Fuseli : Drama and Theatre

Thirteen years after the last major presentation of his work in Switzerland, at the Kunsthaus Zürich, the Kunstmuseum Basel mounts a comprehensive monographic exhibition of the work of Henry Fuseli, a native son of Zurich who rose to fame in Rome and London. One of the most inventive and unconventional innovators in late-eighteenth-century art, Fuseli stood on the threshold between classicism and nascent Romanticism. His oeuvre bears eloquent witness to the competing artistic paradigms in the waning decades of the Age of Enlightenment.

Fuseli styled himself as a painter of Dark Romanticism and «Gothic horror», and that aspect of his oeuvre is still most familiar to audiences today. Shifting the focus, the exhibition demonstrates that drama and theater were no less vital to his artistic vision: the erudite artist’s creations almost invariably draw on literary motifs, quoting ancient mythology, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, or the recently rediscovered Nibelungen saga. After his return from Rome to London in 1779, Shakespeare’s plays become another major source of motifs in his art, as his contributions to John Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery illustrate.

Drama and Theatre—the title captures the interest in the themes from literary and stage works chosen by Fuseli that animates the exhibition, but it also describes his dynamic compositions and constellations of characters and the «theatrical» devices that often enliven his depictions.

Like Fuseli’s art itself, Drama and Theater is hardly subtle. The artist’s seven paintings in the Öffentliche Kunstsammlung Basel, the municipal art collection of Basel, are complemented by works generously provided on loan by the Kunsthaus Zürich and other international museums and private collections.

Kunstmuseum Basel

Füssli, or Fuseli, according to whichever spelling he found made his name easier for the foreigners among whom he spent his life, was born in Zurich in 1741. He studied with Bodmer and, in this pre-Romantic circle, drank in Shakespeare and Milton. He started out as a poet, in the manner of Klopstock, and in 1761 was ordained a Lutheran minister. By this time he had already begun to draw, but only as a hobby. In 1763, after he had exposed a magistrate’s corruption without passing through the proper channels, he was advised to leave Zurich and went in the following year to England. He was twenty-three years old and thought of literature as his profession.

He went to Italy in 1770, at the advice of Reynolds, who upon seeing some of his drawings said that he had it in him to be the greatest painter of his time.

“Fuseli in Rome is something strange and wonderful,” Lavater wrote to Herder in 1773. “He is everything to an extreme, and always completely original; a painter of Shakespeare . . . Some day I’ll send you his letters, which are all fire and flames . . . He looks down on everything and everybody . . . He has devoured all the Greek, Latin, Italian and English poets. His look is lightning, his words are thunder; his wit spells death and his revenge, hell. No one can stand up to him. He cannot draw in a single breath of common air.”

In other words, this short little man with the leonine head was a sort of Stürmer and Dränger whose motto was: “Darkness be thou my light!” In comparing him with the young Goethe, Lavater went so far as to say that although Goethe was more of a man, Fuseli was a greater poet.

The acquaintance of these two was not to last long. Although Goethe at first admired Fuseli’s sketches and acquired a great number of them, he later judged him an eccentric who had made himself into his own parody. And Fuseli, because he could not bear to be overshadowed and to admit the preponderance of Goethe, separated himself from the Romantic movement. He spent the years 1770 to 1778 in Italy, most of them in Rome, where his artistic experience may be summed up in two works: the Sistine Chapel and the colossal horses atop the Quirinal. He was completely carried away by Michelangelo, and proclaimed him greater than the Almighty.

From his return to London in 1779 to his death in 1825, Fuseli led an uneventful life, with the climax of his success coming around 1795. He was made an Academician and professor of painting, and in 1804 Keeper of the Royal Academy. In his Romantic period he had written to Lavater that he expected to die young, but later it seemed to him that his life was unending. (“My spirit will never lose the fire of eternal youth.”) He’d believed in immortality because an earthly life was not long enough to exhaust the energy and gifts with which God had endowed him.

