The black bile of madness and genius

It is unlikely that the chefs d’œuvres currently on view at the Grand Palais in Paris will be reunited ever again after their lifetime in the Mélancolie cycle is over. The exhibition is a thorough exhumation of the melancholic self in religion, in western society, in literature, in medicine and psychology, and in art itself. The paintings, drawings, etchings, lithographs, sculptures, objects, and morbid ensembles that are presented range from antiquity to the twenty-first century.

On the simple level of comprehensiveness this exhibition is incredibly well put together, examining as it does various tints of melancholy through the ages. It demonstrates that the reigning perceptions of melancholy refracted back to the idea of melancholy itself. In the middle ages when it was considered a disease, it is the hells of François de Nomé and red devils tempting Saint Antoine that best capture the meaning of melancholia. However after the enlightenment as we approach our own times, given the testimonies of writers and artists, she becomes somewhat à la mode. La mélancolie, best represented as a young and beautiful woman by Constance Charpentier. Once we pass our own time (what a notion!) and enter into post-modernism we have inmates of mental hospitals, and the self-representing self (as in the case of Artaud and Nebreda).

On another level, those of the individual pieces assembled, this exhibition is nothing short of spectacular.

Who knew that Blake was not one of the few writers to produce art? There are self-portraits here by Charles Baudelaire and Antonin Artaud and two pieces by Victor Hugo. There is an Odilon Redon piece of Des Esseintes from Huysmans' A Rebours and a portrait of Nietzsche by Karl Bauer. A handsome drawing of Picasso from 1900 along with two self-portraits in oil by Goya crown the vision of the melancholic turned inward. The wealth of Goyas in the exhibition range from large oils to small paintings of cannibals and fools in a playground to drawings like Saturn devouring his children.

Almost the entire catalog reads like a collection of jewels. Valenciennes spectacular Vesuvius hung with a precision one can never hope to find in today’s overcrowded museums where the best details of paintings are lost because of the glare. Watteau’s Les Deux Cousines, a piece so delicate you will forget he’s a bore. Grien’s sketch of Saturn still pulsing with energy around the neck some five hundred years later. Ferdinand Bol’s Seated old man from St. Petersburg surely one of the great portraits of all time. The death of Chatterton by Henry Wallis bathed in the baby blue pallor of death, the scene entirely still but for the vivid knots of the bedspread which rise into the air ever so frequently to remind you that it is the man who has died and not everything around him; inanimate, it continues, in a fashion, to live. Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead deserves its own museum. Franz von Stuck’s Lucifer and L’Enfer are guaranteed to pierce the thickest of skins. It is true this exhibition should come with a health warning; the Grand Palais is indeed harboring the devil himself including a handsome one in bronze by Feuchère.

You will be sweetly ensorcelled and when you walk out two hours later than you intended, the Parisian sky will be a deep blue, Georges Clemenceau will be striding between the silhouettes of the trees on the Champs Elysées, and the low hanging moon will make you weak. You will be bewitched all right, this art still has that power.