It is often forgotten that even before the surrealists, artists had surrealist tendencies. One of the current exhibits at the Johnson Museum of Art, Escaping the Ordinary: Artistic Imagination in Early Modern Prints, reminds us of the wild products of the human imagination and artistic endeavors even before such ideas became mainstream. The exhibit features many etchings, engravings, woodcuts, and other paper prints from celebrated artists such as Francisco Goya, Rembrandt, William Hogarth, and even the famed printmaker Albrecht Durer. The prints are quite beautiful and done in incredibly rich detail. Artistry aside, perhaps the most interesting aspect of these prints is their subject matter.
The prints contain mythological, religious, and Classical themes, and are peppered with social and political commentary. Many 16th-century prints featured Classical references, through imagined landscapes depicting Greek and Roman myths. This fascination for all things ancient even translated into prints of wealthy 16th-century women posing in the “Greek style” with gossamer white gowns and some crumbling colonnades behind them. The exhibit also features prints done by Hogarth, the famous 18th-century British satirist responsible for Gin Lane, among other works. Hogarth’s piece on exhibit comments, with great humor, on the corrupt political system of his time. These prints seem incredibly fitting for our current political situation, but with Hogarth long gone, we must settle for tasteless memes instead of his beautiful prints to attack politics. Some of the most beautiful exhibits were Goya’s dark and twisted prints, made with heavy shading and brazenly ghoulish figures. Those prints were less political and more of a condemnation of the ignorance and social convention of 18th-century Spanish society.
My favorite piece was a 3” by 4” etching by the 15th-century Dutch engraver Lucas van Leyden called Death with an Hourglass Pursuing a Noble Lady, a title nearly larger than the piece itself. The piece was dainty and well-made with impressive perspective given its tiny size. What was most interesting in this little square of paper was its subject. A skeleton (“Death”) chasing people around is strange to begin with, but it even has some hair on its head and some anatomically-incorrect organs in its middle section. It was interesting to see the manifestation of this fear, the fear of death in the form of art. Death comes to us all, but in a time when social class was much more rigid, religion more prevalent, and death unpredictable, what did death mean? To the noble lady? To the artist? To us?
Another fascinating aspect of the collection was how many prints had a strange, surreal dimension to them. For example, Death of Procris by Giorgio Ghisi looks quite normal at first, but upon a second look you realize that in the middle of the print is a woman riding two horses with waves of hair radiating off of her head, bursting through the clouds and into the canvas. Another example is Leda and the Swan by Cornelis Bos, in which, when looking closely, you realize that there is a baby in an amniotic sac discreetly placed in the corner. This intersection of witchcraft and classical mythology is only one example of the products of the artist’s imagination and their turbulent times. As we ourselves move into turbulent times, Escaping the Ordinary: Artistic Imagination in Early Modern Prints is an exhibit that allows us to immerse ourselves in a strange and different world that, in reality, is not much different from our world today.