"The Paris Morgue Closed to Sightseers," 1907

Doing research for the 2015 Morbid Anatomy Museum Wall Calendar, I came across the wonderful tidbit above from the a 1907 issue of Australia's Kalgoorlie Miner. For more on the Paris morgue--which attracted throngs of tourists throughout the 19th century eager to view the bodies of the unclaimed dead--see these recent Morbid Anatomy posts (1, 2, 3). To find out more about the calendar--and pre-order a copy!--click here.

Reasons to Love Paris #638: Candlelit Statue of the Virgin Mary, Église Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis

You can find out more about the church by clicking here; click on image for larger, more detailed version.

Éditions Baleine, Paris

A publisher that uses photos of the waxes from the Spitzner Collection on all its book covers, sells postcards of the Cabaret du Néant, and has made veritable tatty cabinet of curiosities out its front window? Yes, please!

If you are in Paris, I highly recommend you check it out; you will find it at 11 rue Muller, 75018, on the way up the hill to Sacre Coeur. You can find out more here.

"The Angel of the Odd: Dark Romanticism from Goya to Max Ernst," Musée D'Orsay, Paris; Through June 9, 2013

Whilst in Paris last week for the Anatomical Model conference at the Academy of Medicine (which was wonderful, by the way) I made time to visit the Musée D'Orsay's spellbinding exhibition "The Angel of the Odd: Dark Romanticism from Goya to Max Ernst." I and my companion spend a good three and a half hours marveling at the works--which ranged from romantic painting to Hitchcock film clips to spirit photography to decorative arts--and absorbing the text, which sought to trace a through-line from the Dante-inspired 18th century romantic paintings of Johann Henry Fuseli to today's horror films. Above are just a very few of my favorite works seen in this wonderful, sprawling exhibition.

The exhibition terms this trope "dark romanticism"--drawn from art historian Mario Praz's 1903 publication Flesh, Death and the Devil in Romantic Literature--and traces its development in three major sections. The first examines its genesis in the years from 1750-1850 in, paradoxically, "the age of reason," a response to the post-French revolution "Terror" and Napoleon's wars which, the text explains, "mark[ed] the end of the belief that reason alone could lead to enlightened humanity." Text and images demonstrate how the romantics used literary works--Gothic novels, of course, but also Goethe's and Milton's visions of hell and the darker interludes of Shakespeare--as the launching off point for artworks exploring the darkest and most taboo aspects of humanity: "cannibalism, Satanism, torture, incest, infantacide, and nightmares." The real standouts in this section were the works of Goya (4th down), Fuseli (2nd and 3rd down), some wonderful illustrations by Delecroix for Goethe's Faust (8th down), and the shockingly perverse and powerfully large-scale "Dante And Virgil In Hell" depicting an act of cannibalism described in Dante's Inferno (top image) and painted by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, whom I had previously known as the artist behind exceedingly competent and somewhat sentimental academic paintings such as this one. Another surprise in this section was a Goya print from his "Les Caprices" series which, the text convincingly asserted, served as the inspiration for Karloff's iconic Frankenstein.

The second part of the exhibition which examined the "dark romantic" revival of the 19th century was the real strength of the show for me, showcasing dozens of unforgettable works by the French Symbolists drawn from the Musée D'Orsay's magnificent permanent collection. We learn that the work was a response to a time of upheaval, when faith in scientific positivism and democracy were weakening, and artists and intellectuals were growing increasingly frustrated with the hypocrisy of bourgeois propriety. It was also a time of "obsessive fears" about prostitution, venereal disease, and evolutionary degeneration, where a post-Darwinian nature was viewed not as gentle mother but, instead, "a devouring force relentlessly destroying personal happiness to ensure the survival of the species." No wonder, then, that this section is rife with images of Medusa, Salome, The Sphinx, "The Idol of Perversity" and other erotic and terrifying femme fatales. This section also boasted some surprising images by Gauguin (12 down), a number of oddly contemporary and revelatory fetishy cyanotypes by Charles-François Jeandel (13 down), and a the fantastic sculpture "Eternelle douleur (Eternal Pain)" by Paul Dardé, a wonderful, dynamic depiction of the lifeless head of Medusa aloft on a nest of writhing snakes (bottom image, but does not capture the power of the original).

