Gothicisms

The Gothic style emerged in the 12th century, in Île-de-France and Picardy.
The work carried out at this time in the Abbey of Saint Denis is the forerunner of the style. It was an architectural revolution, characterised by the use of the rib vault, openings in the walls and the art of stained-glass. The Gothic style established itself as an art of construction and light. A similar movement developed in the Meuse Valley (in modern-day Belgium) and represented a complete break from Romanesque forms. Artists were looking for more natural proportions and poses in representations of humans, and a geometric and symmetrical harmony in compositions.
In only fifty years, from around 1150 to the 1200s, artists throughout Europe developed one and the same art that drew on the innovations of Gothic sculpture in the Île-de-France and on the scholarly and harmonious efinements of the art of the Liège region.

The term “Gothic” emerged after the movement it refers to.
The term did not exist when the cathedrals it is associated with were being built. It instead appeared in the 16th century, in the context of the Italian Renaissance, as a name for the art of the Middle Ages. Used by Raphael (1483–1520) and Vasari (1511–1574), it originally had a disparaging connotation. As this art form did not contain references to Antiquity, it was seen as “Gothic” – in reference to the Goths, who were then considered “barbaric”. The Goths were a Germanic people from territories near the modern-day Baltic states, who were associated with the fall of the Roman Empire, in particular the sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410. It would take a few hundred years before the word underwent a reversal in meaning, from criticism to admiration. Gothic, baroque, impressionism and even fauvism: sometimes movements initially viewed with disdain have become, in unique ways, flattering banners in the history of art…

Griffins, dragons and gargoyles: a bestiary of fantastical monsters and creatures came to inhabit Gothic art from the late Middle Ages. Artists combined details from real animals to create hybrid imaginary beings. Although the gargoyles in Gothic architecture are above all functional (evacuating rainwater collected from the roofs), they also form a catalogue of strange creatures corresponding to the medieval hierarchy: they are found on the margins and in less visible places. In the 19th century, there were only a few vestiges of medieval gargoyles remaining on the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. Architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, in search of examples to copy, drew his own “grimacing monsters leaning out over the void”, and sought inspiration from the gargoyles described by Victor Hugo in Notre-Dame de Paris (1831). Today, the image of the gargoyle is still celebrated in film, fantasy and comic books, notably in Gotham City in the Batman series.

In the 19th century, the idea of the monument and preserving heritage began to emerge in Europe and France. In France, Victor Hugo was one of the first to call for a law to protect major historical edifices. The author Prosper Mérimée, then Inspector-General of Historic Monuments, was the driving force behind the restoration of the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, with Lassus and Viollet-le-Duc. The renewed appreciation for Gothic art in the 19th century, known as “neo-Gothic”, is closely connected to Viollet-le-Duc.
Another major movement in the 19th century marked the birth of our modern society: the Industrial Revolution. The Gothic Revival developed in Victorian-era England, advocating a return to a legendary medieval past in reaction to the prevailing classicism. Gothicism and modernity came together. The quest for elevation of medieval architects inspired the verticality of skyscrapers that were appearing in the USA.

This exhibition goes in search of history’s first “Goth” personalities. These literary and artistic figures were key sources of inspiration for the Goth culture, which many artists draw on today. Sarah Bernhardt was one of the most celebrated French actors of her time. Her attraction for the strange was expressed through the many diverse objects decorating her apartments. Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) and Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) were also important figures. The former embodies American Romantic literature with a predilection for horror and the macabre, and influenced by the English Gothic novel. A dark Romanticism permeates the latter’s body of work, from Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) to Le Spleen de Paris (1869).
This combination of poetry and dark Romanticism is one of the literary influences for singer Mylène Farmer. Her second album, Ainsi soit je… (1988) pays homage to Poe, but also to Baudelaire, by setting to music his poem L’Horloge, an ode to passing time and the inevitability of death. Even the design of the stage backdrop on her last tour featured a Gothic building. Artworks by many contemporary artists draw inspiration from this legacy: its influence can be seen in the exhibition in works by Agathe Pitié, Stan Manoukian and Benjamin Lacombe, who even illustrated Edgar Allan Poe’s Contes Macabres.

The elements of Gothic art that were retained in the 19th century are what strongly define it, even today.
It was in the 18th and 19th centuries that a dark, nocturnal aesthetic began to develop, inspired by Gothic ruins. Out of the English Gothic novel, in particular Mary Shelley’s book Frankenstein, emerged the idea of the “dark Gothic”, which has become a reference for today’s Goth culture. In dark Romanticism, the Gothic style became a subversive art, an art of the night. Surprisingly, in the 18th and 19th centuries, a dark Gothic style and a colourful neo-Gothic style coexisted. Our contemporary view of the Gothic style contrasts with the colourful Gothic art of he Middle Ages, with its stained-glass, and painted and gilt sculptures. However, even at that time, the art form played with the contrasts between black and white. In the 14th and 15th centuries, some prestigious tombs made of marble and dark stone juxtaposed black and white. In regions of the North, the black stone known as “from Tournai” is dark grey, bordering on black when polished. When the deceased are portrayed lying down, they are known as “recumbents” or tomb effigies, and “cadaver monuments” when they look like a cadaver.
These commonplace representations in religious edifices contributed to the dark and macabre impression of the Gothic style that has predominated since the 18th century.

