Community as Gesamtkunstwerk: Dick Ket’s Self-Portraiture and the Debt of Epic Film

Abstract

Abstract This essay posits that Weimar-era film sets—in their evocation of Richard Wagner’s concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk—served as a previously unseen visual source for painters that in some cases pushed back against interwar aesthetics of power. Focusing on the Dutch figurative painter Dick Ket, it investigates the ways in which this artist’s self-portraits from 1930–1940 acted as a memory index of his experience of the mises-en-scènes in Fritz Lang’s 1924 epic two-part film Die Nibelungs through Langian devices such as heavy geometric patterning, leitmotifs and subjugation of the human figure to the set. Ket’s work evinces the artist’s own sensation of confinement in his parents’ home as a result of a terminal heart condition while also reckoning with Adolf Hitler’s extremist rhetoric and expansionist policies in the years that preceded the German Occupation of the Netherlands.