Michael Savage
posted 23 March 2006

I had a Gothic Nightmare at the Tate's Late Night Friday when a huge mass of people, many dressed in black and more than a few with pointy hats, crammed into the latest crowd pleaser. Like so much of this exhibition, it reflects the quality and professionalism of the Tate's marketing machine. It is a shame that curatorial excellence is less evident.

This exhibition is driven by an idea. An idea can be a rewarding premise for an exhibition, particularly when it makes us see what is hidden, revealing lost contexts and making the familiar seem strange. Gothic Nightmares is the opposite; it tries to make the strange seem familiar. Rather than revealing the debates and ideas and aesthetics that drove artists in the early nineteenth century, it ties them to a more modern idea of horror, especially in the awkward 'phantasmagoria', which blurs the vital boundary between presenting original art and inventing a new spectacle.

The eerily engaging Fuseli 'The Nightmare' confronts you first, the supine maiden supporting a diabolic dwarf on her chest, with a maniacal horse looking on. Post-Freudian viewers are entranced in different ways from Fuseli's peers, but it is perhaps more a social and psychological document than a great painting; it is badly drawn and the woman is oddly proportioned. The exhibition's wall text is especially bad. It rarely rises above the obvious. When it does, it is either partial (the description of the Prometheus myth unfolded gradually across several representations, never mentioning the gory highlight where he has his liver pecked out daily!), or questionable (calling Goltzius an artist of the sublime is meaningless - art historical categories are fluid, but he is quintessentially mannerist, an earlier and quite distinct style). In one room a diaphanous curtain shields the innocent from indecency. The coy warning is calculated to cause maximum discomfort for families - how do you explain that your children can't see the end of the room? Or try to view alongside your parents? Parents and children alike will feel awkward.

The highlight is the catalogue, which is well illustrated and provides a lot of information. It is the one sop to the aspirational visitor wanting more than the standard chit chat provided by the wall text. Unfortunately it is dreadfully dry, and the price limits circulation to the well-heeled aspirational visitors. Like many of the paintings, the entries lack passion, conviction or even interest and are generally restricted to facts.

Fuseli's big paintings are captured well by photographs, with their clear forms and narrative clarity. On the other hand, Blake's sinuous little watercolours defy reproduction. Until now, I had only seen second-rate Blakes in the original; seeing the best is very different. Fuseli's histrionic manner belies the grandiloquent narratives he illustrates, Romney's large drawings are absurd, and most of the rest derivative; Blake alone carries conviction. Blake's 'The Blasphemer' is a mannered, contorted masterpiece on a tiny scale. The Blasphemer is bound naked, bending back to reveal a powerfully modelled torso, with six arms raised about him with stones to cast upon him. There is no blood or gore. My sympathy is drawn to the executioners, with the controlled poise and purposeful glare. Six are acting as one in their terrible task.

Not all of Blake's watercolours are hits. He relies on rather schematic composition, but sometimes it produces something wonderful like 'Pestilence: The Death of the First-Born', where a giant scaley figures struts before us in a grand arabesque, with a classical frieze of diminutive figures below mourning the dead son laid out in the centre. The enormity of gesture is balanced by the muted coloration. It is the Blakes that make the show worth seeing.

In contrast, so many of the other classical and mythological scenes, often on a much grander scale, seem daft. You can see what the artists wanted to do, and some of them were quite talented. But for all their classical learning, artistic range and pedagogical ambition, none of them carries it off. This was a time of nostalgia rather than grandiloquence in the arts; the great developments were in the smithies rather than the battlefields, the cotton mills rather than the cathedrals.

The works exhibited here are from a time when aesthetic questions were publicly discussed to a degree rarely equalled before or since. An idea encapsulating much of what these artists stood for is the sublime, referring to a range of responses that can perhaps be summed up as a sense of awe and wonder, which was sometimes opposed to ideas of beauty that were merely pretty. Today's more modest approach is perhaps the triumph of the beautiful over the sublime. The Tate glosses these debates with something more familiar; Buffy and Frankenstein rather than Reynolds and Burke.

High culture is inherently opposed to the quotidian; part of its appeal is that it rises above familiar concerns. Laments about 'dumbing down' express frustration that marketers are trying to rob us of these experiences by making art 'accessible', derived from a contemptibly patronising assumption that common people cannot connect with anything that isn't rooted in our daily existence. The Tate should give us more credit.

Till 1 May 2006