As an expatriate from his own land and always a foreigner, with an elusive double name, in the land of his adoption, Fuseli was quickly forgotten. In England, William Blake, who had a temperament akin to his and was somewhat of a pupil, handed down a reputation for greater originality. And he received neither recognition nor honor in Switzerland until the first exhibition of his work in Zurich in 1926, which marked the beginning of a vogue whose repercussions are still felt today. Because his most impressive subject (one which won fame as soon as it appeared in 1782 and retained it even during the years he was forgotten) is titled Nightmare, and he is quoted as having said “One of the most unexplored realms of art is the realm of dreams,” a generation which has grown up on Freud has claimed for its own. Likewise, because his anatomy was influenced by Michelangelo and by the brutal gestures which he saw in the London performances of Shakespeare’s plays, the Expressionists hail him as their ancestor, in which they are quite right, for his heroes have something of the titanism of the Superman about them. And the Surrealists have an equally good case, for the violent action of his stories, inspired by Nordic or Homeric myths and the supernatural elements of Milton, seems to take place in an abstract, cataclysmic, magical world, and his heroes and heroines deck themselves out in bizarre clothes, with towering headdresses that seem to be beetle sheathes or sea anemones. (Fuseli had a fetish for styles of combing the hair). Probably the Existentialists, too, are intrigued by the intensity of the passions with which he endows his diabolical creatures.

 Biographers suspect that there was a mystery in Fuseli’s life, one which they guess at through some of his drawings which are not suitable for publication. “There was Evil in him,” says Haydon, and even without penetrating it completely, we can see eloquent signs in the violence, cruelty and extravagance of some of his work. The painter of nightmares is obviously a contemporary not only of the painter of the Caprichos but also of the writers of the “black novels” and the Marquis de Sade, with their world of tyranny and fatality, of prisons and figures outside the law, all reflecting a state of things which led up to the French Revolution and impinges upon the world of today, with its iron curtains, atom bombs and nightmare of uncertainty and destruction. Of course Fuseli is too theatrical to attain the tragic depth of Goya, although this theatrical quality is not static, like David’s tableaux vivants, just as his violence is a far cry from the maniacal obscenity of the Marquis de Sade and, indeed, is limited to an emotional and watered-down imitation of Michelangelo.

When Wordsworth heard Haydon quote Canova’s opinion that Fuseli had more flame and Raphael more fire, he said: “There’s one other thing, and that’s smoke, of which Fuseli has a superabundance.” He was magniloquent in the manner of Piranesi and the best way to describe his characters is as men fit to inhabit Piranesi’s Prisons. For these men are galvanized robots, they have something of the nature of insects, the only small creatures which he admired (he was totally indifferent to flowers). His heroes incline to be posed and draped; there is a remnant of Classicism about them, which in Blake is even more persistent.

In theory, Fuseli was a Neo-Classicist. (I must refer here to the excellent anthology of his writings, The Mind of Henry Fuseli, by Eudo C. Mason.) True, he gloried in the appellation of “painter ordinary to the Devil” (“Yes, more than once he has posed for me,” he declared); his favorite color was a sickly green like that of mildewed brass; he drew with the dark, bony hand, like a bat’s wing, of which he has left us a likeness; he held that art was the product of cultured depravity, of knowledge rather than vision, and delighted in portraying satanic women. (In a striking story from his Memoirs of Hecate Country, Edmund Wilson lends a female devil the features of an equivocal matron of Fuseli). But in spite of this, he burnt incense at the altars of the Venus de Milo and the Belvedere Apollo; he said that art should have an impersonal and universal aim and that single shapes and forms are only degenerations of a perfect archetype; he criticized the gaunt and awkward deformation practiced by Rembrandt, and held out for historical paintings rather than portraits. All of which he contradicted not only in his own works, which bear witness to an individuality eccentric to the point of idiosyncrasy, but also in many of his aphorisms, where we read that the essence of art lies not in ideal beauty but in expression and spirt, where he deplores the fact that Michelangelo has cut himself off from the variety and modesty of nature and urges every artist to bury himself in the crowd for inspiration (as did Rembrandt).

At the confluence of two rivers, Classicism and Romanticism, there is a curious eddy of waves; call them Fuseli, Blake or what you will. Transitional figures, say the art historians, Mannerists (although Fuseli condemned Mannerism completely), whose twisted, snakelike creatures, like waves, seem to be shaped by two contrary currents and by an interplay of forces which affect these two artists, apparently so individual, just as much if not more than the others.

Painter ordinary to the devil.  By Mario Praz.  ARTnews  ,  October 19, 2018

This essay was first published in January 1953 issue of ARTnews. Mario Praz was an Italian-born critic of art and literature, and a scholar of English literature. His best-known book, The Romantic Agony (1933), was a comprehensive survey of the erotic and morbid themes that characterized European authors of the late 18th and 19th centuries.

