Dark Visions is the title of an exhibition of about 25 works on paper with fantastical subjects. There's really no unifying theme to the small show on display at the Minneapolis Institute of Art as I write this note at the end of August 2024. The pictures are on show in the Winton Jones Print and Drawing Gallery on the museum's third floor, a small room accessed through the medieval collection on the north side of the grand stairway. The highlight of the exhibition is a large print by William Blake, a monotype named "Nebuchadnezzar", brilliantly colored in flame-like orange and various shades of brown. In the picture, the mad king (as described in the Book of Daniel) prowls on all fours a meadow stippled with green and bluish pigment; the king's face is the stuff of nightmares, haunted with great staring eyes embedded in stark white and turned backward to peer out of the picture in a full- frontal view -- the head doesn't seem set exactly right on the bestial crawling figure. This is one of Blake's most famous images and I have known it all my life, but the picture is big, bright, and impressive when seen in person -- it's about a yard long and two feet wide. Blake's drawing is unerring and the image is one of the great, idiosyncratic images in Western art -- a cautionary picture, although one can't quite specify what we are being cautioned against. Two of Blake's much smaller engravings from his narrative series illustrating Job are also on display. By contrast with the picture of Nebuchadnezzar, which is much larger than anticipated, the Job images are very compact and jewel-like, a little larger than playing cards and, again, Blake's virtuosic designs framed with quotations from the text are wonderfully shapely and appealing to the eye. The other usual suspects are on show: there's a set of smoky-looking Goya engravings from his Proverbios, a book from his Capriccios turned to a macabre plate Se Repulsen ("they preen themselves"), and two large and elaborate Carcieri (""Prisons") by Piranesi. There are several Italian baroque images from mythology, a bony chimera, also by an Italian engraver, and Delacroix' 's big print of a lion cradling a doomed rabbit in its paws, the creature reposing in a dark womb-like grotto -- this is called "Lion of the Atlas Mountains." The rabbit, seemingly resigned to its fate, is weirdly passive and limp in the beast's claws. George Romney's spooky and abstract "Study for the Lapland Witch" depicts a howling spectral creature with wide eyes and an open mouth, her features and hair streamlined as if depicted in a blizzard gale -- some of the elegant sfumato calligraphy on display in this chalk and ink drawing have a distinctly Chinese or Japanese appearance. Gustav Dore's "Street of the Old Lantern" is big, dark, and morbid -- it shows the poet Gerard de Nerval hanged from a grating on his door, hosts of spirits and sinister winged figures hovering around the rather corpulent, grimacing corpse; there's certainly nothing flattering about the image of the dead poet and the crowds of angels and demons don't know what to do about the suicide (whose ghost is nowhere to be seen). This is a stark and rather defamatory engraving -- I wonder how it was received by contemporaries. There's a scary illustration to Poe's "The Black Cat" by an artist named Alphonse Legros (I never heard of him before), Alfred Rethel danse macabre image of a hideous skeletal Death playing on a femur-fiddle among revelers who have either fallen over dead, their masks tilted over their faces, or are fleeing post-haste from the infected ballroom -- this image seems to be connected to Poe's "Masque of the Red Death" although I don't know if there's any actual influence. Rethel, a German engraver, was a precursor to Max Klinger, also a master of the macabre, and he was an influence on Kaethe Kollwitz who has recently been featured in a big retrospective of all of her works at Metropolitan Museum of Art. An artist hitherto unknown to me, John Bingley Garland is represented by one of his "Blood Collages" -- these are intricate collages assembled from chopped-up woodcuts in books and scraps of gold-leaf together with what look like handwritten lists on yellowed paper,, the picture is streaked by "blood" in the form of drips and smears of bright red pigment. These eccentric images are worthy I think of more study -- Garland seems to have made the collages toward the end of his life in England during the latter part of Queen Victoria's reign. The "Blood Collage" shown in this exhibition looks surprisingly modern and has a sort of psychedelic buzz about it. (Garland, in fact, was from England but spent most of his life as fish-monger and legislator in Newfoundland, but, when his brother died, returned to England. His "Blood Collages" are said to be outstanding examples of Victorian "decoupage" -- the red pigment is supposed to represent the salvific blood of Christ).
JoAnn Verburg's photography show, "Aftershocks", occupies the third floor gallery ordinarily devoted to camera art and consists of about 25 large pictures. The photographs, showing objects life-size, are presented in "light-box" format -- in other words, they seem to be lit from within. Several of the pictures include motion although it is subtle -- someone turning the pages of a newspaper, rippling water, people reclining on the ground, ribcages moving as they breathe, and, sometimes, slightly changing position. It's a pretty show that mines the vein of Theocritean idyll or pastoral. The pictures show olive trees and green thickets in which you can glimpse people behind the brush or resting on the banks of a natural spring. Verburg made the pictures near Spoleto in Umbria and the photographs have a faintly elegiac tone, the hushed atmosphere of Poussin's Et in Arcadio ego. Labels tell us that the pictures were made in the aftermath of the international furor over George Floyd's murder, in the context of the Covid pandemic and that the title refers literally to an earthquake and its aftershocks palpable in the area where the pictures were taken. In about half the pictures, furtive-looking figures, mostly masked by intervening branches, read newspapers. Some headlines are visible -- the International New York Times reporting on terrorist attacks, immigrants drowned at sea, and the like. The images obviously contrast the tumult in the human world with the serenity of nature -- although wreckage of fallen branches in the foreground of some of the pictures suggest that nature may not be that peaceful either. There is a wonderful book about Latin pastoral poetry, Poets in a Landscape by Gilbert Highet -- the show reminds me of that book and the poetry cited in it. The pictures also supposedly are in dialogue with the MIA's famous Van Gogh showing olive trees under a blazing sun -- I didn't see much similarity, but Verburg who is a native of St. Paul, has apparently lectured on that picture. This is a subtle and interesting exhibition, very tranquil and counter-cultural and its worth spending some time with these images. Too much contemporary art intends to provoke and slap you across the face -- Verburg's means of persuasion are much more low-key and, ultimately, effective.
(Verburg is an instructor at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. The male figure shown reclining in the pictures is her husband, the poet Jim Moore. She lives in St. Paul and Spoleto. She is quite well-known. She was the director of the Rephotography Project, an expedition that set out to create contemporary photographs of locations on the frontier that were the subject of pictures by pioneer photographers like Timothy Sullivan. A copy of the book documenting this project and some volumes by Jim Moore were on a table in the exhibit and I recognize that you peruse these materials if you attend the show.)
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