Theodor Kern’s 1951 painting ‘Krippe’ – literally ‘crib’ or ‘manger’, but in German also used to mean a Nativity scene – is back on sale again at the Dorotheum in Salzburg.
A couple of weeks ago I noted that the painting had been offered at auction at the same location last December, but there was no information on the Dorotheum website about the actual sale. It now seems that either there was insufficient interest or the painting didn’t realise its minimum price, as it will be offered for sale again on 22nd of this month. As before, the starting price is 360 euros.
In my opinion, this is one of Kern’s more accomplished later works, and one of his better semi-abstract depictions of the Nativity. If my pockets were deeper, I’d be tempted to bid for it myself, but even if the painting realises its minimum price, the addition of taxes, shipping costs and import duties would make it prohibitively expensive. I’m hoping that a public gallery might be tempted to enter a bid, so that this fine work of art doesn’t disappear from view into a private collection.
Update: 23.02.24
The painting was sold yesterday. It realised its starting price of 360 euros (£310, $390).
Today – 6th January – is the feast of the Epiphany, known as Dreikönigsfest, or Three Kings Day, in Austria and Germany. The adoration of the Christ Child by the three kings – die Anbetung der heiligen drei Könige – was a subject that Theodor Kern returned to throughout his career as a painter, depicting the iconic scene in very different styles at different stages in his artistic development.
The first painting below, from 1929, is quite conventional, reflecting its probable origin as a commission for a church or religious building. The second example, from about 1950, is from Kern’s unfinished Madonna cycle and is representative of the highly-coloured, semi-abstract style with which he was experimenting at the time. The third work, from the same period, is different again, less abstract but surrounding the key figures with swirls of colour rather than a realistic or semi-realistic landscape. The effect is to focus attention on the intimate exchange of looks between one of the kings, the Child, and His Mother. It’s one of my favourite paintings by Kern.
The final image is a wooden carving of one of the three kings, part of a set created by Theodor Kern and left in her will by his widow Friedl to members of the Watts family: photograph courtesy of Gerard Watts (see this post).
‘Die Anbetung der heiligen drei Könige im Stall’ (1929), Salzburg Museum
Madonnenzyklus-Anbetung der Hl. Drei Könige (c.1950), via artnet.com
‘Anbetung der Heiligen Drei Könige’ (c.1950), Museum der Moderne, Salzburg
I’d like to wish all my readers a very Happy Christmas and to thank you for following this blog during the year.
The painting is Theodor Kern’s Anbetung der Heiligen Drei Könige, one of his many representations of the adoration of the Christ Child by the Three Kings.
I’m grateful to Gerard Watts for sending me photographs of the three paintings by Theodor Kern in his possession. As I explained in a recent post, Gerard is one of the sons of the late Jean Watts, a stalwart member of Hitchin Art Club; Jean and her sons were bequeathed paintings and carvings by Kern in the will of the artist’s widow, Frieda.
Two of the paintings owned by Gerard appear to be from an undated sequence depicting the Passion of Our Lord and may even be sketches for a series of Stations of the Cross. Whatever their original purpose, the pictures – one representing the betrayal of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane and the other his encounter with Saint Veronica on the way to Calvary – are rather conventional in style and were probably commissioned by a church. The other painting, also undated, is yet another version of Theodor Kern’s favourite subject, the Madonna and Child. I wouldn’t make any claims for this being Kern’s most interesting or original depiction of the subject, but the picture is vividly colourful and has a certain direct and very human appeal.
Gerard has also sent a photograph of a canvas, signed by Theodor Kern, in 1952, which appears to be an incomplete semi-abstract painting in vivid shades of orange and yellow:
On this, the last day of 2022, I’ve been looking back over my posts from the past twelve months and recalling that this was the year in which, thanks to a good deal of help from others, I discovered an abundance of ‘new’ works by Theodor Kern, in private collections, in the collections of Salzburg Museum and the Museum der Moderne in the same city, and closer to home, in a church in Bedford. I’m grateful to those who pointed me in the direction of these discoveries, and indeed to all of those who have helped with my research this year, including Stephan Bstieler, Astrid Ducke, Pamina Lahnsteiner, Heinz Böhme, Eva Jandl-Jörg and James Collet-White.
