More than 100 years after Mors Imperator caused a scandal in 1887 amid fears it mocked the German kaiser, the painting is being displayed in a state museum in Berlin, according to The Guardian.
Wrapped in a cloak with ermine fur and wearing a jagged iron crown, a hulking skeleton rests one foot on a globe and knocks over a royal throne with a dramatic flick of its ivory wrist.
Entitled Mors Imperator (“Death is the Ruler”), the German artist Hermione von Preuschen’s 1887 symbolical painting was meant to express the transience of fame and power.
But authorities feared the picture could be seen as mocking the aging German Emperor Wilhelm I, who then had recently turned 90, and refused to accept its submission to the Berlin Academy of the Arts’ annual exhibition that year.
More than 100 years after the painting’s rejection and subsequent display in the 19th-century equivalent of a pop-up gallery caused a stir in Berlin society, Mors Imperator is returning to the German capital.
From Sunday until mid-November, the 2.5-meter by 1.3-meter painting will be shown in a state institution at last, at the Alte Nationalgalerie museum.
The scandal around von Preuschen’s work illustrates how prone single-ruler autocracies can be to paranoia about hidden meanings in art. According to the Berlin exhibition’s curator, an offense against the monarchy was neither what the artist intended nor how it was perceived by its supposed target.
Born in Darmstadt in 1854, von Preuschen was a poet, world traveler and painter known for her large-scale and flamboyant historical still life pictures. At the 1896 International Women’s Congress in Berlin she gave an impassioned speech calling for women to be allowed education at artistic academies.
“Hermione von Preuschen was bold, not short of self-belief, and an early advocate of female emancipation,” said Birgit Verwiebe, an art historian. “But she was not a political person, and there is no record of her having any anti-monarchical instincts. After all, she came from nobility herself.”
