Rattle your bones and jangle your chains, Los Angeles, for once again it is Astor, wailing out a dark serenade from the shadowed recesses of Speakeasy Tattoo. I promised that every week of October I would discuss some piece of spooky art history. Still in keeping with that theme, I have something a little different planned for you today. So sit back in your sepulchres, as we turn back the clock to the year 2000.
Things were different then. Fears over Y2K were barely in the rear view, terrycloth tube tops were in, and a webpage being viewed 30,000 times was considered viral. Such was the case for one particular listing on eBay in February of that year. The listing was for a painting, and the reason for the attention was that the seller’s description claimed… the painting was haunted.
Created between 1972 and 1974 by California artist Bill Stoneham, the painting is entitled The Hands Resist Him and is the product of two great stressors in the artist’s life: first, that he was an adopted child, and could only speculate upon the possibilities had he been raised by different parents, imagining the hands of different mothers, fathers, siblings, reaching out to him but being arrested by a darkened pane of glass; and second, that he was under contract with a gallery in Beverly Hills and needed to complete two paintings a month. Running up against a deadline, Stoneham found an old photograph from his childhood, depicting himself standing in front of a glass door, alongside a neighborhood girl. This, and the words of a poem his then wife had penned, would serve as inspiration for the work. His playmate was transformed into a lifesize doll, and she was given a curious piece of mechanical junk to hold (according to the artist, it’s a dry cell battery and a tangle of wires— more on this later). The doll has empty, eyeless sockets and a permanent frown. This was perhaps an effort by the artist to convey the feeling that he couldn’t relate to his peers as a boy, but in the here and now, it severely creeps out a lot of viewers.
The painting went on display during the gallery show at the end of his Beverly Hills contract, was reviewed in the Los Angeles Times, and was purchased by actor John Marley (you know, that guy who wakes up next to a horse head in The Godfather? That guy).
Within a year of the show, both the gallery’s owner and the journalist who had reviewed the painting were dead.
John Marley sold the painting sometime before his death a few years later, and it disappeared for almost 30 years.
But then. Somehow it had found its way to a space behind a California brewery, where in or about 2000, it was acquired by a couple, who took it home to display in their daughter’s room. Full disclosure, I can only find the original listing in bits and pieces, so here is the story I have gleaned from the sum of those parts:
Their four year old daughter did not like it. Specifically, she claimed that the children were fighting, and that they’d come out of the painting and into her room at night. The couple claims that, in order to allay her fears, they set up a motion-activated camera in their daughter’s room, and that what they saw next shocked and terrified them. They say that the footage revealed the boy crawling out of the painting, and that later photographs showed the doll holding a gun (and not a dry cell battery) and forcing the boy out of the painting. Indeed, the red-tinted nighttime photographs of the painting look as though the doll could be holding a crudely-painted gun shape, though this is likely just the effect of thicker white paint(lead or titanium-based) in the battery and one of the struts of the door coming forward to the eye, as white tends to do. While the couple initially urged caution to any potential buyers, later in the listing, they also walked back their claims, stating that there’s no such thing as ghosts or supernatural powers, and that the fact that they wanted their home blessed after the painting was gone should not dissuade any bidding. Sure, Jan. But the painting sold anyway, for the princely sum of… $1025.00. This is how you know a story took place in the early 2000’s. If a story like this went viral today, I estimate that the painting would have sold for at least ten times as much, falling into the hands of an influencer mining it for content, or some other person wanting a slice of internet fame and riding the coattails of a viral post to get it.
Back in 2000, though, much of the interaction with the piece was through that eBay listing, and the people engaging with it claimed to have had paranormal experiences simply from viewing the jpeg. One claimed feeling ill and needing to cleanse his home with white sage; another reported hearing voices and feeling a blast of hot air; another said that viewing the painting online caused “blackout/mind control experiences”. But the paranormal anecdotes did not end when the painting was sold, and the listing expired.
In 2016, Darren Kyle O’Neill, having acquired the film rights to the story and the image licensing rights for the painting, published a dramatized account of the memetic tale. He, too, had an unusual experience with the piece. He’d printed out a photo of it, and left it on his desk in Dubai while he went to Italy for a month. When he returned, he found that something in his home’s ductwork had gone awry, and everything was covered in a carpet of green mold: the bed, his suits, his daughter’s cot, all of his paperwork… everything except the printed photo of the painting, which lay untouched by the spores, while everything else on the desk was buried by them.
