Gothic Modern: From Darkness to Light

With work from 1875 to 1925 alongside medieval works, this exhibition considers how modern Nordic and northern European artists such as Käthe Kollwitz and Edvard Munch were influenced by the gothic aesthetic

Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Lemminkäinen's Mother, 1897 (detail). © Finnish National Gallery/Ateneum, Antell Collection. Photo: Finnish National Gallery/Hannu Pakarinen.

The National Museum, Oslo, Norway
28 February – 15 June 2025

by CHRISTIANA SPENS

Having opened first in Helsinki’s Ateneum Museum in October last year, Gothic Modern now comes to Oslo’s National Museum, before travelling on to Vienna’s Albertina in the summer. Conceived at a conference on gothic modernisms at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, where attendees discussed the ways in which gothic architecture and medieval painting influenced modern artists such as Käthe Kollwitz, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Akseli Gallen-Kallela and Edvard Munch, the exhibition presents these two strands side by side. It illuminates the ways in which northern European and Nordic artists were influenced by the gothic architecture that dominated their surroundings, and the medieval paintings and etchings of old masters, such as Hans Holbein, Lucas Cranach the Elder and Albrecht Dürer, with which they would have been familiar through their history of art lessons and studies.

Lucas Cranach the Elder, St. Sebastian, 1543. Photo: The National Museum of Norway/Børre Høstland.

Although we tend to think of that period of modern art as a series of movements – impressionism, post-impressionism, cubism – emanating from Paris and a group of ever-more innovative, experimental artists, Gothic Modern shows another side, centred around Berlin rather than Paris, where early 20th-century artists such as Vincent van Gogh, Munch and Max Beckmann were united in their shared rumination on memory, death, sex, spirituality and the shadow sides of our psyches. Developing in parallel with the birth of psychoanalysis in Vienna, this shadow side of modernism, as it were, taps into common experiences of war, introversion, suffering and the heavy presence of the church in European lives.

Edvard Munch, Ashes, 1895. Photo: The National Museum of Norway/Børre Høstland.

Gothic Modern is particularly interested in the ways in which religious symbols and stories are used to ruminate on death, sex and suffering; in the darkened rooms, there are skulls, crows, monsters and vampires, melodramatic scenes of despair and melancholy – from Munch’s Vampire (1893) to Van Gogh’s lesser-known but wryly entertaining Head of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette (1886). In these works, an occultist sensibility mixes with religious parables and iconography; art and mysticism entwine to create arresting visions of our deepest emotional states in a way that is strangely comforting. The darkness is forgiving – so forgiving, so consuming, that it can be hard to believe that the light is even more absolving. Gothic Modern points to our bounding between two states, which cannot exist without one another, a binary and bipolarity of the psyche, where we are not complete without the freedom to encompass both worlds. It is a spiritual space we cannot help but live in, which is not only cerebral but also the fabric of our material world, our memories, the architecture of the world we live in now.

Arnold Böcklin, Self-Portrait with Death Playing the Fiddle, 1872. © Alte Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Photo: Andres Kilger.

Although we are encouraged to acknowledge links between the modern period of the late-19th and early 20th century and the medieval period, the exhibition also serves to reveal how this history resonates today; churches and ruins in mediaeval, gothic styles still surround us, and the ideas they signal remain as relevant as ever. Particularly in the northern European and Nordic countries where this exhibition travels, there is a sense of timelessness in the weather and landscapes, to which these works of art, created across hundreds of years, bear testament. Norwegian artist Theodor Kittelsen’s drawing She Covers the Whole Country (1904) depicts a grim reaper huddled by fishing huts, the landscape seeming more imposing than the figure of death itself. Recollecting the black death, the painter was also consumed by what he understood as the mystical melancholy of nature, of which plague was just one more manifestation of a power beyond human control.

Käthe Kollwiz, Death, Woman and Child, 1903. Photo: The National Museum of Norway/Andreas Harvik.

Whether it is a charcoal drawing by Kollwitz, Death and Woman (1910) or Michael Wolgemut’s dancing skeletons in the 15th-century Nuremberg Chronicle; or Hugo Simberg’s The Wounded Angel (1903) alongside Cranach’s depiction of the torture of the Saint Sebastian from 1543, these works show us that the states and fears that preoccupy us are the same as those with which our forebears wrestled. The modern artists of last century may have been inspired by the art they studied, but their works resonated because they dealt with experiences that were directly relevant to them – war, sickness, love, grief and the tempestuous landscapes they all, and we now, continue to share.

Hugo Simberg, Wounded Angel, 1893. © Finnish National Gallery/Ateneum, Ahlström Collection. Photo: Finnish National Gallery/Hannu Aaltonen.