CONTENTS

Introduction

FRANCISCO DE GOYA

8.1

Goya’s Demons

8.2

The Disasters of War

JAMES ENSOR

8.3

Psychic Malaise

8.4

The Painter of Masks

8.5

The Carnivalesque:
Images of Social Morbidity and Spiritual Crisis

8.6

Madness, Mania, Melancholy:
The Artist as Observer

VINCENT VAN GOGH

8.7

Finding the Spiritual in Art

8.8

Van Gogh’s Empathic Eye

8.9

Arles: Aesthetic Advances
and Visions of Madness

8.10

Asylum

8.11

Portraits of Madness
and Soulful Self-Images

EDVARD MUNCH

8.12

Death and Life

8.13

The Frieze of Life

8.14

Female Representations:
Halos and Hysteria

8.15

Alienation, Angst, and Collective Despair

FERDINAND HODLER

8.16

“Always a Corpse in the House”:
The Search for Constancy

8.17

Symbolic Expressionism

8.18

Disillusion and Psychic Despair<

8.19

Hodler’s Parallelism

INTRODUCTION

Images of madness reflect shifts in social ideology and the changing cultural concerns of a given era. Until the Enlightenment, views of madness were attached to a fear of the supernatural and were visualized in terms of good and evil. With the Age of Reason came the recognition that insanity was a disease and that madness was a morbid condition. The mentally ill were sequestered and often subjected to experimental ‘treatments’. In visual terms, the insane were pictured as the other, diminished by their disease, and essentially lesser humans.

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries heralded modern psychiatry’s beginnings and the dawn of the moral era. But it was only in the late eighteenth century that a more humane treatment of the mentally ill emerged.

With Romanticism, in the early nineteenth century, detached sympathy gave way to a fascination with the bizarre and the uncanny. Disillusioned with the Enlightenment’s rational ideals, artists of the Romantic era turned to the imagination for their subject matter, emphasizing creative subjectivity and delving into the furthest reaches of the human mind to reveal narratives of human experience. For example, Francisco Goya used romantic imagery and realism to probe the world of inner demons and social madness.

During the latter 19th century, the term madness encompassed several disorders that could be both mental and physical; ideas of alienation and angst surged within the cultural lexicon. Madness became an expression of passionate feeling, difference, and a response to the toxicity of modern life. In fin-de-siècle Europe, concepts of degeneracy were embraced by a rebellious avant-garde forging an identity outside the so-called norm.

This chapter will examine the practices of Francisco José de Goya, James Ensor, Vincent van Gogh, Edvard Munch and Ferdinand Hodler, each of whom addressed aspects of madness by laying bare the world of inner experience. Their subjective interrogations of psychological truth, ability to locate the universal in the personal, and belief in the freedom of artistic expression helped establish the trajectory of twentieth-century modern art.

Francisco José de Goya

8.1
| Goya’s Demons

Francisco José de Goya was one of the first modern artists to address the world of the irrational in visual terms. The frontispiece of his Los Caprichos album of etchings, entitled The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, depicts the slumbering artist assailed by nocturnal monsters of his imagination: the creatures associated in Spanish folk tradition with mystery, folly, ignorance and evil. Goya’s caption for this print offers an interpretation: “Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters; united with her, she is the mother of the arts and source of their wonders.” The implication is that without rational balance, the wondrous world of the imagination can quickly slip into the realm of insanity.

Gillian Achurch, writing about the exhibition Goya and Modernity at the Pinacothèque de Paris, (“The Madness of Goya: The Father of Modern Art” (December 20, 2013) (https://www.meer.com/en/6556-the-madness-of-goya) explains,

“No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness,” so Aristotle tells us. A quick glance over Goya’s oeuvre is enough to recognize art both great and, by some definition, mad. Goya is famously often considered the first modern artist, for his concentration on depicting his own, inner thoughts and responses to the world he saw around him, rather than reflecting those of others or attempting to produce an ‘objective’ representation. What he saw, both in his private life and in the events occupying Spain, was often incomprehensible turmoil. It is unsurprising, therefore, that this is dramatically reflected in his astonishing works. The symbolism implies the dangers of withdrawing into oneself.

Within Goya’s prolific output of some 700 paintings, 900 drawings and 300 prints we find madness appearing again and again. Incarcerated lunatics roam an asylum yard,

and play fancy-dress in their cell,

cannibals gnaw on their victims,

and monsters loom over humans.

Goya’s fascination with the subject of insanity speaks to Romanticism’s emphasis on passionate feeling and self-expression. His personal experience with depression and anxiety, of feeling, as quoted in Achurch, “so bad that I don’t know if my head is on my shoulders… I don’t know what is happening,” and the delusions of madness aggravated by a severe illness at forty-six which also left him deaf catalyzed his engagement with themes of reason and unreason and the dark side of the human psyche.

The socio-political turmoil of the era, and the horrific events of Spain’s Peninsular War, which Goya witnessed first-hand, furthered his interest in exploring the fragility and ferociousness of human experience and what can occur when we are faced with the unfathomable.

8.2
| The Disasters of War

Goya’s Disasters of War series signals an abandonment of his attempts at moralizing or rationalization. He created a series of etchings highlighting the horrors of the war between France and Spain, barbaric acts beyond rational understanding. As Achurch writes,

Predating photojournalism by centuries, in these personal works which went unpublished until thirty years after Goya’s death, the artist portrays with equal attention the atrocities committed by the French troops and those of the Spanish guerrilla fighters. This is no attempt at patriotic propaganda, but a bitter record of the things of which humans are capable. Alongside the drawings that Goya produced throughout his life, these raw, monochrome prints are where we find Goya’s most vivid, frightening and touching renditions of madness.

In an address he made at the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts, Goya emphasized the importance of allowing art students to follow their imaginations. This is certainly what he did throughout his life, finding the courage to do so knowing that though the imagination creates genius, so too is it the root of insanity. For Goya, giving free rein to his imagination was the only way to explore his persistent fascination with humankind and to express his sympathy for those he saw as dehumanized Perhaps they were mad, perhaps he was mad, and perhaps the world was mad, but the monsters roamed and Goya wanted only to open our eyes.

Goya’s subjective exposés of the grotesqueness of the human condition made him a precursor of James Ensor, Vincent Van Gogh, Edvard Munch, and Ferdinand Hodler. All four artists, active on the verge of 20th-century modernism, engaged with an irrational and uncanny liminal world.

James Ensor

8.3
| Psychic Malaise

James Ensor was born in 1860 at the seaside resort of Ostend in northwestern Belgium to James Frederic Ensor, a British engineer and the Belgian Maria Catherina Haegheman.His maternal family owned a novelty shop that sold exotic curios, taxidermic specimens and souvenir masks to tourists who flocked to the city during Carnival in summer. But it was a troubled family, frequently afflicted by ill health. Ensor’s father was an outsider in Ostend, often unemployed, mentally unstable, and suffering from several addictions, mainly alcohol and heroin.

James Ensor’s early years were spent in relative isolation, making art in the small attic above the family’s curio shop. The works he made then reflect his interest in a northern naturalism that was far removed from the psychological complexity of his later paintings. From 1877 to 1880, he attended the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. However Ensor was essentially self-educated, honing his skills through the practiced study of the master drawings of Rembrandt, Callot, Watteau, Goya, and Daumier.

In Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason the philosopher Michel Foucault addresses the concept of madness and its evolution in the early Renaissance, Classical and Modern eras, describing that it once “was allowed free reign; it circulated throughout society, it formed part of the background and language of everyday experience (that one sought neither to exalt nor control…).” The insane had a role in the community, and madness was seen as intrinsic to the human condition. Madness, like death, was not romanticized but was a constant reminder of the nearness and possibility of eternal damnation. During the nineteenth century, psychic maladies were often associated with the volatility and angst experienced as an effect of modernization.

Ensor’s early images were often of interiors and family scenes. Executed in dark colours, they introduced his engagement with the intricacies of the human psyche. In his early career, the theme of psychic malaise was couched in the small dramas of domestic life. His impressionistic bourgeois interiors of the early 1880s were conveyed with the economy of a palette knife, yet still evoked interpersonal idiosyncratic behaviours. There is little doubt that the eccentricity of his domestic life marked him. The suggestion of neurosis and madness often undercut allusions to the home as the nucleus of safety and affection. Afternoon in Ostend, which shows the artist’s mother and sister at tea, suggests an uneasy encounter and foreshadows the psychological tensions of Ensor’s later theatrical spaces.

Marnin Young in “1882 -The Revolutionary Foyer” (Realism in the Age of Impressionism: Painting and the Politics of Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 165-203) writes about these earlier works by Ensor:

Afternoon in Ostend on the whole seems especially attuned to the comforts of home. Like the other paintings of the artist’s home and family, this canvas starts from an assumption of bourgeois composure within the space of the interior. Yet, there is also sense that these paintings cut against their own familiarity and the comfort with their subjects. The atmospheric effects of Ensor’s loose paint handling across the surface only heightens the sense of disconnect between these women. The absence of men from these scenes speaks of the family dynamics that underpinned the social life of these interiors. Both Ensor and his unemployed father spent large stretches of the day indoors…two Ensor men are missing from these interior spaces.

In the early 1880s, Ensor aggressively exhibited his various paintings of interiors… By 1886, these “bourgeois interiors” had made the painter’s name, and he was widely noted for them… With some notable exceptions, critics reviewing his work focused almost exclusively on the paint handling, comparing it repeatedly with French Impressionism. As early as 1882, an anonymous review in L’Art moderne described the “great quirkiness” of Ensor’s brushwork and proclaimed that he was “strongly inspired by the procedures dear to the Impressionists.” At Les XX, one critic dismissively declared that “French Impressionism dominates him,” another that he sought to “enthrone Impressionism in Belgium.” Beyond the predictable lamentations for a lost national school of painting—Ensor was haunted “by wan, second- hand memories of the French school”— critics failed to explain exactly why this embrace of Impressionism so troubled them… Ensor vehemently denied the influence of Impressionism but nonetheless insisted that the “deformations” that light subjects to line had been the key concern in his early works.

The critic Jules Destrée, for example, waxed enthusiastic over Ensor’s Afternoon in Ostend: “It has a superb intimacy and intensity of life. How well one senses the closed up apartment! How one discerns the chit-chat of the two women, one smelling her coffee with a natural gesture, the other depicted with such truth, such observation, such a modern sense.” In discussing the necessity of painting the modern world at the exhibition of Les XX in 1885, Albert Dutry used the same word to describe what advanced painting can achieve: “We must paint what is around us, as it is only from this that we can penetrate into intimacy.” As Fried points out, French critics in the 1860s consistently used both “intimacy” and “penetrating” to praise the absorption of the characters depicted in paintings. Dutry use of both terms confirms that the critical vocabulary had migrated to Belgium, and Ensor’s productions only typified these wider preoccupations.

Young continues:

In the end, Ensor’s interiors—Chez Miss (Russian Music), Afternoon in Ostend, The Bourgeois Salon, and others—sought to hold in some kind of tension, the interior as stereotyped, sentimentalized representation and the interior as a space of lived experience. This seemed to demand the production of paintings that made visible the to-and-fro between the comforts of home and the recognition of its falling into mere image.

8.4
| The Painter of Masks

Working in his cramped, stock-filled studio, Ensor was drawn to the aesthetics and symbolism of the papier maché masks sold in the souvenir shop, causing the writer and poet Émile Verhaeren to later dub him “the painter of masks.” His early interest in masks and skeletons introduced the elements of the macabre imagery that would dominate his paintings of the grotesqueries of the world as he experienced it and the darkness of humanity as a whole.

Scandalized Masks, initially exhibited as Les Masques, announced a new interest in the pictorial potential of the mask motif as a manifestation of covert things and contrivance of concealment. Here, a brightly lit interior shows a man seated at a table, a half-empty wine bottle and glass before him. A blue-spectacled shrew stands at the doorway, holding a stick like a weapon. Both figures wear long-nosed masks. The harsh lighting, the carnivalesque costuming of the woman, and the arrested action of the scene create an eclectic atmosphere of intimacy and menace.
Young discusses Scandalized Masks:

Within the more naturalistic iconography of his earlier works, the scene might be viewed as a domestic narrative of alcoholism … even if it uncannily unfolds at the time of Carnival. Yet, the painting also seems to literalize the problematic of absorptive motifs giving way to frankly facing effects. The mask was Ensor’s means of allegorizing this doubleness, and this motif, which typifies his later work, should be understood as an outwardly facing object, intended to be seen—it literally faces us—but also as a mechanism to conceal the subject from view.

Scandalized Masks is one of several domestic scenes evocative of strangeness and alienation that the artist produced over the next several years.

The cryptic Skeleton Looking at Chinoiseries painted two years later, lends itself to multiple interpretations. Is the skeleton the artist? Is the work a symbolic representation of a shopkeeper’s tawdry secrets? Or does it conceptualize the living death of madness, a notion described by Foucault as “…the head that will become a skull is already empty. Madness is the deja-la of death.”

Ensor’s father died of the effects of alcoholism in 1887, followed by the death of his maternal grandmother. The shadow of mortality that had percolated beneath the surface of Ensor’s oeuvre now assumed prominence.

In Self-Portrait with Masks, Ensor’s self-image dominates in a carnival of masks, including skulls, glaring faces, exaggerated noses, piercing eyes and mixed looks of shock, menace, fear and amusement. Clad in a red fedora adorned with flowers and feathers, the artist’s gaze directs the viewer on a tour of the claustrophobic masked crowd, always returning to his image.

Here, the motif is repeated across the scene, a symbolic critique of a two-faced bourgeois society. For Ensor and others, masking was deployed as a multi-faceted metaphor, at once playful and dark.

