The New Testament tells of how Christ brought the daughter of
Jairus back from the dead, and in his Resurrection of the Daughter of
Jairus (1886) von Keller made of the Biblical locus the central «modern»
historical subject of his oeuvre. As if he had set out to colonize new
periods for use by painters, von Keller here explores various deep-seated
levels of consciousness. Christ appears in the guise of a hypnotist, as
it were, reviving his medium from a trance state. Von Keller’s daughter
of Jairus was based on a series of studies, of models both living and
deceased. The artist painted ‘miracles’ in a demystifying age that had
already begun to lose its awe, a process that continues to this day.
Here too, as in his observations of society, von Keller is intrigued by the
exclusive and the exceptional. He analyses miraculous occurrences in
the no-man’s-land between traditional religious thinking and the secular
thirst for knowledge. The charm of his ‘Resurrection’ painting derives
from its nuanced account of human behaviour, from the enthralling range
of von Keller’s attention to both the appearance and the emotions of the
witnesses to this miraculous event.
      Albert von Keller styled himself a sort of artist-medium and fostered
the rumour that he had painted certain of his works while unconscious,
under the influence of suggestion. By his own account, he considered
himself ‘in many ways a passive instrument for the perfection of the
creative process’. Von Keller claimed to see in the creation of a work of
art ‘a miracle every bit as marvellous as the creation of a human being;
and in the feeling of bliss attendant upon artistic production, upon the
completion of an act of creation and the ability to make something out of
nothing, the chief motivation for artistic work’. The ‘painter-psychologist
and metapsychic’, as his friend, the physician and parapsychologist
Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, called him, represented the last generation
preceding Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis.
      Lily disgeistes, the anonymous medium von Keller painted in
1895, is to this day the most enigmatic figure in the painter’s corpus.
Her countenance, pale, nervous, sensitive and slightly fraught, unites the
quintessential features of his subjects. His sympathy for his model’s
sleepwalking essence is overt; she was surely one of the figures in his
repertoire in whom he saw his own soul reflected.
      At the dawn of the 20th century, the somnambulist dancer
Madeleine Guipet caused a furore, and von Keller’s paintings of her
anticipated various Expressionist tendencies. He was plainly at pains
to inform his pictures with the fascination aroused by the nexus of
dreams and expressive dance, and to evoke in his viewers a reprise
of their enthusiasm for the actual phenomenon.