The painting, along with others purported to be haunted or cursed, is a popular topic online for communities dealing with the ooky, kooky, and/or spooky. And I suppose this is one of those spaces. One wonders, though, is it possible to get a haunted tattoo? I remember there was an X-Files episode like that, but it turned out that (spoiler alert) the artist’s inks had somehow become contaminated with ergot fungus, leading the subject of the episode to have powerful hallucinations. No ghosts this time, Mulder. I’ve heard of haunted tattoo shops, but so far I can find no record of a haunted tattoo. So, if you and your ghoulfriend want to make the commitment that says ‘forever’, even after death do us part, let us know. Exorcism not included.
By the pricking of our thumbs, something wicked this way comes… Blessed Be Los Angeles, it is I, Astor, the hermaphrodite crone of the Speakeasy Tattoo coven, and today on this grim autumn morn we will together cast aside these trappings of rational society and run howling back to our dark mother the untamed wood and perhaps, if time permits, weave a spell of art and ages past.
Story time: back when I was a young hot dummy I went on a field trip to Salem, Massachusetts where we— that is, me and my equally dumb peers— were given a very brief history of the infamous witch trials which basically boiled down to this: ‘in the past people where too foolish to understand the world because they didn’t have reason and science and so they believed in superstition and magic as a way to cope and fueled by fear and religious fervor murdered a whole bunch of women under suspicion of witchcraft’. And like it or not, this brief history informed a lot of how I thought of the past. I know I’m not alone in this; the story that pre-modern people believed in magic as a way to ascribe order to chaos is pretty standard in our collective idea of pre-enlightenment Europe and its colonial descendants. But here’s the thing: I don’t think that’s true anymore.
Firstly, it’s more than a little patronizing to assume that everyone in the past was as uniformly idiotic as your average group of high schoolers on a class trip, mindlessly consuming the worldview of some person in a position of some supposed authority. It is demonstratively apparent that possessing “logic and reason” as we supposedly do today (post-enlightenment and all that) is not a viable shield against believing in conspiracy and fantasy.
Mostly, though, I think this narrative falls short due to what it says about the purpose of magic. Magic, according to this reading, was a way for people to attempt to make sense of the natural world, a way of understanding and quantifying it… but if we were
to look at the function of magic and the practitioners of magic in pre-modern Europe we would see that it served a different social need than that of a pure pre-enlightenment explanation of why things are the way they are. Magic was not ever the simple attempt to explain away the chaos of the natural world, but in fact, an effort to allow access to it, to be the gateway through which harmony could be met between the world of the known and the natural and that of the unknowable and supernatural. Similarly, practitioners of magic (witches) were arbiters of that gateway, women who held knowledge not only of magic but of medicine, midwifery, herbalism, nature—all disciplines that, during the age of witch trials, would be taken out of the domain of women and magic and put into the hands of male doctors and scientists— and in so doing, turn them from modes of living within the natural world to arenas of study, dissection, and eventually, dominance.
Whether it was in opposition to this change, or a response to it, if ever there was an artist who could depict magic as a qualitative natural force, it was Salvatore Rosa. Born in Naples during the tail end of the witch trials this reportedly tempestuous and flamboyant proto-goth icon lived a wild life, and in turn had an equally wild career. From fathering many many children out of wedlock and cohabitating with their (still) married mother (a crime that would punishable by imprisonment or worse by the papal inquisition), to possibly living with a gang of roving bandits as a teenager, Rosa was, in his time, something of a rebel. He was also, by all accounts, a massive egoist obsessed with self-promotion and his reputation as a great painter. He wanted, again by all accounts, to be the kind of artist that shines truth on the world and to paint canvases that depicted the best in contemporary Italian history, philosophy, and morality.
Unfortunately, his rebellious spirit and hustler mentality was constantly restrained by the academically prudish conventions of late 17th century oil painting. To be an artist working at this time meant having your canvases put under constant scrutiny by local magistrates and the church, as painting was not only one of the most dominant artistic forms of the day but a way to visually demonstrate and spread specific cultural values and ethics. For Rosa, this meant constantly restraining himself in his compositions lest he attract the ire of the literal morality police. However, if there was one avenue that gave him the freedom to truly express himself with his paintings it was landscape. Throughout western art history, landscape painting has been regularly considered a less lofty or important pursuit, compared to other types of painting. Because this hierarchy held true in Rosa’s time, landscape painters were subject to less magisterial or ecclesiastical restrictions than the more ‘noble’ and/or austere genres of history paintings, religious paintings, and portraiture. Today, somewhat ironically, Rosa is most fondly remembered for his wild moody landscapes, as opposed to his more ‘serious’ canvases. His landscapes depict worlds beyond the familiarity of the road and pasture. Drenched in dark shadows, they are lands packed with gnarled, decaying trees, jagged cliffs, and turbulent skies. Yet landscape wasn’t the only topic in which he excelled oh no— to inhabit his feral forests, Rosa also painted lots and lots of witches.