The third part of the exhibition focused on "Surrrealism's Redescovery," and traced this early 20th century movement's ebrace of the dark non-rational after the absurd horrors of WWI. Although thematically fitting, aesthetically there were few things of great interest to me, personally, in this section. The only things of note here were some works by Dali and a series of photographs of Hans Bellmer's wonderfully perverse dolls (16 down).

Throughout the exhibition, there were also a good many film clips meant to be playing in small theatres; sadly, many were out of order on the day we were there, but on a good day, one would find clips from Dracula, Frankenstein, Nosferatu (17 down), Hitchcock's Rebecca, Un Chien Andalou, Häxan, and much more.

The official introductory text for the exhibition--which is on view through June 9, 2013--follows; you can read the complete wall text by clicking here; you can learn more about the exhibition by clicking here. Full captions for all images follow as well.

You can order a copy of the exhibition catalog (in French but so, so worth it!) by clicking here. A copy will also soon be in The Morbid Anatomy Library. Special thanks to Pam Grossman for letting me know about this wonderful exhibition, and to "professor of art" Michael Daks for lingering with me there for 3+ hours.

The Angel of the Odd: Dark Romanticism from Goya to Max Ernst
It was in the 1930s that the Italian writer and art historian Mario Praz (1896-1982) first highlighted the dark side of Romanticism, thus naming a vast swathe of artistic creation, which from the 1760s onwards exploited the shadows, excesses and irrational elements that lurked behind the apparent triumph of enlightened Reason.

This world was created in the English Gothic novels of the late 18th century, a genre of literature that fascinated the public with its penchant for the mysterious and the macabre. The visual arts quickly followed suit: many painters, engravers and sculptors throughout Europe vied with the writers to create horrifying and grotesque worlds: Goya and Géricault presented us with the senseless atrocities of war and the horrifying shipwrecks of their time, Füssli and Delacroix gave substance to the ghosts, witches and devils of Milton, Shakespeare and Goethe, whereas C.D. Friedrich and Carl Blechen cast the viewer into enigmatic, gloomy landscapes, reflecting his fate.

From the 1880s, seeing the vanity and ambiguity behind the belief in progress, many artists picked up this legacy of Dark Romanticism, turning towards the occult, reviving myths and exploiting the new ideas about dreams, in order to bring Man face to face with his fears and contradictions: the savagery and depravity hidden in every human being, the risk of mass degeneration, the harrowing strangeness of daily life revealed in the horror stories of Poe and Barbey d’Aurévilly. And so, right in the middle of the second industrial revolution, hordes of witches, sniggering skeletons, shapeless devils, lecherous Satans and deadly enchantresses suddenly appeared, expressing a defiant, carnivalesque disillusionment with the present.

After the First World War, when the Surrealists took the unconsciousness, dreams and intoxication as the basis for artistic creation, they completed the triumph of the imagination over the principle of reality, and thus, put the finishing touches to the spirit itself of Dark Romanticism. At the same time, the cinema seized on Frankenstein, Faust and other masterpieces of this genre that are now firmly established in the collective imagination.

Following the first stage of the exhibition at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, the Musée d’Orsay plans to present the many different expressions of Dark Romanticism, from Goya and Füssli to Max Ernst and the Expressionist films of the 1920s, through a selection of 200 works that includes paintings, graphic works and films.

1. William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Dante And Virgil In Hell, 1850
2. Johann Henry Fuseli, Sin Pursued by Death, 1794-1796
3. Johann Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare, circa 1782
4. Francisco de Goya, Witches in the Air, 1797-1798
5. Louis Boulanger, Les Fantômes, 1829
6. Gustave Moreau, Galatea, Circa 1880
7. Eugène Grasset, Trois Femmes et Trois Loups, 1892
8. Eugene Delecroix, Illustration from Goethe's Faust, 1828
9. Odilon Redon, La Mort: C'est moi qui te rends serieuse; enlaçons-nous (Death: It Is I Who Makes You Serious; Let Us Embrace) from La Tentation de Sainte-Antoine (The Temptation of Saint Anthony) (plate XX), 1896
10. Jean Delville, Idol of Perversity, 1891
11. Franz von Stuck, The Kiss of the Sphinx (Der Kuss der Sphinx), 1895
12. Paul Gauguin, Madame le Mort, 1891
13. Julien Adolphe Duvovelle, Crâne aux yeux exorbités et mains agrippées à un mur, 1904
14. Cyanotype by Charles-François Jeandel
15. Anonymous spirit photograph, 1910
16. Hans Bellmer, The Doll (face and knife), 1935  
17. Still from F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu, 1922
18. Arnold Böcklin, Shield with Medusa's Head, 1897
19. Paul Dardé, Eternelle douleur (Eternal Pain), 1913

