You might laugh off Halloween as little more than kids dressed as ghouls demanding sweets and leaving sticky fingerprints on doorbells. But we’re all susceptible to the spine-tingling embrace of the supernatural, at least when it comes for us in the seductive guise of the gothic. We never seem to weary of it. Indeed, as a major exhibition, Gothic Modern, opens in Helsinki before visiting other European capitals, it may be time we recognised this idiom for what it is: the style that won’t die.
Gothic began as the architectural pattern-book that furnished the great medieval cathedrals and churches of Europe, all flying buttresses and pointed arches. But it fell out of favour after the Reformation, when it was seen as an idolatrous efflorescence of popery. Henry VIII ransacked the churches and monasteries and these “bare ruined choirs”, as Shakespeare called them, became the setting for tales of sex and death and the occult, by the Bard himself and other hands.
By the time gothic was ripe for reappraisal by the Romantics, many of its most historic sites were wrecks – and nothing could have pleased the likes of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Turner more. The old marbles seemed to be repositories of the sublime, a numinous quality capable of arousing strong feelings in the beholder. They were a refuge from the clamour of the dawning industrial age. The first gothic novel was Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto published in 1764. Bram Stoker wrote Dracula, Mary Shelley breathed life into Frankenstein’s monster, and these and other gothic abominations have stalked popular culture ever since, trailing blood and neck-bolts, surviving pitchforks and stakes through the heart, endlessly reinvented for thrills, for laughs, for musicals and cartoons and fridge magnets.
A century or so after the Romantic writers and painters rediscovered gothic, so did a group we think of as pioneers of modern art: Van Gogh, Munch, the Finnish artist Helene Schjerfbeck and others. At least that’s according to the curators of Gothic Modern. Like sextons in a cluttered boneyard, they hope to break new ground with the show, which is at the Ateneum in Helsinki, part of the Finnish National Gallery.
Anna-Maria von Bonsdorff, co-curator of the exhibition, says: “We’re showing that early modern artists weren’t just looking forward to abstraction and to Picasso and Matisse and so on, but they were also looking back, to the gothic art of the northern Renaissance, to painters such as Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach the Elder and Hans Holbein.”
For the artists of 100 years ago, the advent of the machine age brought social upheaval, growing nationalism and the outbreak of world war, and they turned to the gothic to express their unease. This emerged in extraordinary visions of sexuality, death and trauma. More than 200 artworks at the Ateneum range from paintings, drawings and prints to sculpture and furniture. Key exhibits include Munch’s The Sun (1910-13) and Arnold Böcklin’s Self-Portrait With Death Playing the Fiddle (1872).
One of the best-known works in the show is a painting that Van Gogh made as a student: it’s a head-and-bony-shoulders of a skeleton, with a smouldering cigarette clamped between its teeth. Its mordant swagger feels very contemporary: it could have been made last week, perhaps by Banksy or Damien Hirst. It’s an exceptional loan from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, where it’s the most popular artwork among young visitors. Art history has tended to treat Skull of a Skeleton With Burning Cigarette (1885-6) as a juvenile joke, says Von Bonsdorff. “But this clearly recalls the Danse Macabre, a subject explored by Dürer and Holbein. We know from Van Gogh’s letters to his brother Theo that he was looking at Holbein and thinking about him at the time he painted the smoking skull.”
The exhibition suggests that people’s preoccupations are pretty similar wherever you go and throughout time – we all have an appointment with the ultimate gothic scene-stealer, death, after all – but there are winsome local variations. The Finnish painter Hugo Simberg depicts skeletons contentedly absorbed in tending pot plants in The Garden of Death (1896): an allotment out of a Tim Burton storyboard. And according to Nordic folklore, the bearer of bad tidings to a stricken hearth isn’t the Grim Reaper but an old woman. Several artists in the exhibition depict this black widow plodding through the snow to make her unwelcome house calls.
It isn’t all doom and gloom, though of course people are paying good money to see precisely that. The exhibition is organised into themes including “erotic devotions”, nature and the uncanny, and the “dance of death”. Munch contributes several sickly, colour-saturated sex-scapes. Death in the form of sexually transmitted disease, which was often fatal in his day, is an unseen presence in these trysts, joining Munch’s lovers in morbid threesomes. With the sepulchral and the sensual laid out in this inviting smorgasbord – or voileipapoyta, as a cold spread is called in Finland – the Ateneum hopes its show will appeal to young audiences.
Fiona Sampson, author of In Search of Mary Shelley, says the gothic resonates with young people because of its qualities of overstatement and hyperbole. “It feels enough for the intensity of emotion we have at that stage of life, before – perhaps – it’s knocked out of us. Gothic is also subversive. It looks backwards, sideways, forwards: anywhere but here. It articulates the way life can feel scary and uncanny. Millennial anxiety is the sense that the world, or the world as we know it, is going to end. With the climate crisis, pandemic and wars, there’s plenty to make young people today feel their world is indeed ending.”
Manchester-based academic Xavier Aldana Reyes consumes gothic material with the avidity of a deathwatch beetle. He’s co-president of the International Gothic Association, a group of scholars researching this aspect of popular culture, and he has contributed to the Death Studies Podcast. He says the gothic is often seen as outsider art. “It’s now typically associated with feminist, queer and anti-racist messages, especially in its contemporary iterations. Because it speaks the language of fear, it provides a good platform through which to explore the violence of marginalisation and inequality: it’s become almost a truism that communities who have experienced social injustices can sympathise with the plight of the monster”.
Aldana Reyes’s hitlist of current gothic attractions includes the novels of Laura Purcell and Sarah Perry’s Melmoth. “Often books will hark back to foundational texts like Frankenstein, Melmoth the Wanderer, Dracula and Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca’,” he says. “In film, we might include the recent sequel, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and the Demi Moore film The Substance, which to some extent rethinks The Picture of Dorian Gray and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde through body horror.”
Even the new biopic about Donald Trump, The Apprentice, has been seen by some reviewers as yet another remake of the Frankenstein story, with Roy Cohn, Trump’s mentor, as the dark genius who applied the jump leads and jolted his monster into life.
Gothic is everywhere, instantly recognisable and yet uncanny, as befits any view of human experience that deals with the great unknowable, death. It’s immediately legible to us – and endlessly cryptic.