Throughout his career Rosa returned to the subject of witches again and again, spurred by a reinvigorated public demand for images of the occult following the closure of the most recent series of European witch trials. In his paintings, drawings, and etchings, Rosa gave people a glimpse betwixt the trees into a shadow world; one where witches dance with devils and share in their unholy communion. The witches of Rosa’s paintings move and behave much like his trees, bent over and twisted or otherwise hunched and seated, refusing to engage with the viewer who is merely an interloper on their private rites. Like the beasts that inhabit these twilight woods, Rosa’s witches are almost always depicted naked— yet their nakedness does not function as a typical artistic nude might. Their bodies are not meant for sexual enticement or a humorous taboo, nor are they an indication of some sort of prelapsarian state of naked purity; his witches clearly have lived and sinned and his woods remain far too treacherous to be an Eden. They are naked because the wood to which they belong is naked and the wood lives within them just as much as they in it. Similarly Rosa’s witches aren’t painted to look grotesquely ugly or sublimely beautiful. More than anything they are typical in appearance. His witches might exist amongst the greater human population, possibly as the viewer’s friends and neighbors, until the sun sets and they are once again called to the forest.
The renewed interest in paintings of witches at the end of the 17th century marked a decline in witch trials all over Western Europe, but they would serve a similar cautionary purpose. Europeans would no longer need to bear witness to the bonfires with the artists’ rendering of the witch burned into their mind’s eye. Yet for as much as people were repelled by the prospect of witchcraft and the realm of the supernatural, they were clearly hungry for it. Like I said above, Rosa wanted to be known as a great painter, and that lead him to seek his own path and play ball with patrons in equal measure. Case in point, he painted the series Scenes of Witchcraft (below) whilst at the Medici court in Florence.
Salvatore Rosa was widely regarded in his time and continued to be so for centuries following his death. It wouldn’t be until the 19th century when an exhibition of his works caused a well-known critic of the day to remark that his paintings contained “unmitigated falsehoods” and showcased "laws of nature set at open defiance” that his popularity would fade. For the record this was the painting.
He would languish in semi-obscurity until the 1970’s when public interest in his paintings would begin to resurface, perhaps due in part to the subsequent rise in the popularity of the horror genre and the formation of the goth subculture. We may all be the proverbial decedents of witch hunters but it would seem that some of us are always going to have a predisposition to return to the woods and follow the chanting into the dark. So, until next time friends, continue to live deliciously.
Updated: Feb 6, 2024
Seasons screamings ghouls and ghosts of Los Angeles, it is I, Astor, lifting the lantern from the steps of Speakeasy Tattoo to exhume art history before your glowing eyes. In honor of the month of October, or as I like to call it Goth Pride Month, we will be examining a particular piece of spooktacular art history every week this month— because what’s scarier than short form art historical essays?
So to start things off we are going to take it back to a very scary year indeed… well a very scary year if you happened to be a member of the British nobility. It’s 1782 and the loss at the Battle of Yorktown has seen the end of British Colonial rule in what would become the United States. It’s the end of what historians call the “First” British Empire, and Parliament is gathering steam to oust the Prime Minister by a motion of no confidence. The King, though popular, is unpredictably stricken by bouts of mania caused by an unknown disease. Elsewhere in Europe, an Age of Enlightenment is spreading, but English philosophers remain comparatively conservative, and His Majesty’s doctors still apply poultices to “draw out ill humours”. If you are an English aristocrat, things must seem very strange and confusing, surrounded as you would be by all these vast external changes. Amid all that uncertainty, at the Royal Academy of London, Anglo-Swiss artist Henry Fuseli unveils his opus, The Nightmare.
