Dark Art

While love and romance, light and joy may have have dominated art of all time, the darker side of humanity and especially its myths have also greatly influenced periods of art history in general and the works of certain painters in particular.

Naturally, during the black plague artists were influenced by the horrors of disease and death. The Dutch painter Pieter Brueghel the Elder´s "The Triumph of Death" (1562) stands out as a symbol of the fear and desperation of these dark times. His son, Pieter Brueghel the Younger, continued the dark tradition. And they were all followers of the great and mysterious Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch (1450-1516).

In late 19th and beginning of the 20th century the horrors of the several outbursts of plague that had hit Europe with such disastrous force inspired famous artists like Swiss Arnold Böcklin and Norwegian Theodor Kittelsen.

As a matter of fact, the dark and troubled side of art developed at some level its very own school of painting - SYMBOLISM - which was a kind of Gothic version of Art Nouveau. Great "dark" Symbolists were Czech Maximilian Pirner, Polish Wilhelm Kotarbiński, Germans Franz von Stuck and Max Klinger, Swiss Carlos Schwabe and Finnish  Hugo Simberg, to name a few and famous ones.