Beethoven (sculpture)

Beethoven
ArtistMax Klinger
Year1902
Location

Beethoven is a 1902 sculpture by the German Max Klinger. On a large plinth in black marble, it depicts the composer Ludwig van Beethoven bare-chested on a throne with an eagle in front of him.[1][2]

At the Vienna Secession's exhibition

The sculpture was first presented at the 14th exhibitions of the Vienna Secession where it was unveiled on 15 April 1902. The event received considerable publicity, including newspaper coverage of the sculpture's transportation to the Secession Building and its assembly by Klinger.[3]

It caused controversy for depicting Beethoven as ghost-like and in a hunched position, which critics regarded as a poor tribute. Thomas Mann was among those who praised it precisely because Beethoven looks vulnerable and tender, like someone who has overcome weakness. Mann wrote: "Klinger's frail little Beethoven, who is sitting on a huge godly throne fervently concentrated, his fists clenched—that is a hero."[4]

The sculpture is in the collection of the Museum der bildenden Künste in Leipzig.[4] In his 2013 book A Kingdom Not of This World, Kevin Karnes writes that it "constituted an essential, perhaps the essential, artistic expression of fin-de-siècle utopian longing in the Austro-German artistic world".[3]

References

  1. ↑ Morgenthal, Friedrich (1902). "Max Klinger's Statue of Beethoven". Brush and Pencil. 10 (5): 305–312. doi:10.2307/25505787.
  2. ↑ Virkar, Aakanksha J. (September 2023). "Max Klinger's Beethoven (1902), Nietzsche's Übermensch and the Anti-fascist Poetics of T.S. Eliot's Coriolan I "Triumphal March" (1931)". Journal of Modern Literature. 47 (1): 1–24. doi:10.2979/jml.00001.
  3. 1 2 Karnes, Kevin (2013). A Kingdom Not of This World: Wagner, the Arts, and Utopian Visions in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna. OUP USA. pp. 37–40. ISBN 978-0-19-995792-7.
  4. 1 2 Hickley, Catherine (3 March 2020). "Topless Beethoven to take centre stage in Leipzig survey of Symbolist artist Max Klinger". The Art Newspaper. Retrieved 2 April 2026.
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