Here are a few of my favourites from those new discoveries:
Theodor Kern, Untitled (collection of Stephan Bstieler)
Theodor Kern, ‘Doppelbildnis’ (Museum der Moderne, Salzburg)
Theodor Kern, Bildnis des Malers Franz Lerch’, 1935 – 38 (Salzburg Museum)
Theodor Kern ‘Brustbild der Keramikerin Poldi Wojtek’ ,1927 (Salzburg Museum)
Theodor Kern, ‘Manifest’ (St Paul’s Church, Bedford)
The next day, John saw Jesus coming to him, and he saith: Behold the Lamb of God, behold him who taketh away the sin of the world. This is he, of whom I said: After me there cometh a man, who is preferred before me: because he was before me. And I knew him not, but that he may be made manifest in Israel, therefore am I come baptizing with water.
John 1, 29 – 31, Douay-Rheims translation
I was browsing the ArtUK site a few weeks ago, when I noticed that the following text had been added to the page about Theodor Kern:
Painter, sculptor and stained glass artist, born in Salzburg, Austria. He worked in England from 1938 and taught at Luton School of Art. In the early 1950s, the artist and designer Gordon House was his assistant. Kern was commissioned by the monks of Buckfast Abbey, among others, to make ecclesiastical sculpture. His oil painting Manifest, showing a pronounced Eastern European influence in its strong colours and brushwork, is in St Paul’s Church, Bedford. Lived in Hitchin, Hertfordshire.
The source was said to be the book Artists in Britain Since 1945 by David Buckman, published by Art Dictionaries Ltd. in 1998. I already knew about Kern’s work with Gordon House, which I wrote about in this post, and about his commission for Buckfast Abbey. However, I hadn’t heard of a painting with the title ‘Manifest’ before, nor was I aware that Kern had painted anything for St Paul’s, the principal Anglican church in Bedford.
James Collet-White (author’s photo)
I was intrigued and keen to find out more, so I emailed St Paul’s and was pleased to receive a reply from James Collet-White, a parishioner and former churchwarden, as well as a widely-published local historian. James told me that the painting was still on display in the church, where it was known by a different title, ‘The Baptism of Jesus’. It wasn’t painted as a commission for the church, but was in fact donated by the painter’s executor, who was also a parishioner.
Although I’ve had no success in tracing Theodor Kern’s will, I had always assumed that his executor was the same person who was responsible for overseeing his widow Friedl’s will: i.e. Peter Smith, the former curator of Luton Museum and a close friend of the Kerns (see this post). However, James informed me that the executor’s name was Peter Browning and that he was Chief Education Officer at Bedfordshire County Council from 1974 – 1979. On his retirement, Browning moved to the North of England, where his widow Eleanor is apparently still living, in a care home in the Lake District. James has kindly offered to use his networks to find out whether it’s possible to contact Mrs Browning, in the hope that she may have further information about her late husband’s relationship with Theodor Kern and about other paintings that he may have owned.
St Paul’s Church, Bedford (author’s photos)
James Collet-White invited me to visit St Paul’s to see Kern’s painting, so on Wednesday we drove through the snowy countryside from Hitchin to Bedford. The church, rebuilt in the fifteenth century in the perpendicular style, dominates the old centre of Bedford, with the town’s ancient market in its shadow, and surrounded by a number of other historical buildings.
