Byline: KAREN von HAHN
BERLIN -- It is almost too fitting to go to a show about melancholy in Berlin. But after a morning spent reading in the Herald Tribune about how the current fashion mood in Paris is one of "sweet melancholy" -- with models in mourning cloaks and widow's weeds in sad procession to operatic arias at McQueen and Galliano, followed by a visit to Peter Eisenman's unremittingly bleak grid of concrete coffins laid in memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe -- it just seemed like the logical next step.
Melancholie-Genie und Wannsinn in Der Kunst (or Melancholy-Genius and Madness in Art), opened two weeks ago at the Mies van der Rohe-designed Neue Nationalgalerie (it's on until May 7), and it's already such a hot ticket on the international calendar that when I arrived on a Wednesday afternoon, the glass box was buzzing like a hive, with art types queuing up for a downer.
Brilliantly curated, the show brings together hundreds of diverse, yet miserable masterpieces, from 6th-century Sapphos, their alabaster drapery sad and weepy, to lonely Caspar David Friedrich seacoasts, and tortured genius self-portraits by tortured geniuses from Goya to Warhol.
When you see the 75th portrait of a figure lost in thought, head heavy in one hand, or yet another still life of skull and snuffed candle, the big picture emerges loud and clear: Sadness is intoxicatingly beautiful. So decisively does the show make the case for a sadness cult in the history of Western art, it leaves us pondering whether it might be sadness itself that motivates us to make art in the first place.
Socrates apparently believed that creativity required a tortured soul. "Our greatest blessings come to us by way of madness," he said. According to the medieval theorists who believed in the "humoral" theory of health, that "gift" of genius was caused by an overabundance of black bile -- "melancholy" comes from the Greek melas, meaning black, and chole, or bile.
The result was that intellectual depth, and the colour black, became associated with depictions of sadness. Hence the 16th-century Coello portrait of the extremely unhappy looking Spanish king Philip II, reputedly a man of great intellect who spoke little, read everything and insisted, like many a jaded, latter-day sophisticate, on wearing only black.
The "sweet melancholy" of the 18th century shifted sadness from an intellectual gift to a case of extreme sensitivity. With this interpretation, misery was no longer the exclusive purview of kings and prophets, but could be demonstrated by every one of us with a poet within--a romanticization of melancholy that has persisted to this day (think Cash and Cobain, lone wolf Clint Eastwood, the bravely singing Judy Garland, and celebrity suicides from Hemingway to Hunter S. Thompson).
Now, instead of beautiful, gloomy portraits of desperate mourning, lushly tortured Christs and unrequited love, we get the nihilism of 50 Cent and Quentin Tarantino. In the place of landscapes with their ruins, tempests and torrents, we get our sad beauty fix from distressed denim, torn crochet and faux wall finishes (sadness for us, in our numb uncertainty, equates with nostalgia for, and a sense of loss of, authenticity and tradition).
In the end, the most au courant pieces in the show were the creepiest. Through the lens of tattoo art, the 18th-century Memento Mori and Vanitas paintings and engravings of skulls and spider webs with inscriptions like "NIL OMNE" or "all is nothing" looked so hip, some jeans line is likely to rip them off for a new sad-chic brand.
The night we saw the show we went to a bar called Newton, after the Berliner and late photographer Helmut Newton. It was cold, and we were tired, so we settled down with our scotches in front of a wall-sized frieze of Newton's beautiful, miserable high-heeled nudes to listen to the music.
After a while we realized that what we were listening to was a series of recordings of the same song being played over and over again in different styles: a bossa-nova version, a jazz version, then one set to a disco beat. There was something lovely and wistful about hearing the song sung over and over again. The waitress showed us a two-volume CD set of the song, which was apparently all the rage at clubs in Berlin (in record shops here, these one-song CDs are their own category). Given this madness for sadness, it struck me as particularly poignant that the song they were playing over and over again at Newton was the 1966 Bobby Hebb hit Sunny.
kvonhahn@globeandmail.com
Sad chic's top 5
1. All black, as in mourning dress.
2. Funerary, or 18th-century engraving styles in tattoo art and fonts.
3. Ripped, torn or frayed edges and hems, similar to widow's weeds.
4. Cameos, silhouettes, Victoriana.
5. Chiffon and black lace.