Sebastian Schütze

"Around 1900, a small group of influential patrons, critics, writers, and artists turned Weimar, the capital of the small Duchy of Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach in present-day Germany, into a utopian centre of modern art and thought. Artists like Max Klinger, Edvard Munch, and Ludwig von Hofmann, and writers like André Gide, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Rainer Maria Rilke sought to create a 'New Weimar and position Friedrich Nietzsche at its head as the radical prophet of modernity. Nietzsche's profound thinking, expressive language, and poignant aphoristic style made him the ideal philosopher of modernism. It is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified. With philosophical maxims, such as this from The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche became an extraordinary influence on artists and critics in their search for a 'new art,' a 'new man,' and, ultimately, a 'new society.' In 1902, two years after the philosopher's death, Max Klinger was commissioned to carve his portrait for the Villa Silberblick in Weimar, where the cult of Nietzsche was organized. Starting from a heavily reworked death mask, he executed the famous marble herm that still today adorns the reception room of the Nietzsche Archive. Only three monumental bronze versions were cast, one of which is now in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada. With this sculpture in focus, accompanied by a series of paintings, drawings, plaster casts, and small bronzes, 'Radical Modernism' will show how Klinger and his patrons invented the 'official' Nietzsche, transforming a highly expressionist portrait into an idealized classical cult image."--publisher.

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