WHERE CLIQUES,
OLD AND NEW,
COME TOGETHER IN HARMONY
The Macabre Gallery: Art from the Shadows
by Hella Cliques
October 31, 2026
From gothic nightmares to surrealist meditations on mortality, artists around the world have long captured the eerie, the grotesque, and the haunted.
Before Saturn (known as Cronus in Greek mythology) took power, he overthrew his own father, Uranus. Following his victory, his parents foretold that Saturn himself would one day be overthrown by one of his own children. Driven by paranoia and a desire to retain absolute control, Saturn swallowed each of his offspring—including Neptune, Pluto, Ceres, Vesta, and Juno—immediately as they were born so they could never challenge his rule.
The plan ultimately failed. When his wife Ops (Rhea in Greek myth) gave birth to Jupiter (Zeus), she tricked Saturn by hiding the newborn and handing the titan a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes to swallow instead. Jupiter grew up in secret, returned to force Saturn to vomit up his living siblings, and led them to victory, overthrowing Saturn just as prophesied.
Beyond the literal story, the myth carries deeper symbolic meanings:
The Inevitability of Time: Saturn was conflated with Chronos, the personification of time. In this light, Saturn devouring his children symbolizes Time consuming everything it creates.
Paranoia and Power: The myth serves as a psychological warning about the destructive nature of absolute power and the self-fulfilling paranoia of trying to escape fate.
The painting directly recreates a profound personal experience Munch recorded in his diary in 1892. He was out walking near the fjord at sunset with two companions when the atmosphere suddenly shifted.
American Meteorological Society
Munch described the event:
He recalled walking along a path as the sun set, causing the sky to turn a striking blood-red. Feeling an overwhelming wave of sadness and exhaustion, he stopped and leaned against a wooden railing while his friends kept walking. Above the dark blue city and fjord hung flaming streaks of fire and blood. Standing there trembling with anxiety, he felt as though a vast, endless scream was echoing throughout the surrounding landscape.
Edvard Munch’s The Scream (originally titled Der Schrei der Natur, or The Scream of Nature) is a cornerstone of modern Expressionism.
Munch actually created four distinct versions of The Scream between 1893 and 1910—two in paint (tempera and oil) and two in pastel, along with a lithograph print that made the imagery widely known globally.
The setting is real: an elevated overlook along a path on Ekeberg Hill in Kristiania (modern-day Oslo), overlooking the Oslofjord.
The central figure is deliberately androgenous, skeletal, and fluid, resembling a stylized corpse or a Peruvian mummy—an exhibit Munch is believed to have seen at the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris.
At the time, Munch was suffering from intense psychological distress, isolation, and anxiety. His personal life was marked by tragedy—his mother and favorite sister had both died of tuberculosis during his childhood, another sister was institutionalized for mental illness near the very site depicted in The Scream, and his father had recently passed away.
Munch was deeply interested in capturing psychological states rather than mere external reality. Rather than painting what a scene looked like objectively, he aimed to paint how a moment felt internally.
Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare (1781) is one of the iconic landmarks of Romanticism, shocking audiences when it was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in London in 1782. Instead of illustrating a scene from classical mythology, religion, or literature—as was standard for high art at the time—Fuseli painted a raw, unmediated manifestation of human psychological terror.
The title plays on the folklore of the "night-mare," an old English concept where a demon or spirit was thought to ride people in their sleep, leaving them suffocated and unable to move.
The painting was an immediate sensation. It was reproduced as an engraving by Thomas Burke in 1783, which sold thousands of copies across Europe, fueling dark Romantic fiction and even influencing Mary Shelley when she wrote Frankenstein.
Why Did Fuseli Paint It? (Personal Obsession)
Beneath the grand mythological framing lies a surprisingly intimate story of rejection and revenge.
Shortly before painting The Nightmare, Fuseli had fallen madly in love with Anna Landolt, the niece of his close friend Johann Kaspar Lavater, while traveling in Switzerland. Landolt’s father fiercely disapproved of the relationship and rejected Fuseli’s proposal. Heartbroken and bitter, Fuseli was forced to return to England.
Art historians discovered that on the back of the original canvas, Fuseli had painted an unfinished portrait of Anna Landolt. In a chilling personal twist, the sleeping woman in The Nightmare is widely believed to be modeled after Landolt, transforming the piece into an eroticized fantasy of subconscious possession and bitter emotional retribution.
Painted in 1938 using oil on a small metal tin plate.
Frida Kahlo’s work was deeply autobiographical, and Girl with Death Mask serves as a haunting window into her psyche during a period of intense personal suffering:
Art historians note that the painting was created around 1938, a time when Kahlo was dealing with profound personal grief, including mourning the loss of a pregnancy through miscarriage, alongside mounting marital strains with Diego Rivera.
Following a devastating bus accident in her youth, Kahlo underwent dozens of surgeries and endured chronic, lifelong pain. She lived so closely with physical trauma that friends frequently remarked she "lived dying". This painting reflects her view that mortality was a constant companion, shadowing her even from childhood.
By placing an innocent child inside terrifying ritual items, Kahlo bridges personal trauma with rich Mexican cultural traditions. Rather than viewing death purely with Western dread, Mexican tradition treats it as an inevitable, cyclical part of life. Here, the painting captures the agonizing isolation of feeling fundamentally alone with that inescapable reality from a very tender age.
Painted in early 1886 while Van Gogh was attending the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Belgium.
It is a small oil-on-canvas work measuring just 32 Ă— 24.5 cm (12.6 Ă— 9.6 inches).
