Macabre and sinister subjects in visionary art

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Dark Romanticism: From Goya to Max Ernst

Edited by Felix Krämer

Dark Romanticism: From Goya to Max Ernst focuses on the macabre and sinister subjects in visionary art dating from roughly 1790 to 1945. It includes a stellar cast of artists from the last two centuries: Géricault, Delacroix, Friedrich, Munch, Magritte and Dalí.

It starts with the art of Goya. The generous selection of Goya’s work includes prints from the ‘Miseries of War’, the ‘Caprichos’and ‘Proverbs’ suites and some of his Black Paintings, depicting witchcraft, madness and cannibalism. Ironically, though Goya proved to be a touchstone for artists in the 20th century, his Black Paintings were unknown until 1900, by which time the Romantic movement had long expired, having run parallel stylistically and topically to Goya’s dark visions.

The story continues with British artists Henry Fuseli, William Blake and John Martin. Swiss émigré Fuseli caused a sensation at Royal Academy salons with his spectacular mythological scenes and grotesque tableaux, the most famous being Nightmare. The large illustrations will leave readers admiring the quality of Fuseli’s imagination while lamenting his reliance on anatomies borrowed from Blake and reproduction prints after Michelangelo.

John Martin was one of the most important and influential of the Romantic painters, famed for his apocalyptic visions of divine destruction (seen in 2011/12 at Tate Britain). The single oil on canvas by Martin is unrepresentative and was presumably all that was available. It would have been better to locate a couple of the Martin’s mezzotint prints, as dramatic as his paintings and just as accomplished.

The special strength here is the selection of German paintings, a number from the Städel Museum collection. Although Casper David Friedrich is well known, Carus, Blechen, Lessing and Friedrich’s other followers will be new to many readers. A painting by Carl Friedrich Lessing of a ruined castle in mountains is particularly fine; its brooding decrepitude surrounded by the dank and chilly mountain inclines is convincingly depicted.

French Romanticism is well represented with Géricault, Delacroix, Scheffer, Delaroche and the Belgian Antoine Wiertz. French novelist Victor Hugo’s remarkable drawings (created by dabbing and smearing ink on paper and then extrapolating these forms as buildings, figures and landscapes) are not well known to Anglophone audiences, though in France and Germany he is increasingly being seen as a major artist. Paul Hippolyte Delaroche’s portrait of his dead wife (1845–6) is an unsettling combination of horror and eroticism. Louise Delaroche née Vernet had been the daughter of an artist and as a child had been painted by Géricault. In Delaroche’s portrait she is pale as ivory, her hair in soft tresses flowing like a departing life force, her mouth and eyes slightly open in a cruel imitation of ecstasy.

Symbolist art is represented by Arnold Böcklin, Fernand Khnopff, Max Klinger, Alfred Kubin, Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon, Félicien Rops and others. It is not always these artists’ best pictures that are included but this is more than compensated for by the inclusion of unfamiliar paintings which should be more widely known.

Most of the major Surrealist painters are included here, to which are added photographs by Brassaï and Bellmer. The book includes many film stills of films projected at the exhibition, concentrating on Expressionist and horror cinema: Nosferatu,Frankenstein,Dracula andVampyr.

The publication is divided into small sub-sets of pictures connected by movement, period or the nationality of the creator. Each group has a short text by a different author. There are short chapters on Romanticism’s links with film, literature and opera, as the arts overlap extensively in the Romantic movement, with works in one form inspiring accomplishments in others.

A fundamental problem is that the birth of Romantic movement is taken as the starting point for Dark Romanticism, although both the movement and its dark aspects have much earlier origins. Goya, Géricault and Fuseli do not come from nowhere but from a line that goes back through Salvator Rosa to Bosch, Baldung Grien and Grunewald. Clearly a study of the Romantic movement and the artists subsequently under its influence is under no obligation to survey origins but it does feel like coming into a movie after the first 30 minutes have played.

Overall, this is a worthwhile attempt to analyse a significant strand of Romantic art but one that is limited by a restricted selection of pictures and a late starting point. As it is, Dark Romanticism links Romanticism, Symbolism and Surrealism in a useful primer on the dark tendencies in fantastic art.

Dark Romanticism: From Goya to Max Ernst  edited by Felix Krämer is published by  Hatje Cantz, 2012. 305 pp., 360 illus. ISBN 978 3 7757 3373 1