Depicting a tenebrist dream-space, the canvas’s subject is that of a sleeping woman, beset by a glowering imp or incubus. Her head and arms are thrown back in an ecstatic sprawl, arrested mid-entropic slump as she tumbles from the bed, her nightclothes nearly translucent and twisted about her so as to cleave to her slumbering form. To the left of the woman, coyly emerging from behind a bit of stage-like red drapery, a shadowy horse voyeuristically observes the scene. It’s a bit of an Inception situation, as the image follows a sort of dream logic— horse in a bedroom, demon perched on a woman’s chest, while her night table remains upright and undisturbed. However, the woman herself is also dreaming, tossing fitfully in her sleep, so that what we are shown is a dream within a dream, and we are thus intruding not only upon the sanctity of her bedchamber, but also upon the recesses of her mind. In contrast with the sleeping woman, the demon— small, hunched, and grotesque as opposed to her stretched, languid beauty— challenges the viewer with its hateful stare. Much could be and has been said about this creature. Firstly, it references the Mare, an evil creature which exists within the folkloric traditions of Germanic, Slavic, and Scandinavian Europe. The Mare rides your horses by night, exhausting them. It tangles your trees and mats your hair, and worst of all it sits on your chest and brings you night terrors. The name is thought to derive from the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European root mer-, which means “crushing or oppressing”. It is also the origin of the word “nightmare”, itself. Fuseli has, however, also included a horse, a literal mare in the night, as sort of a visual pun, or else an allusion to the belief that the Mare would ride a horse ragged. Is he suggesting also that the woman is to be ridden to her end? This could be, as the creature also exhibits the attributes of an incubus, a male demon which lies upon a sleeping woman in order to take advantage of her body. The word “incubus” comes from “incubare”, which means “to lie upon”, and this creature has very obviously taken his seat upon the woman’s sleeping form. I would not be the first to point out the suggestive elements in this painting. Critics at the time of its display at the RA were disquieted by the imagery, with one reviewer in the Morning Chronicle saying that it “has strong marks of genius about it; but hag-riding is too unpleasant a thought to be agreeable to anyone”. There exists a play between intrigue and revulsion here, which is often the case with works employing oblique sexual themes. There is the arch of the woman’s back, her knee canted into an open pose, and her flimsy night dress. Also, the motion in the piece, the way light leads the eye, begins at her exposed throat, traces her body over her breast, down to her knee where the eye then jumps to the highlight on the horse’s nose, which then points straight toward the apex of the woman’s thighs. Only then is the eye drawn to the crooked little imp, and to its wide-eyed grimace, its finger pressed rudely to its cheek in a gesture which seems accusatory, acknowledging the path that the viewer’s eyes have taken. Whereas Fuseli’s other work often referenced Shakespeare or Greek Myth, and thus borrowed from those subjects a moral lesson, this work did not, and left viewers shocked, but also titillated. According to the Detroit Institute of Arts, where the painting now hangs, Sigmund Freud had an etching copy of this painting hanging in his office in Vienna. A copy was also found in the home of Mary Shelley. Jung referenced it in his work on the unconscious, and there have been multiple Jungian analyses of the painting, interpreting the woman as his unrequited lost love, Anna Landolt, and the demon either as Fuseli himself, trapping her and thus keeping her, or else, as her husband, an interloper on the object of his covetousness. In The Fall of the House of Usher, Poe describes a painting which bears a striking similarity to the work by Fuseli, though it is not explicitly named. The painting is also the header image for the Wikipedia article on sleep paralysis. Almost since its first exhibition, it has been an icon of psychosexual analysis, and of horror, and of the sultry shadows where those two meet. It is emblematic of fear and lust at once.
With all this heavy allegorical symbolism, one would think it would have been shunned outright, given the conservative moralism of England, and the “Age of Reason” blossoming elsewhere. On the contrary, it has been reproduced and referenced and parodied countless times in the past 239 years. For a while, it served as a sort of visual shorthand for satirists looking to either point out the trysts of political figures by depicting them as the incubus, or in other cases, to poke fun at them for other weaknesses, by caricaturing leaders and lawmakers as the sleeper. The painting was so popular even in Fuseli’s own lifetime that he painted several iterations on the same theme. Today, too, it finds its way into art which walks the line between sex and terror. See for example Cecily Brown’s Black Painting I. The artist states that the inspiration for it was a book of Victorian erotica, but given the influence and ubiquity of The Nightmare, it’s likely that volume bears the sweaty fingerprints of Fuseli’s infamous work. Like desire, or like a nightmare, the painting is hard to escape.