in the Graphic Cabinet
How can the invisible be depicted? Long before Surrealism introduced a new, overarching reality into art through its exploration of dreams and the subconscious, artists were already exploring the worlds of nightmares, visions, the fantastic, and the spiritual. As a prologue to the major Surrealism exhibition at the Staatsgalerie, the Graphic Cabinet exhibition “Nightmare and Vision. Between Shadow and Enlightenment,” traces the origins of these pictorial worlds through approximately 40 works.
In graphic works and paintings from the 18th and 19th centuries, including highlights such as Francisco de Goya’s “The Sleep of Reason” and Max Klinger’s variation on Arnold Böcklin’s “Isle of the Dead,” a twilight realm of hallucinations, metamorphoses, and inner visions seems to emerge. The exhibition situates these works within a longer European pictorial tradition. Since the Renaissance, artists have engaged with demons, folk beliefs, alchemy, and mystical revelations. These ideas by no means disappeared with the Age of Enlightenment. Rather, they became counter-worlds to reason, in which fears, desires, and the hidden forces of the human psyche coalesced.
Rather than presenting these artists merely as precursors of Surrealism, the exhibition views them as part of a shared history of the imagination. André Breton recognized many of them as kindred spirits—artists who contrasted visible things with a hidden reality, thereby laying the groundwork for one of the most significant artistic movements of the 20th century. “Nightmare and Vision: Between Shadow and Enlightenment” thus offers a new perspective on the origins of Surrealism.
Credit: Franz von Stuck, Lucifer, 1890, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Graphische Sammlung, alter Bestand, © Staatsgalerie Stuttgart
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