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CB555-FM CB 555-ConnellyFM-V 2.cls April 23,2003 9 :55
MODERN ART AND
THE GROTESQUE
Edited by
Frances S. Connelly
University of Missouri, Kansas City
iii

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published by the press syndicate of the university of cambridge
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom
cambridge university press
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 2ru ,uk
40West 20th Street, New York, ny 10011 -4211 ,usa
477Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207 , Australia
Ruiz de Alarc ´on13,28014 Madrid, Spain
Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001 , South Africa
http://www.cambridge.org
C/circlecopyrtCambridge University Press 2003
This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,no reproduction of any part may take place withoutthe written permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2003
Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, CambridgeTypeface New Caledonia and Gill Sans 10/13.5pt. System L
ATEX2ε[tb]
A catalog record for this book is available from the British LibraryLibrary of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Modern art and the grotesque / edited by Frances S. Connelly.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 0-521-81884 -2(hardback)
1. Grotesque in art. 2. Arts, Modern –19th century. 3. Arts, Modern –20th century I.
Connelly, Frances S., 1953 –
NX650.G7M63 2003
709/prime.03/prime4–dc21 2002041458
ISBN 0 521 81884 2 hardback
iv

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CONTENTS
List of Figures page vii
Contributors xi
Preface xv
1Introduction 1
Frances S. Connelly
2The Archaeology of the Modern Grotesque 20
David Summers
3Van Gogh’s Ear: Toward a Theory of Disgust 47
Michel Chaouli
4Conceiving 63
Barbara Maria Stafford
5Blemished Physiologies: Delacroix, Paganini and the
Cholera Epidemic of 1832 98
Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer
6Ingres and the Poetics of the Grotesque 139
Heather McPherson
7The Stones of Venice: John Ruskin’s Grotesque
History of Art 156
Frances S. Connelly
8Eden’s Other: Gauguin and the Ethnographic Grotesque 175
Elizabeth C. Childs
9Grotesque Bodies: Weimar-Era Medicine and the
Photomontages of Hannah H ¨och 193
Maria Makela
v

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vi Contents
10Convulsive Bodies: The Grotesque Anatomies of
Surrealist Photography 220
Kirsten A. Hoving
11Willem de Kooning ’sWomen: The Body of the Grotesque 241
Leesa Fanning
12Double Take: Sigmar Polke and the Tradition of the
Grotesque –Comic 265
Pamela Kort
13Rede finitions of Abjection in Contemporary Performances
of the Female Body 281
Christine Ross
14The Grotesque Today: Preliminary Notes Toward
a Taxonomy 291
No¨el Carroll
Index 313

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ONE
INTRODUCTION
Frances S. Connelly
Since the early nineteenth century it has not been possible to describe the
grotesque as peripheral to the visual arts. The romantic period marked
the entrance of the grotesque into the mainstream of modern expression, as ameans to explore alternative modes of experience and expression and to chal-lenge the presumed universals of classical beauty. The modern era witnessedan explosion of visual imagery that in various ways incorporated the grotesque.A remarkable number of canonical works of modernism, including G ´ericault’s
Raft of the Medusa , Ensor’s Entry of Christ into Brussels , Picasso’s Les Demoi-
selles d’Avignon , Ernst’s Elephant of Celebes , or Bacon’s Study after Vel ´asquez’s
Portrait of Pope Innocent X , employ structures deeply rooted in the western tra-
dition as grotesque. The grotesque figures prominently in romantic, symbolist,expressionist, primitivist, realist, and surrealist vocabularies, but it also plays arole in cubism and certain kinds of abstraction.
The reemergence of the grotesque in the fine arts was only one of a remark-
able range of new expressive modes through which the grotesque was extended,expanded, and reinvented in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These cul-tural vehicles for the grotesque included such disparate developments as psy-choanalysis, photography, mass media, science fiction, ethnography, weaponsof mass destruction, globalization, and virtual reality. The grotesque was firstlinked to the notion of “primitive” expression in this era, with profound reper-cussions for modern art and aesthetics. The grotesque gave expression to otherprimal realities. In Le monstre , published in 1889 , J. K. Huysmans contended
that the microscope revealed an entirely new field of monstrosities equal to anyof those animating medieval art. Odilon Redon’s biological fantasies corroborateHuysmans’s claim. Similarly, Freud’s exploration of the unconscious was em-braced by surrealists who employed grotesque modalities. A striking number ofthe period’s most influential thinkers, including Baudelaire, Ruskin, Nietzsche,Freud, Bataille, Bakhtin, and Kristeva, have drawn from and reinterpreted thegrotesque tradition.
1

