Gothic Modern - From Edvard Munch to Käthe Kollwitz

Gothic Modern is the first such study to shed light on the profound fascination that medieval Gothic art held for Edvard Munch, Käthe Kollwitz and their artist contemporaries as a transformative source of inspiration and new artistic practices, crossing cultural borders, to shape new ideas of the artistic self, of ‘belonging’, modern society, sexuality, spirituality and identity. The artist-journeys explored in this publication bring to new visibility, the potency of the Gothic and its objects from a remote age, yet as revealed, is so tantalizing close to a sense of our modernity (Jacques Le Goff); in short, to making modern art. They reveal powerful new ways that the inspiration of Gothic art and sites – a ‘Gothic’ conceived flexibly across time periods, cultures and interconnecting spaces – proved to be adaptable, inspirational and resilient. This was especially so for artists’ turn to the Gothic past between the 1870s and 1920s to respond to deep challenges of their modernity, of identity, belief, social change, war, transforming communities and their hopes for the future. Gothic Modern as the twelve chapters in this publication examine, illuminates a potent tension; of a medieval past that gains pivotal new meaning for modern art as a site of new creativity, identity and to re-imagine potential futures. Dark or radiant, enchanted or uncanny; spiritual or traumatic, embodied or haunted, these alternative sites of ‘Gothic modernity’ engaged Edvard Munch, Käthe Kollwitz, and key artists of their generation with urgent new creative visions for imagining and making worlds.