Elegant Terrorist

The only Man that e'er I knew Who did not make me almost spew Was Fuseli: he was both Turk & Jew--And so, dear Christian Friends, how do ye do?

With these lines, tempestuous Poet-Artist William Blake--who thought of God as "Old Nobodaddy" and of most men as nobodies--saluted one of his few friends. Henry Fuseli (1741-1825) was, in fact, neither Turk nor Jew, but a Swiss Lutheran; Blake brandished the terms in honor of his friend's rebellious temperament and alien air. Fuseli's style as a draftsman and painter strikingly resembled that of the great Blake. As a result, his reputation has languished in the shadow of his friend's genius. Last week Manhattan's Morgan Library had on view the first comprehensive Fuseli show ever held in the U.S.

The exhibit was assembled for the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, mostly from the Kunsthaus in Zurich. After New York, the 64-picture Fuseli show will go to Cleveland, Detroit, St. Louis and Baltimore. Most of the pictures have an extravagant, stagelike quality; men and women gesture and posture elaborately, as in The Witches Show Macbeth Banquo's Ghost. Macbeth, a heroic, anatomically detailed nude, holds an outstretched hand against the apparition conjured up by the three hags. There are also a few amorous scenes, such as The Kiss, in which the lovers' bodies are passionately contorted, suggestive of the meticulously executed pornographic studies which Fuseli turned out (none of them is on view in the current show).

Fuseli's age was full of elegance and horror; he portrayed the horror elegantly and the elegance horribly. His fashionable ladies carry a mocking suggestion of death, while his death's heads seem carefully coifed. Fuseli was ordained a minister in his youth, and in 1764 went to England and took up art. Eventually he got a job as a professor at the Royal Academy, settled down to a quiet life painting, writing, and raising moths (he was an ardent amateur entomologist).

But Fuseli's pictures were so violent and his vanity so strong that his contemporaries came to look on him as a character from one of his own drawings. Benjamin Robert Haydon, the historical painter, wrote five years after Fuseli's death: "[He] was undoubtedly the greatest genius of his day . . . But in the modes of conveying his thoughts ... he was a monster . . . His women are all strumpets, and his men all banditti, with the action of galvanized frogs, the dress of mountebanks, and the hue of pestilential putridity . . ." There is something terrifyingly timely in Fuseli's nightmarish mysticism. In some ways, Fuseli bridges the gap between the 18th and the 20th centuries; his shrieks and murmurs carry across the Victorian era (which merely stopped its ears) to the present. In several paintings and drawings all called The Nightmare--whose principal characters are variously a monstrous dwarf, a leering horse and a recumbent maiden--Fuseli seems as modern as Dali or Freud. Despite his inescapable similarity to his great friend ("Blake," he once said, "is damned good to steal from"), Fuseli speaks to the U.S. audience in his own peculiar and terrifying way.

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