The major art exhibition during last year’s Edinburgh
International Festival was entitled Symbolist Landscape. I was apprehensive
about the show: there are many ghastly Symbolist paintings. In the event, I was
pleasantly surprised. The category was stretched a bit but there were many fine
paintings that I had not seen before and several beautifully hung walls. The
curator had no axe to grind and he or she (I am in favour of curators having a
low profile) had assembled an exhibition of great and interesting paintings.
But ghastly paintings, in every sense do predominate in one
of this year’s Festival shows at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. For the
exhibition Witches and Wicked Bodies, which is advertised as being a first to
explore artists’ view of witches, the curator has obviously struggled to come
up with many artists of quality. The show relies heavily on Goya who is
represented by one small painting based on a long-forgotten play, The Forcibly
Bewitched, and several etchings from The Caprichos that can be seen at any time
on request, at the Scottish National Gallery. If, as I understood from an
interview on Scottish Newsnight, the curator is making any point about the
horrific treatment of women during the witch craze in the 16th and
17th centuries, the inclusion of Goya is to say the least
problematic.
Goya, as his letters make clear, didn’t believe in witches.
Robert Hughes in his scholarly monograph explains how the painter completed a
small series of witch paintings for his patron the Duchess of Osuna who was
interested in them ‘rather as one might display a faux-naïve or campy taste for
horror movies without actually believing in reincarnated mummies or creatures
from the black lagoon.’ Without being aware of the context, many of us must
have wondered about the great Goya’s Witches Sabbath (1797-98) with its comical
billy goat. It’s difficult to take it seriously. And, of course, the witches
and hobgoblins of The Caprichos they’re meant to be satirical aren’t they?
Other exhibits too, have a very tenuous connection with the
persecution of old women as witches. Fuseli’s Weird Sisters was produced for
the dealer Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery and the witches in Macbeth are really
a dramatisation of the inner monologue of Macbeth’s demented ambition. No
artist has been found who deals with the witch craze at a serious level. Even
the painters and printmakers contemporary with the grim realities produced
fantasies with a carnival spirit that make them appear sophisticated Halloween
events.
I’m sure that a search among popular prints of the time
would produce images of the atrocities but there is no evidence that any
serious artist bore witness as Goya did, of the horrors of war, or recorded
with relish the barbarities of the age. Among Rembrandt’s drawings there are two
sketches of a woman on a gibbet but there is no suggestion that she was an
executed witch. An axe hangs beside her. Perhaps she struck down a brutal
husband. Rembrandt doesn’t turn her into a monster. The mood of the drawings
seems even compassionate
So what is the point of this exhibition? If one wants to
know about the witch craze there are several well know studies. If one expects
aesthetic excitement, disappointment is in store.
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