Down with the sickness: Arnold Böcklin’s art

William Blake once said, “You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.” With the tsunami of everything coming at us all at once in every direction, it’s hard to draw a line in the sand, especially when high tide keeps getting higher. Yet, when we look back at history, it’s easier for us to connect the dots. If a piece of art does escape the grasps of high society and acts like a sloppy drunk at a dinner party, then it gets noticed.

At the end of the nineteenth century, art felt proper and contemplative. You had demur and mindful art like Evelyn de Morgan’s “Helen of Troy” or Henri Matisse’s “La Mur Rose.”

There was this:

Gustav Klimt’s “Portrait of Sonja Knipps,”

or this,

Vilhelm Hammershøi’s “Interior of a Young Man Reading.”

As you sift through the catalog that is saturated with works filled with views of Impressionism and paintings paired with the Realism movement, there is one painting that stands out like a sore thumb and punches you in the face like a 1900s jump scare.

If only clickbait existed back then. “You won’t believe what I just painted” or “Wait until the end for the real shocker.”

Now housed in the Swiss museum, the Fine Arts Museum Basel, “Plague” is a work by Swiss painter Arnold Böcklin. Born in the early nineteenth century, Böcklin was an influential Symbolist artist whose most famous work includes variations of “The Isle of the Dead.” The painting inspired late-Romantic composers.

But for “Plague,” it serves as a small representation of Böcklin’s fascination with death and pestilence, strange because his overall artistic visions are not as depressed or dramatically dismal as it seems.

“The fresh water of life is what we want, and that is ever flowing for us, as it was for the Greeks. We will only be Greek when we grasp it in our own way”.

“Plague” is painted in tempera and depicts death swooping down a city street on a dragon, wings outstretched horizontally and depriving the city of sun. It’s part Death Metal and part Dungeons and Dragons. The dragon-like creature is moving towards the viewer — menacing over the streets. Riding on it is Death brandishing a scythe, Böcklin depicting a representation of pure horror. Here, it’s unnecessary and uncontrollable fueled by a hidden enemy and an arsenal of evil. Although any actual plague anywhere in the world was a fuzzy afterthought some 200 years prior, he has experience with sickness. His first fiancée died young (of what I have yet to find in research). When he finally remarried, the couple had a total of fourteen children, five died in childhood and another three died from pestilence, one specifically of cholera. He, himself, nearly succumbed to typhoid in 1859. So why not dive into source material soon after? Too soon? Even the first version of “Isle of the Dead” did not come out until 20 years later. Böcklin still seemed happy grabbling glorious paints from his palette and bringing seaside villas or Greek mythology to life. The robust colors of “Idyll,” his artistic world was based on unrealistic visions while creating worlds fascinating to the beholder. It may not have been his world, but it was symbolic of some real world vision at some point of time in history or embellished from his own existence.

Below Death, people are trying to escape their fate while those in white and red are succumbing to the diseased onslaught, scattered in chaos and misery. Most paintings portray a saint as the dominant figure compared to the visualization of death or the grim reaper. Here, it’s almost a cruel joke reversing roles of dominance. Besides color, the clothing depicted remains insignificant and people portrayed tend to be generic. The painting is considered unfinished, but what painting is truly finished. He was 71 years old and battling a serious illness at the time. This was his final work and his get off my lawn period saying “Go fuck yourself” to high society. Death does not spare the living, even if your garments come in silk and you chow down on fancy chocolates like they were M&Ms at the dollar store. He knew he was dying, and the inspiration hit at the right time, symbolically, of course.

Böcklin’s final moments are a pessimistic view of life with cruel intentions, which makes its existence even more stark as the final days of the nineteenth century wound down.

“Nothing in art is created without effort, and the painter’s ideas don’t come to him on wings while he dreams, either”.