As the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin explains in Rabelais and His World (Bloomington: Indian University Press, 1984 (1965):

The mask is connected with the joy of change and reincarnation, with gay relativity and with the merry negation of uniformity and similarity; it rejects conformity to oneself … It contains the playful element of life; it is based on a peculiar interrelation of reality and image, characteristic of the most ancient rituals and spectacles. … It reveals the essence of the grotesque. The Romantic mask loses almost entirely its regenerating and renewing element and acquires a sombre hue. A terrible vacuum, a nothingness lurks behind it.

Ensor’s portraits of family and friends were inclined toward naive renderings or misogynistic mockery. The woman is presumably Neel Doff, the Dutch writer and publicist.

Portrait of the Artist’s Niece shows a girl who appears two-dimensional, empty, and lifeless. Leering masks surround her. Her painted face is mask-like, and behind her, a halo of light suggests an unreal space, perhaps an allusion to the theatre of life and death.

8.5
| The Carnivalesque:
Images of Social Morbidity and Spiritual Crisis

Ensor co-founded Les XX, an artist-run group initiated in 1883 by Octave Maus, a Belgian lawyer, art critic, and writer. They aimed to promote international modern art, holding regular exhibitions of works by the group’s members and invited artists.

Les XX was sympathetic to anarchist ideas, as was Ensor. They advocated for freedom of individual expression while actively promoting the social role of art. They utilized a variety of tactics, including hanging red flags outside their salon and printing the cover of their catalogue in red to represent their activities to the Belgian public as radical and revolutionary.

In 1886, four days after the closure of Les XX‘s March exhibition—which included works by members Ensor,Alfred William (Willy) Finch, Fernand Knopff, Théo van Rysselberghe, Guillaume Vogels, as well as invitees Monet, Redon, and Renoir, among others— anarchists commemorating the anniversary of the Paris Commune rioted in the streets of Liège.

Susan M. Canning writes in “The Ordure of Anarchy: Scatological Signs of Self and Society in the Art of James Ensor” (Art Journal 52, no. 3 (1993): 47–53):

On March 18, four days after the exhibition of Les XX closed … anarchists in the east of Belgium paraded through the streets of Liège to commemorate the fifteenth anniversary of the Paris Commune. The demonstration capped months of nationwide agitation for wage increases, work-time reforms, and the institution of universal suffrage. The vicious police response to the Liège event, resulting in numerous deaths, escalated national protests and crackdowns over the course of the year, ending with military control of industrial regions and the consolidation of the recently formed Parti Ouvrier Belge as a legitimate and enduring political force in the kingdom. Louis Bertrand would write at the end of the year, referring to the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune, “1886 is our année terrible, just like the year 187 was in France.”

Ensor was in the thick of things politically that year, possibly even participating in demonstrations, and he responded to the events with works both small and large over the next half-decade.

From the late 1880s onward, Ensor’s imagery grew more exaggerated and twisted. He turned to caricature in his complex commentaries on social malaise and hypocrisy.

Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 is regarded as his most significant work. The monumental canvas introduces the artist’s forte as a mordant observer of his time and declares his leftist leanings. Apart from its imposing ten by 15-foot scale, the frenzied work is jarring in form and content. Strident colour animates the agitated crowd. Among them is the figure Ensor, personified as Christ, riding an ass and barely discernible in the crowd of military bands, masked marchers, historical figures and politicians of all persuasions. The work exudes the madness of crowds, social deviancy and religious indecency. It conjures up the festivity of the Carnival of Ostend and turns it on its head.

Suspended above the obscured Christ figure is a banner which reads “Vive La Social” (Long live Socialism) and a poster announcing “Fanfares Doctrinaires Toujours Réussi” (doctrinal fanfares always succeed). The stacked configuration of the crowd on the viewing stand on the other side is surreal, a metaphor for mounting madness. The distorted faces and uniform stare are demonic, conveying twisted spirits. But this was not a celebration of socialist and artistic politics. Ensor was striking out against the crushing of individual freedoms in a panoptic critique of institutional control.

There are comparisons to the Flemish Renaissance painter Brueghel worth noting. For one, the composition compels a reading that unfolds in time, as we decipher the pictorial pattern. In Brueghel’s The Fight Between Carnival and Lent, disparate characters animate the cacophonous scene, from Carnival’s corpulent figuration to Lent’s emaciated personification. Carnival embodies the three great excesses of carnival: food (and drink), sex and violence. He is Indulgence personified, and also Folly, a piper to the crowd of frenzied revellers.

The Carnival is everyday material life; Lent is attired as a thin nun with severe countenance; she is the antidote to Indulgence. She is Abstinence, and she is losing. Elsewhere, people give alms and go to church, and the clergy are conspicuous among them (by the time of this painting, 1559 the clergy were at the forefront of campaigns against Carnival).

Bruegel does not seem to lean in favour of one side or another. Unlike Ensor’s work, this is not a mortality painting. The folly of Carnival simply highlights life after the Fall, the reign before the Second Coming. It is life as inherently foolish.

Ensor’s works frequently featured people (clergy, kings, the bourgeoisie) vomiting, urinating, or defecating as an allusion to the crudity of their actions. Canning states, “Ensor as Christ triumphantly enters Brussels in the midst of a Mardi Gras celebration, while on a balcony in the background revelers vomit and defecate on a banner bearing the Vingtist emblem ”art.”

Canning compares the “moral satire” of this work to others painted during the same period:

In The Strike, or Massacre of the Fishermen of Ostend Ensor turns his attention to contemporary events. This large composite drawing refers to the August 1887 strike called by Ostend fishermen to protest the use of their fishing areas by the British. In the course of the strike, several fishermen were killed. In his drawing, Ensor merges reality with fantasy as he juxtaposes the bloody repression by the police with the imagined revenge of the townspeople, who defecate or vomit fish on the invaders. Whereas the men and women of Ostend are given heroic poses, the police are shown as brutal agents of state authority who surround and overwhelm the small group of protesters, slaughtering all who stand in their way.

In The Strike, the scatological acts as an equalizing element, raising or lowering all to the same level. At the same time, Ensor associates the vulgar aspects of defecation, elimination, and vomit with an instinctual, unrefined state, a way of living, which in the artist’s view appears more in tune with the natural order of things than the artificial leisure of the bourgeoisie or the violent actions of a repressive state. Like the anarchists whose beliefs he shared, Ensor sought in these works to replace the values of the old social order with representations of a new, more elemental society based on natural law and on harmony among classes.

After 1888 Ensor employed exaggeration, distortion, and caricature as well as scatological references to comment upon a society which he saw as conformist, conservative, and hypocritical. As these images grew more political, Ensor’s individualist ideology assumed a more anarchistic tone. Like many of his contemporaries, Ensor never publicly proclaimed his political views, but he associated with anarchists from the beginning of his career.

Ensor first learned of the theories of Elisde Reclus, the geographer and anarcho-communist, in the late 1870s when he came to Brussels to study at the Academy. Later, in 1886, Ensor read excerpts of Prince Kropotkin’s Words of a Revolutionary in the Brussels avant-garde journal l’Art moderne. While these contacts educated Ensor on the fundamentals of anarcho-communist theory, at Les XX he learned the strategies of anarchist action. Les XX had declared themselves an anarchist group when they formed in 1884, and throughout their ten salons they utilized a variety of tactics, including hanging red flags outside their salon and printing the cover of their catalogue in red to represent their activities to the Belgian public as radical and revolutionary. Like the anarcho-communist theorists, Les XX did not outline a specific way for artists to visualize their political beliefs. Instead, the group proclaimed the freedom of individual expression while actively promoting the social role of art. Although in agreement with the socialist goals for class equality and the collective ownership of the means of production, anarcho-communist theory rejected the socialist model of collectivity. Instead, they called for small associations of individuals to form into harmonious federations. In anarchist theory, the free individual became an agent for social change. The anarchist sought an ideal order which would result in a natural world founded upon the harmony between the individual and society, a “life without masters” as Reclus termed it, where a social accord would arise “from the free association of individuals and groups, conforming to the needs and interests of each and all.” In the anarchist’s view, until this ideal order was created, each individual must continue to struggle against all forms of political, economic, and personal authority by means of direct action or “propaganda by the deed.”

Canning notes that Alimentation doctrinaire (Doctrinal feeding) is even more explicit in its assessment of social, political, and religious deceit than The Strike, or Massacre of the Fishermen of Ostend.

As indicated in this print, Ensor addresses the beholder in an aggressive, inflammatory way. He bares the buttocks of the political, military, and religious leaders of the Belgian state while titling the scene with a plaque and subtitling it with cards to underscore his point. He also inverts the scatological referent. Rather than a sign of the natural power is enfranchised lower class, excrement becomes a symbol of the foul-smelling, anal processes of the ruling order. Here, as the Flemish say, “zij schijten in een pot” (they all shit in the same pot).

Alimentation doctrinaire is Ensor’s most overt political statement and his most direct use of scatological imagery. By the mid-1890s, when his art began to sell and he gained some critical and public acceptance, Ensor’s use of scatological imagery declined. While he continued to make scatological references in later works, they are not as confrontational as the images discussed here. Just as the anarchists turned in the 1890s to a more constructive and less destructive model for social change, so too does Ensor’s criticism of society grow more general and less abusive. Yet even with the artist’s mellowing, the ordure of anarchy that acts as a sign for his sexually repressed, alienated, and foolish self and for his personal revolt against social and political repression remains fresh.

Mark Leonard and Louise Lippincott in “James Ensor’s Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889: Technical Analysis, Restoration, and Reinterpretation” (Art Journal 54, no. 2 (1995): 18–27) provide an informed formal and technical analysis of the painting when it was purchased by the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

It is essential to recall that Ensor was a consummate draftsman, and Christ’s Entry into Brussels must be seen in comparison with his own graphic works, particularly Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem. It is revealing to observe the way in which the calligraphic notations of the crowd from the drawing have been translated into similar shorthand notations in paint in Christ’s Entry into Brussels.

It is clear that Ensor considered himself the heir to a Northern tradition of draftsmanship that looked back to Rembrandt (the similarities between Ensor’s prints and Rembrandt’s etchings are notable), and the importance of underdrawing to the creation of a work of art has even deeper roots within the earliest traditions of Flemish painting and manuscript illumination.

Ensor used his underdrawing as a strong guide for the painting. In a sense Christ’s Entry into Brussels could be considered to be an enormous colored drawing. Ensor carefully filled in the lines of his extensive drawing and was certainly not prone to bursts of spontaneity or change. In fact, aside from the changes within the inscriptions of the banners, there are virtually no major pentimenti to be found within Christ’s Entry into Brussels. In a detail from the lower right of the painting, it is possible to see that bordering colors of paint do not overlap, or as in the profile of the head, even touch. Ensor simply left the bare ground visible between the outlines of the underdrawing. The silhouetted effects of the forms are heightened by this careful and controlled handling of the paint.

Ensor’s palette in Christ’s Entry into Brussels was actually quite straightforward; he favored the use of pure colors and only rarely resorted to mixtures of any type. For example, a cross section taken from the red feather just below the signature showed that it was painted on top of the green background. Three simple layers were found: the lead white of the ground, the pure emerald green of the background, and the pure vermilion of the red feather. In the lower-right corner of the picture, underneath the podium, where the head of the figure identified as Ensor’s aunt overlaps a blue stripe in her costume, the flesh tone is a simple mixture of vermilion, chrome yellow, and lead white. The blue is a pure Prussian blue. It is important to note that all of the pigments used were standard artist’s pigments of the period. Media analysis suggested that these were straightforward oil colors…. Analysis of all of the cross-section samples taken from Christ’s Entry into Brussels supported the fact that development of complicated or overlapping layers of paint was not part of Ensor’s working method. The paint is very thick in many areas of the picture, but the layer structure is actually quite simple; the colors were applied in single strokes, simply and directly.

While Ensor retained possession of Christ’s Entry into Brussels for over sixty years, he reworked a number of details within the picture. Some of the basic analytic techniques commonly used to sort out the later changes actually revealed very little as a result of the nature of the materials that Ensor used in the painting.

Ensor’s The Intrigue which he painted several years later, is yet another portrayal of humanity gone mad. The faces are at once realistic and surreal, a comment on the depravity ordinarily hidden behind the facade of everyday appearances. Coarsely painted in clashing hues of red, green, yellow, blue, and white, the work describes a carnivalesque culture, discordant and dark. It is a veiled critique of the “mercurial speculators” who were bringing about the ruin of Ostend through modernization. His writings and art reveal that he sought a return to cultural unity, to a Belgium untainted by commercialism, tourism, and industrialization. “Let us re-establish our pure and natural carnivals…those which included greatcoats of arms and red-lipped prostitutes, ostrich plumes and wooden shoes.” The Intrigue speaks to the collapse of familial and communal bonds in a society increasingly centred on materiality.

In some respects, The Intrigue also references Hieronymus Bosch in notions of satanic evil and the end of the world. There are thematic equivalences to be made between Ensor’s carnivalesque madness and Bosch’s Ship of Fools, for example, sailing through a landscape of superficial pleasures while demonic forces anticipate the end at hand.

8.6
| Madness, Mania, Melancholy: The Artist as Observer

Diane Karp writes in “Madness, Mania, Melancholy: The Artist as Observer” (Philadelphia Museum of Art Bulletin 80, no. 342 (1984): 1–24):

The enlightenment of the public to the complicated workings of the human psyche opened a whole new interior landscape to the scrutiny of the artist’s eye, a landscape that had not escaped his vision in the past, but one that was becoming increasingly acceptable. Demons Ridicule Me, a powerful etching by James Ensor, is a frightfully moving self-portrait of the artist surrounded by phantasmagorical demons that claw and pull at him.

In comparison to the prints by Martin Schongauer or Lucas Cranach, the depiction is not of a saint… but of a mere mortal. The artist presents himself in a state of compromise, a human being tormented by his own demons, oppressed and pursued by the enemy within.