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2 Frances S. Connelly
Given the prominent role of the grotesque in modern image culture, there
are surprisingly few signi ficant studies on these issues, a failure that reveals a
blind spot in art-historical theory and practice.1The neoclassical foundations of
art history and aesthetics, with their emphasis on ideated beauty and rationalinquiry, set up an intrinsic hostility toward the grotesque.
2There is, however,
an even greater chasm between the history that modernism wrote for itself andthe grotesque character of modern life. The experience of modernity is one ofunprecedented disjuncture and shifting boundaries, with the collision of culturesand scienti fic challenges repeatedly stripping away the veneer of familiar reality
from the chaos of raw experience. The essays that follow explore the subversiveundertow of the grotesque within the modern.
***
Acknowledging that any attempt to de fine the grotesque is a contradiction in
terms, we begin with three actions, or processes at work in the grotesqueimage, actions that are both destructive and constructive. Images gatheredunder the grotesque rubric include those that combine unlike things in order tochallenge established realities or construct new ones; those that deform or de-compose things; and those that are metamorphic. These grotesques are notexclusive of one another, and their range of expression runs from the wondrousto the monstrous to the ridiculous. The combinatory grotesque describes crea-tures ranging from the centaur to the cyborg. Readily associated with images likeArcimboldo ’s bizarre portraits, it also animates Joan Mir ´o’s frolicking harlequin
and Otto Dix ’s horri fic image The Skat Players (Figure 1). Inasmuch as the
combinatory grotesque brings together things from separate worlds, it also hasprovocative connections to collage.
Grotesque also describes the aberration from ideal form or from accepted
convention, to create the misshapen, ugly, exaggerated, or even formless. Thistype runs the gamut from the deliberate exaggerations of caricature, to the unin-tended aberrations, accidents, and failures of the everyday world represented inrealist imagery, to the dissolution of bodies, forms, and categories. The individ-uals portrayed in Courbet ’sBurial at Ornans , their red-faced plainness merging
with fleshy, trowelled paint, were castigated as grotesque by critics accustomed
to the laminate perfection of French academic classicism. Dix ’s mutilated figures
are at once a kind of bricolage, patched together with the most unlikely objects,but they also function as caricature and mediate a living horror too real to dwellon. Photography created a whole new vehicle for exploring the grotesque in thereal, not only broadening the field, but fixing moments, places, and events that
were rarely seen before and exposing them to a mass audience.
3The abject and
the formless also hover on the boundaries of this grotesque, each in its own wayresisting form or coherent entity altogether.

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Introduction 3
1.Otto Dix. The Skat Players , 1920. Oil and collage on canvas. Galerie der Stadt Stuttgart.
c/circlecopyrt2003 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New Y ork/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.
While the gaps, or disunities, of the combinatory and aberrant grotesques
require an imaginative leap, the metamorphic grotesque does much of thiswork for the viewer. This grotesque can combine or deform in the same way as itsstatic counterparts, but the metamorphic exists in the process, the “morphing ”
from one thing or form to another. It also seems much more reliant on mimesisand illusion, transgressing them for its impact. While this grotesque immediatelycalls to mind surrealist imagery like Dal ´ı’sApparition of Face and Fruit Dish on

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4 Frances S. Connelly
a Beach , it has suggestive links to analytic cubism as well, where monochromatic
planes blur boundaries, merge hands with violins, tables with torsos, wine bottleswith walls. The fullest exploitation of the metamorphic grotesque can be foundin the media that combine the greatest illusionism with the element of time,such as film and computer animation.
Central to the grotesque is its lack of fixity, its unpredictability and its insta-
bility. Victor Hugo ’s observation has special resonance here: that ideal beauty
has only one standard whereas the variations and combinations possible for thegrotesque are limitless.
4Consider how a grotesque such as The Skat Players
inverts the legend of Zeuxis: instead of the artist fusing the most beautiful indi-vidual components of the human body into one whole, perfect, proportionedform, Dix ’s bodies are made monstrous, jumbling categories, confusing ori-
fices and wounds, creating their own horri fic kind of non-sense. Confronted
with the embodiment of Unlust , the impulses to scream and to laugh come at
once. A premise central to Kant ’s idea of the beautiful, that it makes us feel as
though the world is purposive, that it is here for us, cannot be more brutallyand speci fically refuted than in the dis figured humans playing a game of chance.
Grotesques are typically characterized by what they lack: fixity, stability, order.
Mikhail Bakhtin emphasized the creative dimensions of this flux, however, de-
scribing the grotesque as “a body in the act of becoming …never finished, never
completed; it is continually built, created, and builds and creates another body. ”
5
In other words, grotesques may be better understood as “trans —”, as modalities;
better described for what they do, rather than what they are.
We can go a step further to add that these modalities are at play on the bound-
aries and nowhere else. The grotesque is de fined by what it does to boundaries,
transgressing, merging, over flowing, destabilizing them. Put more bluntly, the
grotesque is a boundary creature6and does not exist except in relation to a
boundary, convention, or expectation. Grif fins merge boundaries between lion
and eagle; Dix ’sfigures subvert the expectations of both machine and man, merge
horror with humor, and challenge the boundaries of propriety in order to attackthe nationalism that created this result. Anamorphosis also plays against bound-aries, transgressing the rules for looking into an idealized, perspectival spacebut depending on those rules for its impact. Boundedness is a critical featureof the grotesque ’s relationship with both the beautiful and the sublime. In aes-
thetic discourse, clear and discreet boundaries are integral to the apprehensionof beauty, a point Edmund Burke makes explicit.
7But, as Bakhtin observes: “the
artistic logic of the grotesque image ignores the closed, smooth, and impenetra-ble surface of the body and retains only its excrescences and ori fices, only that
which leads beyond the body ’s limited space or into the body ’s depths. ”
8The
issue of boundaries differentiates the grotesque from the sublime in revealingways. The boundlessness of the sublime, dynamical or numerical, overwhelmsreason and exceeds its powers to contain and de fine. The grotesque, by contrast,

