I’ve never actually seen Arnold Böcklin’s famous but now not really all that famous, let’s say once-famous and now fairly obscure painting known as Die Toteninsel, or The Isle of the Dead. I haven’t seen it in person. There is a version of the painting, I guess Böcklin painted a number of versions of the painting since they kept getting destroyed by wars and other annoying events, but there is a version of the painting at the art museum in Leipzig and I kick myself that I was in Leipzig not that long ago, a couple of years ago and completely and utterly failed to go see the painting. I wasn’t just in Leipzig, I was in Leipzig partly to see a big exhibit of Caspar David Friedrich paintings and could easily just have walked over and seen the Böcklin.
In retrospect, I suppose I didn’t even bother to find out what other important paintings and works of visual art were in Leipzig because I didn’t want to know. I only ever have a fairly small amount of looking in my system, I guess you could say, and I wanted, rather zealously and also somewhat self-protectively, I wanted to reserve all my looking-energy for the Friedrich paintings. This was probably a good idea, in retrospect. In retrospect it took a lot out of me to look at all those Friedrich paintings because Caspar David Friedrich is such a funny painter in that many of the canvasses I just find so completely stupid. It is both the glory and the hilarious idiocy of Caspar David Friedrich that he painted, from the beginning of his career all the way to the end, as a stupid person. He would paint, for instance, a landscape and just put a big mountain in the very middle of the landscape and think to himself something like, this mountain is God. It doesn’t get much dumber than that. You can’t just put a big mountain in the middle of a canvas and decide that this will make people think of God and feel that you’ve done something profound in the act.
He’s an idiot. Or he’ll paint a graveyard and some dead trees and, voilà!, death. It’s indecent and dumb beyond belief. By ‘beyond belief’ I mean that you can’t believe that he did something so dumb. You try to make excuses and you try to explain to yourself and others that he, Caspar David Friedrich, couldn’t possibly have been such a dumb-ass, he was really doing something much more subtle or at least less embarrassing. But it isn’t true. He really was a stupid painter.
I am not against stupid painters.
I’m not much moved by the ‘mountain is God’ paintings but I have to say that a fair amount of the cemetery and dead tree paintings end up being good even though they are idiotic and shouldn’t be good. But they are good. They are good, I suspect, not despite being stupid but because they are stupid. Stupid and good, stupid and beauty, these things are not mutually exclusive. Not everything that is stupid is good or beautiful, of course, I’m not crazy enough to claim that (though semi-secretly I do have some perverse desire to make such a claim), but it is also clearly the case that many stupid things are very good and very beautiful. Probably there is just no fixed relationship at all between stupidness and goodness and beauty and so we shouldn’t think about it much or even at all.
I like thinking about it, though.
The Isle of the Dead is a wonderfully stupid painting. I haven’t, as I mentioned, actually seen it in person but I believe very deeply that seeing it in person I’d be even more blown away by how stupid it is. So many clichés. The cypress trees and the big chunks of rock and the boatman and the white figure. The painting is so dumb that it stupidified even Rachmaninoff, who is generally, so I understand, considered a pretty smart and clever and both technically and conceptually sophisticated composer. I mean, you might generally dismiss the late-Romantic tendencies of Rachmaninoff if you’re the sort of person to dismiss such things, but you’d still probably say that as far as such music goes, Rachmaninoff was pretty good at it.
But our friend Rachmaninoff once wrote a piece of music inspired by Isle of the Dead, which is a downright gloomy piece of music that is such a literal attempt to capture the ‘sound’ of the painting that one is, I don’t know, disappointed. Didn’t Arnold Böcklin himself once say that the whole point of the painting was to induce silence? I’m pretty sure he said something like that. But the painting is so silly that our poor Russian composer friend was tricked into writing what is essentially the film score for a Boris Karloff film.
Wait! There is a Boris Karloff film called Isle of the Dead. Unfortunately, it contains no Rachmaninoff. Isle of the Dead the film was directed by B-movie luminary Val Lewton, creator of Cat People (1942), among other wonders, and a figure so fascinating in his own right that I’m not going to talk about him here. I can’t. It would be too much. But here’s the thing, Isle of the Dead is not a bad movie. I mean, it is a bad movie. But it is also kind of a wonderful movie. And so very gloomy. Infinite gloom and dread.
It is often said that Arnold Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead portrays a figure in white waiting for the boat. But I don’t think this is right. In the 1886 version of the painting, the figure in white is stooping over a bit getting out of the boat. I find this stooping extraordinarily moving in the same way I often find Boris Karloff to be moving. It’s the clumsiness, the oafishness, the stupidity. The high drama of death itself, and then a goofy figure wobbling around trying to get off a boat.
Morgan Meis has a PhD in Philosophy and is a founding member of Flux Factory, an arts collective in New York. He has written for n+1, The Believer, Harper’s Magazine, The Virginia Quarterly Review and is a contributor at The New Yorker. He won the Whiting Award for non-fiction in 2013. Morgan is also an editor at 3 Quarks Daily, and a winner of a Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers grant. A book of Morgan’s selected essays can be found here. His books from Slant are The Drunken Silenus. The Fate of The Animals, and The Grand Valley He can be reached at morganmeis@gmail.com.
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