Gothic art has given rise to exceptional artistic forms, and this visual language has special features that are unique, powerful and recognisable, but also sufficiently plastic and diverse to suit projection, reinvention and reappropriation by other artists. A set of common traits has thus emerged that recurs throughout the Gothic style from the 12th to the 21st centuries, while nevertheless evolving in each era. The exhibition focuses on three main elements:

• Firstly, the technical and technological prowess present from the beginning and continuing through to skyscrapers, today mobilised by contemporary artists.
• Secondly, the humanism that feeds the creative impulse of Gothic art, with the representation of people and aspects of human nature taking centre stage.
• And finally, the fantastique and the presence of allegorical symbols, with the chimera, monsters and gargoyles of the Middle Ages. This aspect inspired the great architect-restorers of the 19th century, such as Viollet-le-Duc, and beyond, to the 20th and 21st centuries, but also artists and the worlds of comic books, film, music and fantasy.

Throughout the 20th century, Gothic motifs influenced avant-garde artists and creators of new popular art forms, out of an Anglo-Saxon vision that appeared entirely original. In France, dark Romanticism and the fantastique were common threads. In 1939 the first comic book featuring Batman appeared. The word “Gothic” eventually took on new meaning. Often shortened to “Goth”, from the 1970s it became synonymous with the counterculture. In the music world, punk, metal and dark wave emerged, creating a new sound language but also a new kind of visual language. Band names and tattoo designs picked up the codes of Gothic typography. In fantasy novels, illustration, comic books, video games, board games and role playing, Gothic noir has today been reclaimed, as has medievalism, fed by new influences, both pop and underground.
This “desire for the dark” is more than just a clothing or aesthetic fashion: it is a style and life choice. With the success of intergenerational references such as Tim Burton’s films and Wednesday, a television series focusing on a character from the Addams family, this aspect is for both connoisseurs and the general public. Its success reflects the fact that the Gothic style of the Middle Ages was also a “total” art that pervaded daily life. Today it is still a complex yet accessible art, both monumental and miniature, a world unto itself.

There is still a strong appreciation for the Gothic style among today’s young artists. On one hand, there is the dark and subversive Gothic ambiance, which artists such as Émilie Pitoiset reinterprets in clothing-sculpture with her spectral figures, or Jill Mulleady in painting with her gargoyles that are both disturbing and fascinating. The knight, the monk, the vampire and the witch mutate into new beings. The Gothic style is an active force that enables new, sometimes strange narratives to be built, far from the dominant models. Other artists associate the medieval virtuosity of the Gothic style with a new technological dimension, such as Wim Delvoye and his Gothic machine-sculptures or fashion creator Iris Van Herpen and her astonishing cathedral dress. For many artists in the new generation, there is a growing fascination with the Middle Ages, which is seen as liberating, a new artistic and societal model, a fertile source of ideas to be explored and revived. We find, for example, Agathe Pitié’s frescoes, which tell the story of our times by bringing together dozens of characters from all walks of life with the precision of an illuminator, or the blood paintings of Alison Flora, depicting scenes of enchantment and magic in medieval settings.
Gothic art blurs the boundaries between sacred and profane, reality and imagination, and beauty and fear. Malo Chapuy’s paintings fuse medieval and industrial worlds, while Sacha Cambier de Montravel’s artworks portray detailed scenes combining celebration and battle. By drawing on this language, these artists reactivate the power of symbolic, visual and mental evocations, where the tensions between our past and our present can be played out again, in order to finally speak of our future.

How can we explain this endlessly recurring attraction for the Gothic style, which is just as present today as ever before? Since 2020, the Middle Ages have been more and more popular among the younger generation. In particular, artists have been endorsing a Middle Ages that they have both reconsidered and passed through different imaginative filters, including video, and televisual and digital media. The Gothic style provides a boundless creative source and is a way of responding to life’s fundamental emotions, of dealing with the sometimes-dark torments of the human soul. By both playing on and laughing at fears, it allows us to go beyond our concerns and acknowledge difference and otherness, the element of darkness and light. Faced with the crises of today that are perceived as a new form of apocalypse, 21st-century artists are revisiting an invented Middle Ages, one marked by battles but that also sets out an inspiring model for creating and living differently. To explore, through Gothic art, obscured, past worlds, is to question our ways of living and confront the challenges and random nature of our societies. This art, which in the Middle Ages was one of light and colour, is today more closely associated with a subversive aesthetic influenced by darkness and a reversal of worlds. Gothic art and architecture, the neo-Gothic, Gothic novels, Gothic script, Gothic film, Gothic music, Goth culture, Goth fashion… That the Gothic style speaks to so many of us is most certainly because this powerful language resonates differently depending on our individual references. It contains a multitude of facets that continually reactivate and enrich our varying perspectives on the Gothic style.