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Introduction 5
is in constant struggle with boundaries of the known, the conventional, the
understood.9
One can also take a historical and cultural view of these boundaries. For
example, representations of a Nkisi from Congo or a Ganesha from India wereneither intended nor de fined as grotesques until they crossed into the European
cultural sphere.
10As they were drawn into the peripheries of European art and
aesthetics in the nineteenth century, these images were repeatedly described asmonstrous and grotesque because of their perceived deformation of Europeanrules of representation. Within one hundred years, however, these images wereso completely assimilated into western culture that they ceased to be grotesque,appearing in art museums and academic curricula. In short, they were grotesqueonly while they troubled an established boundary.
***
As we shall see, the grotesque identi fies a class of imagery that has never fit com-
fortably within the boundaries traditionally set by either aesthetics or art historyfor its objects of inquiry. The term “grotesque ”is itself problematic, exempli fied
by the fact that it springs from a fortuitous mistake. The term first appeared in
the mid-sixteenth century to describe the fantastical figures decorating a Roman
villa. Because the rooms were excavated below ground level, Renaissance ob-servers “misconceived ”them to be grottos.
11These decorative Roman designs
preexisted the term, of course, as was the case with many types of images gath-ered under the grotesque rubric. Likewise, the term was extended to imagerycompletely outside the cultural purview of the West. Over the last two hundredyears, other terms proliferated to describe aspects of experience that attach inone or more ways to the grotesque, among them arabesque, abject, informe ,
uncanny, bricolage, carnivalesque, convulsive beauty, and dystopia.
12Y e ta tt h e
same time, the complex and contested meanings of the word “grotesque ”have
lost their resonance and devolved to describe something horrible, or somethinghorribly exaggerated. Accordingly, the decision to use “grotesque ”as the term
for this study ’s object of inquiry requires some explanation.
First of all, “grotesque ”arguably remains a broader and more inclusive term
than those listed, notwithstanding its diminished use in modern times. The manyconnotations of the grotto –earthiness, fertility, darkness, death –link to all the
variants of grotesque imagery discussed herein. At the same time, employinga term whose inadequacies are obvious has unexpected bene fits. Its classical
framework long since displaced, the limitations of “grotesque ”as a term are
readily discernible and as such, reinforce the notion that no name can bindthese modalities to a fixed, discrete meaning.
Using what seems so outmoded a term has another value in that it draws
attention to the complex history of how the grotesque has been “disciplined ”
in modern art history and aesthetics. Compared with its classical forebears,

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6 Frances S. Connelly
who relegated the grotesque to a subservient, ornamental role, modernism has
a far more complex and con flicted relationship with the grotesque. Although
nineteenth- and twentieth-century imagery engages and expands the grotesquemore than ever before in western imagery, modernist theory and history have(until recently) almost completely written out the grotesque and its associationswith the material, the flesh, and the feminine. Kant ’sCritique of Judgment ,
one of the most in fluential works in modern aesthetics, effectively banishes the
grotesque from consideration. As demonstrated in Michel Chaouli ’s essay, Kant
rejects the grotesque as a threat to form and to the act of representation itself.And yet, the grotesque permeates modern imagery, acting as punctum to theideals of enlightened progress and universality and to the hubris of modernistdreams of transcendence over the living world.
13
“Grotesque ”is also a peculiarly western term, as its coinage in the Renais-
sance as a way to describe the “estranged world ”indicates,14as does its use in
modern times to describe so-called “primitive ”imagery. Many image traditions
throughout the world include structures that resemble the western grotesque,but they do not carry the same cultural associations. On one hand, this beliesmodernist (and primitivist) myths of universality, but it also demonstrates theextent to which the grotesque is rooted in the powerful mind –body duality of
western thought. This study concentrates on the grotesque in modern Europeanand American art for these reasons, because its meanings are culturally speci fic
to the West.
***
The grotesque is at the heart of contemporary debates and integral to the artsof the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but it is conspicuous by its absencein modern art-historical and aesthetic scholarship. This project is by its nature arevisionist study of the modern period, but it also adds an important chapter tothe history of the grotesque. A key motivation for this study is to establish a bodyof cohesive scholarship on the modern grotesque, but also to demonstrate thatthe grotesque was conceived and expressed in signi ficantly different ways from
the Enlightenment onward. This is a critical point in David Summers ’s lead essay,
where he argues that Cartesian philosophy sets the stage for a radical changein the nature of the grotesque. This is not to say that the modern grotesqueexists apart from the past, but that it deserves a long-overdue examination inits own right. To better situate the modern grotesque in relation to its pasthistory, I will brie fly describe three strands of discourse that carry over into the
eighteenth century, which I will identify here as ornamental, carnivalesque, andemblematic.
The ornamental strand is a learned, classical version originating with Horace
and Vitruvius, reinterpreted in the Renaissance and again by the art academies

