“Gothic” began as a term of abuse. In his Lives of the Artists, Giorgio Vasari blamed the Goths and other northern invaders for the unclassical architecture filling up Italy. He found the medieval buildings “monstrous,” “barbarous,” and “disordered.” Three centuries after Vasari, John Ruskin was full of admiration for this “architecture of the North” in The Nature of Gothic (1853). Ruskin saw structures like Strasbourg Cathedral and Westminster Abbey as the “work of an imagination as wild and wayward as the northern sea; creations of ungainly shape and rigid limb, but full of wolfish life; fierce as the winds that beat, and changeful as the clouds that shade them.”

Ruskin was writing in a century marked by its medievalism. The art and architecture of the Middle Ages, newly accessible in museums and through photographs in books and magazines, captured the interest of a broad public. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the Gothic cathedrals of Europe—dating from the twelfth century to the sixteenth—were thronged by tourists, while knockoff Gothic furniture and stick-on stained glass were sold for the home. Gothic-themed cabarets, cafés, and taverns opened in Paris: Montmartre’s Café du Conservatoire, with its vaulted ceiling, reminded patrons of Notre Dame.

Another bout of Gothic fever in the early twentieth century revolved less around a style than around a restless Gothic energy, an overwrought Gothic sensibility. In 1921 the German art historian Hermann Schmitz remarked that calling something Gothic had become the highest form of praise: a dancer on Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm might be complimented for the Gothic line of her movements, an Expressionist painting for its Gothic feeling. Schmitz bemoaned this misappropriation of the “most glorious legacy of the pious and pure spirit of our forefathers.” Seen as German by Germans and as French by the French, the Gothic was revered by those yearning for a lost age of faith and unity as well as by avant-gardes in search of the new.

Over the past year, the exhibition “Gothic Modern” brought together medieval, Renaissance, and modern works to explore how European artists of different stripes engaged with the Gothic between 1875 and 1925. This is a Gothic that was never exactly defined and flexible enough to include works in a vaguely dark and frightful mode as well as those by the German Renaissance masters Lucas Cranach the Elder, Albrecht Dürer, and Hans Holbein the Younger. The traveling show presented medieval and Renaissance sculptures, woodcuts, engravings, and paintings alongside artworks by Käthe Kollwitz, Edvard Munch, Max Beckmann, and many others. It made stops in Helsinki, Oslo, and Vienna before closing in January, and many of the modern artists in the exhibition come from the Nordic countries it visited. They were cast as “time-travelers” on “journeys to the Gothic,” though what struck me in Helsinki, where I saw the show, was just how varied their destinations were. This was no group tour.

At Helsinki’s Ateneum Art Museum, the stage was set with pointed arches bearing plaster casts of sculptures from Nidaros Cathedral, which has loomed over the Norwegian city of Trondheim since the thirteenth century. Cathedrals and cityscapes, both real and imagined, appeared in the works lining the walls. Among them was Munch’s Lübeck (1902–1903), an etching of gabled salt storehouses beside the brick Gothic gate to the German city. This Hanseatic port on the Baltic coast was a stop for Nordic artists on their way south to Paris or Berlin. The eighteen-year-old painter Helene Schjerfbeck passed through in 1880 en route from Helsinki to Paris. A scholarship had allowed her to train at the Finnish Art Society’s Drawing School from the age of eleven, and now a government grant was sending her abroad. She arrived at the private academy of Madame Trélat de Vigny on the Right Bank only to find it shut (Madame was on holiday). Schjerfbeck waited out the next month by sketching in the Musée de Cluny, whose collection of medieval and Renaissance artifacts, arranged in a late-fifteenth-century Gothic town house, had opened to the public in 1844.

She quickly switched schools and met the Austrian painter Marianne Stokes (then Marianne Preindlsberger), also recently arrived in the city. These sometime roommates and lifelong friends each had several paintings in “Gothic Modern”—Stokes’s Melisande (1895–1898) portrays the piteous heroine of a medievalesque play by Maurice Maeterlinck that premiered in Paris in 1893. Schjerfbeck had a tight-knit circle of friends that included her “painting sisters,” who had also trained at the Helsinki drawing school (women were admitted from its founding in 1848). Though she lived with a limp from a childhood injury, Schjerfbeck traveled widely with her painter friends. In January 1884 she was staying with Maria Wiik at the artists’ colony of Pont-Aven in Brittany. She wrote in a letter back to freezing Finland, “We like being here at the edge of the world, where strawberries were in bloom on New Year’s day.”

