9 of Art History's Most
Horrifying Mysteries
By Alex Greenberger
Oct. 30, 2013
Walter Sickert's "The
Camden Town Murder"
Coolly supercilious
attendants at white-cube galleries. Exhibition press releases that invoke
Derrida and words like "neo-objecthood" to describe a pile of rocks.
The fifth non-question question from the audience at an artist talk. The art
world is full of horrors—but, as one might expect from a den of wealth and
often cut-throat ambition, sometimes they extend beyond the hair-raising to be
purely blood-curdling. And often, the scariest occurrences relate to mysteries
that go unsolved.
This Halloween, to cast
back the shroud on a few of the more gristly, uncanny, and
downright ectoplasmic outrages, we venture into nine particularly dark
tales from the art crypt.
JACK THE RIPPER (AND
PAINTER?)
Walter
Sickert
In 2001, Patricia Cornwell,
the famed British author behind the Kay Scarpetta series, made a radical claim:
that the British painter Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper, a serial killer
who terrorized England in the late 19th century. Sickert, a
onetime student of Whistler's, was notorious for his tenebrous, impasto-heavy
scenes of nude women in various states of despair or distress that he painted
with eerie detachment—along with scenes stemming from his strange interest in
the sadistic murderer, including one called Jack the Ripper's Bedroom,
which he painted of a room that his landlady suspected had housed the killer.
(Perhaps she suspected the wrong tenant.)
In her book Portrait
of a Killer, Jack the Ripper: Case Closed, which she wrote after financing
a $6 million investigation of the murders, Cornwell presented other salacious
evidence that included another potentially revealing painting: The
Camden Town Murder, in which a man is shown deep in thought as he sits next
to a dead, nude woman. She also purported to find watermarks on the painter's
correspondence that matched the grotesquely taunting notes the killer sent the
police.
Cornwell’s theories have
yet to be proven, and many Jack the Ripper theorists disagree with her, but in
2005 she took out advertisements in London's biggest newspapers challenging
experts to debunk her claim... and the mystery remains unsolved.
CARAVAGGIO’S
REVENGE
Caravaggio's
bones
Baroque master Caravaggio
was known for his nasty temper, so most 17th-century Romans knew it was best
not to cross him. Unfortunately, his hapless tennis partner wasn't one of them.
After losing a match, the painter of rapturous biblical narratives killed his
opponent with a sword (which he wore at all times) and was forced to flee Rome
permanently. Many theories surround the events of the tennis court—some
scholars even believe the man that Caravaggio killed was a pimp, and that
Caravaggio had merely meant to castrate him. An even more radical theory
explains Caravaggio’s own mysterious death in southern Italy—commonly
attributed to malaria or, according to recent evidence, poisoning from his lead
paints—as his murder at the hand of the tennis player’s friends.
MURDER EN PLEIN AIR?
A field
nearby Auvers-sur-Oise
Van Gogh, with the gun, in
the wheat field—but who did it? For years, most art historians agreed that van
Gogh shot himself to death in a patch of grain in Auvers-sur-Oise, France. But
two years ago, art historians Steven Naifeh and Gregory White wrote in their
book Van Gogh: The Life, that the addled artist had not, in fact,
shot himself, but rather had been murdered by a trigger-happy 16-year-old
schoolboy who came across van Gogh as he innocently walked through the land.
While the possible motive for the crime remained elusive, and there were doubts
about the veracity of the forensic evidence, the book inspired heated debate
among art lovers and historians. Some consider Naifeh and White’s theory to
have been debunked in July by rival scholars Louis van Tillborgh and Teoi
Meedendorp, but the details surrounding van Gogh’s death remain sketchy at
best.
THE CURSED STATUETTE?
The
cursed statuette of Neb-Senu
In late June of 2013, while
many unsuspecting innocents were enjoying the summer sunshine, Manchester Art
Museum Egyptian art curator Campbell Price was scrutinizing a surveillance
video after docents complained that someone had been moving one particular
ancient figurine in the collection. The video, later uploaded to YouTube, shows no malefactor to be at work—rather, the ten-inch, 3,800-year-old
Egyptian sculpture of a man named Neb-Senu appears to completely turn
around over the course of two days of its own accord. When asked about why the
sculpture moved, Price said that the only explanation he could imagine was a
spiritual one, since the sculpture had never moved before in the 80 years the
museum had owned it.
THE AB EX-FILES
Painter
and UFOlogist Budd Hopkins
It’s not often that an
artist is credited with beginning a whole new field of supernatural research.
The rare case is Budd Hopkins, the late Abstract Expressionist painter first
known for the Mondrian-like canvases he made in the 1940s and later, in the
'60s, for his keen interest in alien abductions. Regarded as being influential
as both a painter and a UFOlogist (as his field is called), Hopkins claimed
that he himself was abducted by extraterrestrials who revealed to him their
unholy desire to crossbreed with humans and eugenically create a perfect
species.
