Maneater

I was stunned.  I am endlessly fascinated by the language of art and its seemingly countless expressions that echo through the annals of time and across all verbal language barriers.  I have been in the Sistine Chapel, shared a secret with “Mona Lisa” and seen the best works from many of the greatest titans of art. But I don’t think I was ever as thunderstruck by a work of art as I was a decade ago when I rounded a corner at a sporting convention in Las Vegas, Nevada. What I saw literally took my breath away. 

I try and put the experience  in words now, but at the time it was just a raw, primitive feeling of a time before man grunted his first words. I somehow knew I was looking at the most honest work of art I had ever seen. It was unflinching, and I stood in wonder.

I was looking at Wilhelm Kuhnert’s Der Menschen Frosser, The Man Eater. You could cut its presence with an axe. You can see in this magazine layout a copy of the painting inches across and on glossy magazine paper, but I was standing two feet away and could have touched it if I dared. The composition was brutally beautiful, seven feet across, in a frame as thick as a railroad tie.  

The thick oil paint in many places looked to have been applied with a paintbrush made from the tail of an ox. Deep, thick strokes and a mixing of paint showed the confidence of an artist who knew what he wanted to say and how to say it. The painting as a standalone was epic, but the story of how it came about is even better.

Apparently, Wilhelm Kuhnert was quite a successful artist in the early 1900s living in Germany and making a tidy living. He could paint anything, but as with the best artists, he was bored making pleasing copy or art that would sell and pay the bills. He was drawn to paint wild animals, but the best he could do for reference was the animals at the zoo and they had been stripped of their wildness and were content to lay lethargically about waiting for their next meal. 

The drill back then was to paint the animal while trying to imagine it doing something worthwhile in the wild, oftentimes filling in the background with a Garden of Eden motif. I can only speculate that the artist who had painted this most honest painting I had ever seen knew that drill was a lie and that it left him craving more.

Kuhnert decided that if he was to fulfill his artistic destiny, he needed to go to Africa where the animals lived, died and killed.

For any adventurer in history, there is a trainload of naysayers—flaccid souls who I think are secretly jealous about real courage. It shines a light on their lack of it, and that is why we are talking about Kuhnert and not them.

He was laughed at. Why would he risk his life and give up his comfortable living and niceties of the upper art circles to go to the Dark Continent? It was a foolhardy death wish where certainly you would meet a horrid death from savage man or beast. And if those didn’t get you, Africa was putrid with disease and poison and hardship as a way of life or death. It was certainly not a place for a civilized and cultured man. But the naysayers’ words meant nothing to Kuhnert.

The realness for a truth-seeker such as Kuhnert is that Africa energized him, and his paintings are still considered to be all-time masterpieces of Africa art. He fell in love with the rawness of the bush and the people and animals living there. In addition to the animals, he painted some of the local people and was able to capture their beauty, grace and dignity with the touch of a paintbrush. His favorite animal was the lion, and he painted many of them earning him the nickname “Lion Kuhnert.” 

One day he was at a remote outpost when a man came running in frantically blurting what was wild gibberish to Kuhnert.  I can imagine the man glistening with sweat and fear in the bright sun—eyes tense, sinewy body trembling.  Kuhnert couldn’t figure out exactly what had driven this man to such a state, but it was likely a lot of “Gun! Gun! Simba! Simba!” that got him to grab his double rifle and follow the man. Kuhnert’s was the only gun for miles.

When they arrived a short distance away, the lion was finishing its gruesome meal—the postman. Kuhnert killed the lion, and Der Menschen Frosser is what he saw. Kuhnert’s quick, decisive killing of the lion likely saved scores of locals from the same gruesome fate as the postman. Once a lion gets a taste for easy man meat, they can do it for years leaving scores of dead and spreading terror. Der Menschen Frosser was the one painting Kuhnert never sold, also saving the lion’s skull, hide, his double rifle and the postman’s bag.

While we look at the painting with macabre fascination, I imagine he looked at it in remembrance. 

One of the many things that struck me in that painting is the lion’s nonchalant attitude to the gore strewn about him and what he had done. It meant nothing to him other than a brief stop on his endless search to fill his needy belly. He cared none that the postman he had just eaten was a man with ideas and dreams, maybe enjoyed a good joke, likely had a wife and children and was proud of his position as a postman. 

The lion, an old male outcast with sagging skin hanging on a bony frame, yet with a mane proud from being in the middle of thousands of bloody feasts. The lion could care less if it was man or a beast’s blood it licked from its paw.  His belly was full, and for now he was content. But for this poor soul of a postman, man’s greatest fear to be killed and eaten by a savage animal had come true. 

I will never forget when I first saw Der Menschen Frosser, and have never stopped thinking about it since. I studied all the books on Kuhnert, listening to his artistic voice—a voice that sang so deeply and true, apparently never missing a note.

Much of art starts as a simple thought, and I find that most of the best art is found at the edges and not “what will sell best.” I was fiddling at my sculpting table and wanted to engage deeper with Der Menschen Frosser and decided to do a commemorative bronze. I find when I sculpt anything it gives me the chance to drill deeper into the concept or the animal at hand.

I was deeply interested and wondered what I might find and feel as I took a lump of clay and turned it into a bronze.  I love gritty stuff, and this was the grittiest. Graphic yes, but so can life be when it is at its most real—raw and honest. I chose the same general setting yet thought, Let’s sculpt what was happening when Kuhnert had been called to arms minutes earlier. 

In their focused haste, Kuhnert and the native hoped to save the man being attacked, but it was already too late. The lion, his sharp hunger pains appeased with gluttony setting in as it contently finished its meal, didn’t know death was rushing toward it.  Although the sculpture captures a moment in time, that moment is timeless as the story has played out for tens of thousands of years, not only in Africa, but dark forest and wild jungle—wild places throughout time and all over the globe—when beast was king.