Sub-Rural # 53, Reviving the Dance of Death, MAM

There’s a lot that’s fated about the “Revival of the Dance of Death” print exhibition at the Milwaukee Art Museum, much more than an October flirtation with witchcraft and the Day of the Dead. The exhibition  consists of a series of prints by the extraordinarily gifted and formally diverse Symbolist Max Klinger, and the accomplished Impressionist/portrait artist Albert Besnard. Each late 19th Century painter  produced a body of etchings that reflected the anxiety over groundbreaking theories in biology and medicine.

The imagery raised a measure of metaphysical panic by channeling various medieval visual and literary art forms such as the “Danse Macabre.” Like prior expressions of death as a subject, the museum’s collection of prints, organized by Curator Nikki Otten, contain a register of images that detailed a growing consciousness about malignancies and complexities of illness periodically represented in artworks since the middle ages. While the new pathogens didn’t exactly infect victims with deep-rooted impressions of plagues being a consequence of behavior, there was little space with which to find blame for their affliction and anxiety ruled.

The prints are modest in scale but optically and psychologically imposing. Depictions of death and suffering, often epitomized by sidling skeletons, stalk figures or shade the vicinity. Death haunts innocents and villains in scant rooms and stark landscapes suggesting life in labyrinthian dilemmas . Each artist’s proficiency in rendering dense, hatch-marked tableaus nocturnalizes moments in a legendary figure or woeful stranger’s concluding breaths.

The Dance of Death’s subject revolves around the increased concern and speculation about the causes of disease infecting the lives of society the late 19^th Century, a culture that was already undergoing a less secure, secular, class conversion. Part of the prints’ consequence is that they feel disturbingly analogous to the present, stung by sometimes byzantine research, restricted public access, and accompanying conspiracy theories.

Absence and gloom patrol our gaze in the work of Albert Besnard. In the finality of Besnard’s self-portrait “Demanding” the elderly artist slumps in front of a blank canvas. His angel of death taunts him with the fact that he was once a lord of enchanting art but is no longer charming or timely. His sinuous graphic sensibility is fitting for atmospheres more mournful than Klinger and that despair cloaks his subjects. In “The Duel” the skeleton victor appears as dissipated as the victim and attendants.

Today’s obsession with death in the arts is more conflicted, subtle, and normalized, judging by the breadth of media habits blinkered by market guile. The origins of new and increasingly mediated pandemics and class-based wellbeing tweak knee-jerk fears that befoul virus management and trust.

Klinger, who at the turn of the century had more credence, commanded the architecture of desolation and panic and was invested in prints, the most democratic and experimental technology of his time. Guilty pleasures of boldness amidst images of evil, might mediate malevolency, but did little to defang them.

The most striking of Klinger’s selection is “Herod,” which illustrates the diabolical king crumpled at the base of his mammoth black throne. Its detailed carvings are replete with lion heads that depict the ferocity and cruelness of his reign and perhaps the cause of his physical collapse. The throne and corpse are unattended in a vast yard surrounded by a mostly vacant amphitheater.

The throne is angled to the left, which is a sign of an obsession with the past. The seat’s vacancy is a stark reminder that earthly power is no insurance for, an unearthly rest or flattering biography. When your’e dead your’e dead, might be an apt marker inscription.

Gradually art has became a well of ideas born from an ambivalence about our mortality, accompanied by an aching restlessness. We flinch at the signs of evil and shrug at Heaven. The 20^th Century embraced the slaying of illusionism to heal the past but conceded the freedom to expire in peace.