Max Klinger was born in Leipzig, Germany in 1857. He was brought up in the correct milieu of provincial German society. He was aware of a split between his paintings and his more private graphics. Klinger the painter moved sedately between a professorship in Leipzig and his country vineyard, turning out the portraits and allegories his patrons sought and trying to ignore the themes that particularly haunted him: fetishism and an erotic consciousness of death. These themes dominated his strangest and best known series of etchings.

Klinger died in 1920, after a career of prolonged and dull success. The paintings from which he earned a handsome living were promptly forgotten and his strange etchings,...