The art of melancholy - Art & Architecture - Times Onlinehttp://tls.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,2180-23185-1947862-231... CLICK HERE TO PRINT CLOSE WINDOW Times Online The art of melancholy MARK HUTCHINSON MÉLANCOLIE Génie et folie en Occident Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais until January 16 Jean Clair, editor MÉLANCOLIE Génie et folie en Occident 504pp. Éditions de la Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Gallimard. 59euros. 2 07 0111831 2 Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl SATURNE ET LA MÉLANCOLIE 738pp. Paris: Gallimard. 79euros. 2 07 071566 3 Hélène Prigent MÉLANCOLIE Les métamorphoses de la dépression 160pp. Gallimard. 13.90euros. 2 07 0305996 Among the nearly 300 works on show in Mélancolie: Génie et folie en Occident, the complex and hugely ambitious exhibition currently running at the Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais in Paris, is a copy of Robert Burton’s miscellaneous masterpiece, The Anatomy of Melancholy. Littered with Bible quotations, Latin tags and allusions to everything from Chinese jugglers to the diversity of meteors, this promiscuous leviathan of a book is a good example of the dangers that lie in store for the student of melancholy. Originally designed as a medical treatise, it had grown, by the time Burton had seen it through its fifth and final edition, to half a million words and touched on virtually everything under the sun: literature, religion, philosophy, climatology, cosmography, folklore, politics, love, social reform. Burton even gives us a blueprint for Utopia. There is, it seems, no area of human activity that is not, in some shape or form, subject to the baneful influence of black bile, no nook or cranny of the mind into which this “roving humour” has not insinuated itself. It is “inbred in every one of us”, an infirmity of body and soul that dogs our every step. Burton’s genial masterpiece is also a good illustration of one of the more puzzling features of melancholy. That reclusive clergyman may have “lived and died in melancholy”, as his epitaph in Christ Church says, but, paradoxically, this doesn’t seem to have hampered his genius in any way. On the contrary, we may find ourselves wondering whether the good-natured gusto with which he gives himself up to his task, the ferment apparent on every page, isn’t connected in some 1 of 8 25/04/2006 14:17 Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl. set out to examine the subject. It was only when the humanists of the Quattrocento turned their attentions to his work that the decisive shift occurred. the work of Theophrastus. painting. attributed by the Greeks to Aristotle. along with a detailed commentary. the “homo literatus” or tortured genius. due largely to the efforts of one man.co. pitched back and 2 of 8 25/04/2006 14:17 . Raymond Klibansky. and. we are told. but reissued in French to coincide with the exhibition – in which three distinguished scholars. the text cites not only tragic heroes such as Herakcules.Art & Architecture . I”. For the author of “Problem XXX. There was nothing inevitable about this. this is precisely what happened. and melancholy as a disposition characteristic of the outstanding individual. at the beginning of their book. To understand how this revolutionary transformation came about. and it wasn’t until the medieval schoolmen began their rehabilitation of Aristotle that any attempt was made to integrate the ideas set out in the Problems with a Western perspective.. the idea of the gifted melancholic was forgotten. with no serious bearing on science or philosophy. is that in distinguishing between melancholy as a sickness. and is reproduced. not merely have a constructive role to play in the life of the mind. . what references there were to the Problems were little more than scholarly allusions. under certain conditions. Plato and Socrates) “and almost everyone in the realm of poetry”. Tucked away in a relatively minor text from the “Aristotelian” corpus. the new conception of melancholy could easily have passed unnoticed. I”. Even then.200 years. The text in which this new conception of melancholy is introduced for the first time is known as “Problem XXX. I” is in the opening sentence: “Why is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy or politics or poetry or the arts are clearly melancholics . Marsilio Ficino.. the sufferings of the philosopher and the frenzy that led Ajax to slay a flock of sheep in the belief that he was actually slaying his enemies can alike be attributed to the influence of black bile. they tell us. that