Theodor Kern, ‘Manifest’ or ‘The Baptism of Jesus’ (undated), St Paul’s church, Bedford (author’s photos)
Kern’s painting is currently displayed on the north wall of the church, appropriately next to the baptistery. I liked the painting as soon as I saw it. Although undated, it clearly belongs to the artist’s late period, which began in the 1950s and ended with his death in 1969, and during which he experimented with abstract and semi-abstract styles (see theseposts). Kern created a number of semi-abstract sacred works at this time, which demonstrate a radical departure from the more conventional style of his earlier religious commissions. They include the paintings of his unfinished Madonna cycle (see this post) in which, to quote Karl Heinz Ritschel, Kern ‘worked with dabs of colour, with dissolving shapes…overcoming conventional timidity to make the faces of Mary or the Christ Child completely abstract’ (my translation). Ritschel likened some of these works to ‘precious icons’: perhaps that’s what David Buckman meant by a ‘pronounced Eastern European influence’?
Theodor Kern, unfinished painting of the Nativity of Christ (1950), Smith Collection
In ‘Manifest’, or ‘The Baptism of Jesus’, Theodor Kern both follows convention, in his depiction of the familiar biblical scene, and at the same time subverts it. Coincidentally, the Gospel readings in this third week of Advent have been concerned with John the Baptist preparing the way for Christ’s coming. On Thursday, as I began writing this post, the reading from the Gospel of St Luke included Christ’s proclamation that ‘of all the children born of women, there is no one greater than John, yet the least in the kingdom of God is greater than he is.’ Alongside the daily Gospel reading on the Universalis website, I’ve recently subscribed to the daily reflections on the Christian Art site, maintained by Patrick van der Vorst, a former director of Sotheby’s who is now training to be a priest. Each day he selects a painting to illustrate the Gospel reading, and on Thursday it was the 14th century Italian artist Giovanni Baronzio’s ‘The Baptism of Christ’.
Giovanni Baronzio, ‘The Baptism of Christ’ (c. 1335), National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
Being confronted with this painting on the day after I had seen Kern’s ‘Baptism’ in Bedford helped me to see how the Austrian artist had drawn on a number of the conventions surrounding depictions of this scene, such as the positioning of the two key figures, Our Lord and John the Baptist, with the two angels standing to one side. Kern’s painting is like a mirror image of Baronzio’s, with John on the right and the angels on the left. And whereas in the fourteenth century picture, we see a figure who is presumably God the Father, imparting His blessing from a circular heaven, in Kern’s twentieth-century version, it’s the Holy Spirit we see in a heavenly cloud, in the form of a dove. The Spirit descending on Jesus is represented, as it is in other sacred paintings by Kern from this period, by streams of light, in this case in blue, yellow and white. As is often the case, colour is an important symbolic element in Kern’s painting, with the heavenly blue of the sky and the waters of baptism contrasting with the red of John’s cloak (traditionally the colour of martyrs), the orange angel, and the two men’s brown bodies.
Of course, the main difference between Kern’s painting and conventional representations of this scene is that realism in depicting both the human figures and their background is subservient to capturing the spiritual essence or truth of the scene. As in the Madonna cycle paintings, but perhaps even more so, the key figures are shown mainly in outline, without facial features, the emphasis being on their actions. The figure of the angel to the left of the picture is even less defined and only identifiable by its wings. The right side of the painting depicts a hazily defined landscape, possibly with other human figures, their clothing perhaps represented by the blotches or red and dark green: and is that white shape a headscarf, and are we meant to infer that this is Jesus’ mother Mary?
It was wonderful to discover a ‘new’ Theodor Kern painting, and especially one that adds so much to our understanding of his development as a religious artist.
