The Dark Arts: Gothic Modernism

Courtesy of Finnish National Gallery, Ateneum Art Museum. Photo by Finnish National Gallery, Jenni Nurminen

Hugo Simberg, The Garden of Death, 1896

With its origins in late Medieval art and religious culture, the word “Gothic” conjures the dark, the mysterious, or the otherworldly. A international exhibition, Gothic Modern: From Darkness to Light, not only broadly explores such popular associations but also provides a ground-breaking examination of later 19th- and early 20th-century artistic fascinations with the era, all while complicating traditional narratives of the history of Modernism. Having concluded its debut at Helsinki’s Ateneum Art Museum (October 4, 2024-January 26, 2025), the show is set to continue its run at Oslo’s National Museum (February 28-June 15, 2025) followed by a stint at Vienna’s Albertina (September 19, 2025-January 11, 2026). Works on display are by popular Modernist figures such as Vincent van Gogh, Edvard Munch, and Käthe Kollwitz, as well by under-recognized artists such as Gustave van de Woestyne, Hugo Simberg, and Marianne Stokes.

Art history as a discipline has traditionally organized artistic developments into a timeline of periods and movements, creating a tidy, albeit simplified, narrative. The organizers of “Gothic Modern” set out to shift our thinking on what the “Gothic” may include, all while rewriting the history of modern art in Germanic and Northern Europe. This new history suggests that a Northern Gothic existed in tandem with but boldly distinct from Italic and French conventions and may be applied to art from the 13th to early 16th centuries, rejecting traditional divisions between the Medieval era and the Renaissance, the pre- and early modern worlds. A diverse cast of predecessors is addressed, from the spaces of Germanic and Nordic cathedrals to artists including Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach the Elder, and Matthias Grünewald.

With this revisionist history established, the exhibition and its accompanying catalogue track scholarly and creative interest in a Germanic Gothic around the turn of the 20th century. Largely gone are labels common in the discipline—Expressionist, Symbolist, etc.—and instead, works of art in varying formats and stylistic traditions are examined for their interpretation of and engagement with the ideas of the past rather than basic shared visual affinities.

This version of the Gothic served not simply as a sort of shared cultural heritage for artists in Northern Europe but as a potent means of encountering and responding to a changing world. From the rapid shifts associated with industrialism to the horrors of World War I, artists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries sought to find community in an era of trauma, to connect with the natural, to tap into and work through the most challenging of human feelings—birth, death, suffering, and sexuality. By looking at this earlier yet still-alive period, artists found the tools, both stylistically and iconographically, to express and deal with the challenges of the modern condition.

At its core, the organizers suggest, to be “modern” and to make “modern art” are not always intrinsically linked to the new and can be conceived of as a sort of journey to the past. Moreover, through displaying work by artists from across Germanic and Nordic Europe, the exhibition rejects nationalist narratives and stresses that creative practice superseded newly established political borders.

The curators make every effort to broadly define creative fascination and also to emphasize the points of connection for artists and scholars studying the Gothic. By the mid-19th century, restoration projects, scholarship, collection development, museum exhibitions, and periodicals allowed artists to “time-travel” to the Gothic era. And, as the organizers emphasize, creative people embarked upon a pilgrimage to a spiritual past in which they found strong affiliations to their present situation.

During the early 19th century, Bauhütten and Dombauvereine (societies that promoted and financed the completion of historical churches) cropped up across Northern Europe, finishing structures such as Cologne Cathedral (1880) and in so doing making the spaces of Gothic worship a very real part of the present moment. In preparation for the Aula paintings at the University of Oslo, his first major public commission, Munch sketched cathedrals and rose windows, which served as models for his landscapes. The Sun (1910-13) depicts the dawn, the faceted and prismatic colors forming a clear parallel to the shimmering light provided by stained glass in the space for Gothic worship. In describing the purpose of his art, Munch often
emphasized the need to provide a sacred experience.

Museums across Northern Europe built public collections and sponsored exhibitions that helped foster a popular understanding of past Germanic and Nordic art. Other books and publications helped bring these histories to even greater popular acclaim. Well known as a space for the work of progressive, emerging talent, the Berlin-based periodical Pan (1895-1915) also provided an aesthetic reappraisal of Germanic past masters, whose work they viewed as unzerstörbar lebendig, or “indestructibly alive.” The publication’s editorial team emphasized that early German art was not simply an interest of regional import but relevant to all international modern artists. Such rhetoric runs counter to our assumption that Modernism was an avant-garde rejection of the past. Yet this dismissal of the cutting edge was in fact a radical gesture. As one essayist argues in the exhibition catalogue, the stunning “un-modernity” of Austrian painter Marianne Stokes’ compositions was a cunning evocation of the tendencies of Modernism in its refusal of expected conventions. In Madonna and Child (1909), she utilizes a hyper-stylized technique—tempera, gold leaf, precise outline and flat color—that is both strangely archaic and uniquely fresh, a kind of uncanny Modernism.

