Dark Dreamer

IN DECEMBER 1936, "Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism" opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

- BY MAXWELL CARTER

The exhibition featured everything from Arcimboldo's mannerist profile "Summer" (1563) to Disney animation, the "art of children" and the "art of the insane" (according to official diagnoses, at least). On one wall, placed incongruously between an 18th-century French School memento mori and Thomas Cole's "The Titan's Goblet" (1833), hung the second of four versions of Henry Fuseli's masterpiece, "The Nightmare" (1790-91). A study in darkness and dreams, the painting shows its ethereal, slumbering heroine surmounted by an incubus and an unutterably strange, glassy-eyed horse head, the latter of which must have been-though I've never seen it confirmed the basis for the iconic scene in "The Godfather." As Christopher Baker, an art historian and the editor of the Burlington magazine, observes in "Creator of Nightmares: Henry Fuseli's Art and Life," the artist's "Nightmare" has, today, eclipsed the artist: "Many people would be able to summon up in their mind's eye an image of the painting as it has retained an uncanny quality of recognition, but few could plot the life and career of its extraordinary creator." Fuseli's grandfather, father and all four of his siblings were also artists. His older brother, Johann Rudolf, painted, drew and etched; his younger brother, Johann Kaspar, produced still lifes; his sisters, Elizabeth and Anna, specialized in botanical subjects and insects. While art might have seemed the normal course for Fuseli, his initial career was in the Protestant Church.