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Introduction 7
of the Enlightenment. Horace ’s relatively brief and dismissive characterization
of the grotesque in Ars Poetica is remarkable to the extent to which it touches
on many of the enduring issues attached to this modality. This text is the gen-esis of the phrase ut pictura poesis , which means “as in poetry, so in painting, ”
and presents literature and painting as sister arts.
15Ars Poetica situates the dis-
cussion of images within the expectations of the written word, an intellectualtradition that plays a dominant role in western thought. Not surprisingly, it sin-gles out the grotesque as confused and excessive. Horace exclaims that there isno rational reaction but to laugh out loud at these ridiculous, ill-conceived hy-brids that jumble categories and confuse beginnings and ends. But the argumentthat the grotesque does not conform to the structures of language also demon-strates that the grotesque is peculiarly and adamantly imagistic. Too thick andcontradictory to be manipulated in an abstract, linear realm, it is fundamentallyresistant to language. The modalities described earlier –combinatory, aberrant,
and metamorphic –are dif ficult, if not impossible, to mimic in language.
The particular images discussed by Horace are ornamental ones, much like
the wall decorations unearthed in Renaissance Rome in which human torsossprout leafy tendrils for legs or faun ’s ears spring into architectural volutes.
Horace ’s text is most often interpreted as a warning against artistic license.
Vitruvius, too, decried the improper use of ornament in architecture, wherethese hybrid inventions are put in the place of structural elements. In classicalaesthetics, ornament was the product of the imagination, and both were sub-servient to rational order. Ornament might enhance the design or make the ideamore appealing, but it must not subvert either one. Horace and Vitruvius, then,established the grotesque as a particularly extreme kind of ornament and rele-gated its discussion to debates concerning the balance of power between artisticlicense and the rules of design.
These debates reemerged in the High Renaissance and Mannerist periods.
Signi ficantly, it is during this time that both Giorgio Vasari and Benvenuto Cellini
directly linked the term grotesque with the recently discovered wall decorationsof the Domus Aurea.
16Horace ’s dictum was reinterpreted by sixteenth-century
Italian theorists as a defense of artistic license, asserting the artist ’s right to
dare.17Vasari argued that an artistic genius such as Michelangelo should not be
constrained by rules of design and decorum; rather, his fantastic inventions andvirtuosity revealed his divine talent. In his Lives of the Most Eminent Painters,
Sculptors, and Architects , Vasari expanded the de finition of grotteschi from a
technical term for a speci fic ornamental type to include the deliberate exagger-
ations and distortions of Michelangelo ’s sculpture and architectural designs.
18
Throughout the sixteenth century, artists put all the modalities of the grotesque
into play as they challenged the boundaries of Renaissance style (Figure 2). Dis-
tortions, anamorphoses, and fantastic combinations proliferated, moving those

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8 Frances S. Connelly
visual forms that were considered peripheral to a central role. Mannerism was
“the con fident assertion of the artist ’s right …to make something that was first
and last a work of art. ”19
The characteristics of mannerism and the interpretation of this period have
important connections to modernism. Mannerism ’s emphasis on formal inven-
tion, unfettered play of the imagination, and individual artistic virtuosity hasstrong parallels with the values by which we judge artists today. Yet these asso-ciations were often problematic: the excess and overt arti ficiality of mannerism
were frequently branded as degenerate and self-indulgent, a style enamored ofstyle and little else. As early as 1672 Bellori lamented the decline of the arts:
“the artists, abandoning the study of nature, poisoned art with maniera .”
20Jacob
Burckhardt ’s assessment of mannerism as a “false, pompous style ”greatly in-
fluenced the art-historical assessment of the period as decadent.21By the early
years of the twentieth century, critics of avant-garde experimentation drew di-rect corollaries between modern and mannerist and repeated the charge thatit was a degenerate style. The historiography of mannerism and of this Hora-tian grotesque serves as a microcosm of western aesthetic debates concerningornament, style, and artistic license.
The carnivalesque strand is a populist one expressed in medieval imagery,
given voice in the work of Rabelais, and theorized later, most in fluentially by
Mikhail Bakhtin. This carnivalesque type is a bodied one in every respect. AsBakhtin writes: “The body that figures in all the expressions of the unof ficial
speech of the people is the body that fecundates and is fecundated, that givesbirth and is born, devours and is devoured, drinks, defecates, is sick and dying. ”
22
Unlike the ornamental, Horatian type, this grotesque originated in folk culture
and was appropriated into a literary and fine arts tradition in the sixteenth cen-
tury. While the Horatian grotesque prompted aesthetic debates about artisticlicense, the carnivalesque was overtly transgressive in realms beyond the aes-thetic. Bakhtin summed up the nature of the grotesque body when he pointedout its emphasis on ori fices and protuberances
23; in essence exposing all those
parts and processes by which the body takes in or spews out the world alien to it,all those parts and processes that are suppressed by social codes of behavior. Thegrotesque body in no way abstracts into forms or figures, but remains resolutely
a body of flesh and blood. These grotesque bodies perform a coarse and comic
burlesque, but when they upend hierarchies and social conventions, they shiftinto the carnivalesque. Carnivalesque refers to the pre-Lenten merry-making, abrief period of revelry that traditionally involved actions and images representing“the world upside-down, ”with fools crowned as kings or donkeys consecrated
as priests. Bakhtin interpreted the carnivalesque as the voice of the people, asthe vehicle of self-expression for the suppressed and regulated proletariat.
24
Although this may ascribe too much of twentieth-century politics to peasantrevelry, it is certainly the case that the grotesque body fundamentally and often

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Introduction 9
2.Giovanni Antonio de Brescia, after Nicoletto da Modena. Ornamental Panel Inscribed “Victoria
Augusta,” c. 1516. Engraving. Rosenwald Collection. Photograph c/circlecopyrt2002 Board of Trustees,
National Gallery of Art, Washington.