Hopkins—who titled his
memoir Art, Life, and UFOs—then started an organization for other alien
abductees, and some even credit him with being the first person to ignite
serious scholarly interest in aliens and UFOs. But, as he would contend is the
case with humanity in the cosmos, Hopkins is hardly alone. Other artists who
claim to have been visited by aliens include Minimalist sculptor John McCracken
and the contemporary painter Ional Talpazan (whose work is coveted by
connoisseurs), both of whom have bodies of work relating to their supposed
visitations and abductions.
CROWLEY'S CURSE?
Occultist
Aleister Crowley
It seems very possible that
Aleister Crowley was the busiest occultist of all time. In the early 20th century,
he made trance paintings, tried a vast array of drugs, became a fixture of the
Parisian art scene (his Tarot illustrations are included in Massimilano Gioni's Venice
Biennale show), and even founded his own
religion, Thelema, founded upon ideas of finding one’s harmony with nature and
achieving what he called "True Will." Thelema was partially devoted
to worshipping certain Egyptian gods, so when Howard Carter opened
Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922, it’s suspected that Crowley had a bone to pick.
Some researchers believe that the supposed Curse of Tutankhamun, which killed
20 people involved in Carter’s excavation, may have actually been caused by
Crowley. Though Crowley—who many accused of being, in fact, an outright
Satanist—never admitted to any such curse, his diaries suspiciously say that
his mood was “lifted” the day after he discovered that certain excavators had
died.
A DISAPPEARANCE AT SEA
A
photograph of Bas Jan Ader's In Search of the Miraculous
Whatever happened to Bas
Jan Ader? In 1975, the passionate, romantic, and highly conceptual performance
artist embarked on a pan-Atlantic voyage as part of his ongoing piece In
Search of the Miraculous. The long journey across the ocean was expected to
take approximately 60 days, and it was the second part of a larger performance
intended to explore artistic inspiration from nature. (An accomplished sailer,
the artist had ventured out shorter distances in the past.)
Several months after Ader
left on the Ocean Wave from Cape Cod, his 13-foot boat was discovered submerged
off the coast of Ireland. The spooky part: Ader was nowhere to be found. Even
spookier: The boat was stolen shortly after it was found. Some scholars believe
Ader committed suicide as part of the performance, though other evidence
suggests that the artist went to great lengths to ensure that he would survive
the voyage—he even had his appendix removed on the off chance that he might get
appendicitis during the 60 days at sea. Another theory, that the mast may have
swung suddenly and knocked him off the boat, assumes him to be more of a
sailing novice than he was. Whatever the case may be, Ader’s strange
disappearance continues to stir questions over what, exactly, happened on the Atlantic.
THE GALLERIST OF HORRORS
Andrew
Crispo
To unsuspecting New Yorkers
in the ‘80s, Andrew Crispo was just another art dealer with an up-and-coming
gallery in Midtown. But Crispo was a connoisseur of more than just art—he also
dealt expertly in pain. In 1985, the body of a young model was found in a
smokehouse in Rockland County wearing nothing but a leather S&M hood
(a “death mask,” as the tabloids deemed it). His body was severely burned, and
he had been shot twice in the back of the head. A man soon came forward, saying
that Crispo had drugged the model, forced him to kneel, and then shot him—all
of which allegedly transpired in Crispo’s expensive Manhattan apartment.
Police found the gun in the
dealer's gallery, and proof that Crispo had picked up the model the night of
the murder and plied him with cocaine. Nevertheless, the trial was dismissed
(Crispo, strangely, wasn't even called to testify). One year later, however,
another man claimed Crispo tortured him for several hours straight—landing Crispo
with charges of kidnapping, assault, coercion, and sodomy. He eluded those as
well. Finally, he was jailed five months later for tax evasion.
Theresa
Duncan and Jeremy Blake
Known for his colorful
paintings and films, Jeremy Blake wasn't
afraid of incorporating eerie qualities into his work, as in his extraordinary
2003 Winchester Mystery House films devoted to the true-life occult
swirlings around an heiress of the rifle-making family who was convinced the
spirits of those killed with the guns would kill her—unless she continuously
built out her haunted mansion with fake staircases and dead-end hallways.
Soon, however, mysterious
forces began to spill into his personal life as well: starting in 2005, Blake
and his girlfriend, Theresa Duncan, claimed to have been harassed and followed
by Scientologists, who the couple believed had begun sending them threatening
messages after Blake had collaborated with the musician Beck. (The two had made
headway into Hollywood too, with Blake creating animations for Paul Thomas
Anderson's film Punch-Drunk Love.) In 2007, after spiraling into
increasingly erratic behavior, Duncan committed suicide in the couple's unusual
apartment in St. Mark's Church in New York. A week later, a distraught Blake
brought about his own tragic end, too, by walking into the waters off Rockaway
Beach.
Whether Blake’s claims are
true remains unknown, and how their paranoid fears played into their deaths can
never be fully understood. Today, however, artists and bloggers alike remain
interested in Blake's unfortunate demise. Bjarne Melgaard, for example, continues to make art devoted to the suicides of Duncan
and Blake.
http://www.artspace.com/magazine/art_101/art_historys_spookiest_mysteries?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Master&utm_campaign=October_31_2013_Dark_Arts_Holiday
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