Gabriel von Max (1840-1915)
"Schlechte Zeiten" [Bad Times]
1915
oil on canvas
63 x 60 cm
Signed lower right: "G. v. Max"
Inscribed lower left: "Schlechte Zeiten"
Conserved by Andrea Rothe (formerly, Senior Conservator of Paintings, Getty Museum) and Jeanne McKee-Rothe (formerly, Conservator, Norton Simon Museum).
Catalogue Raisonné: Richter 389
Provenance:
Galerie Oskar Hermes, Munich, 1915. Gabriel von Max delivered this painting to Oskar (Oskar) Hermes on October 8, 1915.
Osker Grünhut (1874-1943), Munich, purchased 1920s
Fred S. Gruen (1908-1993), Milwaukee, Osker Grünhut's son; Annelies Gruen (nee Mayer) (1920-1915), Fred Gruen's wife
thence by descent in the family
Exhibition History:
"The Apes & Us: A Century of Representations of Our Closest Relatives," Stanford University, California, Hohbach Hall, Green Library, January 9, 2024 - June 21, 2024
Publication History:
Margaret Mary Richter, Gabriel Max: The Artist, The Darwinist and The Spiritualist, PhD dissertation, New York University, 1998 (Ann Arbor: UMI Dissertation Services, 1998), cat. no. 389, at pgs. 490-491 (not illustrated).
Jessica Riskin and Caroline Winterer, The Apes & Us: A Century of Representations of Our Closest Relatives (Stanford, California: Silicon Valley Archives/Stanford University Libraries, 2024), ill. at pg. 4.
An academically-trained painter, Gabriel von Max is perhaps best known for his naturalistic paintings of monkeys from the second half of his career, when he actually lived with a menagerie of monkeys on his estate outside of Munich; in these portraits of his pet monkeys, von Max tried to reveal their “humanity” or "humanness" as a way of evidencing the theories of Charles Darwin and Ernst Haeckel that monkeys and humans descended from a common ancestor. The Daulton Collection owns the world’s largest collection of Gabriel von Max's monkey paintings.
"Schlechte Zeiten" [Bad Times] was one of the last three paintings that Gabriel von Max completed before his death on November 24, 1915. It is likely that von Max himself was in declining health, in "bad times," when he painted this work.
