Danse Macabre 1904

0:00

print, etching, intaglio

allegory

narrative-art

print

etching

intaglio

figuration

symbolism

Dimensions 12 1/4 × 15 1/8 in. (31.12 × 38.42 cm) (image)17 3/8 × 23 in. (44.13 × 58.42 cm) (sheet)

Marcel Roux’s Danse Macabre is a print that lives in the Minneapolis Institute of Art. It's this crazy dance of death, full of wild energy and dark humor, etched with fine lines. I can imagine Roux hunched over his plate, obsessively scribbling away, lost in this morbid fantasy. Maybe he was thinking about mortality, maybe he was just having a dark day – who knows? What strikes me is the energy: figures careen across the picture plane, and the eye is dragged along with them. Look at the wing of the central figure. It’s really just a few marks, but they suggest so much movement, so much ominous flight. It’s like Roux is talking to all those other artists who’ve grappled with the big questions, like Goya or Ensor. And what they all seem to say is that art can be a space to confront the messy, uncomfortable truths about life, death, and everything in between. It’s not about answers, but about the ongoing conversation, the dance of ideas that keeps us all going.

Comments

minneapolisinstituteofart over 1 year ago

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Marcel Roux places us, his viewers, in a ghoulish bell tower festooned with human remains. A giant scythe serves as a banner for the title and signature. The tower overlooks a river city. A winged demon brings a lifeless woman wrapped in a shroud—or perhaps in the sheet from her deathbed—to the tower as a shrouded skeleton announces his compatriot’s successful mission by swinging two hammers to strike a bell. In the distance we see two more demons bringing their prey and further ones flying through the night sky. Roux had studied with artists inclined toward Christian mysticism, but instead of expressing his own spirituality by decorating church interiors, he obsessed over death, Hell, and Satan.