It resides in the permanent collection of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
At the time, drawing and painting skeletons was a standard academic exercise designed to help art students master human anatomy and bone structure before moving on to live models.
While created as an anatomical study, the inclusion of the lit cigarette transforms a routine student assignment into a sharp piece of satire and personal expression:
Van Gogh hated the rigid, traditional teaching methods at the Antwerp Academy. He found the repetitive copying of plaster casts and skeletons tedious and soul-crushing. Placing a smoldering cigarette between the skull’s jaws was a rebellious, cheeky poke at his conservative instructors and the dry academic routine.
Van Gogh was a heavy smoker and coffee drinker who frequently neglected his physical health. Some art historians view the painting as a playful yet grim self-caricature—a nod to his own destructive habits and fragile constitution.
The painting revisits the traditional 17th-century Dutch vanitas genre—art intended to remind viewers of the transience of life (memento mori). However, instead of using formal symbols like hourglasses or decaying fruit, Van Gogh injected a irreverent, modern object (the cigarette) to give the eternal theme of mortality a wry, contemporary bite.
Katsushika Hokusai’s The Ghost of Kohada Koheiji (c. 1831–1832) is one of the standout masterworks of Japanese yōkai (supernatural/monster) printmaking from the late Edo period.
During the 1830s, urban Japan experienced a massive craze for supernatural entertainment, ghastly Kabuki plays, and eerie urban legends (kaidan). Publishers capitalized on this public appetite by commissioning leading artists to create ukiyo-e (woodblock prints) of popular theatrical ghosts.
The print comes from Hokusai's famous series titled One Hundred Ghost Stories (Hyaku monogatari). The title references a popular Edo-period parlor game (Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai) where participants gathered at night, lit 100 candles, and took turns telling ghost stories, extinguishing one candle after each story. It was believed that when the final candle flickered out, a real spirit would manifest in the pitch-black room.
Unlike ancient myths, the tale of Kohada Koheiji was relatively contemporary for Hokusai's audience. It originated from a real-life crime that was popularized in Santō Kyōden’s 1803 novel Strange Tales of Revenge at Asaka Swamp and subsequently adapted into a smash-hit Kabuki play.
The ghostly skeleton is shown pulling down a blue mosquito net (kaya)—a familiar domestic summer item—to peer silently down onto the futon of his murderers.
Hokusai used imported Prussian blue pigment (Berlin blue), a vivid synthetic ink that had recently become affordable in Japan. To Edo-period viewers, the deep, cool blue tones evoked the chilling atmosphere of the spirit realm and the supernatural occult.
Hokusai was fascinated by movement, human anatomy, and dramatic storytelling. By rendering Koheiji not as a vague, wispy cloud of smoke, but as a sharply detailed, grin-bound skeletal creature with realistic bony joints, Hokusai brought a visceral physical horror to the traditional floating-world print tradition.
This striking, macabre masterpiece is one of the most famous and widely recognized images in the entire history of Japanese art. A legendary woodblock triptych created around 1844 by the master ukiyo-e artist Utagawa Kuniyoshi
The triptych illustrates a famous scene from a 19th-century epic novel by Santō Kyōden. It depicts Princess Takiyasha, daughter of the failed 10th-century warlord Taira no Masakado. After her father was executed for trying to establish a rival eastern court, she retreated to the ruined family palace at Sōma. Using dark arts learned from a mountain hermit, she summons a terrifying phantom—a colossal skeleton—to frighten away Ōya no Tarō Mitsukuni, a brave imperial officer sent to root out the remaining conspirators.
Unlike traditional Japanese artistic representations of ghosts (yūrei), which were usually rendered as ethereal, limbless apparitions draped in white shrouds, Kuniyoshi’s skeleton is rendered with striking osteological precision.
During the Edo period, the ruling Tokugawa shogunate enforced strict censorship laws. Artists and publishers were legally forbidden from depicting current political events, criticizing the government, or referencing recent historical uprisings. By setting his story in the 10th century and wrapping it in folklore and supernatural fantasy, Kuniyoshi safely explored themes of political rebellion, fallen power, and resistance.
Kuniyoshi was a rock star of the popular art world. The public loved sensationalism, ghost stories, kabuki theater tropes, and heroic adventures. Printing giant, theatrical scenes on multi-panel formats was a brilliant way to capture the public's imagination and drive sales in a fiercely competitive commercial art market.
Head VI (1949) is the final work in Francis Bacon’s six-part series of heads and marks his first explicit reinterpretation of Diego Velázquez’s 1650 masterpiece Portrait of Pope Innocent X. Held in the permanent collection of the Arts Council Collection in London, the oil-on-canvas painting captures a truncated figure wearing a papal mozzetta, his upper face dissolved into darkness while his lower jaw remains fixed in an agonizing scream.
Bacon was obsessed with a hand-colored still of the screaming nurse who is shot through her pince-nez glasses on the Odessa steps (Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925)). The open, screaming mouth and raw psychological terror of Head VI directly mirror this image.
Bacon kept handbooks of mouth diseases and dental illustrations in his studio, fascinated by the physical structure and vulnerability of human flesh when exposed in an involuntary spasm or cry.
Bacon was driven by a desire to deconstruct authority and portray the post-WWII existential condition. Created shortly after the horrors of World War II, Head VI channels the collective psychological displacement, alienation, and raw human anxiety of the era. Bacon stripped away religious dogma to expose human nature at its most raw and animalistic.
This striking piece is an Untitled work by the famous Polish surrealist, dystopia, and fantasy painter Zdzisław Beksiński (often referred to as Untitled (Creature) by fans).
