Death as a Knight

Here, Death is depicted as a knight in armor. German painter Carl Strathmann (1866-1939) painted this work around 1902. According to an exhibition catalog of the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin (@dhmberlin), in this painting Strathmann explores the ‘end of the world’ atmosphere prevalent at the turn of the century. In those years, many artists were prophesying the end of the West with apocalyptic imagery.

Strathmann returned to the theme of Death more than twenty years later. This time, his 1925 work ‘Knight, Death and the Devil’ (‘Ritter, Tod und Teufel’) pokes fun at one of Germany’s most solemn images (See image 2).

That image is an engraving by Albrecht Dürer from 1513 (See image 3).

An armored knight is advancing through a mountain pass. Death rides alongside him on horseback, holding up an hourglass to show him that time is running out. Behind him, a devil waits. The knight doesn’t even turn his head. For a long time, this engraving was interpreted as a depiction of a person walking fearlessly along the right path.

Then the Germans remade this knight in their own image. During the Romantic period, the Christian soldier riding to his death was transformed into a ‘German knight’ who defeated Death and the Devil. Before World War I, the armored knight was a symbol of readiness for war; after the war, he found his way onto war memorials.

Strathmann repainted the same trio in 1925, right in the midst of this solemnity, and placed them in a sunlit meadow. As Munich art critic Christa Sigg put it, Death and the Devil are walking behind the armored knight here, as if the knight were leading a carnival procession to the nearest village tavern. Even the hourglass, which in Dürer’s work was raised as a warning, is now inside a lantern, illuminating the path (See image 4).

According to art historian Doris H. Lehmann, looking only at Dürer is not enough to understand this painting. Strathmann was also inspired by Gustav Klimt’s ‘The Golden Knight’ from 1903 (See image 5). Another title for the painting is ‘Life Is a Struggle’. According to Lehmann, Strathmann reinterpreted it with a witty yet profound commentary, adding Death and the Devil alongside the knight.

This was typical of Strathmann.

According to art critic Sigg, whenever he tackled a solemn subject in art history, he would subvert that sacred seriousness in at least one detail. She lists examples: while St. Francis is preaching to the birds, a stork has already dozed off. Strathmann depicted this scene at least twice; in a version published in 1913, the stork stands on the right, its beak lowered toward the ground (See image 6). The bloodshot eyes of Medusa, who turns anyone who looks at her to stone, are frightening at first glance; yet there is a peculiar expression on her face. As Sigg wryly notes, Medusa has to do the scaring herself instead of her dumb-looking snakes (See image 7).

Strathmann could afford this nonchalance. He was the son of a wealthy merchant from Düsseldorf and didn’t actually have to work. In Munich, he spent his evenings at a wine tavern, and as the night wore on, he would sing comic songs and drinking songs. His close friend, the painter Lovis Corinth, painted his portrait in 1895 (See image 8). The witty postcards the two exchanged eventually came to be signed simply with “Prost!”, meaning ‘Cheers!’

But these joyful days did not last long.

World War I and the economic crises of the 1920s eroded the merchant’s son’s fortune. This painting, which depicts Death joining a carnival procession, was created in the middle of those years. In 1934, Strathmann was forced to leave his beloved studio; his wife, Elisabeth, repeatedly appealed to the Bavarian Ministry of Culture to have his artist’s pension increased. No one was interested in his paintings anymore.

As early as 1903, the painter Corinth had written that once ordinary paintings were forgotten as they deserved to be, his friend’s true value would become increasingly apparent. Strathmann died in Munich in 1939. Even as the masters of Jugendstil - Germany’s Art Nouveau - were rediscovered in the 1970s and 1980s, he remained overlooked, with the exception of an exhibition in Bonn in 1976. His estate, donated by his daughter, is now housed at the Münchner Stadtmuseum (@muenchnerstadtmuseum). In 2019, the museum dedicated an exhibition to him titled ‘Jugendstil skurril’, or ‘Eccentric Jugendstil’. Both paintings were on display there.

The face of Death · image 1