Courtesy Munch Museum, Oslo. Photo by Munch Museum, Ove Kvavik

Edvard Munch, Eye to Eye, 1899-1900

Similarly, the Belgian artist Van de Woestyne explored work across various media and found solace in artistic communities modeled in part on Medieval guilds. His work seeks out iconography with archetypal resonance, such as the strong peasant farmer seen in The Bad Sower (1908). The long, drawn faces of his figures bear a resemblance to those of Van Eyck and other early Northern artists, while his subject matter is drawn from biblical parables popular in the Gothic period. Here, the enigmatic portrait is less about the individual and more about the very soil in which he toils and from which he draws his strength and therefore becomes a means of visually affirming mankind’s connections to nature.

In a 1905 publication, the French critic Joris-Karl Huysmans recounted his travels in Germany at the end of the century, championing a trinity of German Gothics—Dürer, Cranach the Elder, and Hans Holbein the Elder—along with the visceral emotionalism of Grünewald’s masterworks such as the Isenheim Altarpiece (1512-16). The large scale, multi-opening composition was commissioned for a hospital chapel at an Antonite order monastery in Colmar. The complex primarily treated those afflicted with skin ailments, including Saint Anthony’s fire (ergotism), contracted from contaminated rye. The twisted, gnarled, and contorted body of the crucified Christ was intended not only to relay explicit Germano-Gothic stylistic conventions but also to empathize with the afflictions of the site’s patients. For Huysmans, the work was an exemplar of art’s power, and a model for what the catalogue essayists call “the expressive turn” at the fin de siècle.

Writing in 1916, in the midst of World War I, the critic Walter Benjamin found in Grünewald’s composition a startling representation of the grim realities of existence and a mirror for the nightmarish conditions of human conflict. Subsequent artists drew from the violent intensity found in the Gothic to help express not only their experiences of the war but a world shattered in its wake. In Käthe Koll- witz’s Hunger (1923) a jagged, skeletal mother is wracked with grief. Clutching her head, her mouth open in an almost primal cry, she grieves the dead child in her lap. The composition’s emotional intensity mirrors that of the Gothic past, here also evoking historical representations of the Pietà.

Other work on display in the exhibition engages with the Gothic imaginary via repeated subject matter. The exhibition highlights the Gothic Modern’s fascination with and translation of the Danse Macabre or Totentanz (Dance of Death). In this Medieval trope, a “dance,” or confrontation between the living and the dead, stands as a symbolic reminder of the frailty of existence and mortality, a message that in a religious context was intended to emphasize the importance of Christian salvation. For turn-of-the-20th-century viewers and artists alike, the motif also provided a means of responding to the harsh realities of modernity, an era of overwhelming uncertainty. What more is there to understand about life than the certainty of death?

By studying the Dance of Death’s historical origins, the curators present a re-reading of well-known works such as Van Gogh’s Head of a Skeleton with a Burning Cigarette (1886). Often dismissed as a crude joke from his school days, the work now evinces Van Gogh’s engagement with and modernization of age-old symbolism. More impressive are Finnish painter Simberg’s multiple renderings of the theme. Dance on the Quay (1899) shows two dark-suited skeletons twirling and dancing with peasant children lakeside on a dock. Based on the responses of their dance partners—one a young girl flush with excitement, the other tentative and unsure—we see a gentle, almost humorous depiction of the tragedies of existence. Simberg seems to suggest that in an era of u certainty we can only grasp at fleeting joy and laugh in the face of danger, willfully holding fast to the present and ignoring the possibility of future tragedy.

The “Gothic Modern” project began in 2018, prior to the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and other contemporary tensions, which, the curators point out, bear a stunning resemblance to the world in which these earlier modern artists found themselves. Rife with trauma, tension and fear, ours is a world that shares an affinity with both the Gothic and the Gothic Modern, which makes these movements more relevant than ever. The exhibition offers viewers the opportunity to also time travel, to look back upon the past as a means of con- fronting the challenges of today.

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