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10 Frances S. Connelly
violently transgresses entrenched social codes and cultural values. In this way,
the carnivalesque has provocative links to the more contemporary notion of theabject.
25As Christine Ross observes, abjection has become a powerful means
of transgression and reinvention for many feminist and postcolonial artists (seeFigures 90and91) whose works often fuse the creative and destructive processes
of the body in much the same manner described by Bakhtin.
Another populist tradition that intersects with the carnivalesque, known as
Traumwerk ordiabl `erie, was inhabited by more fearful grotesques, whose bod-
ies are monstrous, tormented, or decomposing. These include the frequent rep-resentations of the dance of death and the last judgment in medieval imageryand carry over into the work of artists such as Bosch, Holbein, and Gr ¨unewald.
These grotesques do not play on the body ’s appetites, but rather on its inevitable
failure and death. They exude their own brand of dark humor, but it is a humorabsurd enough to make the horrible bearable and to mitigate our responses offear and disgust. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the grotesque bodydominates the work of artists from Goya to Ensor, Dix to Beckmann, Baconto Kiki Smith. But in the work of these and many other moderns, the carniva-lesque merges with the darker associations of the diabl ´erie.
26Goya ’sCaprichos
(see Figure 12) are harbingers of this critical shift: the bitterness of these prints
confounds their designation as caprices, and whatever laughter they provoke isconjoined with feelings of repulsion and dread.
27
The connections of the carnivalesque grotesque to modern caricature are
many and complex, and are far beyond the scope of these introductory para-graphs. Several points bear consideration, however. Despite the sixteenth-century origins of the term, caricature truly came into its own in the modernera.
28In certain respects, caricature continued the transgressive functions of
the carnivalesque, yet through a fundamentally different means (mass media)and within a radically new social and political terrain. While not all caricature isgrotesque, and only a fraction of grotesque expression appears as carica- ture,it is signi ficant that from the eighteenth century onward, commentators and
theorists came to link the two. In the Enlightenment era the ornamental, fan-tastical images first described as grotteschi in Renaissance Italy were increas-
ingly associated with the French style and identi fied as “arabesques. ”
29The term
“grotesque ”was more often equated with the kinds of figures inhabiting diabl ´erie
and the carnivalesque, and was discussed in terms of comedy and satire. This iscorroborated in the early studies of the grotesque by Justus M ¨oser, Harlequin,
or the Defense of the Grotesque –Comic (1761 ), Christoph Martin Wieland, Con-
versations with the Parson of
∗∗∗(1775 ), and Karl Friedrich Fl ¨ogel, History of
the Grotesque –Comic (1788 ). The principal nineteenth-century theories of the
grotesque, particularly Victor Hugo ’s“Preface ”toCromwell (1827 ), Baudelaire ’s
seminal essay, “De l’essence du rire et g ´en´eralement du comique dans les arts
plastiques ”(1855 ), and Friedrich Theodor Vischer ’s¨Uber das Erhabene und

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Introduction 11
Komische (1847 ), focus on the relationships of the comic with the ugly, the
horrible, and the fantastic, and explore the boundaries between caricature andthe grotesque. As with the grotesque, caricature was frequently tied to folkand“primitive ”expression by nineteenth-century observers. Rodolphe T ¨opffer,
Swiss educator, theorist, and illustrator, defended the caricatures found in the artof“savages ”and the graf fiti of street urchins as “a sign of elemental beauty, un-
polished, coarse, but nonetheless absolutely …born from thought, ”an opinion
shared by Champ fleury in his Histoire de la Caricature (5vols., 1865 –80).
30
Baudelaire, too, drew a sharp distinction between the comique significatif ,a
sophisticated and topical satire, and the more elemental comique absolu , which
had no intention of parody but produced expressions of such creative force asto provoke both laughter and awe.
A third, emblematic strand interpreted the grotesque as a kind of imagistic
language, primitive and mystical. Paradoxically, this particular interpretationtook shape just as the rationalist turn of the Enlightenment caused many toreject the use of emblems as well as mythical and allegorical figures.
31The Abb ´e
DuBos ’sR´eflexions critiques sur la po ´esie et sur le peinture (1719 ) characterized
the growing preference for didactic, prosaic narratives. DuBos could barelycontain his exasperation with any sort of figured language, arguing that the
modern mind could no longer comprehend allegorical or mythical creaturesand had no desire to do so. In this same period, however, the nascent socialsciences sought to map the origins and development of culture, and combinatorygrotesques such as centaurs and grif fins, as well as emblems and allegories, were
often reinterpreted as an early form of language, one now inscrutable to themodern mind. In one of the first and most ambitious of these studies, La scienza
nuova (The New Science ,1725 ), Giambattista Vico attempted to reconstruct the
origins and development of human society and believed that by doing so hecould explain both the prehistory of “civilized ”cultures and the current status of
“primitive ”cultures.
32He argued that a sense of collective identity began with
the establishment of “imaginative universals ”(early peoples having no ability to
reason and to form abstract concepts) and that these were “bodied forth ”through
pictures. These pictures, which Vico identi fied as “poetic monsters, ”were similar
to what we would describe as emblems, forming thought by combining disparatethings. As reason superseded imagination, Vico argued, this pictured languagewas superseded by the abstract characters of the alphabet. Text became theprincipal vehicle for abstract thought, and the combinatory and metamorphicgrotesques that made up the poetic monsters were relegated to subservientroles. In literate cultures, they appear in the peripheral roles of allegorical figures,
emblems, and heraldry, as well as colorful figures of speech in rhetorical orations.
Nonetheless, Vico maintained that imaginative universals and their monstrousincarnations never completely disappeared, but were buried deep within thecollective reality of the culture that created it.
33

