Elisar von Kupffer

If you want to know more...

http://www.elisarion.ch  : a Swiss Foundation about von Kupffer's art (most of the pics I used come from their website).

Fabio Ricci: Ritter, Tod und Eros: Die Kunst Elisàr von Kupffers (1872-1942) (2007)

Graziano Mandozzi. Elisarion : un santuario per il Clarismo (1996)

Elisar von Kupffer's photographic art

Autoportrait as "Prince Carneval"

Gino Taricco, a model of von Kupffer

Die Klarwelt der Seligen (details)

Die Klarwelt der Seligen (von Kupfer's Arcadian dreams)

This circular frescoe Die Klarwelt der Seligen was painted by von Kupfer in his house at Minusio, close to Locarno (Switzerland). Mixing together mysticism and sensuality, spirituality and homoeroticism, this impressive painting is an hymn to the male beauty and love, in a paradisiac landscape.

Von Gloeden's vision used the Sicilian landscape as a stage set up and the real boys of Taormina as actors of the Arcadian scenography he loved to recreate through his photographs. Von Kupfer's world looks like Eden before the fall, Paradise before the fault, a Platonic world where bodies radiate as much as souls.

Love, tenderness, intimacy, friendship of souls and embraces of bodies, purity and innocence... There is so much light and colour in von Kupfer's frescoes, such a freedom of desire and sensuality, such a vision of love... We are at the same time in the intimacy of a private house, on the shores of Lac Majeur, and in the public space of a visual manifesto about the right of homoerotic desires to be lived and accepted.

Von Kupfer's frescoes are lyrical as a song, choregraphic as a ballet.

Elisar von Kupffer

I should admit that I never heard about Elisar von Kupffer (1872-1942), before discovering him through W. von Gloeden's network of European admirers. Elisar von Kupffer was an influential and very creative gay writer and artist, born in Tallinn, educated in St. Petersburg and Berlin. He made several travels in Italy from 1902 to 1915: he most certainly met von Gloeden in Taormina.

Then he established himself in Locarno (Switzerland) with his partner, the historian and philosopher Eduard von Meyer (1873-1960). From 1925 to 1929, they transformed their Minusio Villa into an unbelievable private Art Museum. It was the "Sanctuarium Artis Elisarion". Art and religion were closely linked, and von Kupffer and von Meyer launched a new religious movement called the Klarismus ("Clarity").

Von Kupffer was also the author of an anthology of homoerotic literature, Lieblingminne und Freundesliebe in der Weltliteratur (published by Adolf Brand, 1899-1900), a way to protest against the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde in England, as well as of various theatrical plays, poems and scholarly works (for example a monograph on Sodoma, a Renaissance artist).

As a photographer, he made photographic studies of boys and used them in the creation of his paintings.

(NB: most of the above biographical sketch relies on the wikipedia entry on Elisar von Kupffer

Elisar von Kupffer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

Recommended book !

Wilhelm Von Gloeden

Fotografie

Nudi, Paesaggi, Scene di Genere

A cura di Italo Zannier

Firenze, Alinari, 2008, 192 pages.

Mount Etna

Ruskin

Earth and sky, fire and water, snow and sun, light and shadows

Mount Etna challenges the thought and the senses of the viewer.

No wonder if so many painters and photographers played with its silhouette...

Thomas Cole

Young Faun

— "Ne bouge pas ! Souris ! disait-il... "Sehr schön... Achtung, achtung... !" Il me disait que j'étais un petit faune du cortège de Dionysos, que j'étais un petit satyre avec une peau de bête sauvage sur les épaules, un petit satyre avec des cornes de chevreau sur la tête... "Achtung ! Achtung... !" Il signore Gloeden, Il Barone di Taormina, il mio caro amico Wilhelm était tellement sérieux et concentré derrière son appareil qu'il me fait rire...

—  Carissimo Giovannino, tu es si beau... Sehr schön... Bello ragazzo... Tes yeux et ton sourire éblouissent mon appareil photo, tu es mon petit soleil, Giovannino mio..."

— Je me demande de quoi j'ai l'air, avec mes cheveux qu'il Signore Barone Professore Dottore Gloeden a mouillés puis mis en forme entre ses doigts... Je me demande à qui je souris, en regardant ainsi l'oeil de cet appareil photographique étrange...

— Giovannino mio, encore une photo, prego, questa e l'ultima, prego, prego !

