The Morbid Imagination

Since childhood, I’ve loved Edward Gorey. As I said in a previous post: “Gorey marked us with a dark worldliness that was more profound than the standard images of werewolves and shambling corpses we found in movies and comics.”

John Kenn Mortensen surely seems to have been deeply influenced by Gorey, as well. He adds a bit more of a modern sensibility to his finely crafted drawings, but somehow he still seems grounded in an earlier era of black veiled sick rooms, gas-lit alleyways, and haunted cottages.

Mortensen, according to his blog, writes and directs TV shows for kids. In his spare time, he makes exquisitely morbid little sketches on Post-It notes. He has published two collections of his work: Post-It Monsters, and More Post-It Monsters. He’s brilliant.

Check out his work at:

http://johnkenn.blogspot.com/

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Joel-Peter Witkin is an artist who actually works directly with death – some of his morbid tableaux feature actual corpses or body parts.

His scratched, distressed photographs look as though they are rediscovered crime scene evidence from a Victorian era horror. Nude men and women mix with animal parts, masks, random bits of machinery, severed limbs, or bowls of fruit. Some of his works are borderline pornographic; most are deeply disturbing.

Witkin was a war photographer in Vietnam and claims to have touched the decapitated head of a  little girl following a horrific car accident when he was a child. Raised Roman Catholic, Witkin combines an old world gothic sensibility with an intense interest in deformity, perversity, and death.

In the 1980s, Witkin advertised for models, asking for the following: “Pinheads, dwarfs, giants, hunchbacks, pre-op transsexuals, bearded women, people with tails, horns, wings, reversed hands or feet, anyone born without arms, legs, eyes, breast, genitals, ears, nose, lips. All people with unusually large genitals. All manner of extreme visual perversion. Hermaphrodites and teratoids (alive and dead). Anyone bearing the wounds of Christ.”

This attraction to depicting the ill-formed and strange is reminiscent of the photographs of Diane Arbus or Robert Mapplethorpe. The same debate of “is it art or is it exploitation?” that surrounded their work is often thrown at Witkin. How do I feel about it? Hey, I revere the Morbid Imagination, where do you think I stand? Perversity, deformity, decay, death, pain, and alienation are just as valid as subjects for art as sunsets and royalty. To me, Witkin has a definite style that is compelling and admirable.

Here is a link to some of his works

I found a link to Mena’s show at the B. Hollyman Gallery in Austin, TX and was seduced by his images. Mena interposes objects into scenes taken from 1950s science fiction movies to create dreamlike images of strange apparitions or alien vistas impinging on reality.

Mena is indeed a dark artist, treading on ground familiar to fans of Jack Arnold. (From his website) “I’m fascinated by humanity’s proclivity to fear, and explore the disorienting space between reason and reality. I reconstruct the equation, remove crucial elements, introduce unexpected variables, and disrupt the usual formula. And I question the limits of our social and collective experience, and challenge the assumptions of our given world.”

The show, “While I Sleep” runs through September 24. Mena’s website may be found here: http://www.albertomena.com/

In my last post, I spotlighted Harry Clarke’s 1919 etchings for an edition of Edgar Allen Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination. From 1905 to 1909, the Italian artist Alberto Martini created a series of 132 ink drawings inspired by Poe’s stories. Whereas Clarke’s illustrations were rendered very much in the style of the day, Martini’s nightmarish creations exist in a world apart, and are pure expressions of an artist’s dark imagination.

Like so many artists before and since, Martini seems to have been deeply inspired by the writings of Poe. The best work of his career followed his work with Poe, although you could make the argument that these drawings are his best work.

Martini is considered a forerunner to the surrealists, and you can see why in some of his Poe work. A few images are nearly abstract, but still manage to evoke strong, dark emotions. In this sense, Martini is fishing in the same waters as his contemporaries, the Expressionists.

Harry Clarke’s reputation as an illustrator was made by his striking black and white etchings from a 1919 edition of Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Edgar Allen Poe. His style, while arresting, was very much in the Art Nouveau-esque vein of the day for book illustration. For Clarke, book illustration largely paid the bills, his real passion was stained glass, at which he excelled.

After the initial success of the first edition, a second one with additional color plates from Clarke was published in 1923. This book is prized by book collectors; a beautiful reproduction is available currently from Amazon books.

“Contemporary culture, human folly and an obsessive curiosity for the macabre provide the fuel for my subject matter.” – Sandra Yagi

Hmmmm. Sounds like the perfect Morbid Imagination artist.