There are stories that are as old as mankind. For example, that of the emigrant who escapes the confines of his homeland and attains fame elsewhere. Likewise, there are currents in art that recur throughout its history. For example, mutual penetration and inspiration across genre boundaries. This is called crossover or interdisciplinarity in today's curatorial slang.

Johann Heinrich Füssli (1741-1825) was not just a painter, but a universal scholar with a broad horizon. In his life and work, the two repetitions mentioned above come to bear: the fate of the emigrant and the penetration of different artistic genres.

The Kunstmuseum Basel is hosting an extensive exhibition of the world-famous Swiss artist. Around 70 works are presented in the museum's new building. They come from the museum's own collection, from the Kunsthaus Zürich, the Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York or from Tate London. Curator Eva Reifert and her team take an enlightening look at Füssli. They show the painter not only as a black romantic and forerunner of the gothic horror. As such, he has immortalized himself in collective memory with scandalous images such as "The Nightmare”. The show in Basel shows him above all as a painter who draws his motifs from literature.

Johann Heinrich Füssli was born in Zurich in 1741. His father was the painter and writer Johann Kaspar Füssli. He introduces his son to literature and painting. After a comprehensive humanistic education and the study of theology, Johann Heinrich was twenty years old when he was ordained a Reformed pastor. However, he soon had to leave Zurich because he worked on a pamphlet against a bailiff. He came to London via Germany in 1765. He worked as a translator. On the advice of a friend, he began to paint and went to Rome, where he trained his craft for over ten years, especially by studying Michelangelo.  He remained in contact with London. In 1780 the self-taught artist caused a sensation with his painting "Satan Flees, Touched by Ithuriel's Spear", and two years later with his "The Nightmare" he caused a scandal.

The fact that Henry Fuseli, as London calls him, quickly becomes known is not only due to the painting skills of the autodidact. His knowledge of anatomy is rather average. The painter established himself as a worldly scholar who not only reads Shakespeare, but also Homer and Ovid in the original. He presents the heroes and heroines, the demons and spirits of antiquity and the Middle Ages to an astonished audience in a drama never seen before. Because of his fallen angels, death yearning virgins and lascivious fairies he is soon called "the wild Swiss".

With his spectacular large formats for "Macbeth", and "Hamlet" he got the nickname "Shakespeare der Leinwand". With his great cycle to "Paradise Lost" by John Milton he ruined himself financially. But his reputation was so strengthened that he was elected professor of the Royal Academy at the age of 58.

If Füssli had been born 200 years later, he would have made movies. His thing would not be British realism, but rather "Game of Thrones", "Lord of the Rings" or " The Shining". If Füssli had been interested in the reality in London at that time, he would have painted the first industrial workers in front of coal-black backdrops. Throughout his life, however, he was fascinated by the drama and fantasy of literary material. The exhibition in Basel is a wonderful example of how he was able to stage them both effectively and mysteriously. Thematically, it leads from room to room and from climax to climax. You don't have to be a literary connoisseur to enjoy these detailed pictures. Otherwise, audio guides or the extensive catalogue will help.

But the mass of the works also has a sobering effect: the technique and tricks of Füssli's drama become transparent. The pale, half-naked women with outstretched arms, the wide-open eyes, the pathos in every gesture. This is exactly where the video installation by theatre director Thom Lutz comes in. It is cleverly placed in the middle of the exhibition. In it, 15 actors and actresses from the Basler Ensemble recreate motifs and gestures from the exhibition, without historical costumes. This is refreshing,  the drama is let out of the air, because the comedy of Füssli's pathos shows itself, because a human being is once again brought back to human dimensions.

Johann Heinrich Füssli: Wie der  ‘wilde Schweizer‘ London eroberte. By Mathias Balzer. Luzerner Zeitung ,  October 20, 2018

When artist Henry Fuseli debuted his painting “The Nightmare” in 1781, it was a turning point for Romanticism in all that folkloric influence and high gothic drama was openly embraced. The unsettlingly sexual nature of the painting where a demon waits on the beautiful woman’s chest while a wild-eyed horse disturbs the scene through the curtain, of course helped in attracting attention. It ushered in the theatrical nightmare of art, and was so popular, that Fuseli created another three versions, as well as affordable prints. This made it the most popular painting of the day, and up to his final months he was working on yet another version of it. It even inspired a poem, that was once sold along with a print of the Fuseli, by Erasmus Darwin called “The Botanic Garden” that begins:

So on his Nightmare through the evening fog

 Flits the squab Fiend o’er fen, and lake, and bog;

 Seeks some love-wildered maid with sleep oppressed,

 Alights, and grinning sits upon her breast.

