The painting that haunts me — seven experts share their favorite scary artwork
AS HALLOWEEN approached, we asked seven of our academic experts to tell us about the most unsettling artwork they’ve ever encountered. From gruesome portraits to creepy critters, these are the paintings that have stayed with them long after their first glimpse.
L’INHUMATION PRÉCIPITÉE BY ANTOINE WIERTZ (1854)
Hardly anything is more terrifying than the idea of being buried alive. In Antoine Wiertz’s painting, a cholera victim, presumed dead, revives in the crypt. Lifting the coffin lid, he glimpses a human skull through the gloom. A spider scrambles towards the open lid, while a rat slinks into an adjacent coffin. His face contorts with horror at his realization: he has awakened into a nightmare worse than death.
In 18th and 19th century Europe, the fear of premature burial was rife, and, while rarer than people imagined, the anxiety was not entirely unfounded. During epidemics, bodies were buried hastily and there were few accurate techniques for confirming death.
To guard against the grim possibility of being buried alive, some people specified that their arteries be cut or their heads severed before they were buried. Instant death was preferable to the horror of live burial that Wiertz so frighteningly portrayed. — Chloe Ward, senior lecturer in the history of British art, Queen Mary University of London
JUDITH MURDERING HOLOFERNES BY ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI (1620)
The sheer visceral impact of this painting is heightened by its composition. Our eyes are drawn to the partially severed head of the still-struggling Holofernes.
The story comes from the Book of Judith, which is included in Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Bibles. To save her city from this Assyrian general, Judith has set forth to seduce and murder him, aided by her servant Abra.
The vivid yellow and blue of the women’s dresses and the red of Holofernes’ bed contrast with the background chiaroscuro (an effect of contrasted light and shadow). This gives the artwork a claustrophobic intensity. Gentileschi painted this subject twice. But it is her 1620 version that is considered the more powerful.
In it she has shown blood spurting parabolically from Holofernes’ wounds, spattering Judith’s arms. Yet it is the grim determination of Judith and the death agonies of her victim that, for me, transports the viewer into the private moment of a gruesome murder. — Pippa Catterall, professor of history and policy, University of Westminster
SATURN DEVOURING HIS SON BY FRANCISCO GOYA (1820-23)
Painted in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars and during Spain’s revolution of 1820-23, this nightmarish image is the most powerful of Spanish painter Francisco Goya’s 14 “black paintings.”
Said to depict Saturn (or Cronus in Greek myth) eating one of his children to prevent a prophecy that one will usurp him, it gruesomely combines the taboos of cannibalism and filicide (killing your own child). The pure black background forces the viewer to fixate on the dismembered corpse, Saturn’s strangely angular body, and the madness in his eyes.
The title was not Goya’s, and the suggestion that this is a remote mythological scene or an allegory of time destroying youth may be attempts to distance ourselves from its darker meaning.
Beneath such efforts, this painting unflinchingly depicts the callousness of power, the urge to destroy rivals, the old exploiting the young. Two centuries on, it remains a chilling depiction of raw human instincts when the mask of civilization is torn away. — Karl Bell, associate professor of cultural and social history, University of Portsmouth
THREE STUDIES FOR FIGURES AT THE BASE OF A CRUCIFIXION BY FRANCIS BACON (1944)
Fleshy bioforms with outstretched, eel-like necks are writhing in an orange space. They are sightless, but two of them have toothy open mouths: one is snarling, the other is screaming. They are simultaneously human and not human.
These abject creatures are the creation of the Irish-British artist Francis Bacon in his work Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944). The artist completed the triptych over two weeks, fueled by alcohol and hangovers.
The figures are intended to represent the ancient Greek furies: deities of vengeance from the underworld. The work’s exhibition date is poignant: it was first shown to the public in the final days of the Second World War in Europe. Terror leaps out of these paintings: they are at once a visceral reminder of our mortality and bodily materiality, and an expression of the horrors that humans have inflicted upon each other. And we cannot look away. — Daisy Dixon, lecturer in philosophy, Cardiff University
BLOWING FROM GUNS IN BRITISH INDIA BY VASILY VERESHCHAGIN (1884)
This painting by the Russian painter Vasily Vereshchagin depicts the execution of a group of rebels, the Kuka, after an uprising in Malerkotla, Punjab, in 1872. The British struck back harshly, executing the Kukas by blowing from guns. The rebels were tied to the mouths of cannons, which were then fired.
There is no indication that Vereshchagin witnessed the Kuka event himself. He had probably seen illustrations of the Indian rebellion of 1857, with similar compositions.
This painting was exhibited in London’s Grosvenor Gallery as part of a trilogy showing execution methods in different parts of the world. This framing is disturbing, at least to me — placing the brutal scene in combination with the detached, quasi-ethnographic mission. There is another disturbing dimension: the tension between the painting as an anti-colonial-violence statement or as a piece of political propaganda targeting the rule of the British Empire.
The original painting, in storage at University of California, Berkeley, was destroyed due to water damage around 1950. A photogravure in grayscale of the work still exists, as does a color sketch, now exhibited at the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg. — Åsa Harvard Maare, senior lecturer in visual communication, Malmö University
THE SPIDER BY ODILON REDON (1881)
Imagine a giant spider with 10 legs and a grinning, human face emerging from the shadows in the corner of your room. The French artist Odilon Redon created this nightmarish anthropomorphic creature largely from his imagination, but was also inspired by the experience of viewing nature through a microscope.
Melancholic and introspective from childhood, he was introduced to the world of bugs by the botanist Armand Clavaud. Redon’s imagination was also fueled by decadent literature such as Charles Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil (1857) or Edgar Allan Poe’s gothic poem “The Raven” (1845).
Working mainly in charcoal and lithograph, he was inspired to produce a whole series of black-and-white images — monstrous creatures and giant, floating eyes — that expressed his subconscious fears. Known as his “Noirs” (black pictures), they evoked his obsession with the terrifying, nightmarish visions that are invisible by day. The writer Joris Karl Huysmans defined them as: “A new type of fantasy, born of sickness and delirium.” — Frances Fowle, emeritus professor of 19th century art, University of Edinburgh
DISASTERS AND FAIRY TALES BY CINDY SHERMAN (1980S)
The artist Cindy Sherman uses her own body as the blank canvas for her art: she dresses up in makeup, prosthetics, wigs, and disguises and photographs the results against carefully staged backdrops. The resulting images are often deliberately unsettling.
In her series Disasters and Fairy Tales from the 1980s, she played a series of characters from horror films and nightmarish folklore. The image that I find most difficult to look at is not the goriest or most grotesque, but Untitled #165 (1986), in which a hybrid, part-human, part-animal creature in a gingham dress lurks bashfully behind a tree.
What does it want? Is it malevolent, or just lonely? This creature seems to embody the dark things we don’t want to acknowledge in our psyche, that we push away, but which linger on the edges of our consciousness. As Sherman’s self-portraiture implies, these nightmarish things are not monsters from elsewhere, but versions of ourselves. — Catherine Spooner, professor of literature and culture, Lancaster University
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