How Gothic Art From the Middle Ages Inspired Modern Artists

The question of why, at the turn of the 20th century, modern art flourished in Europe has long been one of art history’s most intriguing. Was it exposure to non-Western influences? The advent of the camera? Or was a radical break with the past the only way to cope with a rapidly industrializing world? A surprising survey exhibition, “Gothic Modernity,” which debuted last fall at the Ateneum in Helsinki and is now on view at Oslo’s National Museum, posits a different theory.

The show argues that many leading modernists were paradoxically fascinated with the past, in particular the medieval Gothic tradition of northern Europe and Germany. Themes of morbidity, trauma, spirituality, and the uncanny that reappear in Gothic art have proven to have an enduring appeal, not least, it seems, for those faced with the uncertainties inherent to modernity. For many of these artists, Gothic no longer described a style belonging to a specific time or place that might be revived, but a sensibility and a richly generative aesthetic available to all.

As such, a through line of inquiry can be found between the work of artists like Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach the Elder, and Hans Holbein the Younger, and those like Edvard Munch, Käthe Kollwitz, Akseli Gallen-Kallela, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. In the short-lived arts periodical , founded in Berlin in 1895, work by the medieval greats was printed side by side with illustrations by contemporary Nordic and German-speaking artists.

Many late 19th-century artists and writers are known to have embarked on pilgrimages to places associated with Gothic art, particularly in Germany and Flanders. They were particularly drawn to the art’s emotionally expressive nature as a portal through which to express otherwise elusive realities. This might also pave the way for an exploration of an artist’s own interiority, or offer a more penetrating glimpse at the alienation or crises experienced by others.

For particularly heavy subjects, like death and suffering, some artists revived the medieval practice of printmaking, which could be all the more impactful for its direct, monochromatic qualities. Other artists embraced symbolism as a means of imbuing scenes with greater meaning.

At times dismissed as a movement lacking the sophistication of Renaissance innovations that pulled the West out of the Middle Ages and into the early modern era, the Gothic has never lost its beguiling appeal. Here is our pick of five of the best examples of artists who looked to the past in order to imagine a new future.

Edvard Munch

While himself in the throes of an affair, the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch painted , a vision of despair as two lovers separate after an amorous encounter. Like many of the artist’s male figures, the regretful suitor holds his bowed head in his hands. The woman, meanwhile, looks out at the viewer aghast, her white dress still unbuttoned to reveal a more racy, red undergarment. Gothic art might have inspired modern artists to explore complicated feelings around carnal desire and the perceived relationship between sin and sexuality.

Munch made several sketches of Gothic cathedrals and their rose windows, which allow divine sunlight to flood into an otherwise austere, dark space. The exhibition links his interest in these scenes with his impulse towards expressionist monumentality. Many old Gothic structures had been left to crumble into a state of disrepair but renewed interest in medieval art dovetailed with a spate of restoration efforts across Europe in the 19th century.

Marianne Stokes

The Austrian-born Marianne Stokes became one of the leading artists of Victorian England, having settled in the U.K. after marrying an English landscape painter. She was greatly inspired by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which had held up medieval culture as possessing a spiritual and aesthetic integrity since the mid-19th century. Many paintings by artists like Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones revived medieval themes and literary subjects with a vivid, archaicizing style and plenty of symbolism.

Stokes’s is based on a popular trope in German Renaissance art, in which a young woman is seized by the personification of death, having developed out of the classic medieval allegory of the danse macabre or dance of death. In this dark vision, a visibly terrified maiden finds herself already in Death’s cold embrace. The trope had regained popularity in the Victorian era, with artist Evelyn De Morgan also making her own version .

Akseli Gallen-Kallela

Lemminkäinen’s Mother is one of the best-known masterpieces by Finnish artist Akseli Gallen-Kallela, depicting a scene from the Finnish national epic the Kalevala in which the hero Lemminkänen’s body is rescued from a river and reassembled by his mother. As she waits for the god Ukko to help her bring her son back to life, she is shown by Gallen-Kallela in the classic style. Translating to “pity,” this depiction of the Virgin Mary cradling the body of Jesus Christ after his descent from the cross is one of the most frequently depicted subjects in Christian art and has become an archetypal image of maternal sorrow.

As the exhibition points out, familiar Christian iconography was repurposed by many modernist artists, borrowing its expressive poignancy while giving it new relevance. Gallen-Kallela also revived the traditions of medieval woodcut for sires like , a memorial to his deceased daughter, finding it to be a potent medium for the expression of inner turmoil.

Theodor Kittelsen

The Norwegian artist Theodor Kittelsen was admired for his illustrations of fairy tales and Nordic legends. He invented various characters, including forest trolls and the so-called monster of the lake, and introduced them to rugged landscapes in works that contain a mix of darkness and humor.

Folktales about the black death, a bubonic plague pandemic that spread through Europe in the 14th century, informed one series of illustrations. In these works, death is personified as the character Pesta, a sinister old woman who roams the world. In one misty scene, she can be seen flying like an owl over fir tops. In another, her head looms into view as she ascends the stairwell of a house, trapping the viewer on the top floor.

Käthe Kollwitz

The work of German artist Käthe Kollwitz never shied from morbidity and suffering, even before she used her work as a medium through which to grieve the death of her young son in World War I. After this time, she repeatedly returned to the motif of the and many of her works honed in on bodily contact, whether tender or oppressive, to explore the intensity of human relationships. As such, Kollwitz also took the danse macabre to its furthest and most powerful conclusion with The central female figure is trapped and pulled between her capacity to create new life and the inevitable tug of death.

Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com