is. mysterious way with the very nature of his theme.uk/printFriendly/0. but be the main driving force behind creative inspiration. Klibansky and his colleagues argue. technology – of intellectual life in the West. . Bellerophon and Ajax. it opens the way not only for the transformation of an essentially pathological taxonomy (the classical doctrine of the Four Humours) into a psychological one (the medieval theory of the Four Temperaments). is an idea that first gained widespread currency in the Renaissance and was to have profound implications for the development of every aspect – literature. This fundamental ambivalence is what the Paris exhibition sets out to explore. the first book to treat of melancholy at any length. take their cue. and from which all subsequent interpretations. father of Renaissance Platonism.Times Online http://tls. including many of the essays in the exhibition’s bulky catalogue.2180-23185-1947862-231. According to the authors of Saturne et la mélancolie. but philosophers (Empedocles. What makes this text so important. thereby laying the intellectual foundations for a new type of man. medicine. ?”.. this reappraisal of the notion of melancholy was first effected very early on in the history of medicine. the great Italian philosopher and scholar. The question posed by “Problem XXX. it is probably. sometime in the fourth century bc when the doctrine of the Four Humours recently formulated by Hippocrates came under the influence of the portrayals of madness in Greek tragedy and the Platonic notion of “divine frenzy”. By way of example. Ficino not only rehabilitated the “Aristotelian” notion of the gifted melancholic. according to these authors.timesonline. or medical pathology. That a condition which we would today class as an acute form of depression might. we need to turn to a book – long out of print in English.The art of melancholy . In De vita triplici (1489). but also for the Renaissance rehabilitation of melancholy that was to prove so influential in so many spheres. For 1. science. but expressly tied it in with the Platonic notion of “divine frenzy”. or Rodin’s “Thinker” – can be taken at face value.Times Online http://tls. and. a bell at rest. elegantly binding in hermeticism and Neoplatonism with classical and Christian themes. or athanor. a sphere. a polyhedron with a hammer lying beside it. diagonally) they always add up to thirty-four. and offsetting the negative influence exercised by Saturn/Kronos in medieval astronomy against the healing power of Jove/Jupiter. it is important to know something of the scholarly background. is only available in French and German (the exhibition will be going on to the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin in February 2006). though the exhibition is impeccably laid out. Her right arm rests on a book in her lap. particularly in sixteenth.. a scrawny-looking dog. you will need to consult the catalogue. the exhibition – turns. Strewn about the ground are a variety of tools and instruments – a self-feeding furnace. including a black-figure amphora of “Ajax Preparing His Suicide” and a red-figure one of “Medea Slaying Her Child”. which follows closely the iconographic scheme outlined in Saturne et la mélancolie (the first room contains a series of works made between the sixth and the fourth century bc. a plane.co. The key exhibit in the early part of the exhibition is. no “Ode to Melancholy”. a set square. her left hand supports her head. The book was hugely influential throughout Europe. no Doctor Faustus either. by extension. or how David Nebreda’s horrific self-portrait photographs fit into the overall argument. each inscribed with a number so that whichever way you read the numbers (vertically. Seated on a millstone to her right is a plump little putto bent studiously over a slate. In the background is a stretch of coastline overlooking an alarmingly calm lake or sea. The scene is steeped in a lugubrious grey twilight. rumpled skirt is a set of keys and a purse. but true also of some of the later sections as well.Art & Architecture . Klibansky tells us. of course. Seated on a step outside a narrow building with a ladder leaning against it is a winged angel. a ruler.and seventeenth-century England..The art of melancholy .timesonline.. If you want to know what Antoine Chintreuil’s luminous little “Silver Birch” is doing in a show on melancholy. and some sort of syringe. horizontally. there are many whose connection with melancholy is by no means evident. is “a marvel of its kind”. Dürer’s engraving is not simply the first great representation of melancholy. and in the sky a