Füssli: The Realm of Dreams and the Fantastic

Acynic remembering the Musée Jacquemart-André’s Botticelli exhibition from the fall of 2021 (which I reviewed in The New Criterion’s January 2022 issue) may regard the museum’s current exhibition, “Füssli: The Realm of Dreams and the Fantastic,” as a dip from the sublime into the ridiculous. This thought may be bolstered by the posters seen in metros and on street billboards throughout Paris featuring one of Fuseli’s 1783 paintings of the three witches in Macbeth. In Kenneth Clark’s book and television series The Romantic Rebellion (1973, 1974), the art historian and broadcaster remarks in an acute look at Fuseli that the three witches on the canvas cannot be considered “much more successful” than they “usually are on the stage.” In the painting, they look more masculine than feminine, more warlock than witch. This ambiguity may appeal to an age of sexual confusion.