Elisar von Kupffer

Biography

In 1939 a twelve-sided rotunda was added to the house at Minusio. It came nine years after the painting it was conceived for had been finished, and only three years before the artist’s death.

Elisar von Kupffer was born on 20 February 1872 at the manor of Sophiental near Reval (now Tallinn), into the family of a doctor from an old Baltic German noble line. He was the third of four children and a sickly boy; at nine, by his own account, he wrote his first play, “Don Irsino”. In 1883 the family moved to the estate of Jootma, and the Baltic Empire-style manor house with its portico remained for him an image of lost paradise. He never learned Russian fluently and did not regard it as his own: his schooling in Reval coincided with the Russification policy under Alexander III.

In 1891 he entered the German Annenschule, a school in St Petersburg. Near the city, at Levashovo, he met Eduard von Mayer (1873–1960), his future lifelong partner and collaborator. In 1893 his mother died, and Kupffer drifted away from the faith in which he had been raised. He studied Oriental languages at the University of St Petersburg, transferred to the faculty of law and in 1894 passed his first examinations. At the same time, at Jootma, he wrote the play “The Dead Gods”.

In 1894 he travelled to Germany for the first time. He lived in Berlin and Munich, studying history, philosophy, ethnography and art history, and gave up his legal studies. In 1895 a collection of his poems, “Life and Love”, appeared, followed by dramas, three one-act plays and the collection “Ehrlos”.

After Mayer defended his dissertation in 1897, the two travelled together through Italy and Sicily, returned to Berlin and in 1899 set out for Italy again. Kupffer compiled the anthology “Lieblingminne und Freundesliebe in der Weltliteratur” (“Love of Favourites and Love Between Friends in World Literature”) partly as a protest against the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde in England. Adolf Brand published it in 1900. Its poems are drawn from ancient Greece, Rome, the Bible, the Arab world, Japan, Renaissance Italy, Elizabethan England and nineteenth-century Germany, and many he had to translate himself. The preface, written in Pompeii, rejected the medical theories of Krafft-Ebing and Hirschfeld: Kupffer understood same-sex love as a cultural and historical phenomenon. The book was reprinted in 1995. Later he said that he regarded it as a side task and named the founding of a religion as the main work of his life.

The idea of Clarism arose around 1900. It was conceived as a response to monism and drew on the Theosophy of Blavatsky. Love between men and the beauty of the body were seen in it as a path to the wholeness of the human being. At the same time Kupffer took the name Elisarion. In 1902 he and Mayer moved to Florence; the departure is also linked to fear of prosecution under Paragraph 175 of the German criminal code. In 1908 his study of Il Sodoma appeared, and in 1911 in Munich they founded the publishing house Klaristische Verlag Akropolis, and in Weimar a Clarist community. There followed “Hymns of the Holy Castle”, “A New Flight and a Holy Castle” and “The Unknown God” (1912). In 1913 the Brogi Gallery in Florence held the first exhibition of his paintings, and a second community appeared in Zürich. He painted and he photographed: pictures of his own body and of his models served as the basis for his paintings. Among the models were a young Piedmontese, Luigi Taricco, and a Berlin boy, Adolf Schmitz, who was killed in the war in 1916.

In 1915, because of hostility towards Germans in Italy, they left for Switzerland and settled near Locarno, first at Muralto and then at Minusio. In 1922 they obtained Swiss citizenship. Kupffer began work on the cyclorama “The Clear World of the Blessed” at Muralto. It shows dozens of nude male and androgynous figures against changing landscapes, and some of the faces resemble his own. In 1925 they bought a plot at Minusio and built the Sanctuarium Artis Elisarion. It opened on 1 August 1927 and served as home, gallery and centre of Clarism. Kupffer almost gave up literary work, and Mayer dealt with the public. Visitors included Magnus Hirschfeld, Gerhart Hauptmann and Kurt Tucholsky, in whose novel “Schloss Gripsholm” (1931) the community was mocked as the “Polysadrion”.

From 1919, when the book “3000 Years of Bolshevism” appeared, racist, antisemitic and anti-Bolshevik ideas became increasingly visible in his writings. Late in life he wrote admiring letters to Hitler, in 1940 and 1942, and tried to link Clarism with the policies of the Third Reich.

After the outbreak of the Second World War the flow of visitors fell sharply, and Kupffer’s health declined. He died on 31 October 1942 at Minusio.

After his death Mayer archived the legacy, but destroyed documents about their relationship and about their contacts with the homosexual milieu. Mayer died in 1960 and left the house to the municipality of Minusio. The building fell into decay. In 1976 the art historian Harald Szeemann took the cyclorama to Monte Verità. In 1981 a municipal cultural centre, Elisarion, opened in the former temple, and on the hill the Centro Culturale Elisarion opened, where the panorama has been shown since 1987. It was restored in 2019–2021. In 2024 the Tallinn Art Museum held the exhibition “Elisarion: Elisar von Kupffer and Jaanus Samma”.