Tonight I paid a visit to my favorite Berlin Art Gallery and spotted this posthumas print by Sigmund Lipinsky (1873-1940).The composition and skills of the artist printmaker just captured my artistic eye. (What's left of it, that is). The asking price cleaned out the remainder of my fun money for the month but the print was affordable so I made the purchase.It should be in my collection in a few weeks.
Here is some biographical information gleaned from the internet: As a master student of the history painter Anton von Werner, Sigmund Lipinsky was one of the most
promising young talents at the Berlin Academy around 1900. Thanks to a scholarship, he moved to Rome in 1902, where he found ideal conditions for perfecting his talent and studying antiquity. An early highlight of his painterly œuvre is the monumental painting Circe, which remained in the possession of his descendantsuntil recently.
The sorceress Circe, who turned men into animals in order to subjugate them, is one of the most famous female figures in Greek mythology. In the 10th canto of the Odyssey, the poet Homer describes her encounter with the Trojan hero Odysseus and his companions. In search of their homeland, they reach the shores of the island of Aiaia, where Circe lives. There, the beautiful daughter of the sun god Helios works at a sacred loom and waits for unsuspecting victims. Odysseus' men, who are supposed to explore the island,
also succumb to her cunning and are turned into pigs by a potion. When Odysseus sets out to free his comrades, Hermes, the messenger of the gods, provides him with a magic herb that immunises him against Circe's witchcraft. After the potion he is given has no effect, the sorceress recognises the fulfilment of a prophecy in his arrival. Shortly afterwards, she reverses the transformation of Odysseus' followers and enters
into a love affair with the Trojan hero. Odysseus and his men stay on the island as Circe's guests and only leave a year later to continue their journey. Like few other female figures from ancient mythology, Circe inspired the artists of the fin de siècle. In most cases, she served as a projection screen for the idea of the woman as femme fatale, whose erotic effect also promised disaster. Paintings by famous painters such as
John William Waterhouse and Franz von Stuck prove that this idea was often more important than the myth itself around 1900. In them, Odysseus appears only as a marginal figure or not at all.
Franz von Stuck: Tilla Durieux as Circe, 1912. As is often the case in fin-de-siècle art, eroticism and danger merge into an indissoluble unity in Lipinsky's Circe. In terms of
both content and form, it follows in the tradition of monumental paintings by other German painters who worked in Rome
towards the end of the 19th century or found inspiration for their work there. These include The Judgement of Paris (1887) by Max Klinger as well as Ulysses and the Sirens (1902) by Otto Greiner, with whom Lipinsky was on friendly terms. Ludwig von
Hofmann should also be mentioned, whose endeavour to connect all the essential pictorial elements with one another
through a coherent rhythm is echoed in the composition ofCirce.
It is easy to imagine that Lipinsky devoted a great deal of time
and energy to the composition and realisation of Circe. The
choice of the representative format and the elaborate framing
give an idea of the demands the scholarship holder placed on
himself in order to fulfil the expectations of the Berlin Academy.
In this context, a photograph taken in 1904 showing the young
artist sitting on a stool in his Roman studio in the Villa Strohl-
Fern in front of the already largely completed Circe is illuminating. Although he is turning towards the viewer, it seems as if he only wants to pause for a moment to immediately get back to work. Did Lipinsky already realise at this point that his future path would lie less in the field of painting and more in drawing and printmaking? Be that as it may, parts of the painting that were not completed down to the last detail and the note "unfinished" in the lower right-hand half of the picture bear witness to the artist's tenacious struggle
for the greatest possible perfection. Lipinsky was not to abandon this ambition until the end of his life.
And here are just a few examples of his other works:
