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Sun Spots, v. 7, issue 1, whole no. 27, Spring 1946
Page 11
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Spring, 1946 SUN SPOTS page 11 ART AND HORROR Although a tremendous volume of horrible art has been produced, the student can point to very few artists in the past who were really concerned with portraying horror on canvas or paper. The reasons for this are various, and for the most part conjectural; probably the major reason is the institution of patronage, first religious then patrician, which pertained until fairly recently in this field. However the artist may have felt about his subject-matter, his patrons were usually interested in something, in the first place inspiring, and in the second pleasant. Yet, when one thinks of these matters, two names stand out from the past as masters of horror in art. The first is Jerome Bosch, a Flemish painter of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century. Bosch was deeply religious, but he saw his religion, and particularly the crucifixion, as something truly terrible. In painting after painting he strives, by the intricate jumbling of grotesque caricatures, to show how frightful he felt that event to have been. The result is a neurotic jumble of clearly-seen yet terror-distorted images which convey Bosch's feelings quite successfully. He also did a number of panoramic views of Heaven and Hell, crowded with many tiny figures enacting the various phases of "life" in the after-world. These paintings also convey something of the feeling of frantic terror, and bear in composition and perspective a strange resemblance to the frescoes painted by Chinese and Hindu artists on the cave walls at the Buddhist shrine of Tun Huang in the Gobi Desert almost a thousand years before. Jumping three hundred years nearer our own time, we might consider as an artist of the fantastic the great Spaniard, Francisco Goya y Lucientes. As a painter, Goya showed a tendency to get away from the fluffy pastoral classicism of the eighteenth century which nurtured him, but he remained sufficiently academic to earn a comfortable living as court painter to the Spanish kings. But it was in his etchings that he was able to indulge all his really original and creative impulses. He was never a religious man, though he remained on sufficiently good terms with the church to execute several commissions; so his impulses to the grotesque and horrible came out first in the Capriccios, a series essentially satiric in conception. Some of this satire comes in the form of men with the heads of asses; yet no artist has ever made such a distortion seem more tragic. And in an etching like the "A Caza de Dientes", showing a woman extracting the teeth of a hanged man for sorcery, he approaches the ultimate in the horrible. This series was matched by the Tauromaquia, concerned with bull-fighting, but all this work was only a prelude to Goya's incomparable Desastres de la Guerra. Taken apart from their subject matter, every one of these etchings is a masterpiece of conveyed horror, and in the aggregate they make a condemnation of war not even approached by an subsequent work, even Picasso's masterful "Bombing of Guernica."
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Spring, 1946 SUN SPOTS page 11 ART AND HORROR Although a tremendous volume of horrible art has been produced, the student can point to very few artists in the past who were really concerned with portraying horror on canvas or paper. The reasons for this are various, and for the most part conjectural; probably the major reason is the institution of patronage, first religious then patrician, which pertained until fairly recently in this field. However the artist may have felt about his subject-matter, his patrons were usually interested in something, in the first place inspiring, and in the second pleasant. Yet, when one thinks of these matters, two names stand out from the past as masters of horror in art. The first is Jerome Bosch, a Flemish painter of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century. Bosch was deeply religious, but he saw his religion, and particularly the crucifixion, as something truly terrible. In painting after painting he strives, by the intricate jumbling of grotesque caricatures, to show how frightful he felt that event to have been. The result is a neurotic jumble of clearly-seen yet terror-distorted images which convey Bosch's feelings quite successfully. He also did a number of panoramic views of Heaven and Hell, crowded with many tiny figures enacting the various phases of "life" in the after-world. These paintings also convey something of the feeling of frantic terror, and bear in composition and perspective a strange resemblance to the frescoes painted by Chinese and Hindu artists on the cave walls at the Buddhist shrine of Tun Huang in the Gobi Desert almost a thousand years before. Jumping three hundred years nearer our own time, we might consider as an artist of the fantastic the great Spaniard, Francisco Goya y Lucientes. As a painter, Goya showed a tendency to get away from the fluffy pastoral classicism of the eighteenth century which nurtured him, but he remained sufficiently academic to earn a comfortable living as court painter to the Spanish kings. But it was in his etchings that he was able to indulge all his really original and creative impulses. He was never a religious man, though he remained on sufficiently good terms with the church to execute several commissions; so his impulses to the grotesque and horrible came out first in the Capriccios, a series essentially satiric in conception. Some of this satire comes in the form of men with the heads of asses; yet no artist has ever made such a distortion seem more tragic. And in an etching like the "A Caza de Dientes", showing a woman extracting the teeth of a hanged man for sorcery, he approaches the ultimate in the horrible. This series was matched by the Tauromaquia, concerned with bull-fighting, but all this work was only a prelude to Goya's incomparable Desastres de la Guerra. Taken apart from their subject matter, every one of these etchings is a masterpiece of conveyed horror, and in the aggregate they make a condemnation of war not even approached by an subsequent work, even Picasso's masterful "Bombing of Guernica."
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