There are three completed paintings and two unfinished drawings by Theodor Kern depicting religious subjects in the collection of Salzburg Museum (see the lastthree posts). Two of the paintings, both of them from 1929 and both depicting scenes from the life of Christ, are quite traditional in style, which leads me to wonder whether they were originally commissioned for religious buildings.The first is yet another version of one of Kern’s favourite scenes, the adoration of the newborn Christ by the three kings:
Theodor Kern, ‘Die Anbetung der heiligen drei Könige im Stall’ (1929), Salzburg Museum
This depiction is much more conventional, and in my view less appealing, than (for example), this later representation by Kern of the same scene:
Theodor Kern, ‘Anbetung der Heiligen Drei Könige’ (c.1950), Museum der Moderne, Salzburg
The second painting is a scene from the Passion of Christ: Veronica offering Jesus a linen cloth with which to wipe his face. Once again, the style is quite traditional and puts one in mind of Kern’s mural of the aftermath of Christ’s death, on the arch over the Franziskanergasse in Salzburg:
Theodor Kern, ‘Das Schweißtuch der Veronika’ (1929), Salzburg Museum
The third painting, depicting the Madonna and Child, another of Kern’s favourite subjects, is undated, but seems to belong to a later period in the artist’s career. It has some similarities with, but is certainly not as accomplished or ‘finished’, as his iconic red and gold representation of the same subject from 1950:
Theodor Kern, ‘Madonna mit Kind’, Salzburg Museum
Theodor Kern, ‘Madonna mit Kind’ (1950)
The Virgin Mary features in one of the two religious drawings in the collection. Entitled ‘Maria einer Verkündigung’ – which could be translated as ‘Mary, from an Annunciation’ – it is obviously a sketch for a painting of that familiar scene, which Kern portrayed in various forms elsewhere. This sketch captures the Virgin’s surprise in a very physical way – she seems literally taken aback by the angel’s salutation:
Theodor Kern, ‘Maria einer Verkündigung’ (Salzburg Museum)
The other religious drawing in the Salzburg Museum collection, from 1926, shows a novice being received into a convent. Although obviously incomplete, the roughly sketched figures manage to convey the devotion and drama of the occasion and are further confirmation that Theodor Kern’s interest in spiritual matters, and in the religious life, predated his dramatic conversion at a Parisian monastery in 1930:
Theodor Kern, ‘Aufnahme ins Kloster’ (1926), Salzburg Museum
Two years ago, I wrote a post on this blog questioning whether Theodor Kern was, in fact, responsible for painting the fresco on the arch which connects the monastery and church in the Franziskanergasse in Salzburg. Although Karl Heinz Ritschel clearly states, in his 1990 book about the artist, that the fresco is by Kern, I had come across conflicting claims, including one on the usually reliable Salzburg Wiki site, that the artist responsible was Kern’s contemporary, Georg Jung. On the other hand, I had found preparatory sketches and designs by Kern in the Smith collection which seemed to confirm his involvement in creating the mural.
The Franziskanergasse arch (my photo, November 2019)
In the last twoposts I’ve drawn on new information about Kern’s paintings and murals sent to me by Stephan Bstieler, who studied art history in Salzburg and lived in the city for a number of years, but now works for the Bundesdenkmalamt (Federal Monuments Authority) in Vienna. Given his extensive knowledge of the Salzburg’s artistic history, I asked Stephan if he could help me resolve the question of who actually painted the mural on the Franziskanerbogen – the Franciscan arch.
Once again, Stephan has been extremely helpful in supplying exactly the information that I needed. He writes in an email that ‘the mural is definitely by Theodor Kern and it was executed in 1935’ and then provides some historical background to the commission. Apparently, there have been paintings on both sides of the arch since it was constructed in the seventeenth century. They were renovated in 1861 by the historical painter Josef Jaud. However, the mural on the west side, closer to the Salzburger Festspielhaus, was in such a poor condition that it needed to be renewed a mere ten years later, in 1871, by Josef Gold. The other mural, on the east side, towards the cathedral, also fell into disrepair, leading in 1926 to a third artist, by the name of Wünsche, being commissioned to renovate it. When this fresco failed to withstand the effects of the weather, Wünsche created a new one, in 1928. Some further restoration was carried out by Georg Jung, which may have contributed to the misunderstanding concerning his involvement in the most recent mural.