Café or Cabaret de L’Enfer (Hell's Café), Paris, France, Late 19th Century

Good friend and Midnight Archive auteur Ronni Thomas just brought Paris's Café de L’Enfer to my attention. Between this and the equally delightful (and previously discussed) Cabaret du Néant (or Tavern of the Dead), I am becoming stronger in my conviction that fin de siècle Paris was probably the most perfect place ever.

As described on the National Geographic Website:

MARAIS
Hell's Swells

A hot spot called Hell's Café lured 19th-century Parisians to the city's Montmartre neighborhood—like the Marais—on the Right Bank of the Seine. With plaster lost souls writhing on its walls and a bug-eyed devil's head for a front door, le Café de l'Enfer may have been one of the world's first theme restaurants. According to one 1899 visitor, the café's doorman—in a Satan suit—welcomed diners with the greeting, "Enter and be damned!" Hell's waiters also dressed as devils. An order for three black coffees spiked with cognac was shrieked back to the kitchen as: "Three seething bumpers of molten sins, with a dash of brimstone intensifier!"

Found via Retronaut who sourced it from Cool Stuff in Paris; all images via Retronaut; more to be found at the original link.

Théodore Géricault's Morgue-Based Preparatory Paintings for "Raft of the Medusa," A Guest Post by Paul Koudounaris

When I was in Los Angeles last week, I had a really fascinating conversation with my friend (and former Observatory presenter) Paul Koudounaris, author of the beautiful and essential book The Empire of Death: A Cultural History of Ossuaries and Charnel Houses. I asked him to do a guest post on the topic of our conversation--a series of relatively unknown preparatory paintings for Géricault's Raft of the Medusa that were based on human remains checked out, library like, from the illustrious Paris Morgue; following is Paul's writeup; really fascinating stuff!

Despite being among the finest early nineteenth-century macabre-themed paintings, Théodore Géricault’s various versions of still lifes with human body parts have remained little known and commented upon. Géricault is best remembered as a pioneering French Romantic and the auteur of the massive Raft of the Medusa [see bottom image]—an over-life-sized painting of the survivors of a shipwreck which had been a tabloid sensation in France in the 1810s. While Géricault’s public personae was that of a hard-living, chaotic, and tempestuous personality, as an artist he maintained an often obsessive dedication. The ship known as the Medusa sank in June of 1816, and Géricault soon began preparatory studies for his painted version, including interviews with survivors, and the construction of a scale model of the raft on which they escaped.

At the same time, Géricault also became increasingly interested in the naturalistic rendering of distressed anatomy, and started making frequent trips to morgues—in particular, that of the Hospital Beaujon in Paris. Initially these trips were intended simply to sketch body parts, but Géricault eventually found beauty in the severed limbs and heads he was studying, and began rendering them as subjects in their own right. At the time, there were programs in local morgues to lend human remains to art students for anatomical study—something like a lending library of body parts. Géricault would take them home to study them as they went through states of decomposition. He was known to stash various heads, arms, and legs under his bed—or alternately store them on his roof—so he could continue to render them in increasingly putrid states and in various angles. The upper torso in the so-called Head of a Guillotined Man in the Art Institute of Chicago (the title is misleading—the head is not guillotined) is one of those which is recognizable from multiple paintings, and is believed to be a thief who died in the insane asylum of Bicêtre; Géricault painted this head from multiple viewpoints over the two week period he kept it in his studio. In particular, the artist seems to have been fascinated by the subtle gradations of color body parts attained as they rotted.