That winter of working en plein air, Schjerfbeck painted The Door (1884). Having made her way into the sixteenth-century Trémalo Chapel in the fields above Pont-Aven, she turned her back on the pointed arches marching down its nave as well as the polychrome wooden crucifix that Paul Gauguin later took as inspiration for The Yellow Christ (1889). Her interest wasn’t so much in the Gothic architecture as in what the light was doing at the dim end of this long, low-slung space—how it could at once softly color the white of a wall, create shadows on a dark floor, and blast through the gaps around a closed door. With a spate of short, strong strokes, she painted its path across the flagstones. It is probably this work that Schjerfbeck describes in her letter from Pont-Aven simply as an “old-fashioned interior.” She didn’t exhibit The Door until her first solo show in 1917, which ushered in a long (if late) period of success.

Before that, Schjerfbeck often had to worry about money. Through the 1890s she taught at her old drawing school in Helsinki (housed in what is now the Ateneum), and on occasion the Finnish Art Society commissioned her to copy old master works for its collection. The copy she made in 1894 of Hans Holbein’s Dr. John Chambers (1543) was accompanied at the start of “Gothic Modern” by Lucas Cranach’s Portrait of a Young Woman (1525); in the same gallery The Door faced a meticulous architectural engraving of a traceried Gothic chapel by a fifteenth-century artist active in Bruges. To my eye, the comparison only served to emphasize that Schjerfbeck was not much concerned with the Gothic in that chapel outside Pont-Aven. She was experimenting with new brushwork techniques while grappling with the challenge posed by competing sources of light (she gave a bakery a similar treatment in 1887). Her copying of the Holbein was a gig that paid for a trip to Vienna, where she copied a Velázquez as well. The Helsinki show also included two of the remarkable self-portraits Schjerfbeck made in her eighties. In the unsparing Self-Portrait with Red Spot (1944), she has painted her gaunt old face and then rubbed it half away. That same year she called flattering self-portraits like those by Dürer “boring.” The exhibition’s inclusion of the unconforming Schjerfbeck seemed a strain, and its broad strokes allowed no examination of artists’ individual motives or idiosyncratic responses to the past.

There was undeniably a marvelous array of artworks in “Gothic Modern,” and the show offered an introduction to a range of artists little known beyond their homelands. Yet by grouping the works into sweeping themes like “Gothic Alterities,” “Forces of Nature,” and “Erotic Devotions,” it presented these moderns as brief glimpses in a busy crowd, giving visitors little understanding of how any one of them may have looked to, borrowed from, or reimagined the Gothic. The older objects, too, mostly appeared as examples of common types—a Madonna and Child painted on a panel, a wooden crucifix—without specific historical connections to the modern works.

What “Gothic Modern” did bring out is the modern appropriation of medieval allegories of death. Affixed to the wall of a windowless corridor in the Helsinki Ateneum was a blown-up photograph of a late-fifteenth-century danse macabre, or “dance of death,” from across the Baltic in Tallinn. That long canvas, with its alternation of dead and living figures, is attributed to the Lübeck workshop of the fifteenth-century artist Bernt Notke, supplier of elaborate decorations for Baltic churches. Death appears in the form of moldering corpses with skulls for heads who grab different types of people for a dance. One figure of Death sits bagpiping; another shoulders a coffin. To one side a preacher stands in his pulpit. The lines of text below him remind us of the point: rich, poor, young, old, “no one can stay here.” Scores of danse macabre scenes appeared on the walls of cemeteries and churches across the continent in the 1400s, though most of these murals have not survived. By 1700 another Dance of Death that Notke painted for a Lübeck church was so deteriorated that it had to be replaced, only for the copy to be destroyed in the Palm Sunday bombing of 1942.

Nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists repurposed the moralizing medieval trope of death and its dance for their day. Death in its modern guise is often cruel instead of impartial, and unlike its medieval counterpart it offers no suggestion of redemption; in Käthe Kollwitz’s etching Death and Woman (1910), it is not a dance we see but a fight. The Finnish artist Hugo Simberg put his own spin on the tradition in the small painting Dance on the Quay (1899). On a still summer evening by the Baltic, two skeletal Deaths wearing black cloaks have joined a gathering of countryfolk at the end of a rickety wooden pier. The boisterous Deaths have each picked a woman for a dance, leaving their partners to stand aside and watch. An accordion has been set down on a bench—these Deaths dance without music. In Dance on the Quay and other works by Simberg from the 1890s, there is an air of quiet resignation as Death comes to the peasants of rural Finland, an acceptance of its inevitability that retains a particular kinship with the late medieval Dance of Death.

