Fernand Khnopff

Estate of the artist
Kunstsalon J. Littauer, Munich
Princely Collection of Thurn und Taxis, Regensburg (sale: Sotheby's, Regensburg, 16th October 1993, lot 3229)
Sale: Sotheby's London, 23rd November 2000, lot 44
Purchased at the above sale by the present owner

Khnopff's celebrated oil of Des Caresses caused a sensation at the inaugural exhibition of the Viennese Secession in 1899 (fig.1). The present reprise, executed some years later, scissors out his composition's central point: touching cheeks of the androgyne and sphinx.

Highly esoteric in its symbolism, Des Caresses has generated various interpretations (including a reading as an allegory of the mysterious Ordre de la Rose + Croix, to which Khnopff belonged). Its protagonists are key figures in the artist's unique iconography of the self: ethereal, enigmatic and profoundly erotic. Their very ambiguity points up the exquisite secrecy in which Knopff cloaked his œuvre. 'Since I have been classed once-and-for-all a Symbolist', he told Ludwig Hevesi in 1898, 'people will go to great lengths to find a hidden meaning in everything I do' (quoted in Delevoy and de Croës & Ollinger-Zinque, Ferdinand Khnopff, Brussels, 1987, p. 178)

The delicate, almost monochromatic, harmonies of the present work and its mixed media technique illustrate the technical experimentation that continued to characterise Khnopff's work into his maturity. It is likely to have been executed expressly for the aesthetic house he built in Brussels around 1900.

FIG 1: Des Caresses, 1896, oil on canvas, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels (detail)