Painter Possessed

By Robert Hughes

To have influenced a great artist may not make a painter great, but it does help make him interesting; and probably no one had more impact on William Blake than John Henry Fuseli. To look at Blake's nudes and then at Fu-seli's, with their rhetorical gestures and armor-plate muscles, is to sense this. Then reckon in Fuseli's eccentricities, which though irreligious were akin to Blake's own, and it seems clear why the younger painter spared Fuseli the contempt he felt for nearly every other English artist of his day. Fuseli was not "normal." His images are full of paranoia. He boasted that the Devil had sat to him many times. He painted and drew like a man possessed. But the intensity of that possession was more important for Blake than its naive fetishism. Energy was energy, and so Blake wrote:

The only man that e 'er I knew Who did not make me almost spew Was Fuseli; and he was both a Turk

and a Jew--And so good Christian friends, how

do you do?

Fuseli was actually neither Turk nor Jew, but Swiss; he was born Johann Heinrich Fiissli in Zurich in 1741, the son of a portrait painter. By 1825, when he died, he had become one of the most distinguished exiles in English art history; he was even buried next to Sir Joshua Reynolds in St. Paul's. Last week, to mark the 150th anniversary of his death, a show of more than 200 Fuselis--oils, engravings and drawings--opened at London's Tate Gallery.

It would be hard to improve on Sir Kenneth Clark's account of Fuseli's ambition: he wanted "to render the most dramatic episodes of Shakespeare in the pictorial language of Michelangelo." Fuseli was not a painter when he went to England in 1764, but a young Zwinglian minister whose liberal ideas had driven him out of Zurich. His intransigence grew with time, ripening into the melancholy sarcasm that was one of his more noted traits. "He is everything in extremes--always an original," wrote Fuseli's close friend, the physiognomist Lavater. "His look is lightning, his word a thunderstorm; his jest is NATIONAL PORT death, his revenge hell." Even Goethe, who met Fuseli in Rome in 1775, agreed with that. "What fire and fury the man has in him!" he exclaimed in a letter.

Fuseli had gone to ? Rome to study painting, and there he was swept away by Michelangelo's Last Judgment. From it most of his work stems: the heroic figures bulging against a flat, gloomy space, the hunched or springing poses, the search for an atmosphere of sublime effort. Even the mannish faces Fuseli gave his witches and bizarre courtesans hark back to Michelangelo. So, in fact, did his idea of the artist as hero: Fuseli raised this romantic chimera to a mock-religious pitch by proposing to fresco another Sistine in homage to Shakespeare. Only a few studies for this project survive; it was too grandiose and expensive to be carried out. His fixation on Michelangelo was such that when painting Sin, Pursued by Death (1794-96), one of the pictures he made to illustrate Milton's Paradise Lost, Fuseli appropriated Michelangelo's Adam for the pose of Sin's voluptuous torso (see color page). That was about as unsuitable a use of the Sistine as one could imagine.

But in general it was Shakespeare, not Milton, who gave Fuseli his big themes of blood, darkness, prophecy and witchcraft, those unfailing ingredients of the romantic sublime. Macbeth and A Midsummer Night's Dream were his favorite sources, though he also illustrated Lear. Hamlet and some of the histories. If the results, like Lady Macbeth Seizing the Daggers or The

Three Witches, now seem overwrought, to the edge of absurdity, one should remember how much closer Fuseli's whole sense of posture, gesture and staging was to the conventions of 18th century theater than to those of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Fuseli's relaxation from blood was lust. The most eminent of his lovers was the pioneer of English feminism, Mary Wollstonecraft--at the very period in the 1790s when she was writing her Vindication of the Rights of Women. He seems to have viewed the woman he married, Sophia Rawlins, as a cruel dominator. The image suited his sexual proclivities. Several hundred of his erotic drawings were burned by his wife after he died, and most of the survivors are about either masochism or hair fetishism or both. But he did produce one of the great sexual images of the 18th century with The Night mare (1781). The painting ought not to work. It is too literal, too obvious. Its spectral horse with Ping Pong ball eyes puffs and blows through a fold in the cur tain, and the goblin looks like an irri table Irish dwarf. It is, in fact, the kind of painting that seems merely an aggressive pantomime in a post-psychological culture like ours. Yet nearly 200 years after it was painted, one cannot help ad miring the symbolizing effort that went into it: no other painting of Fuseli's, or for that matter of the late 18th century, is so full of the sense of trespass on hith erto forbidden territory. No wonder Sigmund Freud kept a framed photograph of The Nightmare on the bookcase in his Vienna study.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.