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12 Frances S. Connelly
Variations on Vico ’s thesis were proposed throughout the following decades
and generated a great deal of scholarly debate.34John Ruskin advanced these
ideas further with the publication of The Stones of Venice (1851 –1853 ) and
Modern Painters III (1856 ), in which he extolled the grotesque as the expres-
sion of the common man. As I discuss in Chapter Seven, Ruskin, identi fied as
a particularly noble grotesque (see Figure 42) that sort of poetic monster that
embodies profound meanings in a way impossible or impractical in the linear andlogical structure of text: “in all ages and among all nations, grotesque idealism has
been the element through which the most appalling and eventful truth has beenwisely conveyed. ”
35The idea of an ancient or hidden pictured language exerted
considerable in fluence on many modern artists and writers unsympathetic to a
rational, secular, mechanical modernity. We are, of course, much more familiarwith the story of how the avant-garde ’s rejection of “painted literature ”opened
the way toward abstraction (often by cultivating the links between painting andmusic). A closer look finds that many modern artists, especially those in move-
ments such as romanticism, symbolism, and surrealism, took other routes awayfrom prosaic narrative and often made use of poetic monsters to do so.
Why and how is the grotesque rede fined in the modern era? The essays that
follow comprise the first extensive inquiry into the diverse means by which the
grotesque shaped the history, practice, and theories of art in the nineteenth andtwentieth centuries. This study is not intended as a historical survey of the topic;in fact, the protean and particular character of the modern grotesque resistssuch a scheme. Instead, these essays present important manifestations of thegrotesque in modern culture by examining speci fic images and historical mo-
ments in depth. As a whole, the essays draw on the principal theoretical modelsproposed for the grotesque during the last two hundred years and apply themto painting, sculpture, photography, prints, medical illustration, architecture,performance art, film, and popular culture. It is, in short, a combinatory strat-
egy, conjoining diverse methods and topics to explore the fertile, cacophonous,monstrous, and ever-changeful realities of imagery in the modern world.
Three essays consider the intellectual and philosophical questions posed by the
grotesques in modern imagery. David Summers takes up the complex transitionfrom the Renaissance grotteschi , conceived in terms of the ornamental, to the
more powerful and threatening forces attributed to the modern grotesque. In do-ing so, he first provides an indispensable history of this Renaissance phenomenon
and a concise inquiry into the central debates provoked by the grotesque, beforeturning to an unexpected source, the Meditations of Ren ´e Descartes. Descartes ’s
mechanistic view of the human body leads him to rede fine the role of the imagina-
tion, Summers argues, blurring the boundaries between perception and fantasyin a way that fundamentally changes the role of the grotesque in the modernera. In “Van Gogh ’s Ear, ”Michel Chaouli explores the nature of disgust, a re-
sponse deeply tied to the grotesque. Scholars have often relied on Victor Hugo ’s