comet. The English-speaking visitor is at something of a disadvantage here. For the visitor to the exhibition. a pair of pincers. which carry on the work begun by Panofsky and his colleagues – whose book basically stops with Dürer’s “Melencolia I” – down to the present day. an hourglass with equal amounts of sand in each bulb. no “Il Penseroso”. say. Dürer’s “Melencolia I”. forth between the heights of rapture and the depths of despair. a handsaw.uk/printFriendly/0. their pans exactly balanced. then leads straight on into the late Middle Ages). three nails. but the work on which the whole argument of Saturne et la mélancolie – and. and. so to speak. which. very likely. and the various works on show to either side of it chronologically – from Gérard de Saint-Jean’s “St John the Baptist in the Wilderness” (c1480–85) to Cranach the Elder’s 1532 version of “Melancholy” – all bear in one form or other on the dilemma which first finds expression there. curled up asleep next to the millstone. for while some of the works on show – Goya’s “Saturn Devouring His Son”. the first in which it takes on a life of its own. The picture is at once immediately legible and deeply ambiguous. This is true not only of the early part of the exhibition. unfortunately. it is the kind of show that can only be fully understood by sitting down and reading the catalogue edited by Jean Clair. Fixed to the wall of the building are a set of scales. for.2180-23185-1947862-231. Hanging from the belt of her long. What makes Dürer’s picture so enigmatic is precisely this superabundance of objects: it is “overdetermined” – has too many 3 of 8 25/04/2006 14:17 . the hand holding a compass. The book. a rainbow and a batlike figure brandishing a streamer with the inscription “Melencolia I”. and a “magic square” composed of sixteen smaller squares. and without it there would probably have been no Burton. the second. unlike Ficino’s.The art of melancholy . in part because it involves seeing the sphere as a symbol of instability and the figure “I” in the title as a symbol of divine unity. and in Mélancolie: Les métamorphoses de la dépression. the curator of the German leg of the exhibition.timesonline. judicious. and cannot possibly be taken as a symbol of Faust-like despair. Peter-Klaus Schuster. In the catalogue.2180-23185-1947862-231. since not only are the rainbow and the comet associated with both categories in Agrippa’s system. The first holds sway over the untutored. Nor. over philosophers. . a category that includes architects and painters. “‘Melencolia I’ marks that fleeting and remarkable moment in the history of western thought when the artist believes he has become a polymath. the crown of watercress and waterparsley around the angel’s brow are an antidote to the dry humour of the melancholic. with the individual soul free to move up or down the hierarchy.co. that he be drawn away therefrom by merry lute-play to the pleasuring of his blood”. clues and signposts pointing in similar but not quite identical directions. over contemplatives to whom God’s mysteries have been revealed. wise and witty”. Agrippa distinguishes three kinds of melancholy: melancholia imaginationis.uk/printFriendly/0. Panofsky concludes that Dürer’s angel is a personification of Geometry overcome with Melancholy (or Melancholy giving herself up to Geometry) and was in all likelihood inspired by a follower of Ficino. a 4 of 8 25/04/2006 14:17 . however. In De Occulta Philosophia. What do the comet and the rainbow signify? Why does the ladder appear to change plane halfway up? Why are there three nails.Art & Architecture . draws heavily on the Italian’s work. melancholia rationis and melancholia mentis. physicians and orators. based on a division of the picture into two halves. of course. whereby melancholy might superabound in him. also takes issue with Panofsky’s interpretation. a “noble” art. but the system itself. are all associated with avarice. was fluid. the left side fortuna. This is not the only way of reading the picture. whose book. and so on). not fixed. one with a double tine? Are they an allusion to the Crucifixion? (Jean Clair thinks they are. the precise interpretation we put on the picture is not important. melancholia imaginationis. the magic square is designed to invoke the healing influence of Jupiter. This is perfectly plausible. the author Hélène Prigent shrewdly observes that Dürer could very well have included objects associated with melancholia rationis (books. arguing that Dürer’s angel is an allegory. De Occulta Philosophia. the keys and the clenched fist. . not of geometry but of astronomy...Times Online