written by agata ida kozuchowska

Frightening, shocking, uneasy, stupefying, or uncomfortable are only a few adjectives used to describe Henry Füssli’s famous painting The Nightmare (1781) in which a woman, her body lifeless and her face ghostly pale, lies sprawled on a bed with a strange demonic creature sitting on her chest, its unnerving eyes fixed on us. In the background, an agitated horse’s face appears from behind the heavy red curtain (a play on the words ‘night-mare’), adding to the overall sense of strangeness and eeriness. The woman’s arms are thrown back, her eyes closed, and her lips parted, therefore, we presume that she must be either asleep or dead. Nonetheless, puzzled by this nightmarish vision, we are simultaneously attracted by its mystery and repulsed by its uncanny elements. However uncomfortable, this painting is a must see and we can appreciate it till 23 January 2023 at the Musée Jacquemart-André.

This season’s major retrospective of the Swiss painter Henry Füssli (1741-1825, also known as Fuseli to the anglophone audience) invites us to step into The Realm of Dreams and the Fantastic, suspending disbelief and facing the daemonic, the grotesque, and the theatrical in his œuvre. The exhibition tells a fascinating story of a multifaceted artist, revealing his fascination with the supernatural and the occult while holding the prestigious position of professor of painting at the Royal Academy in London. The exhibition abounds in Füssli’s enigmatic visions, theatrical scenes imbued with drama, ghostly pale faces in grimaces of shock, and arrays of twisting, stylized bodies. Not for the faint-hearted, this retrospective focuses on a specific terrible beauty, tracing the origins of Füssli’s uncanny compositions to various literary sources such as English folk tales, Shakespearean tragedies, German epics, and Scandinavian legends. However, regardless of the theme explored, Füssli’s figures are almost always disturbed or disturbing themselves, due to his use of intense chiaroscuro and expressive grimaces of his rather monstrous characters that have enough power to invade one’s dreams.

The retrospective presents Füssli as an interpreter of Shakespeare and the renowned painter of mythologies in a rather academic manner, with a proper sense of drama and proportion, in other words, an artist whose interests in the demonic did not disturb him from maintaining a professional position. However, perhaps the most interesting side of Füssli’s work is revealed in his drawings, often accompanying the large-scale oil paintings. It is in those almost comic-like sketches that we can observe his skill and the overt expressiveness of the bodies, the ultra-muscular male heroes, and the eerily sensual women featured in oftentimes erotic compositions like those featured below.

And so, in Füssli’s world of nightmarish apparitions, the human body becomes an instrument of the supernatural, a means of expressing the uncanny. Like in The Nightmare, most of the figures exist between tangible reality and fantasy between dream and wakefulness.

« Le rêve est un des régions les plus inexplorées de l’art » wrote Henry Füssli in his Aphorismes sur l’art (1789-1818) and the retrospective aims to showcase the extent to which his exploration of the realm of dream/nightmare was unique. His pictorial universe consisting of hybrid creatures, strange monsters, ghostly apparitions, and incubi created a new aesthetic and pushed the boundaries of the more traditional academic painting into the realm of the fantastic, paving the way for artists such as Caspar David Friedrich and William Blake of the romantic tradition.

Naturally then, the three versions of The Nightmare provide a point of culmination of the exhibition, highlighting its strange and disruptive force. This theme, for the first time not inspired by literature but purely invented by the painter, lies at the core of Füssli’s foreshadowing of the much later Freudian studies of the unconscious. The paintings’ atmosphere is unsettling, provoking a subconscious and sometimes even bodily response in the viewers (which I encourage them to observe while at the exhibition). Füssli’s work is about making the impression by expressing that which cannot be put into words, the repressed imagery which provides a unique atmosphere of contemplation of this sort of collective nightmare, a study of collective fears and fascinations.

“Füssli’s imagination ranges from madness to genius, from horror to delight, and from terror to the sublime” reads the exhibition catalog and all that intensity of emotion mixed with thematic ambiguity produces a hallucinatory experience of this retrospective exhibition as a whole, which should sound just about perfect for any fan of the spooky season.

The exhibition is open till 23rd January 2023 and more information can be found here.