—Such as of late amid the murky sky

 Was marked by Fuseli’s poetic eye,

 The Romantic arts had been embracing images of witchcraft, ghosts, and especially dreams, and they continued through the 1800s, although faded away with real horrors like war taking the place of the psychological.

While the vision of the woman tormented by the creatures of the night permeated for years through tributes and parodies, what’s not as well-known is that the original painting actually had a reverse. On the other side was a portrait of a woman named Anna Landholdt, with whom Fuseli was infatuated, but who turned down his proposals. This dashed love is probably more Fuseli’s real nightmare, just as the nightmares of our dreams are rarely demons or other monsters, but the nightmares of our consciousness and terror that is often indescribable or incomprehensible in the morning hours.

 When Nightmares in Art Were All the Horrifying Rage. By Allison Meier. Hyperallergic  , August 29, 2013

Nightmares, as we use the word today, are vivid, personal terrors whipped up by a person’s subconscious just for them—a giant snapping turtle, a car that starts backing away from home on its own, a rocket ship with two witches in the backseat eating a potato/voodoo doll that causes the front seat to disappear with every bite. But in centuries past a night “mare” was a very specific type of frightening nocturnal visitor, a spirit or demon that would sit on a person’s chest and suffocate them.

The root of the English word “nightmare” is the Old English maere. In Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse, a mara was something known to sneak into people’s rooms at night, plop down on their bodies, and give them bad dreams. When the mare came to visit, the victim would feel a heavy weight—it might start at the feet, but it always settled on the chest—and lose the ability to move. Mares could be sent by sorceresses and witches: One Norwegian king died when his wife, tired of waiting for 10 years for him to come home, commissioned a mare attack. The conjured spirit started by crushing the king’s legs while his men tried to protect his head. But when they went to defend his legs, the mare pressed down on his head and killed him.

 This apparition roamed across Europe—it was a mahr in Germany, a marra in Denmark, a mare in French. The visions that the mare brought upon its victims were often called “mare rides”—martröð in Anglo-Saxon, mareridt in Danish, and mareritt in Norwegian, according to (now retired) folklore scholar D.L. Ashliman.

  

Ashliman collected accounts of mares from across Europe, as well as advice for how to get rid of them. People troubled by mares might want to place their shoes by the side of the bed and turn the laces towards the place where they plan to lie down. Mares snuck in through keyholes or knot holes, so plugging these openings could keep them away. Alternatively, you could enlist a friend, wait for the mare to appear, and then plug the hole to capture it. (Mares were thought to be female, and a few men in these folkloric accounts were able to trap a beautiful wife this way—but she always escaped when she rediscovered the place she’d come through.) If a mare was sitting on you, you could try putting your thumb in your hand to get it to leave, or you could promise it a gift, which it would come the next day to collect.

Today, it’s thought that the mare’s particular nastiness was a way to explain a type of sleep paralysis that, as historian Owen Davies writes in Folklore, affects perhaps 5 to 20 percent of people in their lifetime. Sleep paralysis happens at the edge of sleep, usually just before sleeping or just after waking. Sufferers can see and hear, without being able to move or speak. And some people who experience this state also report feeling a heavy pressure on their chests and a sensation of choking, and the sensation of a dark presence in the room.

“As a boy, I would experience a frightening sound, somewhere between white noise and insect buzzing, while feeling a dark presence in the room,” the writer Andrew Emery explains, in his account of sleep paralysis. In the worst case, he writes, “I’ll fight to regain consciousness and, having told myself I have done so, will still find that there’s some foul presence in my bedroom which then proceeds to punch me in the stomach. At this stage, my mind, which seconds ago knew it was experiencing sleep paralysis, is now convinced I’m the victim of a real-world demonic attack.”

There’s no precise treatment for sleep paralysis, nothing better than the superstitions and charms used by medieval people to keep away the mare and its attacks. The episodes are, Davies writes, “a moment when reality, hallucination, and belief fuse to form powerful fantasies of supernatural violation”—a truly terrifying experience, demonic or otherwise.

The Original ‘Nightmare’ Was a Demon That Sat on Your Chest and Suffocated You. By Sarah Laskow. Atlas Obscura ,  October 23, 2017