Self-portrait with Skeleton

Corinth painted himself in 1896 in his Munich studio, at 37, standing beside a hanging skeleton with the city rooftops out the window behind him. Painters and doctors kept skeletons like this as anatomy models, and that is exactly how he shows it, a piece of studio equipment on a stand, not a phantom. That was a quiet act of defiance. A generation of German painters, above all Arnold Böcklin, had made death a romantic figure, a fiddler or a whispering companion at the artist's shoulder. Corinth strips all that away and hangs death up in the daylight as a plain fact of the trade. He looks out at us, not at it, and behind his shoulder the ordinary Munich roofs go on as though nothing were there.