Ensor’s self-portrait exemplifies the self-doubt and emotional malaise that occurred at the end of the nineteenth century, marked by a proliferation of exotic religious movements and other manifestations of spiritual crisis. There was a fear that the golden glow on the horizon toward which nineteenth-century man had pointed with scientific-technological pride was perhaps not the bright glow of the rising sun but the waning light of the sun setting on the nineteenth century, leaving goals and hopes unfulfilled in the darkness.

Vincent Van Gogh

8.7
| Finding the Spiritual in Art

Vincent van Gogh’s remarkable contribution to art history has often been viewed through the overarching lens of his mental illness. Yet the context of his artistic development, the social attitudes toward degeneracy and how his art shaped his life are essential to our understanding of his legacy. Perhaps most important is understanding his creative intentionality beyond his illness. Recent research has revealed the extent to which the artist assiduously honed his skills through a self-directed program and how his working methods were far more methodical than previously understood.

Vincent van Gogh was born on March 30, 1853, in Groot-Zundert, the Netherlands, to Théodorus van Gogh, a Calvinist pastor, and Anna Cornelia Carbentus. He was the first of six surviving children, second to a stillborn brother also called Vincent, whose name-inscribed tombstone haunted the artist’s early childhood. His younger brother Théo was born in 1857. The relationship between the two was close and life-spanning. Their correspondence maps out the narrative of the artist’s life, beginning in 1872 when Vincent was nineteen and Théo fifteen and comprises more than 650 letters.

Until the age of twenty-five, Van Gogh worked at several futile jobs—as an art seller, unpaid teacher, minister’s assistant, and book clerk. In 1878 he was awarded a preaching appointment in the Borinage coal mining region, arriving in December and staying ten months. It was a harrowing experience which influenced his spiritual beliefs and inspired his aesthetic interests.

In his first letters from Borinage to Théo, Van Gogh described the booming area, its scenery and the local people as “full of character … and reminiscent of Bruegel’s medieval paintings …The people are completely black, like chimney sweeps. Their houses could be better called huts, scattered along the sunken roads and against the slope of the hills. At first sight everything around it has something dismal and deathly about it. The workers are emaciated and pale due to fever, and they look exhausted and haggard, weather-beaten and prematurely old, the women generally sallow and withered.”

Nellie Hermann, the author of The Seasons of Migration, a novel about Van Gogh’s ten months stay (1878-1879) in the coal-mining village of Petit Wasmes in the Borinage region of Belgium, writes in Paris Review (Idle Bird, June 10, 2015, https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/06/10/idle-bird/)

In October of 1879, Theo van Gogh went to visit his brother, Vincent, in the Borinage coal-mining district of Belgium. Theo was en route to Paris, where he had business to conduct as an art dealer; Vincent was doing self-appointed missionary work… Theo, upset by Vincent’s appearance—he had given away nearly all of his clothes to the miners, and had ceased bathing—told him, “You are not the same any longer.” He felt that Vincent was wasting his time in this squalid place, and suggested that he leave to take up a different trade.

Angry at his brother’s inability to understand him, Vincent wrote a letter to Theo on October 15 that would be the last for ten months. The brothers had been writing letters to each other almost unceasingly since 1872, when Vincent was nineteen and Theo fifteen. This would be the first and deepest rupture between them, a silence that would never repeat itself. Referring to Theo’s accusation of “idleness,” Vincent wrote with bitterness:  “I am not sure it would be right to combat such an accusation by becoming a baker, for instance. It would indeed be a decisive answer (always supposing that it were possible to assume, quick as lightning, the form of a baker, a barber or a librarian); but at the same time it would be a foolish answer, more or less like the action of a man who, when reproached with cruelty for riding a donkey, immediately dismounted and continued his way with the donkey on his shoulders.”

Theo’s visit came at a particularly vulnerable point for Vincent. After almost a year in the dark and poverty-stricken landscape of the Borinage, he was losing any clarity he had about what his life was for. He had brought himself to the furthest limits of his Christian understanding trying to help the destitute community he found there, giving them all of his money and clothes, moving out of the comfortable home he was living in and into a run-down abandoned miner’s hut, trying to live like them and care for them as Jesus would have, and yet it had come to nothing—no one was saved. The break from his brother was only the last deepening of an isolation that had been growing for years. Vincent was wrestling, at base, with who he was; he was struggling to understand the dissonant elements of himself, the religious man and the artist, and the ways they might combine. He was frightened of the spiritual void he might confront if he gave up his religious life, yet he had known no other life. The deep silence of those ten months over the winter of 1879—more than any outside accounts of him or what he would later write of the time—speaks to the profound struggle of this, the most significant period of transition in his life.

In mining country, van Gogh followed Christian teaching literally to the letter—to the dismay of his father and other pastors on the missionary committee—behaving, truly, as if he were Jesus Christ, sacrificing all he had. But in the end, after he had given away everything and was sleeping on the floor of his abandoned hut, feverish and delirious, barely preaching anymore, the townspeople began, as people would for the rest of his life, to think him mad. Enormous explosions rocked the mines and he had nothing to give the people to help, but still he ran from hut to hut, tearing up his remaining clothes to use for bandages. Then Theo came to visit and berated him, completing his isolation and despair.

At some point during the winter after Theo’s visit Vincent walked some seventy kilometers from the Borinage to Courrieres, a town just across the French border; his aim was to see the painter Jules Breton, whom he admired, and whom he had heard had recently moved there. As he wrote months later, “I had undertaken the trip to find some kind of work … I would have accepted anything. But after all, perhaps I went involuntarily, I can’t exactly say why.” The trip seems to have been an artistic pilgrimage, a way of breaking free from the darkness of the mines and the religious life that held him there. He was reaching, however unconsciously, for something concrete to hold onto—confirmation, perhaps, of the dawning of his call to art. Prior to this time, Vincent had never thought of himself as an artist – he was always involved with art and artists, but always as an admirer rather than a creator. In the Borinage, he began to draw more earnestly, and it was after his time there that he began his study to become the artist we know.

It took him a week to get to Courrieres, where Breton lived. Vincent walked through freezing rain and slept in haystacks and woodpiles, waking up each morning in frost. But when he finally got to Breton’s house, he could not get himself to enter. “The outside of the studio was rather disappointing,” he wrote later: “it [had] … an inhospitable, chilly and irritating aspect … But what shall I say of the interior? I was not able to catch a glimpse, for I lacked the courage to enter and introduce myself.” He walked around the town, searching for some trace of Breton or his work, but found nothing concrete. He had no more money and nothing else to do, so he turned around and walked back.

Despite the seeming failure of his pilgrimage, the journey served the purpose Vincent originally hoped that it would. As he wrote to Theo,
“Though this trip was almost too much for me and I came back overcome with fatigue, with sore feet, and quite melancholy, I do not regret it, for … one learns to take a different but correct view of the hardships of real misery … Well, even in that deep misery I felt my energy revive, and I said to myself, in spite of everything I shall rise again: I will take up my pencil, which I have forsaken in my great discouragement, and I will go on with my drawing. From that moment everything has seemed transformed for me; and now I have started and my pencil has become somewhat docile, becoming more so every day.”

In taking up that pencil, Van Gogh did not turn away from the labourers he’d worked among. “I should be happy if someday I could draw them,” he wrote, “so that these unknown types would be brought before the eyes of the people.” Realizing that art could be the conduit to express his passion for religion, the underdog, and beauty cemented his commitment to creative expression.By the fall of 1880, Van Gogh had broken the silence with Théo, seeking his brother’s understanding of the paralyzing effects of his mood disorders. The analogy he employs is revelatory:

A caged bird in spring knows quite well that he might serve some end; he is well aware that there is something for him to do…What is it? He does not quite remember. Then some vague ideas occur to him, and he says to himself, “The others build their nests and lay their eggs and bring up their little ones”; and he knocks his head against the bars of the cage. But the cage remains, and the bird is maddened by anguish.
“Look at that lazy animal,” says another bird in passing, “he seems to be living at ease.” Yes, the prisoner lives, he does not die; there are no outward signs of what passes within him—his health is good, he is more or less gay when the sun shines. But then the season of migration comes, and attacks of melancholia—”But he has everything he wants,” say the children that tend him in his cage. He looks through the bars at the overcast sky when a thunderstorm is gathering, and inwardly he rebels against his fate. “I am caged, I am caged, and you tell me that I do not want anything, fools! You think I have everything I need! Oh! I beseech you liberty, that I may be a bird like other birds!” A certain idle man resembles this idle bird.

8.8
| Van Gogh’s Empathic Eye

In 1881, Van Gogh moved back to his parent’s home in Etten, falling in love with his widowed cousin Kee Vos, whose rejection devastated him. The subsequent family discord spurred his move to The Hague in December 1881, where he studied painting with his cousin-in-law Anton Mauve and became involved with a homeless pregnant prostitute named Clasina (Sien) Hoornik.

Van Gogh would only end up spending three weeks with Mauve who could not tolerate his erratic behaviour. But he gave Van Gogh money to rent and furnish his own studio. Van Gogh was appreciative of Mauve’s short tutelage and mentioned him in 152 letters. Vincent’s determination to marry Sien and support her daughter and unborn child scandalized his family. Out of concern for his mental health, his father sought to commit him to an asylum.

Van Gogh’s evocative, empathic depictions of Sien are portraits of a woman driven to the brink. He described his relationship with her in a letter to Théo in 1882: “I never had such a good assistant as this ugly, faded woman. In my eyes she is beautiful, and I find in her exactly what I want; her life has been rough, and sorrow and adversity have put their marks upon her-now I can do something with her.” When he left her the following year, at Théo’s urging, Van Gogh abandoned the only domestic relationship of his lifetime.

From late 1883 to 1886, Van Gogh lived in Nuenen, a village in the rural Dutch province of North Brabant, where his father had a parsonage and then Antwerp. Carol Zemel has described that despite his unhappiness, he was idealistic about country life. “I for my part,” he wrote, “often prefer to be with people who do not even know the world, for instance, the peasants, the weavers, etc., rather than being with those of the more civilized world. It’s lucky for me.” (“The ‘Spook’ in the Machine: Van Gogh’s Pictures of Weavers in Brabant” (Art Bulletin 67 no. 1 (March 1985): 123-137).

He was fascinated by the weavers who worked from their homes and produced numerous paintings and drawings of them between January and July 1884.

Van Gogh’s empathic nature and his compassion are evident in these works which capture the weavers’ grim, mind-dulling work. But his approach to his subject is also unexpected. Rather than focusing on the weavers portrayed, his scenes are stripped of extraneous and personal detail, fusing worker and work instrument into one.

Zemel writes:

In December, 1883, after two difficult years in The Hague and three lonely months in provincial Drenthe, Vincent van Gogh returned to his father’s parsonage in Nuenen, a village in the rural Dutch province of North Brabant. Despite his own unhappiness, he was idealistic about country life. “I for my part,” he wrote his brother Theo a month after he arrived, “often prefer to be with people who do not even know the world, for instance, the peasants, the weavers, etc., rather than being with those of the more civilized world. It’s lucky for me.” Almost immediately, Van Gogh began to depict the local weavers at their looms, producing approximately thirty drawings, watercolors, and oil paintings of them between January and July, 1884.”

In The Weaver: The Whole Loom, Facing Front, a painting dated May, 1884, the loom and weaver are the single important form. Firmly focused on work or the instruments of labor, and lacking anecdote or extraneous detail, pictures like these and others in the series are virtually emblems of an archetypal, artisanal trade. So Van Gogh initiated his homage to Brabant workers and artisans. But for the modern viewer, at least, these images can also invite less celebratory and even disquieting readings. For rather than the weaver and his skills, it is the loom and its structure that dominate these images, and the weaver is reduced, it seems, to a mere accessory of the monumental machine.

When they were first exhibited in Rotterdam in 1903 and 1904, critic Albert Plasschaert admired the sense of “communication between the object and the encaged man working in it”; and N. H. Wolf was moved by the representation of “unremitting activity” and “the tragedy of labor which man has in common the beast.”… Half a century later in 1953, Carl Nordenfalk wrote: “Van Gogh presents the weaver as a victim held fast in the spiked jaws of the loom, or a captive in a medieval instrument of torture. The social significance is quite unmistakable. Still, this is one possible explanation: the paintings also possess a tender, intimate atmosphere.” Nordenfalk notes the pictures’ “unmistakable social significance,” but he scarcely explains this interpretation and leaves it unrelated to the specific conditions of Van Gogh’s time, place, or experience… [T]hey nevertheless set historical factors aside, and they do not explore the pictures’ unusual and ungainly features – the remote, impassive figures, the starkness of the designs, and their unexpected emphases.

It is precisely these qualities which signal that there is more here and that call for a closer look. For the troubling elements in these images, I believe, are bound to Van Gogh’s own understanding and experience of the Brabantine weavers’ conditions and circumstances. They mark the point at which the artisans’ situation, as he saw it, no longer meshed comfortably with his expectations or general assumptions about country life. And as such, they disclose an unsettling gap at the intersection of personal experience and cultural ideology.

The series, moreover, is problematic, for it does not set out a single position or attitude. In many respects, these pictures suggest reverence for artisanal traditions. But they also tug in another direction that erodes any clear-cut notion of reverence or uncomplicated homage. If we consider them within two historical frameworks – the condition of the Nuenen weavers, on the one hand, and the nineteenth-century cultural nostalgia for artisanry, on the other, they enjoyed nowhere near the wealth or well-being of the craftsmen in large textile centers like Leiden in Holland. In the nineteenth century, however, capital investment, industrialization, widening markets, and entrepreneurial demands substantially altered that rural commerce and the artisan’s way of life.

Many artists and writers – Dickens in Hard Times (1854), Charlotte Bronte in Shirley (1849) – dramatized the oppressive conditions that developed in mill towns and factories, but others expressed their dismay at the changes in terms of a retrospective ideal, harnessing their anger to a nostalgic legend of ‘what once had been.’ The legend was in many ways only that – a fable or fantasy, but it resounded with ideological conviction and generated a widespread literary and pictorial repertoire.

