Chapter 34Indian Preuschen ExhibitionINDISCHE PREUSCHEN-AUSSTELLUNG
📖 This chapter with the German alongside →
At the end of April I was back at "Waldfrieden" and began to work up my Indian studies.
Johanna had confined herself this time to a small typhoid of her own. Afterwards she went into service with the Dernburgs in Grunewald, but promised me to make herself free again for my Indian exhibition. As receiving lady she was superbly suited, with her love for me and her brilliant flow of talk. But she was not equal to the cashier's post, and I had to take on a male force besides.
At the beginning of spring 19071 I opened my great Indian exhibition in the same rooms that I had had painted out for my Greek exhibition under the direction of the architect B. (of dreadful memory). It was on the Köllnischer Fischmarkt, amid nothing but clothes shops. But the hall itself was downright glorious. Nevertheless no critic could refrain from censuring the questionable location. Just as in its day hundreds upon hundreds of critics each assured his public that it should really be called "Mors Imperatrix2" and not "Mors Imperator."
This "Indian Preuschen Exhibition" was the most successful of my life, and for that very reason set a pack of enemies and colleagues on my heels. In it, as its "clou," besides seventy Indian "colour-intoxications" in landscape, flowers and interior, I had exhibited my great, last, Symbolist picture: Leda and the Swan or, as I named it, Santa Vita3, holy Life. As a counterpart to the Circe (which was meant to embody the "swine"-sensuality of the man), it was to represent pure sensuality, the wonder of earthly sensual love. Woman on the golden throne of life, before a thicket of glowing apples of the Hesperides, with the wonder in her lap, the black swan, in highest rapture. At her feet a forest of lilies, and from an antique tripod vapours billow — Santa Vita!
The weekly poetry recitals too I always held before a densely filled hall. I achieved numerous sales — when I think of it today, it seems to me almost past belief — and not only got the enormous expenses covered, but even a few marks of surplus besides.
But actually I was now exhibition-weary. In my innocence I thought: now just London and America still, with your pictures, then the terrible exhibition work falls away, and you can only travel and paint, and are known and famous for all time. I did not yet know then that the artist who strives after the fame of his own time but belongs to no clique, being an Outsider (as I had become one through Mors Imperator), must tramp his whole life long through a deep sand desert in which, at every new step, the one before has already run away in the sand.
In just the same step, fortune thus wanders far ahead of him, and
"With never-wearying longing He now follows the wind-blown trace Of its fleeting soles unto the end." —
But what was it the carpet-Haim said at my first exhibition in the Potsdamer Straße? "You are no businesswoman!" No, thank God (and yet alas), that I am not and never was.
In spite of everything — the Indian Preuschen Exhibition was a great success.
On the last recital evening an admirer of my art presented me with a laurel wreath. I was standing beside a great sheaf of white lilies (whose scent I always let fill the hall for the Indian mood), when my good friend Clara Blüthgen4 stepped up to me: "Hermione, are you not happy? Higher than this there is no going." I looked at her quite dumbfounded: "And that you call high?" — —
Ah, in those days I still had dreams and hopes. Higher, in truth, I have really never come to this day. And now hardly shall, on my wandering through the drifting sand. But I grow wearier and more despondent with every year, and more disgusted with the struggle for life.
Notes
Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.
- ↑the beginning of spring 1907 — The one date in the chapter, and the press bears it out: the "Indian Preuschen Exhibition" opened at Köllnischer Fischmarkt 6 on Monday 8 April 1907 and closed with a farewell party on 22 May (Berliner Tageblatt, 7 April and 23 May 1907). The memoir's own arithmetic seemed to point two ways: her last chapter had her at sea until about April, and the paragraph above has her back at "Waldfrieden" at the end of April, after spring had begun. The press settles it by moving the journey, not the show. She sailed for India in November 1905 and was expected back in May 1906, so that return is most probably April 1906, and a whole year of working up the studies lay between it and this opening. The show sold about forty pictures to 4,900 visitors (Berliner Tageblatt, 24 May 1907).
- ↑Mors Imperatrix — Mors is feminine in Latin — a pedant's correction, and a blind one. The masculine Emperor Death was the entire point: her Death, like the German der Tod, is a He. The painting whose scandal made her an "outsider" (her own word, below) fills chapter 10. (Mors Imperator in the gallery)
- ↑Santa Vita — New to the catalogue: her "great, last, Symbolist picture" — a Leda and the Swan renamed Santa Vita, "holy Life," with a black swan. It had been shown before this: in Berlin in January 1905, where a reviewer describes "Das heilige Leben" ("The Holy Life") as a Leda with a black swan (Dresdner Neueste Nachrichten, 6 January 1905). The programme she gives it makes a diptych. The Circe embodies the "swine"-sensuality of the man — Circe is the enchantress who turns men into swine; Santa Vita answers it with "the pure sensuality, the wonder of earthly sensual love" of the woman. And the counterpart is traceable: a painting called Circe and the Swine was among the five named in an American notice of September 1910, when her pictures went on to Chicago. Whether Santa Vita crossed the ocean with it, and where either canvas is now, is unknown. Note also "my great, last, Symbolist picture" — the previous chapter said the same of the unpainted Nietzsche desert; the last place in her own iconography was claimed twice.
- ↑Clara Blüthgen — Clara Blüthgen (1856–1934), the writer, wife of the poet Victor Blüthgen — "my good friend": another literary friendship recorded nowhere else in her bibliography. (Clara Blüthgen (German Wikipedia))