Matthias Grünewald painted the complicated, multi-paneled, many-surfaced, hinged structure known as the Isenheim Altarpiece around 1515 for the hospital chapel of Saint Anthony's Monastery at Isenheim in Alsace. The altarpiece, as shown above, is now housed in the Unterlinden Museum in Colmar, a nearby town.
The work has been on my mind because it figures in The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald, a book I recently finished rereading (and wrote about briefly here). The Emigrants is organized into four sections telling the stories of four separate individuals who have lost contact with their origins – both in a geographical and a psychological sense – due to the evil upheavals of 20th century European history.
One of the four stories is about a painter who lives in a ruinous post-industrial section of Manchester, painting 10 hours a day 7 days a week. His creative process involves rubbing each piece out dozens of times and starting it over dozens of times, never satisfied. The studio is covered in dust, and the paintings seem to be made of this same dust. The author implies that it is nothing other than the fine-ground debris of death. For this painter, finishing a piece is more the result of exhaustion than accomplishment.
In the English translation he is called Max Ferber. We find out that his parents bribed an English diplomat for the visa that allowed him to board an airplane as a child and escape Nazi Germany, but that his parents never succeeded in organizing visas for themselves and were among the early victims of the Holocaust.
When Sebald's book was originally published in German, the painter's name was Max Aurach. His story closely paralleled the real-life story of the still-living and well-known English painter Frank Auerbach. One of Auerbach's charcoal portraits was published as an illustration in the original German edition of Sebald's book. Later, when Sebald became famous and the book was about to appear in England, Auerbach denied permission for the illustration to be re-reproduced, and asked Sebald to change the character's name so that it would be less similar to his own.
Sebald's Max Aurach/Ferber only leaves his Manchester studio with great reluctance, but he does tell the narrator about an exceptional trip to Colmar to see the Isenheim Altarpiece.
That white winding-sheet rendered as reverse-waterfall is beyond belief, is it not?