It is the loom, then, not the weaver, that we encounter with unusual intimacy in Van Gogh’s pictures, and the tool, not the task, that we see… in Van Gogh’s image the weaver has become the tool, and the loom the locus and embodiment of artisanry. Van Gogh’s friend, the artist Anthon van Rappard, who shared his interest in worker and artisanal subjects, apparently objected to the inversion of hierarchies and the treatment of the figure in these images.

Van Gogh’s letter in reply – the only document that discusses his expressive strategies and intentions in detail – is a telling defense. “. . . I did include the figure in the drawing after all,” he admitted to Van Rappard, “But what I wanted to express by it was just this: When that monstrous black thing of grimed oak with all those sticks is seen in such sharp contrast to the grayish atmosphere in which it stands, then there in the center of it sits a black ape or goblin or spook that clatters with those sticks from early morning till late at night. And I indicated that spot by putting in some sort of apparition of a weaver, by means of a few scratches and blots, where I had seen it sitting. Consequently I hardly gave a thought to the proportions of arms and legs.”

The letter offers no apology for disproportionate figures rendered as mere “scratches and blots.” On the contrary, this was deliberate, for according to Van Gogh, it was the loom, not the weaver, that had to speak. He continued: “When I had finished drawing the apparatus pretty carefully, I thought it was so disgusting that I couldn’t hear it rattle that I let the spook appear in it. Very well – and let us say it is only a mechanical drawing – all right, but just put it beside some technical design for a loom – and mine will be more spectral all the same, you may be sure of that.”

Van Gogh’s Weavers convey a complexity that touches upon social critique. His empathic personality, like his spirituality, undoubtedly influenced his early work, particularly his mundane images of humble peasants. Although he felt forsaken by organized religion and never returned to it, van Gogh did not abandon his spirituality, telling Théo, “I think it is a splendid saying of Victor Hugo’s ‘Religions pass away, but God remains.’”

Van Gogh applied himself to sketching multi-figured compositions, studying from textbooks and creating live drawings. For example, he frequently visited the de Groot family at their mealtime to observe them as they ate, making multiple compositional studies before completing his controversial painting of them, The Potato Eaters, in 1885.

The Potato Eaters is a sombre-toned painting of the peasant family at their frugal dinner. The figures are crudely rendered and distorted; their abject poverty is sensed and seen. Van Gogh was convinced of the strength and moral significance of this painting, so much so that he believed it would afford entry into the Parisian art market. Instead, at best, its reception was reticent, even Theo criticizing its murky, unmodern palette.

In 1886 Van Gogh moved to Antwerp, where he lived in poverty. He went to museums where he was particularly drawn to Peter Paul Rubens and studied Japanese ukiyo-e woodcuts. Not long after he discovered the woodcuts, he determined to buy inexpensive Japanese prints, acquiring over six hundred from an art dealer in Paris. His interest in Japonisme would provide a lasting aesthetic and conceptual influence.

Charles Blanc’s treatise on colour absorbed him. He began investigating the visual language of complementary colours in his flower paintings, developing a chromatic vocabulary that would drive his later style. That same year the effects of excessive drinking and a diagnosis of gonorrhea hospitalized him through February and March. When he recovered, he took the higher-level admission exams at the Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp and, in January 1886, matriculated in painting and drawing. He was defiant and rebellious of the traditional teaching methods, was expelled from the academy and left for Paris in March 1886.

He worked at the studio of Fernand Cormon that spring, meeting fellow students Émile Bernard, Louis Anquetin and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec at Julien “Père” Tanguy’s paint shop, where he also became familiar with paintings by Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, thus fleshing out his exposure to Impressionist work seen at Théo’s gallery on boulevard Montmartre.

In the Fall of 1887, Paul Gauguin returned from Martinique with new exotic works for the Parisian market, which Théo and Vincent saw on display at the apartment of Emile Schuffenecker. The Van Gogh brothers were smitten, acquiring a painting and several drawings. This encounter catalyzed van Gogh’s decision to leave Paris for Arles and his big dream of establishing a studio of the south, a utopian community of artists.

8.9
| Arles: Aesthetic Advances and Visions of Madness

Van Gogh arrived in the south of France in February 1888. In Arles, he “let (himself) go.” His early works there were rarely figural, yet always evoked a dynamic presence that is reminiscent of the emotional expressionism of his peasant paintings. He developed his signature style, characterized by intense colours and energetic brushstrokes.

Judy Sund writes in “The Sower and the Sheaf: Biblical Metaphor in the Art of Vincent van Gogh” (Art Bulletin 70, no. 4 (December 1988): 660-676):

Van Gogh was especially drawn to the parables, which couch Christian thought in everyday incident, and in his work he aimed to communicate meaning within similarly mundane contexts. In so doing, he took Jean-Francois Millet as a model.

In 1883 …Van Gogh told his brother: “I see that Millet believed more and more firmly in ‘Something on High.’ He spoke of it in a way quite different than, for instance, [our] Father does. He left it more vague, but for all that, I see more in Millet’s vagueness than in what Father says.”

Later in life, reprising the motif of the sower, Van Gogh articulated his altered perception: “For I see in the sower a vague figure fighting like a devil in the midst of heat to get to the end of his task. I see the image of death, in the sense that humanity might be the corn he’s reaping. So it is, if you like, the opposite to that sower I tried to do before with a sun flooding everything with a light of gold…It is an image of death, as the great book of nature speaks of it.”

Between 1888 and 1889. Vincent painted five canvases with sunflowers in a vase, with three shades of yellow “and nothing else.”

Van Gogh wrote to Theo about the sunflower paintings that were hung in the bedroom of the house he rented. “The room you will have then, or Gauguin if he comes, will have white walls with a decoration of great yellow sunflowers. In the morning, when you open the window, you will see the green of the garden and the rising sun, and the road into the town. But you will see these great pictures of sunflowers, 12 to 14 to the bunch, crammed into this tiny boudoir with its pretty bed and everything else dainty.”

Paul Gauguin joined Van Gogh in Arles in October 1888 and they worked alongside one another for two months. In December, on the heels of a volatile argument Van Gogh suffered the first in a series of nervous collapses. This was the infamous event which resulted in the severing of part of his ear.
At the end of 1888, following his self-mutilation, and again the following February, Van Gogh was admitted to the hospital at Arles suffering from delusions of persecution.

Sund elaborates,

His self-described affliction was a melancholic “aversion to life” (LT592). Though his spirits gradually lifted, the artist now lived under the shadow of his illness, and within the isolation of the asylum, his thoughts sometimes turned to death – “the great journey to that other hemisphere of life whose existence we only surmise” (W5) – as a promising alternative to earthly unhappiness. Given the bleakness of Van Gogh’s surroundings (LT592) and the uncertainty of his future, the “thoughts of suicide” reported by his doctor (LT602a) are not surprising. Even at the peak of his productivity in Arles he considered death with an equanimity born of belief in a world beyond it; in summer 1888, for instance, Van Gogh observed:

“Is the whole of life visible to us, or isn’t it rather that this side of death we see only one hemisphere? Painters dead and buried speak to . . . succeeding generations through their work. Is that all, or is there more to come? Perhaps death is not the hardest thing in a painter’s life. For my own part, I declare I know nothing whatever about it, but looking at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots representing towns and villages on a map. Why, I ask myself, shouldn’t the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on a map of France? Just as we take the train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star.” (LT506)

In January 1889, Van Gogh left the hospital in Arles. Over the next few months, he painted furiously but sporadically as he continued suffering mental breakdowns.

Throughout 1889 Van Gogh experienced recoveries and lapses. In the spring of 1889, he voluntarily admitted himself to the private sanatorium of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole at Rémy, where he stayed for a year. When able, he continued his paintings of landscapes. When his attacks returned, often triggered by the experience of being outdoors, he would confine himself to his room, sometimes revisiting his earlier works or basing new ones on other artists’ paintings.

Vojtěch Jirat-Wasiutyński writes in “Vincent van Gogh’s Paintings of Olive Trees and Cypresses from St.-Rémy” (Art Bulletin 75 no. 4 (December 1993): 647-670):

A sick, broken man, he retreated into the voluntary protective custody of the asylum of St.-Paul-de-Mausole at St.-Rémy. The artist had acknowledged on a number of occasions, most recently in Arles in the late summer of 1888, that he, like many creative contemporaries, lived with “madness” as their burden in a decadent society. He also believed that he could control and perhaps heal this aspect of his personality. Now, by entering the asylum, he gave that task to professional caretakers; at the same time, he left the city of Arles for a retreat in the Provencal countryside. Van Gogh considered the countryside to be a rejuvenating antidote to the enervating decadence of the modern city. One of the first motifs that he painted in St.-Rémy was a field of wheat behind the asylum, which he could see from his cell window. The walled-in field set amid enclosing hills in the Mountainous Landscape, 1889, presents a striking contrast to the earlier views of the open countryside around Arles. The artist has adopted an expressive agitated-looking handling; a pervasive energy seems to course through the landscape on the edge of the Alpilles.

Vincent van Gogh painted The Starry Night during a relapse at the asylum when he began to suffer from hallucinations and suicidal thoughts. The darker colours of his early works re-emerged, punctuated by passages of brilliant light. This was a vision of the ecstatic and of death. Allusions to transcendent spirituality (extraterrestrial existence), traditional religious practice (the church spire reaching towards God) and earthly life (the darkened village) coalesce in a swirl of painterly energy (life).

Even at the peak of his productivity in Arles he considered death with an equanimity born of belief in a world beyond it; in summer 1888, for instance, Van Gogh observed:

“Is the whole of life visible to us, or isn’t it rather that this side of death we see only one hemisphere? Painters dead and buried speak to . . . succeeding generations through their work. Is that all, or is there more to come? Perhaps death is not the hardest thing in a painter’s life. For my own part, I declare I know nothing whatever about it, but looking at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots representing towns and villages on a map. Why, I ask myself, shouldn’t the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on a map of France? Just as we take the train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star.” (LT506)

He seems, in fact, to have reached beyond his immediate, pain-filled horizon to catch such a glimpse in his best-known painting of this era, The Starry Night of June 1889. It is one of the few landscapes Van Gogh did not paint the spot; instead, the artist aggrandized and melded together a variety of seen motifs to create an ecstatic vision. The scene was, by his own account, an “exaggeration,” its “lines as warped as old wood” (LT607).
…
Its genesis in the artist’s mind suggests the metaphorical intent of The Starry Night; it is a picture that seems to reflect Van Gogh’s unconventional meditations on death. Within the context of his avowed belief in an enhanced extraterrestrial existence promised by the night sky, the darkened townscape at the lower edge of The Starry Night suggests the limits of earthly life and its relative marginality in the larger scope of existence. The prominent church alludes to traditional religious practice and faith (with its promise of salvation), while at the left a cypress – a traditional Mediterranean memento mori and a tree Van Gogh himself called “funereal” (LT541) – introduces a note of death. The elegiac tenor of these motifs is, however, overpowered by the richness and animation of the celestial spectacle beyond – the image of an afterworld both vast and enticing.

For Van Gogh, starry skies bespoke the infinite (LT520) and wakened deep-seated religious sentiments (LT543). He wrote that “a terrible need of religion” induced him “to go out at night to paint the stars” (LT543), and such an impulse doubtless lies behind The Starry Night. The vertical projections of its cypress and steeple are images of aspiration; the flame-like tree extends to the picture’s upper edge, touching and enframing the stars as it goes, and the elongated church spire echoes and underscores this upward movement – which wishfully forecasts the artist’s escape from earthly darkness into astral light.

The cypress tree seen in The Starry Night, a traditional memento mori that Van Gogh saw as “funereal,” was a motif the artist frequently reprised, its intimations of death mixed up in the energy and animating effects of the artist’s forceful paint application.

Van Gogh painted numerous studies of his physical surroundings at the asylum, but Dormitory in the Hospital in Arles is an unusual representation of a populated ward in the hospital. He had started the painting at Arles in the “fever ward” and completed it at St.-Paul-de-Mausole. The image of the hospital at Arles is therefore filtered through the asylum experience, becoming a poignant view of the patients and the isolation of illness. Describing the making of this painting, he wrote:”I am working on a ward in the hospital. In the foreground a black stove surrounded by a number of gray and black figures of patients, behind this a very long room with a red tile floor, with two rows of white beds, the walls white, but a white which is lilac or green, and the windows with pink and green curtains.”

Van Gogh’s understanding of mental suffering radically shifted following his voluntary admission to Saint-Rémy. His growing awareness was bolstered through readings of Dostoevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead. “Some days ago I was reading in the Figaro the story of a Russian writer who suffered all his life from a nervous disease which he finally died of, and which brought on terrible attacks from time to time. And what’s to be done? There is no cure, or if there is one, it is working zealously.” Van Gogh identified with Dostoevsky’s epilepsy and a belief that illness could be controlled by creative work.

At Saint-Rémy, immersed in an alien world, Van Gogh confronted the stark, shifting realities of mental illness, writing, “Though here there are some patients seriously ill, the fear and horror of madness that I used to have has already lessened a great deal. And although here you continually hear terrible cries and howls like beasts in a menagerie, in spite of that, people get to know each other very well and help each other when their attacks come on.” He was afraid of madness when he arrived at the asylum “but all joking aside, the fear of madness is leaving me to a great extent, as I see at close quarters those who are affected by it in the same ways I may very easily be in the future.”

Van Gogh’s composition Interior of Men’s Hospital at Arles expresses confinement and hopelessness. His interest was not in describing classifications or categories of mental illness, but rather the experience of inmates in the hospital, the useless, purposeless daily existence taken up with smoking, reading newspapers, and talking that he wished to convey. “The treatment of patients in this hospital is certainly easy, one could follow it even when travelling, for they do absolutely nothing; they leave them to vegetate in idleness.” There are echoes here of Charles Dickens, a favoured author of Van Gogh, who condemned the absence of any meaningful activity in English asylums “if the system of finding the inmates employment …were introduced…the proportion of cures would be much greater.”