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Introduction 13
formula that the grotesque simultaneously elicits gasps of horror and howls of
laughter, but disgust has received little attention despite the fact that it has beencultivated by numerous artists working in the grotesque mode. Chaouli arguesthat disgust is the response most subversive to Kantian aesthetics precisely be-cause it poses the greatest threat to form, in fact, ruins representation and theformation of form. Chaouli ’s argument is critical to our understanding of why art
history and aesthetics elided the grotesque from their field of inquiry and how the
formless overlaps with the grotesque. He draws valuable distinctions betweenthe sublime, a kind of formlessness prized in The Critique of Judgment , and
the disgusting, a kind of formlessness summarily rejected in those same pages.In the concluding essay, No ¨el Carroll takes the explosion of grotesque imagery
in popular culture today, from X-Files andFriday the 13th toSouth Park and
Japanese anim ´e, as his starting point for an extended analysis of the grotesque.
Carroll considers the structures that de fine the genus of the grotesque, the com-
mon theme being that a grotesque violates accepted biological and ontologicalcategories, and then examines how these structures elicit the affective states ofhorror, awe, and comic amusement we associate with the grotesque.
Barbara Stafford ’s essay, “Conceiving, ”explores the fertile and creative aspect
of the grotesque by examining the complex aesthetic, biological, and culturaldebates in the eighteenth century concerning the nature of conception, bothcorporeal and cerebral. These Enlightenment discourses on generative forces,and the virtual explosion of imagery accompanying them, reveal a deep-seatedfear of the mixed, the aberrant, and the heterogeneous, as well as concerted ef-forts to impose abstract classi fications on the material world. By contrast, many
Romantic artists, particularly in France, embraced the grotesque as a means tosubvert academic classicism and to push the boundaries of feeling and expres-sion. Delacroix was in the vanguard of these explorations of horror and satanicforces. Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer takes up the devastating cholera epidemicof1832 as the setting for Delacroix ’s famous portrait of Paganini (Figure 14)
to show how the grotesque was reinterpreted as the visual link between artisticcreativity and the diseased body, artistic genius and the diabolical. In 1832 , In-
gres painted a portrait of equal fame, that of Louis-Franc ¸ois Bertin (Figure 34).
Heather McPherson uses Barthes ’s idea of punctum to consider the implications
of the grotesque hand planted squarely in the middle of the portrait. Arguing thatIngres, too, pursued a poetics of the grotesque, she demonstrates that his workis best understood not as an exemplar of academic classicism but as a permeableboundary between ideal and monstrous, illusion and distortion.
John Ruskin was one of many moderns who associated the grotesque with
primitive expression. The Stones of Venice (1851 –3) is remarkable, however,
because Ruskin discerned that the imagery made by medieval artisans requireda radically different methodology than that constructed for fine art traditions. I
argue that Ruskin drew on the modalities of the grotesque to create a radically

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14 Frances S. Connelly
anti-aesthetic approach to imagery and non-Apollonian art history, one that is
concrete, disjunctive, polysemous, excessive, and contingent. Ruskin empha-sized two aspects of the grotesque not often recognized in the modern era: itspotential to embody the wondrous and, to use L ´evi-Strauss ’s term, its bricol ´e
character. Exploring the association of the grotesque with both the “primitive ”
and the feminine, Elizabeth Childs demonstrates that Paul Gauguin ’s Tahitian
paintings are not so much representations of exotic and idyllic islands as they areambiguous psychic and cultural borderlands. Observing that Gauguin ’s images
are routinely inhabited by grotesque figures, she reveals the dystopian side of
Gauguin ’s imagery: his representation of Polynesians as animalized, fearful, and
distorted, prey to bizarre superstitions, a culture in collapse.
Dada and surrealism provide fertile ground for the proliferation of the
grotesque. The politically charged photomontages of Hannah H ¨och employ the
grotesque as a savage critique of Weimar ideals. Maria Makela draws fascinatingconnections between H ¨och’s use of the inherent disjuncture of montage and
the combinatory creatures she creates to jumble the carefully maintained socialorder and to satirize the modern mania to impose systems of classi fication on all
aspects of life. Makela delves into the rapid advances in cosmetic surgery follow-ing the Great War, noting that the techniques devised to ameliorate the horri fic
wounds of battle were quickly appropriated to shape bodies and faces to conformwith Germanic ideals of beauty. H ¨och’s actions of cutting and pasting create a
commentary on these practices that is simultaneously horri fic and comic. Surre-
alist photographers also push the boundaries of their medium and of the bodiesthey portray in their efforts to create a new, convulsive beauty. As Kirsten Hovingdemonstrates, Surrealist photographers violate the body as a means to expressprimal psychic states, and through these ruptures (as with Bataille ’sinforme )t o
reveal the chaotic and strange realities underlying the familiar.
Willem de Kooning ’sWomen series celebrates the anarchic, instinctual body,
argues Leesa Fanning, and its deep connections to the grotesque become ap-parent through the theories of Julia Kristeva. In particular, the flux and excess
of de Kooning ’s images match Kristeva ’s concept of the semiotic body, as well
as her notion of the Phallic Mother. Moreover, Fanning makes the case that,although the Women have often been described as frightening and monstrous,
they are conceived in the burlesque mode and their hilarity is key to their mean-ing. The grotesque –comic is integral to the work of Sigmar Polke, and Pamela
Kort situates this work as part of a tradition of modern Germanic art, theater,and scholarship that has received little attention. Kort draws on Baudelaire ’s
definition of the absolute comic to describe the creative destructions of Polke,
but she argues that the playful mimicry, deliberate inversions, and misstepsthat characterize Polke ’s imagery are best understood through Bakhtin ’s idea of
the carnivalesque. Christine Ross looks at a very different aspect of contempo-rary art, the work of artists such as Mona Hatoum, whose video installations and

