This publication undertakes an experiment: travelling back in time into a peculiar late-19th century art world. For the opulent plays staged by the Düsseldorf artists’ association Malkasten, painter Otto Erdmann slips into costume himself and turns his neo-rococo style paintings into miniature stages. Reproduced thousands of times as art prints and trading cards, they reflect a social self-image ranging between play and reality, between unbridled enthusiasm for the future and romanticised dreams of the past. Entertaining and thoroughly researched, this book seeks to understand one of the most controversial epochs in recent art history, and asks what recourse to history signifies for the art of today.