He delighted in playing the morbid tones of putrefying flesh against a warm chiaroscuro which fades into a dark background and seems timeless and quiet, giving these anatomical fragments a presence that is almost iconic. Géricault made frequent jokes about the reaction of his neighbors to this kind of study—not surprisingly, they were displeased, especially with the smell emanating from his studio. Most of these paintings date to the later half of the 1810s. They were apparently entirely for the artist’s own edification—they were not sold to collectors, and most remained in his studio when he died at the age of 32 in 1824, and were offered as lots in his estate sale.

Perhaps the reason that Géricault’s still lifes with body parts have so frequently been overlooked is that they seem to defy interpretation, or lack any kind of editorial intent on the part of the artist. In that sense, they have always seemed perverse. Other, contemporary Romantic artists won great fame for their macabre scenes, but those scenes provide a context to guide the viewer’s reaction. In the Disasters of War by Goya, for example, severed body parts are placed within a moralizing relationship of cause and effect—war produces casualties, and the viewer is invited to disapprove of war itself as futile and barbaric. In various versions of the painting Nightmare by Henri Fuseli, macabre motifs such as demons are menacing, implying the threat of paralysis and loss of free will. But Géricault’s version of the macabre lacks this kind of interpretive framework—he presents his dismembered remains to the viewer simply as collections of objects, nothing more. His insistence on depriving his body parts of any identifiable context has ensured that they remain elusive, and thus marginalized in the history of art. But it is this same lack of context which has preserved them as unique objects of beauty.

To find out more about Paul's work, you can visit his website by clicking here; you can purchase a copy of his book (highly recommended!) from the Morbid Anatomy Giftshop by clicking here. Paul will also be participating in this years's iteration of The Congress for Curious People at The Coney Island Museum, so stay tuned for more on that!

"The Silken Web: The Erotic World of Paris, 1920-1946," Mel Gordon Lecture at Observatory, Tomorrow April 20th

Tomorrow night! At Observatory!

The Silken Web: The Erotic World of Paris, 1920-1946
An illustrated lecture by Professor Mel Gordon, author of Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Wiemar Berlin
Date: Tuesday, April 20
Time: 8:00 PM
Admission: $5
Presented by Morbid Anatomy
In tonight’s illustrated lecture, Professor Mel Gordon–author of Voluptious Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin and Grand Guiginol: Theatre of Fear and Terror–will present a graphic look at the brothel worlds of interwar Paris. Each of the 221 registered maisons closes–French for “closed house”–had its own unique attractions for its specialized clientele: theatricalized sex, live music, pornographic entertainments, aphrodisiac restaurants, even American-style playrooms and wife-friendly lounges for the customers’ families and bored mistresses. Tonight, have some wine and partake in authentic French culture and their Greatest Generation, complements of Mel Gordon and Observatory.

Mel Gordon is the author of Voluptious Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin, Grand Guiginol: Theatre of Fear and Terror, and many other books. Voluptuous Panic was the first in-depth and illustrated book on the topic of erotic Weimar; The lavish tome was praised by academics and inspired the establishment of eight neo-Weimar nightclubs as well as the Dresden Dolls and a Marilyn Manson album. Now, Mel Gordon is completing a companion volume for Feral House Press, entitled The Silken Web: The Erotic World of Paris, 1920-1946. He also teaches directing, acting, and history of theater at University of California at Berkeley.

You can find out more about this presentation here. You can get directions to Observatory--which is next door to the Morbid Anatomy Library--by clicking here. You can find out more about Observatory here, join our mailing list by clicking here, and join us on Facebook by clicking here. To find out more about Gordon's books, click here and here.

In Paris, Sans Internet

I am presently in Paris, where internet connections are scarce, so please forgive the gap in posting. More to come soon, I promise!

Image from Musée Dupuytren; more images of that museum (from my last trip to Paris) here, and more about the museum here. And more soon to come. I promise!

Musée Dupuytren, Paris, France

On my last trip to Paris, I was lucky enough to spend a few hours with my camera at the fabulous and astounding Musée Dupuytren. Founded in 1835, the museum--which I featured in this recent post--features hundreds of human and zoological teratological waxes and specimens adorned with ancient labels and crammed into glass cases in a small, fluorescent-lit room.

You can see my full photoset of 130 images--from which the above are drawn--by clicking here; I shot the video some years ago on an earlier visit. You can find out more about the museum by clicking here. You can find out yet more about it on the wonderful Atlas Obscura website by clicking here.