Gothic Modern: From Edvard Munch to Käthe Kollwitz

First and foremost, Gothic Modern is a collection of essays intended to accompany a museum exhibition held at the Ateneum Art Museum in Helsinki, Finland and The National Museum in Oslo, Norway. It is a collaborative effort between a dozen contributors and institutions. Several of the writings have been translated from Norwegian, German, Dutch, or Finnish into English.

With a flurry of academics joining together it’s no surprise that this project reads on a highly academic level. Some essays are much harder to follow than others, and it’s a pity that the book leads with one of the most difficult writings, with the easier ones organized toward the middle. It can be frustrating to dig into the main points with such complexity when they could have been delivered in a more approachable manner. If the goal was to make their ideas more accessible to the people, they are teetering on a risky ledge near the proverbial ivory tower. Nevertheless, Gothic Modern is sure to be considered a revolutionary contribution to the canons of art history. 

The starting point of art history comprehension is quite high; Gothic Modern includes almost nothing of what the original Gothic style was from which Modern is derived. It is assumed that the reader knows that Gothic is more than a fashion fad with white pasty skin, black attire, and dark brooding attitudes. Gothic refers to the timeframe between the 12th and 16th centuries when a new style of architecture allowed window and building structures to support massive cathedral heights and stained-glass windows. It connected nature with religion, and community with individuality. Which led to pulling the Modern take on Gothic art out of the Medieval and into the 21st century.

The intentions behind the Gothic Modern inquiry, according to Simpson are, “to illuminate the profound fascination that Gothic art held for artists as a transformative source of inspiration and new artistic practices, crossing cultural borders, to shape new ideas of the artistic self, of ‘belonging,’ modern society, sexuality, spirituality and identity.” She continues to emphasize that the artists themselves, by exploring new avenues of expression and revisiting centuries’ old themes, become a sort of time traveler. Thus artists adapt the old Gothic concerns to modern global circumstances.

Using paintings, sculptures, manuscripts, and diaries, the authors base their evidence on the works of Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), Hans Holbein the Elder (c. 1460–524/34), Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553), and Matthias Grünewald (1470–1528) and discuss how influential they were to the generation that included Edvard Munch (1863–1944), Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945), Hugo Simberg (1873–1917), Akseli Gallen-Kallela (1865–1931), and Marianna Stokes (1855–1927). The Gothic Modern obsession with death and dying makes sense in a historical context as this generation spanned the last wave of European plague and the first World War. Infant and women mortality was high, and civil wars were prevalent in the Nordic countries. The art reflects the artists’ realities at the time.

Over 170 beautiful full color images are included in the Gothic Modern catalog, which makes this book worth collecting for any art history enthusiast. The authors use each one to detail themes and motifs that are part of the human condition, that transcend time and space, therefore applying to present day. The paintings, such as Arnold Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead (1883), Vincent van Gogh’s Head of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette (1886), and Kollwitz’s Death and Woman (1910), are still relatable. It’s humbling and shocking to realize that not much has changed for humanity since the beginning of time. There is still war, still sickness, and certainly still death.

Balancing out all the doom is the theme of resurrection and eroticism that leads to new birth. Though everything dies, it is equally true that everything is again reborn. Gothic Modern concludes with a glimmer of hope in Munch’s The Sun (1910–13) which was intended to illuminate a creative path for artists to lift a lifeline into the spaciousness of time. The revelation of a new creation, a new beginning, is just one hope-breath away. The artist is the savior now, the one to imagine a new way for humanity to follow.