Tod und Mädchen

"The subject of 'Death and the Maiden' is an ancient one and goes back to the medieval Danses Macabres, painted as frescoes in charnel houses, to remind the living that Death spares nobody. In the Renaissance, the motif of Death viSiting a young woman is isolated from this larger concept, possibly because the idea of a beautiful maiden dying seemed the most poignant, or perhaps because it offered an opportunity to depict a naked young woman in a moralising context. Mansen takes up this subject, but adds another connotation: his maiden is a reclining woman, in the tradition of Titian's 'Sleeping Venus' or 'Danae'. While Titian in some paintings added a musician or Eros at the end of the bed, in Mansen's version a large skull is lurking at her feet. The artist is thereby not only turning his own work into a memento mori image, but also reflects on Titian's prototype of the reclining nude.

Ever since Holbein's minuscule but splendid cycle of woodcuts of the 'Dance of Death', the theme has also its place in the graphic arts. Technically, Mansen approaches the subject out of the woodeut tradition, but turns it into something altogether different and unsentimental. His woodcut Death and the Maiden is almost life size, cut with broad strokes and thin horizontal, hatched lines into a single, rough plank of wood. The rectangular strokes fall regularly onto her body and define the eyes and mouth of the skull, while the thinner lines vaguely surround the figures. The surface is printed like a monotype in three colours, a patchy vermillion red, brown and green, while the cuts are blank absences of colour.
(Tim Schmelcher: Nr. 58 – Matthias Mansen (Ravensburg 1958). Der Tod und das Mädchen, 1983. In: Beauties and Beasts. Making and Collecting Art in Germany. Herausgegeben von Christie's International Media Division. Berlin/London, 2018.)

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  Fotografien von Matthias Mansen