2023-08-30 12:52:31
It was Guillermo Solana, art historian and artistic director of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, who delved into this fascinating hidden and often imperceptible world. His shrewd gaze scrutinized the fabulous Thyssen collection with another prism and found a good handful of astrological, spiritualist, alchemical, theosophical or parapsychological signs and winks in the museum paintings that he wanted to share with the viewer. It shows us what was always there but we couldn’t see. “There are 59 works, but it could be a hundred,” said Solana, curator of the attractive and unusual exhibition that found many more references than he imagined.
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Paul Delvaux, ‘The Viaduct’, 1963
In a suburban and industrial setting, Delvaux creates a dreamlike atmosphere by playing with artificial lights at night. The mystery culminates in the nearest corner, under the canopy and light bulb, where a mirror leaning against the wall becomes a portal to another world. A small table with a rug and an oil lamp are reflected in it. The Belgian painter associated these objects with his childhood memories: «My grandmother would put on her glasses to read the newspaper by the light of the lamp she had just turned on, it was a poem, a magical moment. […] When you turn on an oil lamp, it leaves part of the room in shadow, which is even more mysterious.”
Edvard Munch, ‘Sunset’, 1888
In 1902, Munch made a series of photographs in which he used techniques that consisted of moving the camera or using double exposure (a common technique in spiritualist photography). Through these resources, some portrayed became transparent as ghosts. Something similar happens in this painting: the figure of Laura (Munch’s sister), seated and looking at the horizon, coexists with the remains of the erased figure of her other sister, Inger, standing in the center of the painting, an element that is visible through the x-ray that was made of the painting.
Dreams, oracles and premonitions
Paul Delvaux, ‘Woman Before the Mirror’, 1936
This work by Paul Delvaux has been related to Ingres’ Oedipus and the Sphinx: the bust of the mirror is extended by two lace bands reminiscent of the sphinx’s front legs, and in the background the same narrow opening to the sky can be seen between the rock walls.
The woman with an abstracted air, perhaps sleepwalking, confronts another woman in the grotto who is her own image in the mirror. Delvaux subverts the myth and redoubles the enigma; It is not Oedipus who fights with the sphinx, but the sphinx herself who questions herself.
Francis Bacon, ‘Portrait of George Dyer in a Mirror’, 1968
Francis Bacon met George Dyer in 1963 and they had a long and intense love affair that ended in a dramatic and catastrophic way. In 1971, Dyer was found dead of a drug and alcohol overdose.
A close friend and biographer of Bacon, Michael Peppiatt, wrote that after Dyer’s death he observed a foreboding quality in paintings such as this: “Dyer turns with such violence that his features are projected in the mirror like a torn mask, leaving behind his shoulders only the stump of a head.
Max Ernst, ‘Lone Tree and Conjugal Trees’, 1940
The “solitary tree” of the title is undoubtedly the green tree on the right and the “conjugal trees” the mass on the left, made up of two cypresses leaning one on top of the other. It is the image of the “chemical wedding” that had already appeared in other works of Max Ernst. In alchemy, the copulation of a man and a woman symbolizes the union of Mercury (feminine) and Sulfur (masculine), a crucial step in the transmutation of base metals.
Georgia O’Keeffe, ‘New York Street with a Moon’, 1925
The full moon appears between clouds; the lamppost with aura is like a second star and the red disc of the traffic light seems to coincide with the position of the hidden sun. Moon, lamppost and disc, when aligned, build a mysterious bridge between heaven and earth. The alignment of three celestial bodies is called syzygy, especially the moon, the earth and the sun. Syzygy causes spring tides (during a full moon) and neap tides (with a new moon), when the ocean rises more and falls less than average. This painting evokes the diagrams that represent the spring tides of syzygy, with the moon above, the earth in the middle and the sun below.
José de Ribera, ‘The Mercy’, 1633
Between the folds of the shroud there is a haunting eye that watches us. It was discovered by a museum room attendant who had been shown it by another attendant. X-rays and ultraviolet photography show that the painting has not been altered in that area, that it was Ribera who put that hidden eye there.
Double journey through unknown and uncomfortable territories that have opened new paths to the interpretation of art
«The occult covers the history of art and all genres. But until the 1980s, the relationship between art and the occult was considered an uncomfortable topic, if not suspicious”, explains Solana, responsible for an exhibition that is as unusual as it is interesting. A journey through the history of paranormal practices and beliefs that runs parallel to that of religion and that sometimes converge. A relationship that until recently was ignored by experts.
According to Guillermo Solana, everything changed in 1986 with ‘The spiritual in art: abstract painting 1890-1985’, an exhibition organized by Maurice Tuchman in Los Angeles. Since then, some museums have reviewed their collections and organized exhibitions on art and esotericism that, according to Solana, “offer new perspectives on their collections.” So The New York Metropolitan. hosted in 2005 ‘The perfect medium. Photography and the occult’, the Minneapolis Institute of Art mounted in 2021 ‘Supernatural America. The paranormal in american art’ and the Guggenheim in Venice hosted last year ‘Surrealism and magic: enchanted modernity’.
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