http://tls. Schuster then proposes a reading of his own. I happen to find his interpretation unconvincing. in 1510. Burton thought Dürer’s “sad angel .) After reviewing in great detail the positive and negative associations of the various symbols and motifs (the purse. There is nothing to prevent us putting a more positive gloss on the picture. that Dürer’s angel is a portrayal of the first of these. not unreasonably. an engineer. was Dürer himself given to romanticizing melancholy: among the guidelines he sets out for the young apprentice in his Outline of a General Treatise on Painting we find. one of the vices attributed to melancholy in the medieval period. for example. As Jean Clair remarks a little further on in the catalogue. “Sixth. instruments for weighing and measuring) to indicate the direction in which the first stage of melancholy was moving. surrounded by her instruments but sunk in gloom at the thought of having accomplished nothing. arranged in an ascending hierarchy. As Schuster points out. What matters is the intimate bond it establishes between the rational imagination and the black waters of despair. In a sense.. just four years before the engraving was made. the third. Panofsky’s argument is persuasive. if the child works too hard. and Aby Warburg saw her as Melancholy triumphing over the madness that threatens to engulf her. not least because it affords an explanation for one of the many riddles posed by the engraving: the number attached to the title. and a draft of which was sent to Dürer’s friend Johannes Trithemius. we should remember. Panofsky concludes from this. the German philosopher Agrippa devon Nettesheim. the right side embodying virtù. some more memorable than others. for instance. a narwhal’s tusk) and an anonymous. that no mathesis universalis can re-order and gather together the disjecta membra of the real”. a room given over to the instruments and emblems of seventeenth. sixteenth-century copy of a Dürer watercolour of blue columbine – are particularly well chosen. I would include Domenico Fetti’s “Melancholy”. Dürer didn’t invent the pose. as Werner Spies remarkssays in the catalogue. for example. And it is this outlook or belief. and two of the most beautiful examples in the entire exhibition – Nicolas de Leyde’s “Bust of a Man Leaning on an Elbow” and an astonishingly vivid polychrome wood carving with the same title by an anonymous maître Strasbourgeois – predate Dürer’s engraving by several decades. Even with the aid of wall texts.The art of melancholy . the large. with the head propped disconsolately on the hand. numero et pondere. “flying” version of “The Angel of the Hearth”. the West had finally come full circle. and the solution they adopt is a mixed one. is identify the pose so closely with melancholy that it became a code. Achronological juxtapositions of this kind can be found all through the exhibition.co. a botanist and a physician. that lays the foundations for the growth of science and. not always successfully. there is a limit to how much a painting or sculpture can be made to say. with the horrors of the twentieth century. part witch”. also includes one of Max Ernst’s most powerful and disturbing paintings. modelled during the Occupation.uk/printFriendly/0. The objects and works in this room – which include a planispheric astrolabe. on the other hand.Times Online http://tls. and one that. with a start. There are many examples of this on display. Picasso’s “Death’s Head”. of course: there is a Roman bronze of Ajax in much the same attitude in the very first room. Painted in 1937 after the defeat of the Spanish Republicans. impressively. part chronological.2180-23185-1947862-231. capable of taking the knowledge and measure of all things.timesonline. The main iconographic thread running through the show is the posture of Dürer’s angel. for the domination of the world by technology. while Giacometti’s so-called “Cube” – a twelve-sided polyhedron made after visiting a Dürer exhibition in Paris in 1937 – has been installed in the middle of the exhibition’sMélancolie’s “cabinet of curiosities”.. the works on show can only go so far towards illustrating. geometer. works from a different period may be interpolated to point up echoes or affinities. What Dürer did do. was widely believed to be a remedy for melancholy. slumped in a corner in the final room. but. are linked in one way or another to the theme of the exhibition: unicorn’s horn. and all.Art & Architecture . for example. of course. a unicorn’s horn (that is. because it touches on so many different fields. bears comparison with Picasso’s famous icon. a “Double Portrait” attributed to Giorgione. it was almost certainly inspired by “Guernica” and. in which the somewhat pantomime-like monster of the smaller canvas (mistakenly reproduced in its stead in the catalogue) has been replaced by a truly hideous and altogether more ominous-looking angel.. Georges de la Tour’s “Madeleine at the Candle”. but within that scheme. “part bat. Broadly speaking. among the more striking ones. Both the Mélancolie exhibition and the catalogue grapple with this problem. even as he discovers. a bat’s skeleton. the shifting attitudes to melancholy are treated century by century. a very beautiful Corot (“Melancholy”) and Ron Mueck’s hugely imposing “Big Man”. Clair suggests. and blue columbine had been associated with the affliction ever since the fifteenth century. The section on the late Middle Ages. This is an intriguing thesis.. lurching menacingly towards the viewer over a deserted landscape.and eighteenth-century science. for the historical pessimism it implies: as though. ultimately. 5 of 8 25/04/2006 14:17 . The reason it has been placed there is not only for the echoes it contains of various late medieval paintings of the Temptation of St Anthony (one of the themes explored in the section). a gilded bronze heavenly globe. appears among a group of grisly seventeenth-century works on the theme of vanitas. part iconographic. it is simply the posture that many music-lovers adopt in order to shut out visual interference. If music played such an important role in sixteenth. as Guillaume Faroult explains in the catalogue. The gentle scholar embodied in Dürer’s portrait of St Jerome.. and. he is behaving much like so many princes and monarchs of that time (Francesco de’ Medici in Italy. he converts the scholar’s study into an alchemist’s forge. “Fortune Teller with a Drinker. we are none the wiser.The art of melancholy . As for “Musicians and Soldiers”. no doubt. but the pose is slightly different from the one we associate with melancholy. Rudolph II in Prague. For all its feverish activity and empire-building. had much time. The woman at the centre of the composition. because the cataclysm that looms on the horizon of Dürer’s engraving has now occurred. but the horned figure of Mephistopheles in the background. as so many of the works in this section bear out. Neither the philosophers of the Enlightenment. meanwhile. Clair argues. could at least reproduce the variety of the world in miniature in their palaces and halls. Among the works in this section are a series of seventeenth-century paintings of David playing for Saul. Valentin de Boulogne’s Caravaggesque “Musicians and Soldiers” and Fernand Khnopff’s “Listening to Schumann”. and the uniformly soft-focus texture of the picture. the connection is borne out by a second painting. in a short article on the subject. it seems. There are also moments when the connection with melancholy seems a touch strained.and seventeenth-century life. the period is one of intense anxiety and gloom. it is partly. for it is no longer the scholar who is winged. Like the cropping of the pianist. is indeed resting her head on her hand. is giving way to a rather more shadowy figure. the divorce between melancholy and the imagination is all but complete. since it is part of the logic of a collection that it can never be complete. however. The medieval world-view that Dürer’s angel had hoped to reconcile with the new humanist learning is fading. If the catalogue entry is to be believed. The Khnopff canvas likewise seems a little far-fetched.co.. the palette of which is dominated by warm reds and golds. describes melancholy as a kind of spiritual exercise designed to shelter the soul from the more violent passions. there is an important difference. This is particularly true of the small room on music. we notice.. for the “English malady”. In Adriaen Mathen’s drawing of “Dr Faustus in His Study”. while Diderot. if they were unable to dominate the universe.2180-23185-1947862-231. greedy to increase his treasure. is decisive: when Marlowe’s Faustus. neither of the Encyclopédie’s articles on the imagination so much as mentions it. in so doing. has nothing conspicuously gloomy about it. As for the positioning of the hand. Philip II in Spain. of whom we see only a hand on the keyboard.uk/printFriendly/0. but since the painting is not included in the exhibition. probably conceived as a pendant to the present work. But when Faustus starts wanting to experiment with and transform the materials in his workshop. a Lute Player and a Pick-pocket”. painted in 1883. As Prigent remarks. are reminiscent of Dürer’s “Melencolia