MONTREAL.- Until December 11, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts’ Graphic Arts Centre becomes a theatre of dark fantasies of the human subconscious with works by some of the nineteenth century’s great graphic artists in the exhibition “The Black Sun of Melancholy”: Monsters of the Unconscious, From Goya and Blake to Redon and Munch. This exhibition, whose title “The Black Sun of Melancholy” comes from Gérard de Nerval’s sonnet El desdichado, brings together drawings and lithographs by sixteen romantic artists who delved the depths of their imaginations to evoke strong feelings in the beholder.

From the stories of Mary Shelley, author of the 1818 novel Frankenstein, and Edgar Allan Poe, to the emergence in the latter nineteenth century of psychoanalysis, the human subconscious became a popular subject for artists of the era like William Blake, Rodolphe Bresdin, Eugène Delacroix, James Ensor, Paul Gauguin, Francisco de Goya, Victor Hugo, Max Klinger, Hans Makart, John Martin, Charles Meryon, Edvard Munch, Odilon Redon, Félicien Rops, James Tissot and Félix Vallotton, whose works are featured in this MMFA exhibition.

“This romantic movement, prefigured by the philosopher Edmund Burke and his reflections on the Beautiful and the Sublime, emphasized the individual creative imagination and a fascination for the intentional evocation of strong personal sentiment and the impact of commingled thrill and terror on the reader, listener or beholder,” explained Hilliard T. Goldfarb, curator of the exhibition and Senior Curator – Collections and Curator of Old Masters at the MMFA.

Francisco de Goya brilliantly explored the dark aspects of the human psyche, both in their political dimensions and in scathing commentaries on human nature, through his series of prints like “Los Proverbios,” of which the Museum’s complete series of the first edition is being exhibited for the first time.

Also being presented are the complete series “To Gustave Flaubert: The Temptation of Saint Anthony,” dedicated to the great writer by Odilon Redon, as well as prints from the series entitled “Homage to Goya,” populated by strange, embryonic creatures of his imagination. The exhibition also features s a new acquisition, The Abduction / Death and the Maiden by Hans Makart ‒ a fascinating drawing that reflects the Austrian artist’s interest in romantic themes associated with music.

William Blake (a selection of illustrations from the Book of Job and Dante’s Divine Comedy), John Martin (his celebrated large-scale mezzotint The Deluge and his illustrations inspired by John Milton’s Paradise Lost) and Victor Hugo (a remarkable, nearly abstract pen-and-wash drawing and a paper cut-out) are also presented in this exhibition, which evokes the nineteenth century’s power to move and terrify.

This exhibition at the MMFA is curated by Hilliard T. Goldfarb, the MMFA’s Senior Curator – Collections and Curator of Old Masters.

NEW ACQUISITION:
The Abduction / Death and the Maiden by Hans Makart
Recently acquired at The European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) in Maastricht, this evocative and intriguing drawing reflects Makart’s interest in romantic themes with musical associations (like the great Viennese composer Franz Schubert’s Lied of 1817 and quartet of 1824). The theme, a sort of amalgam of the Totentanz with erotic undercurrents, dates back to the Renaissance, particularly in Germanic art. The drawing is a wonderful example of the artist’s early virtuosity in the use of ink, pastel and pencil.

The composition is carefully designed for maximum impact. The foreshortened horse of hell leaps into the black chasm of the underworld at great speed, confirmed by the shroud-like cape of Death caught in the wind; Death himself is highly defined to enhance the realism of the horror; the maiden, apparently collapsing into death, her life flow evoked by the strangely pinkish-blonde loosened hair, is more fluidly and loosely defined. The scene is set in ominous lighting against a dark, hovering sky. Makart has also animatedly, even savagely scratched into the surface of the paper, notably at lower right, with the dry point of his pen, suggesting weeds about the rocky outcropping.

1st complete edition presented for the first time: Goya’s “Los Proverbios”
The original eighteen prints comprising “Los Proverbios” were executed by Goya between about 1816 and 1823. Arguably, they were private essays by the artist, never intended for commercial release. Goya left the etched copper plates with his son in Madrid in 1824, when he expatriated to Bordeaux, apparently without having printed them. The Real Academia Española in Madrid first published the series in 1864.

An important key to interpreting Goya’s imagery is that his witches and monsters are not totally fantastical but suggest humans indulging in vices; these are caricatures of people whom the artist viewed as parasitic, unjust or intensely immoral. Goya’s enemies were lust, pride, vanity, ignorance and corruption.

Odilon Redon’s “Homage to Goya”
The title of this series of six lithographs (four of which are presented in the exhibition) is purely a dedication to Goya. Redon seems to have found precedents not only in the works of Goya, Bresdin, Rembrandt and Leonardo, but also in Hindu symbolism and classical mythology. Although Redon was inspired by Poe, Baudelaire and Flaubert, he also read about the latest developments in anatomy and botany.

In The Marsh Flower, a Sad, Human Head, Redon creates one of his famous hybrid creatures as the blossom of a strange plant accompanied by other radiant head blossoms suggestively glowing as pods about to burst. Even more sui-generis forms emerge in There Were Also Embryonic Beings, strange floating cellules or polyps that seem to allude to the mystery of creation itself and of evolution. Redon was intrigued by the theories of Darwin, but he was also drawn to Hindu cosmology and mythic imagery of the Golden Embryo and the Cosmic Egg to which he had been introduced by M. A. Clavaud. A Strange Juggler seems to speak to the cosmic resonances of human relationship – of fear and despair, of comfort and unity – set within a cosmos of heavenly objects, radiant auras, faces, and developing vegetation emerging from an eclipsed sun.