#life escaping

[charnel-grounds]

August Brömse (1873–1925), Life Escaping, 1902

from ‘Death and the Maiden’ series

[mysterious-secret-garden]

August Brömse - Life Escaping. From the series 'The Girl and Death', 1902.

[cultofknotcraft]

Life Escaping, from the series “The Girl and Death” (1902) by August Brömse

[niewiedersehen]

August Brömse,

Life Escaping, 1902

[fetishofsilence]

Life Escaping 

from the series "The Girl and Death" (1902)

by August Brömse

Aquatint, 18 x 25.6 cm. National Gallery Prague. According to Otto M. Urban,

"The Girl and Death" is a modern variant of the Dance of Death. Death (a skeleton) plays a fantastic song on the violin; the girl listens in fascination and dances a wild dance — death accompanies her life's pilgrimage. Life becomes endless suffering for the girl, cursed by the deity; her love is fatefully led from the start by tragic steps. As a symbol of the first fruits of sin the girl, in some sort of hypnotic trance, flies through space on a great snake which — in some prints of the series — holds an apple in its mouth. The concept of the landscape evokes a sense of unreality and timelessness. One of the last prints brings the whole story up to date. The girl lies prostrate on a window-sill; the anonymous roof tops of the modern city appear in the background. [197]

References

Urban, Otto M. In Morbid Colors: Art and the Idea of Decadence in the Bphemian Lands, 1880-1914. Prague: Municipal House and Arbor Vitae Press, 2006. Plate 258.