Tantalizing women, myths and tales, as well as death and nightmares were among the topics of the "Schwarze Romantik" exhibition at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt:
Upon entering the exhibition one is confronted with several sinister works by Swiss painter Johann Heinrich Füssli, the very first being "Nachtmahr" - translated as "nightmare" (shown below/right). A horse with saturnine look stands above a young woman in a deep state of sleep.
Other eerie paintings and sketches from this dark face of the romantic movement are shown:
Several illustrations of cannibals are displayed in works by Spanish painter de Goya, adding even more to the fright of the viewer. Additionally, special emphasis was placed on mythical characters ("Medusa" by Levy-Dhurmer) or illustrations of plays from Shakespeare amongst others, depicting the wicked witches in Macbeth.
Walking through the exhibition, one notices that women are a central topic to this dark sub-movement of romanticism:
Antoine Joseph Wiertz´s "Hunger, Madness and Crime" (left) shows a starving mad woman, with a dead baby lying on her lap. Frightening about this painting is the fact that there is a child´s cut-off leg in the right side of the painting.
Later, when seeing the first paintings of modern painters, such as Munch, Dali or Max Ernst, the viewer understands that the exhibition is not solely about the this dark spirit of romaticism. But that it is also about the continuation of this idea in the epochs of symbolism (Munch) and surrealism (Dali).
The exhibition´s aim was to show dark romanticism as an attitude which started at the closure of the 18th century all over Europe and was carried forward into the 20th century. Dreams, especially nightmares play a pivotal role in the works presented.
Otherwise, remarkable for me is the use of visual displays (as this is not so common in Germany) showing excerpts from famous black and white movies, adding even more to the dark atmosphere the museum managed to create:
This scene shows a unraffled woman whose eyeball gets slit open just after a single,narrow cloud is shown crossing the full moon at night - perfect visual analogy. The film "Un Chien Andalusien" was directed by Luis Bunuel with the help of Dali in France in 1929. (clip above!)
Summed up it can be said that the exhibition is rather substantial (over 200 works) presenting a wide range of paintings from the early beginning of romanticism - e.g. Caspar David Friedrich- to works from modern artists such as Max Ernst or Paul Klee. What made this so special was the use of expressionistic film, for example "Frankenstein" or "Faust" as it added a lot to the overall sinister feel of the exhibition.
Unfortunately "Dark Romanticism" only ran in Frankfurt until the the 20. January, although the Musee D'Orsay in Paris will show the same exhibition, only slightly modified (greater emphasis on symbolism), from March 2013.
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