Ein Handschuh - Opus VI

Max Klinger's Der Handschuh recounts in ten very precise etchings without text the enchanting story of a young man, presumably the artist himself, finding a lady's white glove on a roller skating rink, and becoming obsessed with it and the allure of its owner. In his dreams or imagination, the fetishised glove takes on a life of its own, grows to monstrous proportions and is pursued by a dragon, who ultimately flies off with it and takes it to the ethereal realm of Eros, personified by a cupid with insect wings. It is the most elegant and perplexing of Max Klinger's fantastical visual poems, anticipating many of the preoccupations of surrealism, decades before the term was coined.