Grotesque @ UVA Art Museum

From a book of Hunchbacks

Another good place to see art in Charlottesville is UVA's Art Museum. They have a small permanent collection on display, and have ever-changing shows of both art-historical and contemporary work.

One of the shows up now for a little while longer is “Punch Line: Six Centuries of the Comic and the Grotesque in Prints, Drawings, and Photographs from the Collection". Organized by Matthew Affron, Director of Special Curatorial Projects, the show is a small collection of works on paper from Renaissance engravings to work by Duhrer, Goya, Picasso and Miro.


Odilon Redon, A Mask Tolls The Knell (from Series to Edgar Poe), 1882, lithograph

From the press release:

"Grotesque" is a notoriously unruly category of art and aesthetics. The term, which means “a style of painting, sculpture and ornamentation in which natural forms and monstrous figures are intertwined in bizarre or fanciful combination,” relates to all manner of images which prompt many conflicting emotions, from delight to mirth to horror.

The show follows a strange thread through Western art from weird medical books to high modern art. The grotesque had been used both to "other-ize" and demonize outsiders and as a vehicle for flights of imagination. The show is good - some of the pieces are great on their own, but even more powerful when seen from this perspective.


Picasso, The Dream and Lie of Franco I, 1937, etching

Especially nice is seeing Picasso's "The Dream and Lie of Franco" here - Picasso's cubism in these prints was cranked up specifically to make Franco appear as monstrous in appearance as his actions were during the Spanish Civil War.


Picasso, The Dream and Lie of Franco II, 1937, etching


Cubism itself, when applied to figures, can be seen as a manifestation of the grotesque. In Picasso especially figures are twisted and contorted for all the usual grotesque reasons - to ridicule, to make interesting to the eye and to make desirable.