— J'aimerais aller aux champs, gambader dans les collines et garder les chèvres de mon père comme un petit satyre grec, né de l'imagination d'il Signore Gloeden...

— Giovannino mio, mille grazie, perfetto !! perfetto ! Viele danke, bello !

— "Don't move ! Smile !", he said... "Sehr Schön... Achtung, achtung... !" He was telling me that I was a young faun dancing with Dionysus, that I was a young satyr, with a wild beast's skin on my shoulders,a  young satyr with kid's horns on my head... "Achtung ! Achtung !" Il signore Gloeden, Il Barone di Taormina, il mio caro amico Wilhelm was so serious and so foccussed behind his camera that he made me laugh....

— Carrissimo Giovannino, you are so cute... Sehr schön... Bello ragzzo... Your eyes and your smile are dazzling my camera's lenses... You are my little sun, Giovannino mio !

— I am just wondering how I look like... Il Signore Barone Professore Dottore Gloeden moistened my hairs and gave them a weird form with his caressing fingers... I am wondering who I am smiling for, while looking at the lense of this strange photographic device...

— Giovannino mio, please another photograph, prego, questa e l'ultima, prego, prego !

— I would like to go to the wilderness, I would like prefer to wander through the hills while keeping a close watch on my father's goats... I am just a young Greek satyr, created by Il Signore Gloeden's imagination !

— Giovannino mio, mille grazie, perfetto !! perfetto ! Viele danke, bello !

Choisir une photo / Choosing a photograph

Les tirages des photographies de von Gloeden étaient faits sur commande, d'après des planches catalogues où les clichés originaux étaient numérotés, comme les modèles. On imagine les visiteurs de Taormina, célèbres ou anonymes, feuilletant ces planches et laissant glisser leur regard de paysages en scènes de genre, de nus en visages, de groupes en modèles isolés. Pourquoi s'arrêtaient-ils sur telle ou telle photo ? Quelles harmoniques éveillaient en eux ce visage, cette expression, la ligne de fuite de l'horizon ou la courbure d'une hanche retenant un paréo ? Quelle était la musique singulière de ces photos déplaçant le désir et son objet dans la fiction d'une Arcadie où l'alibi artistique et temporel permettait d'exprimer ce que les sociétés d'Europe du nord ne pouvaient pas encore admettre ?

Ces visiteurs du nord achetaient une, dix, vingt photos qu'il rapportaient dans leurs pays, gardaient dans leur collection personnelle, dans des albums ou exposés dans des cadres. Ils gardaient avec eux un peu du soleil sicilien, de la jeunesse et l'innocence de ces ragazzi aux charmes adolescents, une trace de ce monde idyllique où les beautés masculines pouvaient s'offrir au regard avec pudeur et sans vulgarité.  Les photos de von Gloeden donnaient plus à imaginer qu'elles ne donnaient à voir. Elles laissaient le spectateur entrer dans un monde onirique, où les jeunes modèles étaient à la fois si proches et si lointains, sur l'image et dans l'imaginaire...

Original prints of von Gloeden's photographs could be ordered from a catalogue, where miniature pics were numbered, as the models. One can imagine visitors in Taormina, famous or anonymous, browsing the catalogue and allowing their gaze to wander from landscapes to scenes de genre, from nude bodies to faces, from groups to single models. Why did they focus on a precise photograph ? What kind of harmonics did they hear while looking at a boy's face expression, at the horizon in the background, at the curve of an ankle holding a linen cloth ? What was the unique music of these photos where desire and its objects were moved into a fictional Arcadia, whose remoteness, artistic as well as temporal, allowed gay men to express what the societies of Northern Europe were not yet ready to accept.. ?

These visitors from Northern Europe were buying one, ten, twenty photographs from Gloeden and they were bringing them back to their countries, they kept them in their private collection, in elegant photobooks or exposed on the wall. Thanks to these photographs, these men kept in their heart and their memory a part of the sun of Sicilia, of the youth and innocence of these ragazzi, with their charm of teen boys; they kept a visual and a material record of this world where young male beauties could be seen with a sense of decency and without vulgarity.

Von Gloeden's photographs offered more food to the imagination than to the gaze.

They invited the viewer to enter a dreamy world, where the young models were at the same time so close and so far away, on the surface of the picture and in the remote parts of imagination...