Galerie Welz, Salzburg (my photo: November 2019)
In 1934, the Salzburg Stadtverschönerungsverein (literally: society for the beautification of the city) organised a competition for the re-creation of the murals. The winners of the competition were Theodor Kern, Georg Jung and Emma Schlangenhausen. Draft designs by these three artists were exhibited in the following year, 1935, in Galerie Welz in Sigmund-Haffner-Gasse (the gallery still exists and we visited it during our stay in the city two years ago). Theodor Kern was then commissioned to create the existing mural on the east side of the arch – the one that survives to this day – and it was ceremonially unveiled on 19th June 1935. Georg Jung’s mural, on the theme of the Adoration of the Magi, which was planned for the west side of the arch, was never executed. Interestingly, Kern’s early sketch of the proposed mural, which I found in the Smith collection, included both a depiction of the Anbetung – the Adoration – above, and the scene that appeared in the final mural – the Beweinung – or Lamentation of Christ – below:
As well as providing a helpful historical summary, Stephan also attaches two contemporary newspaper reports on the commission, both from 19th June 1935. The Salzburger Volksblatt provided a short report describing the fresco and offering a brief appreciation and critique. My fairly loose English translation (hampered a little by having to decipher the unfamiliar Fraktur alphabet) follows:
A new fresco in Salzburg
Salzburg, 19 June. Yesterday afternoon, in the presence of invited guests, the covers were removed from the new fresco on the Franciscan Arch by the Society for the Beautification of the City. As reported at the time, the association had announced a competition for the re-creation of the fresco on the side of the Franciscan arch facing towards the cathedral. The painter and academician Theodor Kern was then entrusted with the creation of the painting. The wall surface of the arch is now decorated with a Pietà. The Mother of God holds the dead Christ in her lap, several figures surround the group. Mary is lost in grief. Her stare (some of the faces are rather too intense in expression, especially around the eyes) rests on the corpse, but doesn’t seem to see it, instead gazing into space, lost in deep anguish. On her right kneels St John in humble devotion. His hand caresses the body of the Lord. On the left Mary Magdalene runs to kiss the corpse. Behind her kneels a figure (Maria Salome?) lost in prayer.
The background forms the landscape around Golgotha, Jerusalem to one side, the burial cave to the other. Heavy horizontal clouds have gathered in the sky, a grey, red, Golgotha mood accompanies the scene in which are expressed the calm after the completed sacrificial death and the sublimity of the redemption of mankind.
The colours of the robes create a solemn mood, the red-brown cloak of the Blessed Mother, the green robe and yellow cloak of St. John, the blue and ochre clothing of St. Magdalena. It’s a minor chord that runs through the picture, but it also symbolises the grandeur of redemption. The painting has an emotional expression, it is deliberately awkward, making it distinctive, a painting based on simple popular sentiment, adapted appropriately. For the atmosphere of baroque Salzburg it may lack a little mobility and fluidity. Above all the painting has a strong, memorable ring to it, and that is the main thing.
Franziskanergasse arch, with the monastery in the foreground and a glimpse of the Festspielhaus and the Mönchsberg in the background (via http://www.sn.at/)
The Salzburger Chronik für Stadt und Land offered a rather longer and more critical analysis of Kerns fresco in its regular arts column. The reference to folkloric elements and popular devotion are perceptive. But is there perhaps the faintest trace of antisemitism in the slightly disparaging reference to the ‘race’ of the figures depicted, bearing in mind what would happen in Austria just three years after this was written?
