Die Chaussee (The Highway), from Vier Landschaften Opus VII (Four Landscapes Opus VII)

A virtuoso printmaker, Klinger devoted a significant portion of his artistic output to producing a number of graphic series that portray dramatic moralizing narratives through inventive, perplexing, and often unsettling imagery. His approach to landscape proves to be no less compelling. In this view of a highway in the German countryside, Klinger transcribes the landscape in mottled, monochromatic tones that leach nature of its life force and turn the sky leaden. Although similar in form and subject to the landscapes of his Impressionist contemporaries, Klinger’s rendition is utterly divergent in its embrace of the uncanny and the ominous.