The Comedy of Death 1854

Curator: Rodolphe Bresdin’s lithograph, "The Comedy of Death," completed in 1854, offers a glimpse into a fantastical and morbid landscape. The intricate details draw you in immediately. What's your initial take? Editor: It’s like a meticulously crafted nightmare. A teeming, almost suffocating composition—a kind of beautiful horror, all rendered in these stark blacks and whites. How was this even printed? It’s dense. Curator: Bresdin employed an incredibly demanding process. The amount of labor etched into that lithographic stone... imagine. Each mark is intentional, painstakingly placed to create this dreamlike and unsettling world. The consumption of materials and time alone speak to its value! Editor: It makes me think about Romanticism, doesn’t it? A sort of rebellion against Enlightenment rationalism. Instead, Bresdin embraces these grotesque, almost primal scenes of birth, death, and nature intertwined. Are there really figures dangling from those branches? Curator: Absolutely! The cyclical nature of life and death is really a centerpiece here, represented through the figures. He doesn’t shy away from these more difficult aspects, as seen in his other pieces like the 'Rest in Egypt'. Editor: I get that. But the “comedy” part seems… off. Is it a dark humor, perhaps? It all reads to me more as a harsh reality than comedy. Curator: I interpret it as embracing life’s absurdities, accepting mortality as just another act in the grand play. Though, yes, the comedy definitely sits in the darker corners of human existence! Editor: Given the context, knowing the working class could maybe afford prints, there is maybe also some mordant dark irony at play, with Bresdin’s choice of 'comedy' and death being consumed on an industrial scale through paper, pigment, and machinery! The material reality clashes with what we might consider “high art”. Curator: Precisely! A democratization of morbid fantasy. It's a perfect visual statement about life's inescapable realities, packaged through an art form so deliberately and laboriously created. Editor: Seeing it now, there is more than meets the eye... From labor disputes to high society it seems... Well I would buy this print and laugh maniacally to cope. Curator: Me too. To witness it again is a fresh and welcomed reminder.