Theater, Kunst, Kultur
The fresco above the Franciscan Arch. Although it is only a small, but by no means insignificant section of our cityscape, it plays an undeniable artistic role in the harmony of all the architectural components that appear here, as well as forming a minor addition to the landscape. It has since been improved by the new fresco, which was executed by Theodor Kern on the initiative of the Society for the Beautification of the City. It represents a Pietà, the Sorrowful Mother with the body of her son on her lap, a closed group of five people in all. If one attempts to analyse the picture more closely, one first encounters a certain compactness of the figures, which, to the same extent as they deviate from the strict canon, approach the feeling of a folkloric representation, as though from primitive rural art, the way we encounter her on a shrine, a remnant which asserts itself even in the fresco of the academic painter. The Mother sits somewhat awkwardly; John could well have been born in the Abtenau region or somewhere else in this country. The dead body of the Crucified does not lie in noble dignity on the Mother’s lap, as one would find if an Italian master were depicting the scene; one knows immediately that a German master was at work here. The figure of a young man on the right is of great beauty, showing the noblest perfection without denying the race to which the whole group belongs. The colours are also a little heavy and come across as strong, but otherwise by no means discordant. Moreover, it does not matter from which point of view the picture is viewed. It is best seen from a greater distance, especially when you step through the arches across the cathedral square and notice this suddenly emerging colourfulness for the first time. After all, the picture is not to be thought of on its own, it should only be viewed together with its frame. Then a number of concerns will disappear. The monastery frontage, the monotonous grey, the narrow bridge of the arch, behind it a part of the Mönchsberg, all this has to be viewed; it is not a question of the wall of a studio or a room that is to be decorated, but rather a somewhat deceptive surface from which one can step back at will, almost to infinity, a surface that not only has to have an effect through its colour, but also one that has to carry an image which first and foremost must have a religious effect, i.e. there are a multitude of unreasonable demands that cannot all easily be fulfilled. All of this requires a little getting used to, because every new thing has a certain unfamiliar streak that only subsides after a while when we have become reconciled to it: we understand the artist better and better, and also the work of art, so that, no differently from the way it is with people and everything else, it begins to mature very slowly and thus begins to reveal its true features.
Until I received Stephan’s email about the competition to paint the fresco, I hadn’t heard of the third finalist, Emma Schlangenhausen. However, I’ve since searched online for information about her and have become intrigued by her work and her biography. She was born 1882 in Tyrol and studied at the School of Graphic and Experimental Art and the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, where her teachers included Koloman Moser (incidentally, a friend of the family of Theodor Kern’s first wife Christl Engelhart). With her friend Helene von Taussig, Schlangenhausen continued her studies in Switzerland under Cuno Amiet, and following World War One she moved to Salzburg. Helene, a Jewish convert to Catholicism, who lived and worked in the suburb of Anif to the south of Salzburg, was deported in 1942 to Izbica transit camp in Poland (the same camp that also housed Theodor Kern’s Vienna patron, the writer Ida Waldek), where she was murdered by the Nazis.
Poster for an exhibition organised by ‘Der Wasserman’, designed by Emma Schlangenhausen
Emma Schlangenhausen was a member of Wiener Frauenkunst (Viennese Women’s Art), the Association of Visual Artists of Austria, and Der Wassermann – the Salzburg-based artistic group founded by Felix Albrecht Harta to which Theodor Kern also belonged (Schlagenhausen designed the poster for at least one of their exhibitions: see above). Although Schlangenhausen ultimately lost out to Kern in the Franciscan arch competition, she apparently painted a number of frescoes depicting the life of St Francis for the interior of the adjacent monastery (just as Kern did for the convent at Hallein). Sadly, these were destroyed by the Nazis when they occupied the building and turned it into the local Gestapo headquarters (see this post). Emma Schlangenhausen died in Salzburg in 1947. She and Helene von Taussig were both featured in a major retrospective exhibition at Vienna’s Belvedere Museum in 2019 which threw much-needed light on the often neglected work of Austrian women artists of the pre-war period.
I’m intrigued by what I’ve seen of Schlangenhausen’s work so far, especially her rather striking monochrome woodcuts, many of which feature religious scenes (some of which remind me of the work of the Hitchin-born artist F.L.Griggs) and would like to know more, having so far failed to find much written about her. I’ve also searched for sources relating to Helene von Taussig, but unfortunately I’ve been informed by the Salzburg Museum that the only significant book about her art is currently unavailable (update 18.02.22: I’ve just been informed by the museum that the book is back in stock, so I’ve ordered a copy). If anyone reading this knows of good sources of information about either artist, I’d be very interested to hear from them.
