The Darker Side of Light at the Smart Museum of Art

by Victor M. Cassidy

Sepulchral shriek, dark plumage
I am the rapacious Raven.
Would you like to have my picture?

These lines come from the inscription to Félix Braquemond’s etching The Raven (1854) in which the rapacious bird perches on a gibbet with hanging ropes awaiting use. Behind him are more ravens.

The Raven is one of many such works on paper in The Darker Side of Light: Arts of Privacy, 1850-1900, which is up at the Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago until June 13. Among the 100 prints and drawings in this exhibition, ten depict the devil or evil monsters, two show the dance of death, and there are two cholera epidemics, a pair of morphine addicts, an exterminating angel, an acid thrower and a lascivious temptress (nude) with a serpent slithering between her thighs, wrapped behind her neck, and looking out defiantly at the viewer. Fourteen criminal acts—rape, murder, and incipient suicide–are shown. In one print, we see the severed head of a Japanese miscreant who was executed for robbing and murdering British tourists.

According to Peter Parshall, Curator of Old Master Prints at the National Gallery and organizer of The Darker Side of Light, Paris “reigned as the city of light” from 1850 to 1900. Impressionism “captured the bustle of its lively streets and cafés.” This show, says Parshall, presents “another dimension of the period, one captured by less well known, sometimes enigmatic, and often melancholy imagery.” These works were collected, “kept under wraps,” and “viewed discreetly on chosen occasions,” he claims.

It seems that Mr. Parshall is unacquainted with 19th century French literature. Victor Hugo (1802-1885), Charles Baudelaire (1821-1857), Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880), Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898), Emile Zola (1840-1902), and many others were active between 1850 and 1900. Their works, which the public devoured, contain far more crime, vice, melancholy, avarice, and war than we see in these prints. Also, roughly half the works in The Darker Side of Light are inoffensive landscapes, street scenes, and portraits. Why would a collector hide Charles Meryon’s handsome images of Paris architecture and view them “discreetly on chosen occasions?”

Curatorial piffle aside, this is a solid, very literary show with much unfamiliar art by mostly French (60pieces) and German (30 pieces) printmakers. Some of the prints were published in books to illustrate narratives, some are scenes from novels, and some have verse inscriptions. Many of the printmakers are little-known because they did not innovate, but they still make honest, skillful work that merits serious consideration.

The star of the show with eighteen prints is Max Klinger (1857-1920), the German painter and engraver who is best known for Paraphrases about the Finding of a Glove (1881). This is ten etchings of dream images that came to the artist after he found a woman’s glove at a skating rink. The Glove, whose subject is obsession, anticipates Freud’s studies on fetish objects, but its narrative content can overshadow the artist’s superb skills. Klinger draws beautifully and composes each scene with utmost economy.

Paul Albert Besnard (1849-1934), the French painter and etcher, has ten works in the exhibition, which unsentimentally depict humanity at its best and worst. This master of engraved line and shadow should be better known, which may suggest why Mr. Parshall put so much of his work into this show.

In Intimacy (1889), an etching of a couple reading indoors with light coming through the windows, Besnard creates an atmosphere of settled companionship. In The Embers (1887) shows an attractive boy kneeling in shadow by a fireplace, the light reflected on his face. But the Morphine Addicts (1887) is two young women, dull and enervated, and The Suicide (c. 1886) shows a despairing woman—she looks like a lump of rags—completely alone and hunched over as she sits above the water on the side of a bridge. In The End of it All (1883) a woman is dying in a chair while a friend comforts her and a horrified child looks straight out at the viewer. The show includes some prints in the same vein by Kathe Kollwitz, but she has been widely recognized for years.

Two French artists–Odilon Redon (1840-1916) and Félix Buhot (1847-1898)—demonstrate virtuoso printmaking skills, particularly in their use of black. Redon, who is known for his depictions of fantastic monsters and the dream state in charcoal drawings, lithographs, and etchings, once said that he wanted to “place the visible at the service of the invisible.” Redon’s lithograph This is the Devil (1888) shows the devil “folding under his wings—not unlike a giant bat suckling its young—the Seven Deadly Sins, whose grimacing heads can be dimly discerned,” according to its inscription.

Even grimmer and blacker is Redon’s Temptation of Saint Anthony (1889) which is the frontispiece to A Gustave Flaubert, a book that presumably honored the late novelist. Here, in a deeply shadowy place, a dark winged creature with a lion’s face, presumably the devil surrounds St. Anthony who successfully resists him.

Buhot’s The Spirits of Dead Cities (1885) is a dark, spooky depiction of “human perispirits, weightless troops, carried away by the dead steeples of dead cities,” says its inscription. Considerably more restful is Adolphe Appian’s atmospheric Nocturne (Fisherman in a Boat) (1887), which shows the angler in a boat at twilight with a farmer driving his cattle home in the distance.

Bottom Line: There is much to be learned from The Darker Side of Light and it gives great pleasure. Time there will be well spent.

The Darker Side of Light is on exhibition at the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago in Hyde Park, 5550 S. Greenwood Ave. The show runs through June 13th, 2010. For more information, visit the museum’s website.