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Introduction 15
performances concern the abjected female body. The strangeness and grotesque-
ness of this imagery undercuts all expectations of aesthetic pleasure we attachto viewing the feminine body. Ross argues, in counterpoint to Childs ’s essay on
Gauguin, that these feminist artists use abjection to destabilize western notionsof the other, both the feminine and postcolonial other. These “foreign ”bodies
have become politically charged, to be sure, but they operate on a more fun-damental level, using the excessive and uncontrollable character of the abjectto both break down the discrete categories of self and other, and to providethe material possibilities that new identities might be reformulated. Ross ’s es-
say brings a contemporary focus to a theme that runs through these essays: thegrotesque, whether subversive, comic, abject, wondrous, or caricatural, is at oncea profoundly destructive and creative force.
***
In little more than a decade there has emerged a cross-disciplinary exploration ofthe monstrous, the formless, the abject. What generates this work on monsters?As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen writes: “The monstrous body quite literally incorpo-
rates fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy, giving them life and an uncanny inde-pendence. The monstrous body is pure culture. A construct and a projection,the monster exists only to be read: the monstrum is etymologically ‘that which
reveals, ’that which warns. ”
36These millennial monsters suggest that humanis-
tic studies have reached the limits of the modernist frame: the closed, familialdialectic with postmodernism has little play left in it. Another source may be aresistance to the growing imposition of text, grids, lenses, digital matrices, andgenetic codes on lived experience. But possibly the most powerful generativeforce comes from the emergence of vital new voices in competition with thewestern Enlightenment underpinnings of modernism. The pressures of otherworlds and other narratives have ruptured the modernist frame just enough toreveal (what seems to some) the formlessness beyond. Transgression againstboundaries being one of the constants of the avant-garde and its historians, thefixation on the informe expresses a deep anxiety about the collapse of its own
boundaries and transgressions from without. On the other hand, the ruptureof these boundaries is full of creative possibilities to those cast as outside andother by modern art and aesthetics. The abject, tied to the body, the maternal,the material, has also come to the fore, but abjection carries the promise ofregeneration, creating a new body. It is no accident that many feminists haveembraced abjection as their expressive mode. These ruptures have generatednew perspectives from which to explore the past two hundred years and re-veal, not surprisingly, that the universalist aspirations of modernism obscured arobust grotesque tradition in nineteenth- and twentieth-century art. “The hori-
zon where the monsters dwell might well be imagined as the visible edge ofthe hermeneutic circle itself. ”
37To be sure, a study of the grotesque implicitly

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16 Frances S. Connelly
critiques the modernist narrative, bringing into focus those subjects, styles, and
theoretical viewpoints traditionally marginalized by the discipline ’s Enlighten-
ment foundations. Considering the grotesque in modern art ties directly intoconcerns central to humanistic debate today, including representations of raceand gender, abjection and the other, globalization, and appropriation.
NOTES
1. Twentieth-century surveys of the grotesque in art are Wilhelm Michel, Das Teuflische
und Groteske in der Kunst (Munich: Piper, 1911 ); Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque
in Art and Literature , trans. Ulrich Weisstein ( 1957 ; reprint, New York: Columbia
University Press, 1981 ); Gustav Ren ´e Hocke, Die Welt als Labyrinth: Manier und
Manie in der europ ¨aischen Kunst (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1957 ); Mikhail Bakhtin, Ra-
belais and His World , trans. Helene Iswolsky ( 1940 ; reprint, Cambridge: MIT Press,
1968 ); Frances Barasch, The Grotesque: A Study in Meanings (The Hague and Paris:
Mouton, 1971 ); Geoffrey Harpham, On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction
in Art and Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982 ); Ewa Kuryluk,
Salome and Judas in the Cave of Sex: The Grotesque: Origins, Iconography, Tech-nique (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1987 ); and Andr ´e Chastel, La
grotesque (Paris: Le Promeneur, 1988 ). A reevaluation of the grotesque in modern
imagery is in its early stages. Important works include Yve-Alain Bois and RosalindKrauss, Formless: A User ’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997 ); Hal Foster, The Re-
turn of the Real (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996 ) and Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1993 ); Allen S. Weiss, The Aesthetics of Excess (Albany: SUNY Press,
1989 ) and Shattered Forms: Art Brut, Phantasms, Modernism (Albany: SUNY Press,
1992 ); all heavily in fluenced by the work of Georges Bataille. Joseph Koerner edited
an issue of RES 31(Spring 1997 ) devoted to the abject and, more recently, Timothy
Hyman and Roger Malbert published the catalogue to the exhibition Carnivalesque
(London: Hayward Gallery, 2000 ). On the grotesque –comic in twentieth-century
German art, see the exhibition catalogue edited by Pamela Kort, Grotesk ! (Munich
and London: Prestel, 2003 ).
2. In the Renaissance, grotteschi were typically seen as decorative, but they could also
serve as the expression of inspired genius. See David Summers, Michelangelo and the
Language of Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981 ), esp. “L’alta fantasia ,”
103–43. There was no room for such inventions in the more rationalist classicism of
the Enlightenment.
3.I n1998 , the photography journal Exposure (vol. 31) published an issue concerning the
grotesque in photography and film edited by Martha Langford and M. A. Greenstein.
See also A. D. Coleman, The Grotesque in Photography (New York: Summit Books,
1977 ).
4. Victor Hugo, preface to Cromwell (1827 ), in Oeuvres dramatiques et critiques
compl `etes(Paris: J.-J. Pauvert, 1963 ),139–53.
5. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World ,317.
6. Donna Haraway explores the conjunction of the body and machine in one of the
ultimate combinatory grotesques in her study, Cyborgs, Simians, and Women: The
Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991 ). I borrow the term “boundary
creature ”from Haraway ( 2).
7. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime
and the Beautiful , ed. James T. Boulton (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame
Press, 1968 ).