Yagi, after a decades long career in the business world, turned to expressing herself through painting, in a style that is both grotesque and whimsical. She literally peels back the layers of humanity to expose the ugly truths underneath.

And her monster Barbie art is really fun.

Go to Sandra Yagi’s Website

While searching for something else, I ran across Arnold Bocklin’s “Medusa” (above) and shortly afterwards, found a few more works on the same subject, i.e:  the severed head of the Queen of the Gorgons.  I present them here for your pleasure.

Peter Paul Reubens, “Haupt de Medusa”

Caravaggio, “Medusa”

Sandra Yagi, “Medusa Hair Barbie”

Roland Torpor is best known outside avant garde circles for his work on the animated film Fantastic Planet (1973) – he co-wrote the screenplay and provided the design and look of the film. I really like Fantastic Planet; I view it as a dark bookend to Yellow Submarine (1968), with Torpor’s surrealistic terrors supplanting the dayglo visions of Peter Max.

Within avant garde circles Torpor is known as a co-founder of the Panic Movement in the 1960s, along with Alejandro Jodorowsky and Fernando Arrabal.  Together, they staged provocative performance art which skewered the conventions of surrealism, along with the usual targets of the day.

Torpor was involved in other films, writing, and even television, but what I am spotlighting is his artwork, which was often obscene or scatological. Torpor reveled in the role of provocateur, but there is a consistent quality to his work which I find interesting. Like many of the other artists spotlighted in the Morbid Imagination, Torpor has created a dark fantasy world, peopled with grotesque figures, weird landscapes, and terrible fates.

A good survey of Torpor’s work may be found at the blog linked below:

Click Here

I’m sorry that I missed reviewing this while it was open, but the exhibition website is still active and it provides a nice overview of Burton’s art. Aside from his filmwork, for which he is most familiar to horror fans, Burton is also a talented artist, rendering nightmarish and bizarre visions reminiscent of Ralph Steadman or Edward Gorey. There are whiffs of Expressionism present as well.

http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2009/timburton/

Here’s Burton’s official website, which includes a gallery of his work:

http://www.timburton.com/

“For a long time he had been wanting to paint the effect of a sunset. Red as blood. No, it was blood itself. Nobody else had seen the sunset he had seen. Everyone else saw red clouds. He spoke sadly of how seized he had been by terror when he had seen  this sunset of blood. Sad because the poor medium of paint could never convey the intensity of his vision. I thought, ‘He is trying to do the impossible, and his religion is despair.” Christian Skredsvig, on Munch

Edvard Munch, like Poe and Mary Shelley, survived an early life dominated by poverty and death, narrowly dodging the grim spectre himself on several occasions. Munch carried with him into adulthood a steely intellectual focus and the vision of expressing himself through “soul paintings.” Initially reviled during his lifetime, he eventually found acclaim as the spiritual godfather of the Expresssionists.

“Anxiety” (above) is one of a series of paintings with a similar construction, which includes the very familiar “The Scream.” Here, Munch populates his blood sunset with ghostly figures filing along the water’s edge, all in the grip of some nameless terror.

“Melancholy (Laura)” (below) is a portrait of his sister, deep in the grips of insanity. Munch feared, with some justification, that infirmity and madness ran deep in his family, so much so that he took care all his life to avoid fathering any offspring that might carry his tainted blood. This fear also led to the failure many of his relationships which, in turn, fed his art.

“Dead Mother and Child” (bottom) illustrates another episode from his life, the death of his mother and the horrified reaction of his beloved sister Sophie, who would herself die a few years later.

Munch’s work was not all obsessed with death and madness. Some of his most admired works were simple landscapes or portraits commissioned by wealthy patrons. But the core of his work, the material he poured more of his life force into, were the paintings that were grouped as “The Frieze of Life.” Assembled in different arrangements over the years in different exhibitions, the series of paintings blended themes of sex, love, jealousy, betrayal, bitterness, and death on a scale never previously attempted.

As one of the first proponents of psychological depth in art, Munch channeled his own trauma, fears, and tragedy with an honesty and integrity that keeps his works vital today. It was this quality that translated directly over into Expressionism, which moved art from studied pictorialism to personal, emotive expression.

Despite all the personal tragedy in his life, Munch persevered and remained true to his art. This is what I find most appealing about him, how he maintained his integrity as an artist throughout his life, expressing complex, deep and sometimes dark emotions without surrendering to his personal demons. Unlike Poe or Van Gogh before him, Munch lived to a ripe and productive old age, continuing to pursue “soul painting” to the end.

Thanks to my son for finding this video of They Might Be Giants singing about James Ensor. What an amazing bunch of guys! They make nerds seem so cool.