I”. Designed to illustrate the therapeutic powers ascribed to music ever since antiquity. it is one in a series of devices designed.timesonline. it is without question a very beautiful painting. marks the turn from a theological age to one governed by technology. and the heavens are slowly being dismantled. that is. to conjure up a synaesthetic effect. the screening of the listener’s face from view tones down our own visual response and thereby helps suggest the experience of listening to music. True. this is probably the weakest room in the exhibition. in true Symbolist fashion. By the time we reach the eighteenth century. This. The shift here.Art & Architecture . she’s listening to Schumann and is wearing black. but I’m not sure it has much to do with melancholy. as it was called. who is listening to a figure playing the piano in the background. nor their Revolutionary counterparts. but the mood of the picture. Collecting can itself be considered a melancholy pursuit. both the scholar’s posture and the plethora of instruments. is “la douce 6 of 8 25/04/2006 14:17 . asks Mephistopheles to “fly to India for gold [and] ransack the ocean for Orient pearls”. among them) who.Times Online http://tls. Lest the visitor have any doubts that he is entering a madhouse. in the second group. in an essay tracing the history of this peculiarly toxic notion. a few etchings by Piranesi) on show from that period. Only towards the very end of the century. to a melancholy medieval tradition of Apocalypse. In an essay on “terror and melancholy” in the Salon of 1801. Stéphane Guégan argues that this renewed interest in the subject on the part of Constance Charpentier. had always had two faces. is too familiar to need rehearsing here. it can ultimately be traced back. Both themes.2180-23185-1947862-231.The art of melancholy . are concerned with the revolution in man’s attitude to Nature and are organized around two broad themes: “landscape and the sublime” (“le paysage comme état d’âme”) and “the melancholy of ruins”. The link between imagination and madness is also touched on briefly in paintings by Fuseli (“Self-Portrait“. “Cannibals Preparing Their Victims”. who has no fewer than eight works on display: “Saturn Devouring His Son”. does the black sun of melancholy once more start to rise. reclining figures between which he must pass on his way into the final rooms: Caius Gabriel Cibber’s seventeenth-century carvings of “Melancholy Madness” and “Raving Madness”. François André Vincent and Jean-Antoine Gros (the three artists represented in this part of the exhibition) should not be seen merely as a response to the fall of Robespierre: like the Enlightenment movement of which it was part. much as the medieval hermit withdrew to the desert for purgation. of the notion of “decadence” or “degeneration”. seem to stretch a point) are a series of landscapes by Caspar David Friedrich. sometime around the middle of the nineteenth century. of course. whose “TheTwo Cousins” is one of a small handful of works (Joseph Marie Vien the elder’s “La Douce Mélancolie”.Art & Architecture .co. so the solitary Romantic turns to nature for spiritual replenishment. “Silence”). Clair argues.. Blake (“Nabuchodonosor”) and Victor Hugo (“Planet (Saturn)”). it is probably Goya. Clair argues. “Self-Portrait with Spectacles”. for. “Yard with Lunatics”. If there is a bridge figure here. As the neurologist Laura Bossi explains. The bulk of the works in this section. he argues. The reason they have been placed there is bound up with one of the most sinister chapters in the history of medicine: the introduction. How their ideas played out when taken up by the Nazis. neoclassicism. And an apocalypse. Hubert Robert’s “Ruined Temple” and Arnold Böcklin’s “The Island of the Dead” and “Villa by the Sea”. its dissemination was largely the work of three men: the psychiatrist Bénédict Auguste Morel. however. contain echoes of the Middle Ages. in redrawing the boundaries of the sacred and the profane and rejecting what Auden called the “mechanized desert” of the city. which originally flanked the gates to Bedlam. Among the most striking works in the first group (one or two of which. is pretty much what the twentieth century amounts to. it is brought home to him by two grim. and David’s “The Lictors Bringing Home to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons” is as prescient of the Terror as it is of the fall of the ancien régime. like the silver birch mentioned earlier. is particularly rich in works relating to melancholy.Times Online http://tls. for Lombroso and 7 of 8 25/04/2006 14:17 . “Monk by the Sea” and the