8.10
| Asylum

The history of the insane asylum, its origins, and its purpose as a place of detention bears consideration. In the early 17th century, the French philosopher René Descartes’ dualistic approach to the mind/body relationship advanced a rationalistic and calculative conception of human beings. What could not be grasped by reason did not exist, making communication between sanity and madness impossible; madness had “nothing authentic to say.”

The mid-1700s marked the beginning of the warehousing of the mentally ill. Confined in asylums, ‘patients’ were unseen in the social landscape, and subjected to appalling treatment.“The purpose of the earliest mental institutions was neither treatment nor cure, but rather the enforced segregation of inmates from society,” writes Jeffrey A. Lieberman in Shrinks: The Untold Story of Psychiatry. “The mentally ill were considered social deviants or moral misfits suffering divine punishment for some inexcusable transgression.”

The fact that asylums were not just for the mentally ill but for any so-called societal deviant originated in England in the late 16th century when asylums were instated for the “punishment of vagabonds and the relief of the poor.” Houses of correction were opened in every county, becoming de rigueur across Europe.

Asylums were the function of a society determined to confine those forces that threatened its working order. By the end of the eighteenth century, houses of detention included hospitals, prisons and jails, their inmates running the gamut from criminals to young men who disturbed their family’s peace or squandered their goods, the unemployed and the insane.

Change would only begin with the British prison reformer John Howard. Shocked by the cruelties and abuses he saw when he visited several hundred prisons across England, Scotland, Wales and wider Europe, he published the first edition (of three) of The State of the Prisons in 1777. His work focused on improving the prison system by providing hygienic living conditions and medical care and by offering opportunities for meaningful work.

An illustration of how the mad were incarcerated indiscriminately with vagrants, the poor and criminals may be found in a series of eight paintings by 18th-century English artist William Hogarth, A Rake’s Progress, a satirical narrative of a young man who follows a path of vice and self-destruction after inheriting his father’s fortune.

In Hogarth’s final painting, The Madhouse, Rakewell has descended into madness and is locked up in Bethlem Hospital (Bedlam). Around him are pictured inmates of all persuasions, including a man who thinks he is a king; he is naked and carries a straw crown and sceptre. Also portrayed are two fashionable ladies who have come to observe the lunatics as one of the sights about town. The insane were considered entertainment; as late as 1815, according to a House of Commons report, the Bethlem hospital exhibited lunatics for a penny a day every Sunday. The annual revenue was almost four hundred pounds, suggesting an astonishing 96,000 visitors annually.

Close to a century later, Goya’s The Madhouse at Saragossa echoes Hogarth’s scene of chaotic lunacy, a wide swath of characters acting out their alternate realities in a “casa de locos,” but the misery is palpable here.

During the eighteenth century, it was not uncommon for those deemed insane to be portrayed as alien. William Blake’s interpretation of the biblical story of king Nebuchadnezzar captured the deep melancholy of the biblical character, the madness that followed loss, by portraying him as animalistic. His strangeness is evidenced in his expression and physiognomy.

In 1806 Charles Bell, a Scottish anatomist, published Essays on the Anatomy of Expression in Painting, which emphasized that artists must seek out the true nature of their subjects by learning how to read expressions. He proposed that expressions were not inherent but acquired through constant repetition, a visible consequence of lived experience.

Increasingly, behaviour replaced appearance as the outward manifestation or “proof” of the madness within. Madness was no longer read on the body’s surface but observed through a person’s acts. Bell’s principles of facial expression were based on his extensive observations of anatomical dissections. He concluded that the expression of passions and emotions was revelatory not just of mood but also of madness, “his inflamed eye is fixed upon you, and his features lighten up into an inexpressible wildness and ferocity.” The madman has a “human countenance…devoid of expression and reduced to the state of brutality.” Bell claimed that to understand otherness, “we must have recourse to the lower animals; and as I have already hinted study their expression, their timidity, their watchfulness, their state of excitement and their ferociousness. If we should happily transfer their expression to the human countenance, we should, as I conceive it, irresistibly convey the idea of madness, vacancy of mind and mere animal passion.”

The horrific treatment of inmates at Bethlem included shackling them to cell walls. Samuel Tuke, a Quaker philanthropist and mental-health reformer, provided an account of such treatment in his Report on the Condition of the Insane (1813), describing how a man deemed dangerous was attached to a long chain that ran over the walk, permitting attendants to lead him about on a leash from the outside. Around his neck was an iron ring attached by a short chain to another ring which slid along the length of a vertical iron bar fastened to the floor and ceiling of the cell. When reforms were instituted, it was discovered that he had survived that way for twelve years. Those people chained to cell walls were seen as bestial, without moral reason, acting only on instinct, and as such, were subjected to the same cruelties habitually inflicted on animals.

The French physician Philippe Pinel, “the father of psychiatry,” sought to abolish the shackling of the incarcerated and to introduce a more humane treatment of the mentally diseased. He believed that appearance, along with individualized analysis, was an essential diagnostic tool. A Treatise on Insanity, published in 1806, was a discourse on the physiognomy of the insane.

In 1820, Étienne-Jean Georget, a student of Pinel and Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol, wrote De la folie (On Insanity), which addressed the nuances needed in the assessment of patients through physiognomy:

One must observe their physiognomy in order to capture its image. The patients cannot be recognized from their normal state. The physiognomies are different from individual to individual. In general…the monomaniacal kind has a proud inflated facial expression; the religious fanatic is mild…the anxious patient pleads, glancing sideward…I will stop this rather simple listing of patients for only the direct experience of them can give one an idea of the rest.

8.11
| Portraits of Madness and Soulful Self-Images

The Romantic era ushered in a new interest in individuality and subjective experience. In the arts, the emphasis on imagination and emotion was a response to Neoclassicism’s stress on reason and order. This was reflected in portraiture, as artists sought to probe the inner depths of the human psyche.

Among the most remarkable examples of the newly compassionate representation of the mentally ill is a series of paintings by the French Romanticist Théodore Gericault. In 1822, at the request of Georget, Gericault embarked on a series entitled Portraits of the Insane, in part an effort at destigmatizing mental illness by depicting the insane with the dignity of formal portraiture. Gericault’s interest in the mentally ill was likely related to his lived experience. Both his father and grandfather died of psychic-related causes, and he suffered a nervous breakdown in 1819. Gericault drew on his experiences to portray his subjects through an empathetic lens.

Géricault’s portraits did not seek out the specifics of his sitters’ conditions in a scientific sense. In A Madwoman and Compulsive Gambler, for example, the depiction is free of iconographic symbolism related to mania; we know she is an addict solely through the work’s title.

Gericault illustrates his subjects’ inner realities by conveying the fleeting, unfocused expression that speaks to mental instability.
His portrait of a “monomaniacal assassin” is described as “an intelligent head with the expression of audacity and perversity” in his catalogue raisonné. It captures the patient’s disquiet and represents a break with generalized and moralizing visual descriptions of the insane.

Gericault’s quest for felt authenticity in portraiture finds resonance in Van Gogh’s self-images.

Van Gogh was a prolific self-portraitist, imbuing each of nearly forty self-images with a forceful, haunting presence. His self-images record his shifting states of being and indicate his hope for self-knowledge. The genre required an emotional investment in the probing of self-identity and self-revelation. When he finished the last one, he reportedly reflected, “They say, and I am very willing to believe it, that it is difficult to know yourself…but it isn’t easy to paint yourself either.”

Van Gogh painted himself in many guises: as a gentleman, peasant, worker-painter, wounded man, exotic monk. He was interested in the language of physiognomic perception, being familiar with A. Ysabeau’s Physiognomy and Phrenology (1870) and other accounts of the quasi-science. He recounted to Théo how he had “read with great pleasure an extract from the work of Lavater and Gall, Physiognomy and Phrenology, namely, how character is expressed in the features and the shape of the skull.” He reportedly drew from phrenology, which was no longer in vogue by the 19th century, in his representations of peasants and labourers. He used it to describe his and Théo’s common character, “Certain reddish-haired people with square foreheads are neither only thinkers nor only men of action, but usually combine both elements.”

Lavator produced an encyclopedia categorizing human features and their meaning in 1774.

For example, genius was deemed evident in the forehead, the eyes (especially the upper eyelid) and the root of the nose. He believed the eye and forehead were the most decisive physiognomic traits.

Features such as a high forehead, knitted brow, penetrating eyes (and bristled red beard) appear in most of Van Gogh’s self-portraits like a physiognomic template. While they describe his superficial features, they are also employed as visual signifiers of the artistic temperament and physiognomic marks of activism, determination, and intelligence.

This self-image (1887) is one of seventeen in which Van Gogh depicted himself as a middle-class urbanite, neatly barbered and nattily dressed in a braid-trimmed jacket and cravat.

In nine self-portraits, Van Gogh portrays himself in a collarless shirt or smock suggestive of an artisanal worker or a peasant, an alliance he sought to make with the working classes.

In 1888 Van Gogh and Gauguin made a deal to exchange self-portraits. Van Gogh represented himself austerely, ascetically, and monastically against a brilliant, breathing colour field.

This self-portrait conveys Van Gogh’s self-identification as part of a community of modern artists, marginalized and poverty-stricken. But it is also imbued with a spiritualized personal presence, at a remove from the material world. The slanted eyes, high forehead, and radiant forehead are reminiscent of a bonze, a Buddhist monk. He described his self-portrait thus: “It is all ashen gray against pale Veronese (no yellow). The clothes are this brown coat with a blue border, but I have exaggerated the brown into purple, and the width of the blue borders. The head is modeled in light colours painted in a thick impasto against the light background with hardly any shadows. Only I have made the eyes slightly slanting like the Japanese.”

Van Gogh’s self-portraits are often read as signs of mental crisis and markers of disease onset, partly because he refers to madness in his letters about them and partially because the best of them coincide with his episodic breakdowns.

The works he made while suffering an attack are exceptionally accomplished paintings with equally compelling content. Rather than revealing the malady of the artist, the pictures incorporate madness as an attribute bound up with the modern artist’s persona. During the nineteenth century connections were increasingly made between artists and nervous or neurotic temperaments. This analogy was presented in modern novels and contemporary art criticism.

The French translation of the Italian criminologist, phrenologist, and physician Cesare Lombroso’s L’Uomo di genio (L’Homme du genie) (originally published 1880) explains that “genius is like madness, one of the forms of mental degeneration” advancing the idea that genius and madness were opposite poles of the same axis and therefore intrinsically intertwined.

Van Gogh’s self-image as a bonze re-dresses these concerns by balancing the notions of the “mad” artist with spiritualism.

By assuming a religious figure’s identity, he felt he could reconcile his Japonisme with the religious iconography favoured by his friends in Pont-Aven. Van Gogh maintained that Jesus was a “matchless artist” among men. He “lived serenely,” he wrote to his artist friend Émile Henri Bernard. Jesus “is a greater artist than all other artists … working in living flesh. That is to say, this matchless artist…made neither statues nor pictures nor books; he loudly proclaimed that he made…living men, immortals.”

The bonze represented simplicity in life and rigour at work in pursuit of a higher order. Like Jesus, he served as an archetype for inspired creativity within the context of a utopian ideology.

In January 1889, a week after leaving the hospital at Arles, Van Gogh painted Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear. The image is unflinching in its honesty. While the artist’s thickly bandaged ear features prominently in the painting, the work extends beyond the imaged wound to convey a sense of infinite sadness.

Here, he wears a workman’s jacket and a fur hat, indicating the cold conditions of a winter’s studio. Around him are objects of personal significance, a canvas he has just begun, an easel, and a Japanese print, the whole executed with an energetic application of paint and a strident palette, serving to remind us, or perhaps himself, of his purposeful pursuit as a painter.

This self-portrait, created on the heels of his first major breakdown, is laden with personal biography: the “terribly electric” arguments with Gauguin regarding artmaking methodologies; changes in family circumstances (the marriage of Theo and his wife Johanna’s subsequent pregnancy); professional anxieties and envy. Such events and personal experiences presumably stirred feelings of insecurity and fears of abandonment and loss.

The artist was struck down by a severe psychotic episode in mid-July 1889 that lasted a month and a half until September 1. He confined himself to his room, never venturing outside. He was still ‘disturbed’ at the end of the crisis, as he wrote on 22 August, but he nevertheless felt able to paint again.

The first Self-Portrait was, as Van Gogh described in a letter to Théo, “an attempt from when I was ill.” The self-portrait more than suggests his unwellness. He portrays himself with his head slightly bowed and his body turned somewhat away from the viewer. His timid, sideways glance is easily recognizable and is often found in patients suffering from depression and psychosis. The expression on his face is lifeless, and a brownish-green, downbeat tone dominates the image as a whole. Louis van Tilborgh, the senior researcher at the Van Gogh Museum, has described it as a confrontation with madness. “Here you see a patient, forcing himself to understand he is sick, choosing to confront himself with himself …The self-portrait seems to document his struggle to survive as a patient.” (Quoted in Senay Boztas, “The Madness of Van Gogh: Pivotal Self-portrait,” Dutch News, January 20, 2020, https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2020/01/the-madness-of-van-gogh-pivotal-self-portrait-confirmed/

Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, was painted slightly after the Oslo work. Here, as he had in two earlier self-portraits, he holds the tools that mark his identity as a painter, a palette and brushes, and he wears a painter’s smock.

Both the fervour and fragility of Van Gogh’s life emanate from the canvas, the deep colour and broken directional strokes drawing us into his world. An aura seems to surround him like a pulsating force field. The play of complementary colours between the brilliant background and his green-tinged face and orange hair intensifies the work’s visual impact.

