Prepare to have your perceptions of modern art’s luminaries shattered as a groundbreaking new exhibition unveils the chilling obsessions and ghoulish experimentations of names like Vincent Van Gogh and Edvard Munch. Gothic Modern, a touring European show debuting at the Ateneum in Helsinki, sheds light on the little-known dark sides of the pioneers who shaped modern art as we know it.
Modern Masters Embrace the Macabre
While gothic art is typically associated with medieval cathedrals and 18th-century tales of terror, Gothic Modern reveals how the supernatural, the uncanny, and the downright disturbing cast a long shadow over the development of modern art in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The exhibition, featuring over 200 works, exposes how visionaries like Van Gogh, Munch, Hugo Simberg, and Marianne Stokes channeled society’s unease and their own inner demons into shocking visions of death, sexuality, and trauma.
According to exhibit curator Anna-Maria von Bonsdorff, these artists weren’t just looking forward to abstraction and fauvism, but also gazing back to the gothic nightmares of painters like Albrecht Dürer and Hans Holbein. “By the time gothic was ripe for reappraisal by the Romantics, many of its most historic sites were wrecks,” von Bonsdorff explains. “And nothing could have pleased the likes of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Turner more. The old marbles seemed to be repositories of the sublime, a numinous quality capable of arousing strong feelings in the beholder.”
Van Gogh’s Smoking Skeleton
The exhibition’s pièce de résistance is undoubtedly Skull of a Skeleton With Burning Cigarette, an early Van Gogh painting featuring a leering skull dragging on a cigarette with chilling insouciance. Art history has tended to dismiss this memento mori as a juvenile joke. But von Bonsdorff argues it’s a clear homage to the medieval danse macabre tradition mined by the likes of Dürer and Holbein. “We know from Van Gogh’s letters to his brother Theo that he was looking at Holbein and thinking about him at the time he painted the smoking skull,” she notes.
Munch’s Sickly Sex-Scapes
Edvard Munch, tortured creator of The Scream, unsurprisingly embraced the gothic with ghoulish gusto. Gothic Modern showcases several of the Norwegian’s sickly, color-saturated sex-scapes, deathbeds, and cadaverous visages. “Death in the form of sexually transmitted disease, which was often fatal in his day, is an unseen presence in these trysts,” von Bonsdorff observes, “joining Munch’s lovers in morbid threesomes.”
The Allure of the Gothic
So why does the gothic continue to captivate us? According to author and Mary Shelley expert Fiona Sampson, it’s the perfect vehicle for expressing both youthful intensity and contemporary anxieties:
Gothic is subversive. It looks backwards, sideways, forwards: anywhere but here. It articulates the way life can feel scary and uncanny. Millennial anxiety is the sense that the world, or the world as we know it, is going to end. With the climate crisis, pandemic and wars, there’s plenty to make young people today feel their world is indeed ending.
Xavier Aldana Reyes, co-president of the International Gothic Association, agrees that outsiders are drawn to the genre’s transgressive allure:
It’s now typically associated with feminist, queer and anti-racist messages, especially in its contemporary iterations. Because it speaks the language of fear, it provides a good platform through which to explore the violence of marginalisation and inequality.
As Gothic Modern tours Europe, it promises to reveal modern art’s old, dark secrets while tapping into the eternal human fascination with death and the uncanny. “Gothic is everywhere, instantly recognisable and yet endlessly cryptic, as befits any view of human experience that deals with the great unknowable, death,” von Bonsdorff muses. “It’s immediately legible to us – and infinitely mysterious.”
Edvard Munch, tortured creator of The Scream, unsurprisingly embraced the gothic with ghoulish gusto. Gothic Modern showcases several of the Norwegian’s sickly, color-saturated sex-scapes, deathbeds, and cadaverous visages. “Death in the form of sexually transmitted disease, which was often fatal in his day, is an unseen presence in these trysts,” von Bonsdorff observes, “joining Munch’s lovers in morbid threesomes.”
The Allure of the Gothic
So why does the gothic continue to captivate us? According to author and Mary Shelley expert Fiona Sampson, it’s the perfect vehicle for expressing both youthful intensity and contemporary anxieties:
Gothic is subversive. It looks backwards, sideways, forwards: anywhere but here. It articulates the way life can feel scary and uncanny. Millennial anxiety is the sense that the world, or the world as we know it, is going to end. With the climate crisis, pandemic and wars, there’s plenty to make young people today feel their world is indeed ending.
Xavier Aldana Reyes, co-president of the International Gothic Association, agrees that outsiders are drawn to the genre’s transgressive allure:
It’s now typically associated with feminist, queer and anti-racist messages, especially in its contemporary iterations. Because it speaks the language of fear, it provides a good platform through which to explore the violence of marginalisation and inequality.
As Gothic Modern tours Europe, it promises to reveal modern art’s old, dark secrets while tapping into the eternal human fascination with death and the uncanny. “Gothic is everywhere, instantly recognisable and yet endlessly cryptic, as befits any view of human experience that deals with the great unknowable, death,” von Bonsdorff muses. “It’s immediately legible to us – and infinitely mysterious.”