Wishing all my readers and followers a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
As 2021 draws to a close, I’d like to thank all those who have helped with my research this year, and especially (in no particular order) Matt Smith, Elise Naish, Libby Green, Irene Iacono, Helga Eigner Ziegelder, Richard Barton, Walburga Shearer, Libor Marek, Josef Azizi, Larry Heller, Richard Brice and Angie Taylor.
(The image above is from an unfinished painting of the Nativity by Theodor Kern in the Smith Collection. See this post.)
This is another in my series of posts considering Theodor Kern in relation to other artists with whom I believe he has some characteristics in common. It’s partly a way of setting Kern and his work in their contemporary context, but it’s also, to be honest, an excuse for me to write about other artists that I like. I’ve already discussed the similarities and differences between Kern on the one hand, and Gerard Ceunis, David Jones and F.L.Griggs on the other. In this post, I’ll be exploring some points of connection with Marianne Stokes (1855 – 1927).
Marianne Stokes, née Preindlsberger, was born in Graz, Styria, so their Austrian origin is the most obvious feature that she and Theodor Kern had in common, even if they were born nearly half a century apart. After marrying the Southport–born landscape painter Adrian Stokes (1855 – 1934), whom she met when they were both working at Pont-Aven in Brittany (she had previously studied in Munich and Paris), Marianne made her permanent home in England: another point of connection with Kern. She is generally considered to have been one of the leading women artists of the late Victorian period.
Front cover of Magdalen Evans’ book
I first became interested in Marianne Stokes’ work during one of our many family holidays in Cornwall, when we visited a number of locations associated with the St Ives and Newlyn groups of artists which had flourished there at the turn of the last century. Adrian and Marianne Stokes lived for a time in St Ives, and on a recent visit I discovered that their former home was just a short walk from the place where we usually stay. More recently, my knowledge of Marianne’s life and work has been improved immensely by reading Magdalen Evans’ indispensable book about the couple and their work. Like many others, I also fell in love with Marianne’s stunning painting of the Madonna and Child which has often been featured on Christmas cards and postage stamps in recent years:
Marianne Stokes, ‘Madonna and Child’, 1907-8, Wolverhampton Museum and Art Gallery
Her Catholicism is perhaps the most important characteristic that Marianne Stokes shares with Theodor Kern. She and her husband were members of a loose network of late-nineteenth-century English Catholic artists and writers whose connections have yet to be fully explored: for example, among their earliest supporters and reviewers were the Catholic poet, critic and suffragist Alice Meynell (1847 – 1922) whose biography I read with great interest recently, and her husband, the journalist, editor and publisher Wilfred Meynell (1852 – 1948).
Although her Catholic sensibility shines through all of her work, it is in some of her later portraits that Marianne’s interest in sacred subjects becomes explicit and invites the closest comparison with Theodor Kern. Rather like Kern’s, Stokes’ art is highly varied in style, and perhaps in appeal: personally, I’m somewhat averse to the Victorian sentimentalism of some of her earlier work. Her paintings include a number of stylised depictions of mythical subjects, clearly indebted to the Pre-Raphaelites, as well as other works influenced by the naturalism of painters such as Jean-François Millet and Jules-Bastien Lepage.