The contrast between the raw self-portrait in the Oslo Museum and the calm and controlled self-image in the Washington museum is striking. The first is moody and dark, its lightless quality neither lyrical nor illustrative; the artist’s skin is sickly, and there is a dormant wildness about his expression. In the second, the light has re-emerged; there is a sense of equanimity, a change he was swift to share with Théo, “You will see, I hope, that my face is much calmer, though it seems to me that my look is vaguer than before.” Contrary to van Gogh’s own opinion, however, his expression was anything but vague. His demeanour is focused and determined. He has captured his likeness dynamically, an orange-haired, bearded figure in bourgeois clothing positioned against an animated background of ice-blue paint. One senses the purpose of the picture. It evokes self-assurance and more than hints at the artist’s eagerness to leave the hospital and return to his studio. He instructs Théo to “Show it to old Pissarro when you see him.”

In the spring of 1890, Van Gogh left Saint-Rémy to stay with Théo and then with Dr. Gachet at Auvers-sur-Oise. In June, he began working on three large landscapes:” I hope you will see them soon,” he wrote to Théo, “for I hope to bring them to you in Paris as soon as possible since I almost think these canvases will tell you what I cannot say in words, the health and restorative forces I see in the country.”

The extent to which the paintings were restorative remains a question, for he also wrote, “These are vast fields of wheat under troubled skies, and I did not need to go out of my way to try to express sadness and extreme loneliness.” In his last letter, he also mentioned these works to his mother, adding, “I am in a mood of almost too much calmness.”

Wheatfield with Crows betrays the artist’s extreme sense of oncoming menace: the deep darkening blue of the sky, the tempestuous, whirling brush strokes and the anxiety of a low-flying flock of blackbirds.

On 27 July 1890, aged 37, Van Gogh is believed to have shot himself in the chest. The following morning, soon after Théo‘s arrival, he died of an untreated infection resulting from the wound.

Recent psychiatric studies suggest Van Gogh suffered from several disorders, Claire Selvin reports in “New Study Suggests van Gogh Suffered from ‘Several Comorbid Disorders” (Art News, November 3, 2020). She cites an article in the International Journal of Bipolar Disorders which claimed that the artist also likely suffered from delirium associated with alcohol withdrawal in the years leading up to his suicide in 1890. Whatever the diagnosis, Van Gogh’s mental state was aggravated by malnutrition, overwork, insomnia, and alcohol. It describes the artist’s “enormous willpower, resilience, and perseverance” in the face of such struggles and points out, “Over the years he kept on painting, also during most difficult periods in his life. Only during the most severe psychotic episodes he temporarily stopped working, but in intervals, with less symptoms, he was able to paint.”

Edvard Munch

8.12
| Death and Life

Alongside Van Gogh, one of the most famous artists to portray mental suffering – loss, loneliness and fear – was Edvard Munch. The Norwegian’s artworks consistently and vividly drew on emotional turmoil and trauma. This ability to use deeply personal experiences of mental anguish to create an work suggestive of collective suffering is seen repeatedly in Munch’s work.

Munch was an outsider and a visionary who was plagued by personal tragedy. Illness and failures fed his creativity. “My fear of life is necessary to me, as is my illness,” he once wrote. “Without anxiety and illness, I am a ship without a rudder… My sufferings are part of myself and my art. They are indistinguishable from me, and their destruction would destroy my art.” In an undated private journal, Munch once wrote, “I inherited two of mankind’s most frightful enemies—the heritage of consumption and insanity—illness and madness and death were the black angels that stood at my cradle.”

The Edvard Munch of popular imagination—a tortured, bohemian rebel who seemed almost a living version of the famous figure in The Scream—was in fact a myth carefully constructed during Munch’s lifetime by critics, historians, and the artist himself. Since then, this persona has been reinforced by our collective fascination with his many pictures of existential suffering. But there are many other sides to the artist and his work that have been eclipsed by the traditional emphasis on his supposed emotional imbalance and artistic isolation. In addition to his depictions of death and anxiety, for example, are moody, calm landscapes and pictures of bathers that celebrate the vitality of the human form in nature.

Munch’s moody works gained him a reputation for mental illness from the beginning of his career. The Norwegian art critic and historian Andreas Aubert suggested that he suffered from the psychological condition known as neurasthenia. A medical term invented by the American physician George M. Beard in 1869, neurasthenia, otherwise known as nervous exhaustion, was said to be on the rise in metropolitan centers as chronic fatigue, depression, hysteria, and weakness attacked the emotionally compromised urban body. Adopted and adapted by social commentators, the disorder was connected to decadence and degeneration and applied to the visual arts. (Introduction to the exhibition Becoming Edvard Munch: Influence, Anxiety and Myth, Art Institute of Chicago, 2013, https://archive.artic.edu/munch/overview/)

Edvard Munch was born December 12, 1863, in Löten, Norway, to a middle-class family. His mother was Laura Catherine Bjølstad, and his father, Christian Munch, was a military doctor. It was a puritanical home plagued by sickness. Munch’s father was an extreme Christian fundamentalist who regarded disease as a punishment from God, cured only by penitence and remorse.

The death of his mother from tuberculosis when he was five and his sister Sophie eight years later impacted the emotional tenor of his childhood. He had a weak constitution, suffering from tuberculosis, bronchitis, and anxiety. “The illness (tuberculosis) followed me through all my childhood and youth – the germ of consumption placed its blood-red banner victoriously on the white handkerchief – my loved ones died one by one. One Christmas night, I lay 13 years old – the blood running out of my mouth – the fever raging in my veins – the anxiety screaming inside of me. Now in the next moment you shall stand before the judgement – and you shall be doomed eternally.”

As a young man, Munch traveled to Paris, where he experimented with Impressionism and found inspiration in the work of Gauguin and Van Gogh, particularly their embrace of a raw, expressionistic, and mysterious aesthetic. He adopted a simplified formal vocabulary and an intense palette, pursuing motifs of anxiety and alienation to elicit powerful feelings. He was also influenced by James Ensor, particularly the carnivalesque masks. In 1916 he penned: “I saw all the people behind their masks—smiling, phlegmatic—composed faces—I saw through them and there was suffering—all of them—pale corpses—who without rest ran around—along a twisted road—at the end of which was the grave.”

Munch has been described as a painter of the soul, his works addressing universal themes of life and death. He was also the painter of inner demons, his pieces delving into the darkest recesses of the human psyche, where anxieties, fears and suffering reside.

The Sick Child depicts Sophie before her death. It is one of six paintings and several lithographs, drypoints and etchings of the subject completed by Munch between 1885 and 1926. Munch painted The Sick Child from memory during his first trip to Paris in 1885. The canvas required painstaking work as he built up a surface that he would later dissolve with turpentine, scratch away, and then repaint. Brian Singer, Trond E. Aslaksby, Biljana Topalova-Casadiego, and Eva Storevik Tveit explain in “Investigation of Materials Used by Edvard Munch” (Studies in Conservation 55, no. 4 (2010): 274–92):

The Sick Child is considered to be Edvard Munch’s breakthrough painting and was first exhibited in Kristiania (now Oslo) in 1886. Munch, in his writings, has described how he fought with the image for a year: painted, wiped out, repainted, scraped off, etc. until it was “heavy as lead.” His statement is confirmed by early photographs and X-radiographs.

Norma S. Steinberg in “Munch in Color” (Harvard University Art Museums Bulletin 3, no. 3 (1995): 1–54) offers a comprehensive analysis of The Sick Girl series.

As a struggling young artist he adopted an Impressionist style but found it limited with respect to conveying human emotion. When he veered away from naturalism with his painting The Sick Girl, exhibited in Christiania in 1886, Munch and his work were greeted with derision. He had decided from an early stage, however, that memory was a more reliable source of imagery than nature, and penned this now famous statement on the subject: “I paint not what I see, but what I saw.”

Steinberg notes that his friends and colleagues knew of his use of colour as a reflection of felt experience. Sigbjorn Obstfelder, lyrical poet and art critic, commented,”Munch writes poetry with colour… His use of colour is above all lyrical. He feels colours and he reveals his feelings through colours; he does not see them in isolation. He does not just see yellow, red, blue, and violet; he sees sorrow, screaming, melancholy, and decay.”

Munch’s analogous use of colour and emotion – yellow and sorrow, red and screaming, blue and melancholy, violet and decay – continued in his printmaking practice. Red often predominated, sometimes employed alone, but more often in contrast with other hues, its tonality ranging from clear orangey-reds to the darkness of dried blood.

Tellingly, the artist’s first colour lithograph was of The Sick Girl. It illustrates Munch’s development of an intuitive methodology attached to his quest for symbolic art. It is a close-up view of Sophie’s head and shoulders, concentrating attention on her fragility and transparency. Munch’s translation of the language of the painting is seen here in the wavy lines that stand in for the mesh of paint strokes and the suggestion of an aura for the atmospheric qualities of the image. Obstfelder describes Munch’s process:

After providing the form of the aura, Munch employed the element of chance to determine its color. Although he worked closely with Parisian master printer Auguste Clot, he did not ask him to produce a specific number of edition prints. Rather he used Clot’s expertise in ways that guaranteed variation. Paul Hermann, recalling a meeting with Munch during the printing of The Sick Girl, said that Munch would close his eyes, stab the air above the assembled stones, and recite the colors and order of printing. They would go out for a drink and later, again with closed eyes, Munch would gesture randomly and ask for another group of colors.

The red substance of this version burns with fever,

compared with the ethereal, enigmatic quality of the Fogg print, whose crimson accents are like streaks of fresh blood staining the pillow. Munch used color to transform the very character of the representation of illness; in the latter print the child seems to die while we look on.

8.13
| The Frieze of Life

Between 1893 and 1908, Munch lived most of the time in Germany. During the 1890s, he conceived of and partly executed a series of paintings which he later called The Frieze of Life. The images are united by their existential focus, dealing with themes of love, illness and death. The nucleus of The Frieze of Life was a group of six pictures exhibited in 1893 under the title ‘Studie zu einer Serie “Die Liebe.”‘ They were titled The Death in the Sickroom, Scream, The Vampire, Madonna, Anxiety, and Melancholy.

The Introduction to the exhibition Edvard Munch: A Poem of Life, Love and Death, September 20th, 2022, to January 22nd, 2023, Musée d’Orsay, (https://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/whats-on/exhibitions/edvard-munch-poem-live-love-and-death) describes his ouevre thus:

Munch’s singular creative process led him to produce many variations of the same motif, but also several versions of the same subject. Eminently symbolist, the notion of cycles thus played a key role in Munch’s thought and art. It is manifest on several levels in his work, even coming into play with the very construction of his paintings, where certain motifs recur regularly. For Munch, humanity and nature are united in the cycle of life, death and rebirth.

When the series was first exhibited as a group, it comprised these six works, later twenty-two. Speaking of his revelation of their pictorial reciprocity, Munch stated, “I placed them together and found that various paintings related to each other in terms of content. When they were hung together, suddenly a single musical note passed through them all. They became completely different to what had been previously. A symphony resulted.”

To Edvard Munch, physical and spiritual illness was one; his early experience of disease and loss catalyzed the darkness and pessimism that permeated his life. He once declared, “I was born dying.”

Death in the Sickroom, painted in 1893, expresses the grief of death in the family. Frode Haverkamp describes the painting in “Edvard Munch in the National Museum” (Nasjonalmuseet 2008) (https://www.nasjonalmuseet.no/en/collection/object/NG.M.00940)

The picture shows what we can assume to be the artist’s family grouped around his sister Sophie, who died in 1877. She is sitting in a chair with her back to us. To the right stands an aunt, Karen Bjølstad, who moved in with the family to take care of the children and the household after the mother died of tuberculosis in 1868. In the background stands the father, the doctor Christian Munch, with his hands clasped as if in prayer. Near the centre of the picture is a male figure, probably Edvard, in quarter-face. Sister Laura is sitting in the foreground with her hands in her lap, while the third sister, Inger, stands staring straight at us. The male figure to the left is generally identified as Edvard’s younger brother Andreas. In Death in the Sick Room there is no physical contact between the people, except for the hand that aunt Karen has laid on the back of the chair in which the invalid sits.
…
This is a situation recalled from several years earlier, to which he returned in the 1890s. The scene is strictly composed and excludes anything irrelevant to the theme. The dark clothes and the noxious green of the bedroom walls intensify the mood of discomfort.

Munch produced five versions of The Scream, an image which is said to have been inspired while he was walking with friends: “I was walking along a road one evening – on one side lay the city, and below me was the fjord. The sun went down – the clouds were stained red, as if with blood. I felt as though the whole of nature was screaming – it seemed as though I could hear a scream. I painted that picture, painting the clouds like real blood.”

The screaming colours and multi-directional compositional scheme evoke an unmistakable image of terror. The linear patterning of horizontals and diagonals, the spiralling shore, and the undulant sky against the stretch of the pier draw the viewer’s eyes past the calmly promenading pair toward an androgynous figure of embodied fear. With widened eyes, flaring nostrils and elongated hands pressed firmly against the skull it is a quintessential image of a self in anguish.

The subject matter of Munch’s paintings, particularly the Frieze of Life series, reflects his agoraphobia. Despite the empty expanse of the pictorial space, the image is stifling; the blood-red sky and black fjord are suffocating. The figure appears untethered and entrapped.

In a larger context, the sky is glowing and tortured, perhaps inspired by a genuine scientific phenomenon: the ashes poured into the atmosphere by the eruption of a volcano in Indonesia, which would have had repercussions as far as Northern Europe. The Scream penetrates the realm of the psyche and reveals an extreme form of self-reflexivity that speaks to modern awareness of the self-conscious, embodied self.

Originally entitled Love and Pain and Les Cheveux Rouges (Red Hair) in the influential L’Art Nouveau in Paris, The Vampire acquired its putative title when Munch’s friend, the critic Stanisław Przybyszewski saw the painting on exhibition and described it as “a man who has become submissive, and on his neck a biting vampire’s face.”