astonishing sepia-and-pencil desolation of “View of Arcona with Rising Moon”. only to fall prey there to the temptations of demons. the criminologist Cesare Lombroso and the writer Max Nordau.. Not the least alarming aspect of this whole dark chapter. only to be beset by visions of an infinite and possibly indifferent universe. As one would expect.timesonline. in conjunction with the sister “science” of eugenics. when the French Revolution begins devouring its own children..uk/printFriendly/0. “Portrait of John Cartwright”. “Gaspar de Jovellanos”. “Ezzelin and Meduna”. As for the Romantic fascination with ruins. “Time or the Old Ones” and what is arguably the single most distressing painting in the entire show. the Romantic movement. “Self-Portrait”. as the exhibition sees it. “Capricho 43: ‘The Sleep of Reason Brings Forth Monsters’ ”. is that it reverses the process carried out in the Renaissance: where the Neoplatonist philosophers had seen in the spirirtual torments of the “children of Saturn” the seeds of genius. mélancolie” of the age of Watteau. “Moon Rising over the Sea”. only for petit-bourgeois thinking and neo-Imperial kitsch.co. were holding up Artaud as “the fulfilment of literature” and comparing the grandeur of the “revolutionary” schizophrenic with the destitution of the “reactionary” paranoiac. too. 8 of 8 25/04/2006 14:17 . there was no place for the “children of Saturn” either. the answer is “Yes and No”.The art of melancholy . from a condition known as Cotard’s syndrome or “negation delirium”. a madman. No. the criminologist writes. is still with us in the form of biogenetic engineering. this murky confluence of clinical psychiatry. And it cuts both ways. of course: if there was no real place for the outstanding intellect in the “new orders” of twentieth-century totalitarianism. because it wasn’t all that long ago that Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. put behind us the poisonous confusion fostered by Lombroso et al? Judging by some of the works (Artaud. There is one last question this complex exhibition raises. totalitarian ideology and art is classic Jean Clair territory. not only to Dürer but to the dead weight of Germany’s Nazi past. I might also add that the eight essays Clair has contributed to the catalogue form the best introduction to the show. as Jean Clair suggests.2180-23185-1947862-231. “Baudelaire”. And the effect is exhilarating. in extreme cases.. for example (several of whose self-portraits are included here). not so much a return to as an acting out of the most horrific visions of the Middle Ages. as I have tried to suggest. As anyone who has read his books will know. whose appalling co-opting of mental suffering to political ends in L’Anti-Oedipe has long been an object of Clair’s wrath. company the imaginative powers of Baudelaire. Please read our Privacy Policy. extreme self-satisfaction” and so on. “strikes us as the true type of lunatic possessed by the manie des grandeurs: provocative appearance.uk/printFriendly/0. and on down to Anselm Kiefer’s “Melencholia”. the Gypsies and the Jews. a fighter plane made of lead that looks as though it had been cobbled together in a madman’s garage in a grim tribute. This service is provided on Times Newspapers' standard Terms and Conditions. mark him out as. And Yes. or have we not. and consequently that he is either immortal or already dead. in which the patient believes he has no bodily organs and. David Nebrada) in the final rooms. whatever else may be said of him..Art & Architecture . the elderly and the infirm. defiant gaze. quite literally. There is a very real and depressing sense in which the barbarities of the twentieth century marked. Eugenics. because in the far corner of the last room is Ron Mueck’s great golem of a man who. Copyright 2006 The Times Literary Supplement Ltd. has looked melancholy clearly in the face.timesonline. could be said to reverse the usual relation between exhibition and catalogue.Times Online http://tls. and it is an important one: have we. the misfits and the maladjusted. who were among the earliest targets of the new Reich. may well have suffered. no body at all. Artaud. which. Contact our syndication team to inquire about a licence to reproduce material from The TLS. and everything in the modern section is designed to throw light on it: from Van Gogh’s “Portrait of Dr Paul Gachet” and some distinctly eerie plates from the French edition of Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals to Mario Seroni’s “Seated Woman and Landscape: Melancholy” and Antonin Artaud’s portraits and drawings. like the artist DavidNebrada..