Meet James Ensor – They Might Be Giants

Like many other artists of the macabre, James Ensor was a misfit toy: he spent most of his days living above the curio shop owned by his parents in Ostend, Belgium. After his parents prevented him from marrying in the mid 1880s, his art turned from darkly shaded to bizarre and morbid.

His life was hardly limited to madness and reculusion, however. He was well regarded by contemporaries – especially the Expressionists, was regularly exhibited, and received a number of honors from his home country late in life. Here again, a dark visionary found a welcoming home amongst the Expressionists and the turn of the Century European Avant Garde.

One of the things that distinguishes Ensor’s work is his use of satire and direct criticism, usually directed towards the contemporary Art establishment. Demons Tormenting Me (above) hints at paranoia, as the artist stands before his tombstone, pulled at from all sides by grotesque spirits. Other works are more direct, such as Doctrinaire Nourishment (not shown) which depict authority figures crapping directly onto the masses.

One of Ensor’s better known works is Scandalized Masks (below). Ensor’s family shop sold carnival masks and he incorporated them frequently into his works. Here you have traditional Punch and Judy images transformed into a dark tableau with overtones of alcoholism and domestic abuse.

Skeletons Fighting Over a Hanged Man (bottom) combines two of Ensor’s favorites: skeletons and masks. Two skeletal hags stand over the desiccated form of a clown, with a crowd of leering, masked intruders pressing into the room.

Ensor was an influence on Alfred Kubin, Paul Klee, and others, and was an important innovator at an important time in art history. He didn’t do it with pretty pictures of marigolds or abstract canvases of bright colors; he made his mark with a cramped view of a world populated with grotesque masks and grinning revenants.

In my previous post I noted that the artist Alfred Kubin had initially been the choice to design the look of the pioneering Expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) but instead three other men wound up concieving the distorted sets that were so influential. Those men were Hermann Warm, Walter Rohrig, and Walter Reimann.

Hermann Warm is credited as the Art Director on Caligari. Warm also went on to work with Carl Dreyer on Vampyr (1932), a film which is notable for its dreamy, washed out horror sensibility. Warm also worked on such seminal dark Weimar films as Fritz Lang’s The Spiders (1919) and Henrik Galeen’s The Student of Prague (1926). Walter Rohrig had his own distinguished contributions in films such as F.W. Murnau’s Faust (1926). According to Lotte Eisner in The Haunted Screen, it was Reimann who actually suggested to the group that they model the film’s look along Expressionist lines.

All three men were affiliated with the Berlin Sturm group which helped to define Expressionism, as much as it was ever defined. While there is some dispute about whether the motivation for the producers was art or commerce, there is no doubt that Caligari’s look was directly influenced by the German avant garde and was executed by men who had ties to the leading lights of the day.

In The Haunted Screen, Lotte speculates that “Kubin’s Caligari would certainly have full of Goyaesque visions, and the German silent film would have had the gloomy hallucinatory atmosphere which is unmistakably its own without being sidetracked into the snares of abstractism.” I agree, but I also can appreciate Caligari as the twisted expression of dark dream imagery that it became.

According to Siegfried Kracauer in “Caligari to Hitler” the artist Alfred Kubin was the original choice to provide the highly stylized backdrops for the seminal film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919). Other artists were ultimately utilized, but it’s fascinating to contemplate how his macabre and surrealistic imagination could have affected the film.

Kubin, aside from being an important artist, was an illustrator and author. He wrote one phantasmagoric novel, The Other Side, and was best known as a prolific illustrator of the works of Poe, Dostoyevsky, and E.T.A Hoffmann. But he was also closely affiliated with the Munich avant-garde of the early 1900s and was a member of the important Phalanx and Blaue Reiter groups.  All this despite living a significant portion of his adult like as a near recluse.

Because of his associations with turn of the century German art circles, Kubin is often considered a noteworthy expressionist. It’s reassuring to know that at least one artist who focused largely on fantastic or horrific imagery has survived posterity and was even very well regarded during his lifetime. It may be that expressionism was the only art movement where the morbid and dark-minded were at home.

The Pond (above) is typical of the pen and wash renderings that he was best known for. Wassergeist (below) is one of Kubin’s oil works; it’s a shame he did so few works in this medium since his dark tints and rough brushwork are so reminiscent of the later works of Goya. Epidemia (bottom) falls within Kubin’s catalog of proto-surrealist works.

There is a good collection of Kubin’s works at: http://www.all-art.org/symbolism/kubin1.html