animal and human skulls, which he mainly kept in his villa in Ambach on Lake Starnberg, where he mostly worked in quiet seclusion.
Dr Peter Prange