Simberg was a student at the Finnish Art Society’s Drawing School when Schjerfbeck taught there. His traditional studies didn’t excite him as much as Symbolism did, and in 1895 he left for the watery wilds of central Finland to apprentice himself to the artist Akseli Gallen-Kallela, famously the painter of heroic scenes from the Kalevala, a compilation of folklore published in 1835 that was taken up as the Finnish national epic. Gallen-Kallela had built a log house and studio on Lake Ruovesi, where in 1895 he was making woodcuts in memory of his young daughter, dead from diphtheria, and contributing illustrations to the first issue of the new German art magazine Pan. That year he wrote in praise of his new pupil: “His talent is quite extraordinary; he reminds me of the 14th- and 15th-century masters. His art has a genuine naïve quality…. His message sinks in with the power of a sermon.”

Like Schjerfbeck, Gallen-Kallela had gone to Paris in the 1880s, but he encouraged Simberg to set his sights on London instead: the solid English temperament was more like their own Finnish disposition. By the spring of 1896 Simberg was on his way to the metropolis, where he studied medieval and Renaissance objects—as well as Egyptian sculptures and Japanese prints—at the British Museum. He took notes on a set of danse macabre etchings by the Bohemian artist Wenceslaus Hollar, copying down the phrase “Melior est Mors quam Vita” (Better is death than life). In Helsinki, Simberg’s Dance on the Quay was displayed together with the Dance of Death woodcuts designed by Holbein around 1526, in a gallery containing many lively Deaths—playing the fiddle, smoking, skiing, or sitting politely at the end of a bed as in Marianne Stokes’s Death and the Maiden (circa 1908).

While in London Simberg also had the chance to admire works by the Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones. Gallen-Kallela too was a fan, as he was of the Arts and Crafts visionary William Morris. Like the other well-traveled and widely read fin de siècle artists in “Gothic Modern,” these two Finns knew the work of previous generations of artists within movements that had idealized medieval craftsmanship and collectivism or pictured a haunted, decaying Gothic world. The exhibition nodded toward these nineteenth-century precursors with two tenebrous paintings from the 1820s by the German painter Carl Gustav Carus: one of a castle in ruins, the other of a pilgrim walking alone through a narrow valley. Not a few of the modern journeys to the Gothic in the show seem to have been guided by the Romantics or the Pre-Raphaelites.

Others had more immediate encounters with the medieval and Renaissance past. In 1900 the nineteen-year-old Belgian Gustave van de Woestyne joined a group of artists in the riverside village of Sint-Martens-Latem. The sculptor George Minne was already living there, as was Gustave’s older brother Karel, a writer and poet. Their circle became known as the First Latem Group (a second soon followed their lead). Minne and the Van de Woestyne brothers were from the city of Ghent, where Gustave had trained at the Academy of Fine Arts. Sint-Martens-Latem, only a few miles from their hometown, didn’t offer the remoteness of Gallen-Kallela’s hideaway among the Ruovesi pines, but when Van de Woestyne arrived he felt transported into a premodern landscape. In his autobiography he recalls that first impression: “This is Flanders! This is the beautiful old Flanders you see in the old paintings that have survived.” The villagers, he thought, seemed straight out of Bruegel.

In 1902 Van de Woestyne went to see the exhibition “Flemish Primitives”in Bruges, which gathered hundreds of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century works in the city’s neo-Gothic Provincial Palace. The splendor of the Burgundian Netherlands and the genius of the painters it had supported were on full display. There were Memlings by the dozen and crushing crowds. In Bruges, Van de Woestyne would have seen Bruegel’s Land of Cockaigne (1567), Quentin Matsys’s Portrait of an Old Man (1513), and the Adam and Eve panels from the fifteenth-century Ghent Altarpiece,painted by Hubert and Jan van Eyck. Karel described the blockbuster show as a “lesson and encouragement” for Gustave, who brought what he learned to his Flemish farmer paintings. In Helsinki, Van de Woestyne’s enigmatic Farmer (or Evening) (1910) and Farmer (or The Answer) (1911) were presented in a gallery of portraits and self-portraits, including a dapper mustachioed Simberg and monochrome works by Schjerfbeck and Munch. Farmer (or Evening), finely painted in the muted colors of dusk, shows a man in a black turtleneck before the neatly curtained windows of a house. The solemn farmer, seen in three-quarter view, doesn’t make eye contact but raises his gaze upward in an odd expression suggestive of piety.

Van de Woestyne was a devout Catholic and went off to join the Benedictines in 1905. But within weeks his religious fervor had led to a breakdown; he returned to Sint-Martens-Latem and his painting. A Latem local named Deeske Cnudde turns up in a number of his works. In The Bad Sower (1908), Deeske flings seed onto a stony field, his eyes closed. The painting depicts a parable from the Gospels not often represented in the art of the Middle Ages, about a farmer who doesn’t take care where he sows, his seeds landing where they are scorched by the sun, choked by thorns, or taken by crows. As in Vincent van Gogh’s sower paintings from 1888, the sun glows in the background, but Van de Woestyne has attempted the precision of a portrait by Matsys or Van Eyck, carefully rendering every wrinkle and fold of Deeske’s long, seasoned face. He has surrounded Deeske with gold leaf as though he were a saint in a gilded altar panel. Van de Woestyne was drawn to the clarity and contrasts of medieval and Renaissance “primitives,” to the spirituality and simplicity implied by that label—and even went so far as to sign the work in their manner. “I have always felt like a primitive,” he later said.

