Fuseli the Surrealist ?
The Drawings of Henry Fuseli. By Paul Ganz. (Max Parrish. au) "A unix white-headed, lion-faced man in an old flannel dressing- gown tied round the waist with a piece of rope and upon his head the bottom of Mrs. Fuseli's work-basket "—Benjamin Robert Haydon's description of Fuseli, and the painting entitled "-The Nightmare " probably account for the artist's widest fame. In 1936 the Surrealists included two of his paintings in the New York Exhibition Fantastic Art. Dada. Surrealism. pointing to his dictum. " One of the most unexplored regions of art is dreams," and claiming him as a forerunner. Now, from Switzerland, Fuseles native land, comes this book of his drawings, over a hundred of them well and sizably reproduced, with an introductory essay by Professor Ganz and a foreword by John Piper.
Fuseli found England more sympathetic than Switzerland, and settled here, becoming successively A.R.A., R.A. and Keeper of the Royal Academy, but preserving his independence of opinion and championing such unpopular artists as Blake, with whom he enjoyed a long friendship. During his lifetime his reputation was consider- able, though it never quite matched his prodigious ambition. As a young man he had written in a friend's album, " I do not wish to build a cottage, but to erect a pyramid " ; but he saw his pyramid in his " grand " paintings, and in these he too often failed to observe his own aphorism, "Tameness lies on this side of expres- sion, grimace overleaps it," so that the theatrical paraphernalia of his horrifies protests too much. It is in his drawings that his value, and it is a very real value, lies. As John Piper remarks in his foreword: " In some of Fuseli's work, and almost as if it had nothing to do with it, there is a feeling of tenderness, a feeling of sensitive touch with life that is more valuable than the summonings up of theatrical terror, the hair fetishism, the interest in courtesans and obscenities, which make him a minor hero in our own time." Particularly fine are his "domestic" drawings, showing elaborately coiffured women at their toilet or similarly occupied. These and his obscene drawings, which are also very beautiful, are discussed in an essay by Ruthven Todd in Tracks in the Snow. which is in many ways a better introduction than Professor Ganz's to Fuseli's work. Ganz claims too much : he is concerned to show Fuseli as a great Swiss artist, great not only in his own work but as an influence, and he wrongly lists Blake and Turner as among Fuseli's pupils at the Royal Academy. Blake was an incomparably greater artist than Fuseli, but Ganz equates them (and oddly credits Philadelphia with first making known Blake's illustrated books in an exhibition held just before the Second World War). There is, too, a naivety about his writing: " Fuseli is of great importance for English art, if only as an illustrator of Shake- speare and Milton. Did he not depict more than sixty scenes from Shakespeare's plays in many versions ? "
Fuseli as an artist was a part of the English Gothic Revival ; he was not a great artist, but an interesting one, some of whose work was' very fine. To over-evaluate him as Professor Ganz does is of no service ; but the book is primarily a book of reproductions and
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