Albert von Keller

Munich in the 1880s was arguing about the soul. Albert von Keller, a Swiss-born painter who had made his name with elegant society women in silk, joined a circle around the physician Albert von Schrenck-Notzing that investigated hypnosis, trance and the paranormal, and he began sitting in on séances.

What he saw there fed his art. Alongside fashionable portraits he painted women in states of ecstasy, swoon and death, martyrs and visions, trying to catch on canvas the fringe between waking and the beyond that so gripped his generation. Critics called it modern psychological painting, and it made him famous on both sides of the Atlantic.

In 1892 he was one of the founders of the Munich Secession, the group of artists who broke from the official salon to show on their own terms, and he served as its vice president from 1904 until his death. He kept painting the same charged, half-lit interiors into the new century, and died in Munich in 1920, the city where he had spent nearly his whole working life.