Munch moved in Bohemian circles of artists and writers in Kristiania and Berlin, among them Przybyszewski, August Strindberg, Henrik Ibsen and other intelligentsia who regularly frequented the Black Pig bar in Berlin. In the 1890s, the bar was the meeting place for Nordic writers and artists. In this world, love (free love) reigned, but it was dark, deadly and destructive. Vampires were in vogue. Munch admitted to his friend and biographer Jens-Thiis: “[the title] Vampire is actually what gives the picture its literary character. In reality, it is only a woman kissing a man on the neck.” The image of the red-headed woman, a female Judas, sucking the blood of a defenceless man was too perfect an interpretation to publicly dispute.

8.14
| Female Representations: Halos and Hysteria

Munch’s interest in psychic mobility and atmospheric vibrations influenced hisMadonna, painted the following year. The work evokes mysterious movement, particularly in the lines encircling the figure. The thin, translucent layering of oil paint furthers the effect.

Munch’s interest in images suggesting the hypnotic state of mesmerism, defined by the German philosopher Franz Mesmer in 1779 as an “animal magnetism,” may be discerned here. Munch would later connect his interest in mesmerism to Strindberg’s belief phenomena, “there must be some truth to what Strindberg said about waves which surround and influence us. Perhaps we have a sort of radio receiver in the brain.”

During the critical decade of the 1890s, Munch often engaged with notions of transmutation, particularly as related to the feminine principle. His Madonna evokes not only dominant female sexuality but also the spectre of death. According to Munch, the alternatives of artistic creation or relinquishing one’s individuality to generate new life within a woman’s womb were both acts of creation fraught with anxiety and danger. That Munch associated the image with death is known by his comments on the picture, which he sees as representing the eternal cyclical process of generation and decay in nature. He continually connected love with death: for the man because it eviscerated him, for the woman because her function ended with childbearing.

In 1851, Schopenhauer wrote in Parerga und Paralipomena, a collection of philosophical reflections, that “women exist solely for the propagation of the species and live more for the species than for the individual.”

You need only to look at the way in which she is formed to see that woman is not meant to undergo great labour, whether of the mind or of the body. She pays the debt of life not by what she does but by what she suffers; by the pains of childbearing and care for the child, and by submission to her husband, to whom she should be a patient and cheering companion. The keenest sorrows and joys are not for her, nor is she called upon to display a great deal of strength. The current of her life should be more gentle, peaceful and trivial than man’s without being essentially happier or unhappier.
Deleted: Women are directly fitted for acting as the nurses and teachers of our early childhood by the fact that they are themselves childish, frivolous and short-sighted; in a word, they are big children all their life long – a kind of intermediate stage between the child and the full-grown man, who is man in the strict sense of the word. (The Essential Schopenhauer, first published in Parerga and Paralipomena, 1851 (http://www.naturalthinker.net/trl/texts/Schopenhauer, Artur/OnWomen.pdf)

In some sense, the Madonna figure recalls the mesmeric images of female hysterics prevalent during the era. Carla Lathe has explored this dimension of Munch’s production in “Edvard Munch’s Dramatic Images 1892-1909” (Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 46 (1983): 191- 206). She writes,

The forms of medical inquiry Munch’s friends wished to pursue were the investigation into the unconscious, into the control of nerve fluid and nerve vibrations associated with the theories of the Austrian doctor Anton Mesmer. The ideas Mesmer had made popular a hundred years before were given clinical authority when Jean Charcot persuaded the Paris Academy to accept hypnosis officially in I882.

The French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot who lectured at the Salpêtrière asylum in Paris in the 1880s, explored this so-called female predisposition, aiming to demonstrate that hysteria was a form of mental illness. The climax of the demonstration would occur when he hypnotized a patient into a state of hysterical seizure, “la grande hysterie” which would culminate with the classical swanlike “arc en cercle” movement. Contemporaneous pictures and engravings capture the scene, a rapt, attentive audience, the assistants, the master and then the young woman in a theatrical convulsive pose, head thrown back; body arched forward. One might suspect the regular patients, “actresses,” were well-practiced in their performance; it was too perfect.

Amanda du Preez, in “Putting on Appearances: Mimetic Representations of Hysteria” (de arte, 39 no. 69 (2004): 47-61), explains that hysteria is a disease “that manifests exclusively through visual appearances and images and is reproduced in imitations and representations…. hysteria has no anatomical or corporeal basis. As a result, the condition can be described as a simulacrum of symptoms, where one symptom refers to another without constituting an apparent link to a bodily referent.”

[H]ysteria was most often diagnosed in women who had the cunning aptitude of imitating symptoms of all diseases with such accuracy that the `real’ patients could not be distinguished from those miming them. The fact that hysteria apparently favoured a female disposition corresponded with the conflation of hysteria with the signifiers of both femaleness (sex) and femininity (gender) to such a degree that the terms female, femininity and hysteria actually became inter-exchangeable. Women were epitomised as harbouring intense emotions, sensitivities and as being extremely impressionable, while hysteria was itself diagnosed as a disease of impressionability and susceptibility… Consequently, although not all women were diagnosed with hysteria at the time, all women were, nevertheless, suspected of being susceptible to hysteria.
…
Charcot did not make hospital rounds like other physicians. Rather, patients were either brought to his office for examination or they were examined in the `theatrical space’ of the public lecture rooms of Salpêtrière. His ocularcentric orientation becomes clear if one considers descriptions of private consultations: “He would have the patients brought to his office and stripped naked; he would observe them, ask them to perform certain movements, stare, meditate, and then have them led out. . . . he rarely exchanged words with the patients” (Evans 1991:20). In addition, Charcot held regular public lectures for his students and colleagues. He also opened his theatrical lectures to a lay audience so as to include members of the artistic and literary scene, whom he befriended. These lectures unfolded dramatically as, “Charcot, with a bearing reminiscent of Napoleon, would stand beside a patient in a 600-seat filled to capacity, with floodlights on the stage, and demonstrate each clinical sign to the spellbound audience” (Jay 2000:11). During these public lectures mostly female bodies were displayed and their apparent waywardness was unveiled. It seems that the females on display could be depended upon to produce appropriate collapses and turbulent convulsions, almost as if their performances were rehearsed and their movements carefully choreographed… Hysteria was treated as a condition to be observed, and as a result there was no apparent need to address the predominantly female patients or to listen to their plights. In other words, patients diagnosed with hysteria were not consulted about their condition but, on the contrary, they were silenced in many ways.

Charcot, who is also described as “the medical scientist with the outlook of an artist” (Schade 1995:505), was fascinated by the artistic possibilities of hysteria. Not only did he collect images from the Western canon wherein insanity and possession were depicted (from the twelve to the eighteenth centuries, including artists such as Andrea del Sarto, Goya, Delacroix, Gericault, and Fuseli), but he also tried to redo these images by copying them.

Charcot’s discourse on the female hysterical body could not contain her, for there is no way of conclusively pinpointing or locating her. Although the hysteric seemingly abandons herself to scientific analysis by creating a spectacle of symptoms, she does so in simulation, representation and mime. As Matlock (1994:141) explains: “Hysteria has an appearance, but no materiality. Its symptoms can be catalogued, their frequency registered, but it remains always beyond understanding.” Any attempt to essentialise her fails, for, even though women are embodied beings, they cannot be contained within one conclusive body. The other discursive trick played by patriarchal discourses, namely to evaporate women like a mysterious perfume into unexplainable oblivion, will also not hold, for women do exist, but not always as patriarchy thinks they do.

Outside of his family circle, Munch’s female representations centred on their sexuality. “Munch’s women are disclosed as helpless pawns of biological and sexual forces and processes buried below the level of consciousness,” Kristie Jayne writes in “The Cultural Roots of Edvard Munch’s Images of Women” (Woman’s Art Journal 10, no. 1 (1989): 28–34):

[A]spects of Munch’s art reflect an awareness of Darwinian concepts of sexual difference-as well as a number of other “scientifically based” theories of sexual differences spawned in part by Darwinism—which stressed the female’s procreative capabilities, inclinations, and obligations…. According to Darwin, nature provides an unlimited supply of unsolicited, fortuitous hereditary novelties. The sheer fecundity of nature leads to a constant struggle for existence in which those individuals fortunate enough to be endowed with favorable novelties will survive in greater numbers, while their less fortunate peers will be more likely to perish. Sexual selection refers to the struggle between the males of a species for possession of the females, whereby the successful males will be the strongest, most competitive, and most aggressive and will thus leave the most progeny. Darwin claimed that, through the interaction of natural and sexual selection, man had become superior to woman in courage, energy, and intellect and that these greater physical and mental traits were more readily transmitted to the male than to the female offspring. The process of genetic mutation and transfer was not yet understood; the production of favorable hereditary variations was regarded as requiring intelligence and courage, both of which were male, not female traits. Males were therefore the innovators in the course of evolution, while females were merely the passive transmitters of hereditary material. Darwin argues that women do possess certain faculties found lacking in man-maternal feeling, intuition, perception, imitation, altruism, and tenderness -character ascribed to lower races. He viewed females as primitive, non-varying, and undifferentiated in their function, which was to reproduce. The evolutionary development of women had been arrested, as it were, resulting in the intellectually and physically inferior female.

In the Madonna prints, the “biological substances” of the fetuses and sperm that appear in the borders assert that the female subject’s primary function is the physiological process of reproduction. This interpretation seems confirmed by Munch’s famous comment on the painting: “Now life reaches out its hand to death. The chain is forged that binds the thousands of generations that have died to the thousands of generations yet to come.” Appearing to float in her own fluid-filled, amniotic-like sac, the Madonna is denied any measure of contact with the world beyond by the sperm and the bulky, oversized fetuses swimming around her. The instruments of her own physiological destiny imprison her.

8.15
| Alienation, Angst and Collective Despair

In Anxiety, the specter of an anxious humanity advances in a nightmarish state as if driven by ominous elemental forces. The painting draws on two others from the same period, Evening on Karl Johan Street and The Scream.

Evening on Karl Johan Street situates the spectator in confrontation with a crowd of ghostly figures. The mood on Oslo’s main boulevard is ominous, the nightlights in the inhabited buildings only adding to the sense of strange presences in the accumulating darkness. The skeletal faces are ghostly as they gaze out at us, the fixed, blank stare a device Munch would employ again in The Scream.

In Anxiety, the alienated personages reappear against the swirling inky lake in the distance, hemmed in by a volcanic red sky. Whereas The Scream expressed the loneliness and horror experienced by an isolated individual, Anxiety evokes collective despair.

Munch repeated the motif of Anxiety two years later as a print. The white features are even more visible in the woodcut because of the red-coloured paper backing. The inherent properties of the graphic technique, its linearity and limited use of colour emphasize the emotive forcefulness of the visual content.

In Melancholy and Despair, the long, undulating shoreline recalls The Scream yet again, symbolizing loneliness and a sense of pervasive sadness. The painting was inspired by the unhappy romantic affair of Munch’s friend, Jappe Nilssen, a Norwegian novelist and art historian well known for his numerous contributions as an art critic to the newspaper Dagbladet.

Here once again, Munich produced more than one version of the composition.

Jealousy, a theme the artist returned to throughout his life, engages with the theme of Adam and Eve as it depicts his friend Przybyszewski, frozen and impotent, staring out at us as his wife, Dagny Juel, stands naked beneath a tree with another man. The Bohemian culture that advocated free love was also plagued by the undertow of jealousy.

In The Kiss, the faces of the anonymous lovers appear to bleed together, creating an amorphous, embryonic form. The united bodies are articulated minimally, in disjointed streaks of red, symbolizing the tortured pain of passion.

In November 1892, a retrospective of Munch’s work was held at the Verein Berliner Künstler in Berlin. While it furthered his reputation internationally, the show also garnered hostility for its untraditional vocabulary and ugliness. The exhibition was closed in Berlin within less than a week, and several works were damaged.

The newspaper Frankfurter Zeitung mocked the exaggerated attention given to the whole episode: “And what is the ground for this fear-inspiring lamentation? An Impressionist and a mad one at that has broken into the herd of fine solidly bourgeois artists. An absolutely furious character.”

When a retrospective exhibition of Munch’s paintings took place at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco in 2017, Lindsey Westbrook wrote this short piece entitled “An Icon of Emotion” (August 2017, https://www.sfmoma.org/read/icon-emotion-edvard-munch-san-francisco/)

The show demonstrates the vast range of techniques Munch deployed over the course of his career. He labored over some pieces for months or years, even (notoriously) keeping them outside, uncovered, allowing them to accumulate water stains and bird droppings. He returned to many subjects again and again, either to satisfy a compulsion or because he was constantly creating his own themed groups of works, in a sense curating his own oeuvre.
…
Munch was interested in rigorous figuration. When you look at his work, you see that he understands material power in the same way that an abstract painter does, but he’s always working in the service of telling a story, creating a narrative structure or a figurative scene, that marries the language of making the painting with its thematics. Abstraction was never enough for him.
If he’s painting a scene about sickness, he’s going to show you something about sickness—about emotional sorrow and physical breakdown—through the materiality of the paint.

Munch was an alcoholic and suffered from agoraphobia, among other ailments associated with the stresses of modern urban existence.
Anne Bowen McElroy writes in “Munch and Agoraphobia: His Art and His Illness.” RACAR: Revue d’art Canadienne / Canadian Art Review 15, no. 1 (1988): 23–50):

Munch was terrified of going mad. Consistent with his inscription “Can only have been painted by a madman,” in the sky of The Scream (Version in Oslo, Nasjonalgalleriet, 1893), he wrote in 1905: “And for several years, I was almost mad— at that time the terrifying face of insanity reared up its twisted head. You know my picture The Scream. I was being stretched to the limit—nature was screaming in my blood — I was at breaking point.”

For much of his life he worried about his inherited nervousness from his father’s side of the family. Munch’s father has been described as having suffered from religious melancholia and anxiety, and both his grandfather and sister died in asylums. Consistent with the discussion of the role of childhood fears in either causing or predisposing one to the development of agoraphobia, Munch’s family life was plagued with fear surrounding the death of his mother and sister and anxiety concerning the subsequent nervousness of his father.

