At the Gate (Am Thor)

A Love (Opus X), a portfolio of ten prints, traces the doomed love affair between an upper middle class man and woman.   From the couple's first meeting to the scandal of the woman's pregnancy to her eventual death, Klinger outlines the tragic collision between social convention and sexual desire.  His pessimistic tale sees a society that, despite its military and economic successes, has failed to nurture real human passions, instead stifling them under a blanket of self-righteousness. 

Klinger's portfolio moves chronologically through the couple's story, but includes allegorical images among the narrative ones.  Intermezzo (shown here at lower left), for example, uses a paradigmatic image of Adam, Eve, Death, and the Devil—further inscribed with a Latin phrase that translates "Then the mocking laughter of the devil is heard"—to allude to the eventual fate of the lovers.  The portfolio is dedicated to Arnold Böcklin (1827–1901), the Swiss painter who combined classical motifs with fantastic inventions, inspiring Klinger to explore imagery that lay somewhere between objective reality and subjective experience.