L’ange du bizarre, le romantisme noir

The Romanticism that is familiar to us is rather reassuring, it shows melancolic men with their hair to the wind - like Chateaubriand by Girodet-, solitary characters in a beautiful natural setting, as with Friedrich for example. But there is another version, inhabited by frightening creatures such as ghosts or other monsters, in a natural setting that is poisonous and stiffling, where everything seems to be animated by a subterranean life. That is the version the musée d’Orsay is exploring in an exhibition that is open until 6 June 2013 and in the catalogue that accompanies it. We know its main interpreters, such as Böcklin, Füssli, Goya or Blake. But this event gives us the opportunity to (re) discover others who are not often exhibited, from the homeric fires by John Martin to the frightening processions by Ernst Ferdinand Oehme, the dead towns of Degouve de Nuncques to the vanities of Léon Frédéric. The descendants of this black, sinister Romanticism. This Romanticism, dark and Satanical, is traced all the way to Kubin, the Surrealists and even the movies between the two wars, such as the Nosferatu by Murnau and the Dracula by Tod Browning all worthy descendants!

• L’ange du bizarre, le romantisme noir, collective work directed by Côme Fabre and Felix Krämer, Haje Cantz, 2013, 304 p., 45 €.