Complicating Munch’s agoraphobic condition was alcoholism. The artist’s own account of his use of alcohol to gain relief from anxiety is similar to a cycle frequently described by agoraphobics: “I felt these frightening pains near my heart, I was frightened in the morning, felt dizzy when I got up. Quickly something to calm me. Rang for service, Port wine, a half bottle—that helped. Felt better. Then some coffee and a bit of bread. Renewed anxieties. On into the street, to the first restaurant, one drink, two drinks — that helped. Out into the street. Everything will be alright … I drank and drank yesterday like all days and went to bed in a stupor.”

Munch’s suffering as an agoraphobic had a powerful impact on the content, style, and subject matter of his art. He felt his illness was responsible for his ability to create and shunned any suggestion that he would be better rid of such pain. His famous Frieze of Life series (Oslo, Munch-Museet, 1892-1902) grew out of a deep commitment to representing inner truths and his impatience with what he considered to be trivia. At age 26, he wrote that “we should stop painting interiors with people reading and women knitting. We should paint people who breathe and feel and suffer and love.” His aim was to create a visual representation of an inner, psychic state by painting the “confessions” of his own life.

McElroy concludes:

Following his breakdown and treatment at Dr. Jacobsen’s clinic in 1909, Munch’s motto became “steer clear of everything,” a restrictive lifestyle common to agoraphobics. He bought a small house at Ekely, where he lived in virtual seclusion until his death in 1944. He built a curious outdoor studio with tall perimeter walls and no roof, leaving him and his work open to the heavens but protecting him from the visual threat of the open countryside.

From the depiction of personal sorrows in the Frieze of Life series, Munch shifted to the placid, eternal mood of the Oslo University, Aula Décorations (Oslo, 1909-12).

The works of Edward Munch cannot be thought of in the same terms as those of painters primarily concerned with the formal qualities of art. What was important to Munch was the expression of intense feeling in his art. Much of his source material consisted of his personal sufferings as a victim of panic attacks and agoraphobia. Our knowledge of his illness is not of mere anecdotal interest, nor does this knowledge detract from the overwhelming personal quality of his expression. On the contrary, this knowledge provides us with a more sensitive appreciation of the images that structure his works. Munch was primarily a painter. He was also a man who suffered from a psychiatric disorder that altered his perception of his environment. His genius was his capacity to communicate the intensity of these perceptions to us, and startle us with their familiarity.

Ferdinand Hodler

8.16
| “Always a corpse in the house”: The Search for Constancy

Ferdinand Hodler, the eldest of six children, would be orphaned by the age of twelve. His father, a carpenter, died of tuberculosis on Christmas Eve, a few months after being forced into bankruptcy. His mother, Margareta Hodler, remarried soon after but died six years later after giving birth to three “In my family,” Hodler later said, “there was a constant dying, and it seemed only right to me that there would always be a corpse in the house.” These early experiences of loss and instability marked his psyche. Hodler experienced a psychological crisis in his late 20s, spurred, it seems, by a profound fear of death, and he almost joined the ministry. His search for permanence followed him through life, a quest for a sense of self that would counteract his fears of change and death. In time Hodler’s obsession with disease and death evolved into a vocabulary of symbolic expressionism.

Hodler began his formal study of art at the Geneva School of Design in 1872, where he studied with Barthélemey Menn, a Swiss painter and draughtsman. Menn led him through a rigorous curriculum focusing on historical masterpieces, the analysis of classical literature, Renaissance theory, and a working mastery of traditional techniques.

His early works were mainly landscapes,

a few genre paintings,

and portraits, such as this self-portrait, painted in a realist, traditional style.

Reinhold Heller writes in “Ferdinand Hodler: A Unique Note in the Birch Bartlett Collection” (Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 12 no. 2 (1986) The Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection: 166-187).

A student of J. A. D. Ingres’s and a friend of Camille Corot’s, Menn attempted to fuse the demands of his teacher’s classicism with the concerns of Romantic naturalism in both his teaching and his art. His teaching emphasized the consolidation of an established, universal theory with temporal observation; he advised his students to fuse Euclid’s laws of geometry and Albrecht Durer’s fundamentals of human proportion with a constant process of sketching from life. Hodler, searching for the stasis only a constant theory could provide, absorbed Menn’s principles and transformed them into a personal list of essential rules which he committed to memory and later jokingly identified “Ten Commandments.” Characteristically, these aphoristic “Ten Commandments,” written while he was a student, remained stable principles that guided for life Hodler’s practice of art. Through them and their reflection of Menn’s authority, he could replace the shaky realms of existence with universal laws and inalterable processes. In changeability, he discovered permanence:
“The measure of all things visible is the eye. The painter must accustom himself to seeing nature in terms of a flat surface. In a sensitive and reflective manner, he must subdivide that segment of flat surface he wishes to represent into geometric planes, using the precision of mathematics as it is available to him. After he has subdivided his surface in this way, he should draw as precisely and sharply as possible the contour of his object. In and of itself, the contour constitutes an element of expression and beauty. It serves as the foundation of all further work, and consequently that it be precise and powerful is important.”
Hodler maintained traditional working methods throughout his career, developing his paintings carefully, starting with preliminary sketches, theoretical notations and mock-up compositions. He turned to the actual canvas only once his preliminary studies were completed. Ironically, he often balanced this rigid working method with creative spontaneity, altering the painting as it progressed.

8.17
Symbolic Expressionism

In the mid-1880’s, Hodler met poets, critics and journalists who were the admirers of the German musician Richard Wagner and the French symbolist poets Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine. He became deeply involved with the Symbolist circle in Geneva. His art developed towards a style of realism coupled with idealism and symbolism. By 1884, he became a leading proponent of Symbolism, a movement that rejected the naturalism of external observation in favour of emotion and aesthetic artifice.

The Night displays Hodler’s embrace of Symbolist motifs, as it introduces a series of paintings dealing with fundamental questions of existence: life and death, faith and despair. It depicts four young men and three young women asleep outdoors and naked save for the black blankets that cover them. Hodler portrays himself as the figure in the centre who has awakened, horrified to discover death upon him. Originally the painting was framed with a verse written by 18th-century poet Charles Francois Panard: “More than one who has gone to sleep tranquilly in the evening will not awaken the next morning.” Heller continues:

Hodler’s process of transforming Naturalism into Symbolism culminated in 1890 in Night, in which the evocatively draped black form of the phantom of death crouches on the naked body of a terrified man who reclines in an ethereally illuminated landscape in the center of a group of peacefully sleeping women and men. Created at a time when Hodler was plagued by fears of his own death, following that of his sister, the painting must have functioned to fix and allay those anxieties. The central male figure even bears Hodler’s own features, but in accordance with Symbolism’s demands for the mystical, the full significance of the painting defies clarification in its mixture of the traditional and personal, the naturalistic and the abstracted.
Hodler later pointed out that painting was not a traditional memento mori but an expression of his own obsessions. He described Night in notes for his art critic-friend Louis Duchosal:

Up to now, my most important painting, in which I reveal myself in a new light, is Night. Its appearance is dramatic. It is not one night, but a combination of night impressions. The ghost of death is there not to suggest that many men are surprised by death in the middle of the night, as the Cologne Gazette has claimed, but it is there as a most intense phenomenon of the night. The coloring is symbolic: these sleeping beings are draped in black; the lighting is similar to an evening effect after sunset, showing the approach of night, but the effect is completed by those black drapes which partially cover the figures everywhere; they are the low, muffled notes of an austere harmony, which is merely a transcription of the effects of night. But the most striking feature is the ghost of death and the way – both harmonious and sinister – in which this ghost is represented, hinting at the unknown, the invisible. Night is what I claim to be my first work; it is mine by its conception and setting. At the Champ-de-Mars [exhibition] it was the most original picture. (Ferdinand Hodler, “My Present Tendencies,” translated and excerpted in Peter Selz, Ferdinand Hodler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 115-16)

The painting reflects Hodler’s ongoing feelings of doom at the time, compounded by an unhappy personal life. Although content in a relationship with Augustine Dupin, the woman pictured in the foreground at left, he had recently married Bertha Stucki, the model for the figure on the right. This marriage occurred in 1889 and did not last. That same year Bertha filed for divorce, and he returned to Augustine. In 1890, when the painting was underway, Hodler was literally as well as figuratively caught between two women.

The true impact of the painting may be derived from autobiographical references. The phantom figure represented more than a self-induced nightmare, conceived as a mental haunting. It signified the Doppelganger, or darker side of the artist’s imagination, come to light before his eyes. In German folklore, a Doppelganger is the double apparition of a living person, a symbol of horror, and possibly a sign that one’s death is imminent. The Night evokes a sense of timeless trauma in its abstractedness and repeating compositional scheme. When it was first exhibited in the Geneva municipal exhibition of 1891, the council had the work removed before the public opening due to its “lewd and immoral implications.” It was subsequently accepted at the Champs de Mars exhibition, where while admittedly “aggressive” and “provocative,” it was not considered offensive. When it was submitted to the Paris Salon, the painting was praised by Puvis de Chavannes and the sculptor Auguste Rodin. It was also exhibited at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900, again to great acclaim.

8.18
| Disillusion and Psychic Despair

In The Disillusioned One, Hodler engages with themes of ageing and hopelessness. The solitary figure conveys the depths of psychic despair. His hunched posture, bowed head, and clenched hands held close to the body are evocative of aloneness and desolation.

In Eurythmie, the solitary figures are without narrative or biographical content. The overall result is silent and despairing, suggesting a meaningless destiny. Dressed in white monastic robes and placed in a setting without definition, they are anonymous. Yet still, a sense of dignity is present in this work inspired by the artist’s empathic relationship with the men who worked as his models. The artist concentrates on the human figures’ expressive potential in all these compositions. His reverential interest in images of elderly men, such as the one in this composition, led him to use some of the eighty-year-olds who frequented the café near his Geneva home as sitters. “I knew them all personally, not merely superficially. I was the confidante of their tragic situations; they confessed to me and I listened to them while they sat for me. All of them expected more of life and had given up on themselves and the world … Hopeless submission to an unpreventable, disconsolate fate characterized them all and this identity of feelings also showed itself in their conduct and appearance. That stimulated me and for that reason I painted them.”

Richard Thomson discusses Eurythmy within the context of the Hodler exhibition in Paris in 2008. (“Hodler, Paris,” 150 no. 1259 Burlington Magazine (February 2008): 126-127)

Eurythmy is a group of aging men processing along a stony path in white robes. Both Eurythmy‘s loosely symmetrical composition and its linkage of age and autumn articulate the emergence of Hodler’s theory of parallelism: the eternal interlocking cycles of natural and human existence around which our lives are played. But this is no dry theoretical art. Hodler was a painter, and Eurythmy gets its edge from the counterintuitive direction of the resigned figures and the loose marks of his surfaces, for the mature Hodler never let the viewer doubt his active role in the crafting of his powerful synthetic vision.

8.19
| Hodler’s Parallelism

In The Day, painted a decade after The Night, the malignant dark forces of the night world seem banished by the influx of bright light. The figures act as the opposite of Night. Hodler perceived his emotional traumas as universally expressive of passion, transforming his innermost feelings into monumental, public statements. Existential questions were often conveyed through the occurrences of nature. He developed an ideology of Parallelism, a concept of art and philosophy based on the premise that an underlying order binds nature and humanity, “a world law of universal validity.”

Robert Pincus-Witten explains in “Ferdinand Hodler: Expressionism Versus Symbolism” (Artforum 11 (March 1973): 530-560):

Polarized coordinates are typical of Hodler. The Night, which opens the symbolic phase so brilliantly, cannot really be said to be completed until the painting of the final version of The Day, 1905 …. The Night, with its many homo-erotic clues (an important, neglected aspect of Hodler’s entire Symbolic phase, although there is no question concerning the artist’s personal heterosexual orientation), is balanced by the focus on female sexuality implicit in The Day. The Night’s concern with death is countered by The Day’s focus on life. The symmetry of The Day, balanced parenthetical curves surrounding a central vertical figure, is vaginally implicit. The center of the composition is marked by drapery covered female genitalia. Similarly, the figure of death slouches upon the male genitalia in the center of The Night. The Day can be understood to concern birth as The Night symbolized death. These theatricalized compositions illustrate the duality of birth and death—in short the unity of existence.

Parallelism was Hodler’s Symbolist signature. A principle of formal composition, in Hodler’s hands, the neoclassical elements of balance and symmetry suggested artifice and the surreal, the latter augmented by the addition of mystical overtones. Parallelism extended beyond the pictorial; it was a visualization of a philosophical idea, “relying on the premise that nature has an order, based on repetition” and that all men were equal.

The landscapes Hodler produced were equally inspirational and relevant to his conceptual pursuits. He described that nature as “an impression of melancholy grandeur” which “…overcomes us when we find ourselves on a mountain top in the Alps. All the numerous mountain peaks surrounding us give rise to that feeling of attraction that results from the repetition of similar forms… When I look up to the vast expanse of the cloudless sky, then this great undivided flatness, this great unity inspires a sense of wonder in me… Every molecule of air is identical in appearance to the other, [they are] parallel, and the sum of these individual effects is determined by the great, clear overpowering unity.”

In the end, Hodler’s oeuvre, inspired by spiritual crises and despair, was a quest to express the symmetry and harmony at the core of human existence while evoking a spirituality symbolic of escape from the afflictions of modern life. “Uniformity, as well as diversity, exists within human beings. We are different from each other, but we are even more alike. What unites us is greater and stronger than what divides us.”

This search for universality unites with the quest for psychic authenticity in the practice of artists of the early modern era discussed in this chapter. Goya, Van Gogh, Ensor, Munch and Hodler laid bare the deep, dark dimensions of emotional experience, and did so through a visual language that was unencumbered by stylistic convention, and intensely resonant. Their art spoke to commonality as much as strangeness and helped foster an expanded view of madness, one which acknowledged its place as a potent part of the human condition.