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Why did Vincent van Gogh paint a skeleton smoking a cigarette? His 1886 painting doesn’t quite seem to fit into his larger output, one teeming with swirling landscapes and emotive portraits.
Some art historians have said that “Head of a Skeleton With a Burning Cigarette” was merely van Gogh, still an art student at the time, fooling around with an anatomy exercise. Anna-Maria von Bonsdorff, the director of the Ateneum Art Museum, part of the Finnish National Gallery, has another theory.
She thinks van Gogh was tuned in to a late 19th-century trend that revived religious symbolism from the Middle Ages. The skull referred to the Dance of Death, she said, a visual theme from the medieval era that reminds us death is always close at hand.
Van Gogh gave the allegory an update, von Bonsdorff said. “Because it has a cigarette, and it’s grinning, it has this very modern attitude,” she said. “It’s death in a modern setting, death as the dandy.”
“Head of a Skeleton” is one of the centerpieces of the exhibition “Gothic Modern: From Darkness to Light,” running at the Ateneum Art Museum in Helsinki through Jan. 26, 2025. The show, which will travel to Oslo after that, and then to Vienna, presents a new approach to thinking about modern art.
Students of European art history are often taught about a succession of 19th- and 20th-century art movements, radiating from the art capital of Paris: Impressionism became Post-Impressionism, which led to Cubism, and then the birth of abstraction. This relentless evolution of the avant-garde pushed culture into modernity, with ever more color and light.
But for Northern Europe and the Nordic artists, from around 1870 until 1920, there was an alternative center of artistic influence in Berlin, Von Bonsdorff said. Artists inspired by the culture of the German capital who were interested a darker, more spiritual interpretation of life, and looked to the Middle Ages to express fin de siècle discontent and a search for deeper meaning.
This tendency grew amid sweeping industrialization and social upheaval, when tensions between European empires were rising, and the First World War was looming, said Juliet Simpson, a professor and art historian in Britain who led a team of experts that collaborated on the Helsinki show.
“The world is speeding up and rushing to a state of potential collapse or meltdown,” Simpson explained. “It shifts into a question: What is the meaning of all this, and what can artists do about that?”
“They were discovering things in medieval art and culture that are about the great rituals of life, human longing, yearning for things — not just material, but spiritual,” Simpson added. For artists at the time, she said, “modern life has a shadow side, and it’s bound up with those more irrational elements: death, darker themes and darker emotions.”
These dark themes were explored by famous artists across the continent, including Edvard Munch, Max Beckmann and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, as well as lesser-known Nordic artists and women artists, among them the German artist Käthe Kollwitz and the Austrian British painter Marianne Stokes.
The “Gothic Modern” exhibition displays their work alongside original 500-year old artworks by masters such as Lucas Cranach the Elder, Hans Holbein the Younger, and Albrecht Dürer. The modern artists in the show responded to these older works in a range of ways: sometimes borrowing medieval techniques and styles (like using wood cut printing or gold-leaf backgrounds), but most often taking subject matter or themes and transforming them into something wholly new.
The concept for the “Gothic Modern” exhibition was born seven years ago during a conference on “Gothic Modernisms” at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Participants discussed ways in which Gothic architecture and medieval painting influenced modern art, and began to conjecture which works, shown together, would best exemplify this trend.
Von Bonsdorff and Simpson assembled a team of half a dozen curators — from Berlin, Vienna, Oslo and Helsinki — to select more than 200 artworks that would tell the story of gothic modernism from a Pan-European perspective.
“With this multinational team, we found many artworks that were connected to this topic,” said one of the curators, Ralph Gleis, the director of Berlin’s Alte Nationalgalerie. “Some were well known in their respective countries, but were not known in other countries.”
The fascination for older art wasn’t merely about looking back for inspiration, said Tessel M. Bauduin, an assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam, who helped organize the “Gothic Modernisms” conference. Many modern artists looked back because they were searching for something purer and more authentic than what they found in modernity.
“A lot of people in the art centers like Paris and Berlin found modern art too artificial,” Bauduin said. The older artists “were thought of as ‘primitive’ in the sense that they were not yet spoiled by early modernity.” She added: “Their art was really a direct expression of the inner spiritual experience of the artist, and a direct translation of their artistic experience.”
At the turn of the 20th century, interest in so-called primitive art was stirred by several popular exhibitions around Europe, explained Simpson. The first was an 1898 show of German medieval art in Berlin, she said, followed by a Cranach survey in Dresden, Germany, in 1899. Other significant medieval art shows took place in the first decade of the new century: in Bruges, Belgium; Düsseldorf, Germany; Siena, Italy; and London.
“It’s a big momentum,” Simpson said. “Really major writers and cultural figures from right across Europe and further are visiting these shows, as well as museum directors.” The writers included George Bernard Shaw, Marcel Proust and Stefan Zweig.
Many artists made pilgrimages to see these shows, or to see Gothic art in churches throughout Europe. A particular fascination of the period was the “Isenheim Altarpiece,” by Niclaus of Haguenau and Matthias Grünewald, painted around 1512–16 and considered a Gothic masterpiece.
Their modern artworks then referenced subjects like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden; the Pietà (the Virgin Mary cradling Jesus’s lifeless body); or the Vanitas, a painting genre that uses symbols to remind viewers of their mortality — though artists usually updated these using more modern painting styles or nonreligious settings.
Admiring artists also revived arts and craft techniques from the Middle Ages to make their modern artworks seem more “primitive,” like engraving in wood and metal to make prints.
Some artists were also rediscovering religious art of the past from their own countries that had been hidden or destroyed during the Reformation, a period when ornate church art was forbidden.
In Finland, for example, the Lutheran church leadership of the 17th century stripped churches of ornate textiles and medieval frescoes, or moved altarpieces into church basements, because they favored bare walls and minimal decoration, von Bonsdorff explained. But they did not destroy the works, she added, and during the 20th century, modern artists rediscovered them.
Munch’s 1900 crucifixion scene, “Golgotha,” on show in Helsinki, is an obvious reference to early religious art, but it has been updated in a very modern way, said Cynthia Osiecki, an old masters curator at the National Museum of Norway in Oslo.
“It’s the artist on the cross, and I think it’s hilarious — but Munch took himself very seriously,” she said. “He shows himself sacrificing himself for his art.”
Raised in a strict Protestant family in Norway, Munch understood the symbols of the church, Osieki explained, but he wasn’t religious himself. “Munch had a very religious upbringing, so he loved to play with it and shock people,” she said. “It was extremely controversial in his time.”
Simpson said “Golgotha” was a perfect example of the “gothic modern,” which borrowed from pre-modern imagery to say something about modernity. Rather than embracing faith, she said, the artist is confronting spiritual chaos through art itself — and maybe art alone.
“We’ve got the crowd, which is a modern, urban crowd,” Simpson said, gesturing toward the painting’s lower half. “We’ve got an echo of the modern city, but it’s completely defamiliarized, made strange. There’s violence, suffering, themes of community but also anxiety and uncertainty. Then it morphs into something completely hallucinatory.”
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