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)