A side gallery in Helsinki’s Ateneum was dedicated to a video projection of the Isenheim Altarpiece, a winged retable made in the 1510s for a monastery in Alsace. Visitors were shown the scenes revealed by different configurations of its panels as well as gruesome close-ups of Matthias Grünewald’s wretched Christ rotting on the Cross. The gallery, with its rows of seats and Stravinsky playing over speakers, invited a pause for contemplation but offered no commentary. Though paintings by Max Beckmann were in nearby rooms, neither his nor any other artist’s relationship to the Isenheim Altarpiece was explored. In 1904 Beckmann had stopped in the Alsatian town of Colmar (a part of Imperial Germany since 1871) to see Grünewald’s painting. The polyptych made a profound impression, and he is said to have worried about its safety when Alsace became a battlefield in 1914. Three years later it was removed from the dangers of the Western Front and brought east to Munich. Thousands pilgrimaged to the altarpiece in the city’s Alte Pinakothek, finding comfort in its scenes of grief and hope, and as Willibald Sauerländer wrote in these pages, “Grünewald became a Germanic prophet.”¹

Despite its temporal and thematic focus, “Gothic Modern” averted its gaze from the ways in which objects like the Isenheim Altarpiece were being discussed and put to use in the decades around 1900. Medieval and Renaissance artists and their works were claimed as national treasures and—like the stories of the Kalevala—deployed in the production of tradition. At the closing of “Flemish Primitives” its organizer trumpeted, “Is this not patriotic work?… Rarely have the glories of the past shone more brightly, and the legitimate pride we all felt has made us prouder of being Flemish, prouder of our name as Belgians.” The show was countered in 1904 by “French Primitives”in Paris, which sought to prove that France’s “vieux gothiques” were just as good as early Netherlandish greats like Memling and Van Eyck. Notions of the Gothic were also tied up with a spurious determinism, from Ruskin’s evocation of rugged northern builders at work in a cold climate to the influential theories of the German art historian Wilhelm Worringer, who in 1911 declared the Gothic a timeless trait “rooted in the innermost constitution of Nordic humanity” and described the Gothic qualities of Grünewald, Dürer, and Holbein. For him, “the land of the unadulterated Gothic is the Germanic north.” Such views of the Gothic remained unmentioned in the exhibition and are hardly addressed in its catalog, though they receive more attention in a second catalog that, unusually, was published in the fall to accompany the Vienna leg of the show.²

At the end of World War I, both Alsace and the Isenheim Altarpiece were returned to France. Beckmann had himself suffered damage at the front in 1915, and when he was put on leave he strove to make paintings as strong as those by Grünewald. In his Adam and Eve (1917), the serpent watches as Eve offers not fruit but one ample breast to Adam. A yellow iris is all that blooms in this ashen Eden. Beckmann’s painting was hung in a gallery with other modern refashionings of the original couple, including Edvard Munch’s Eye in Eye (1899–1900), in which a woman and a man stare into each other’s eyes across the scarred trunk of a tree. A handful of Munch’s works scattered throughout the exhibition are part of his Frieze of Life, the ever-changing project in which he grouped a series of paintings into life’s grand themes, its sorrows and joys: birth, love, death. The exhibition catalogs note that in the 1910s Munch planned to place the entire Frieze of Life in a “chapel of art,” which he envisioned as a round hall evoking the Norwegian forest and decorated with stained glass windows—“a kind of Gothic.”

There were, in the end, too many kinds of Gothic in “Gothic Modern,” and the show slipped too easily between them. The result was a clumsy conflation of disparate ideas about a mystical, moody, or historical Gothic. Artists in Europe around 1900 may have been “time-travelers,” but they were of their own time and place as well—abandoning modernizing cities for the unspoiled countryside, debating the part of art and artists in the modern nation, or creating artworks that bolstered a regional and national identity. Not all of them saw themselves as heirs to a northern Gothic spirit, and many did belong to the transnational communities mentioned in a wall text in Helsinki: Schjerfbeck and Stokes painted together in Brittany and Cornwall; Gallen-Kallela and Munch drank and exhibited together in Berlin. But an effort to present a modern vision of the Gothic somehow free of tribes, terrain, and territory leaves us with a rather shadowy image of these mingled histories of art.