Cover of the Stokes’ illustrated account of their visit to Hungary, published in 1909(image, complete with library bar code, taken from the digital version accessible via the internet)
In my view, Marianne Stokes’ best work emerged from the period that she and her husband spent in Hungary, particularly in Transylvania and the High Tatra, in the early years of the last century, and which they wrote about, and illustrated, in a lavish book published in 1909. The book can be hard to track down today, and the few original copies in circulation are prohibitively expensive, but thankfully a good quality digital reproduction can be easily accessed online. The text was written by Adrian and illustrated both by his landscape paintings and by Marianne’s portraits of members of the various nationalities and ethnic groups whom they encountered on their travels. The book has an obvious appeal to those of us with an abiding interest in this fascinating corner of Europe and, certainly for this reader, it evoked memories both of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s account of his travels in the same region and of Miklós Banffy’s fictional Transylvanian trilogy.[1]
Perhaps there is a further tangential connection here with Theodor Kern, who in 1935 also spent some weeks in Hungary, at the magnificent abbey of Pannonhalma in the west of the country, a spiritual and artistic retreat arranged by his friend the philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand. According to Kern’s nephew Ernst Ziegeleder, Theodor ‘was a guest and in return gave the abbot lessons in German conversation.’ This would have been Keleman Krizostom, who was abbot from 1943 to 1947, and who sheltered hundreds of Jews and others in the abbey during the Nazi occupation. After the war, and the communist takeover of his country, Krizostom left for Brazil. According to Ziegeleder, he and Kern remained firm friends until the former abbot’s death in 1950. Adrian and Marianne Stokes were also good friends with a senior Hungarian prelate: Dr Boromisza Tibor, the bishop of Szatmár, who was their initial contact in the country and to whom their book is dedicated.
Theodor Kern, ‘Wood, Hungary’, 1936 (Wardown House Museum and Gallery, Luton)
Adrian Stokes, ‘Birches at Lucsivna-Fürdő’, 1909 (on some websites this painting is attributed, wrongly in my view, to Marianne)
Another link is provided by the fact that many of Marianne Stokes’ portraits from her Hungarian period are of people in traditional Slovakian dress (parts of present-day Slovakia were Hungarian territory at the time), including her painting of a Slovak girl in Sunday attire, which invites comparison with Kern’s portrait of his first wife Christl (whom he married in what is today the capital of Slovakia: see the last post), also in Slovakian costume, though the dazzling richness of Stokes’ painting risks making her fellow Austrian artist’s colours appear almost dull by comparison:
Marianne Stokes, ‘Slovak Girl in Sunday Attire’, 1909
Theodor Kern, ‘Portrait of a Woman (Christ Kern-Engelhart)’, 1931 (Salzburg Museum)
Like Theodor Kern, Marianne Stokes’ was an accomplished colourist, as evidenced in many other portraits included in the Hungarian volume. A number of them depict women and girls in traditional costume attending church:
Marianne Stokes, ‘Young Girl of Menguszfalva Going to Church’, 1909
Marianne Stokes, ‘In Church at Vazsecz’
Kern, by contrast, rarely if ever painted people engaged in religious practice, though of course many of his sculptures, carvings and stained glass windows decorate religious buildings in England and Austria.
Perhaps the most significant similarity between the explicitly religious art of Marianne Stokes and that of Theodor Kern is that they both return again and again to the subject of the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child. Besides the famous ‘Christmas card’ painting by Stokes already mentioned, there are a number of other examples in her oeuvre, including her beautiful late work, ‘Madonna of the Fir Tree’:
Marianne Stokes, ‘Madonna of the Fir Tree’, 1927
Many of Kern’s depictions of Our Lady are in wood and stone rather than on canvas, and are to be found in churches rather than galleries, though the painting below, from 1950, with its icon-like golden background, is a notable exception:
Theodor Kern, ‘Madonna and Child’, 1950
Marianne Stokes’ and Theodor Kern’s styles were in many ways very different: she remained rooted in nineteenth-century naturalism, and none the worse for it, while his work was shaped by his exposure to Post-Impressionism and Expressionism. But in their representations of Our Lady and her divine Son they reflect a similar combination of human tenderness and deep devotion.
In their different ways, the work of these two Austrian-born British-based Catholic artists enriches the development of twentieth-century religious art in England, and they both deserve to be better known.
The Guardian recently featured Marianne Stokes’ painting ‘The Net Mender’ in its Great British Art Tour series, describing her as ‘one of the leading female artists in Victorian England’.
Theodor Kern 