A series studying Lovecraft’s attitude towards aesthetics and the way his own aesthetics are embodied in his writings.

Mar 17, 2024

H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) has inspired generations of authors and artists through his original fiction and verse, but what was his own attitude towards the visual arts? Was Lovecraft as receptive to the pictorial as he was to the narrative? This article will assess Lovecraft’s attitude towards visual art, primarily through three key stories “Pickman’s Model” (1926), “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926) and “At the Mountains of Madness” (1931), as well as some others.

Before we look at Lovecraft’s responses to, and uses of, fine art in his writing, it is worth considering his attitude towards literary craft. In his landmark statement regarding horror literature, “The Supernatural in Literature” (1925-7), Lovecraft displays his erudition regarding horror and Gothic literature. He writes of the supreme level of supernatural literature as being attuned to the racial sensibilities of its audience, having been shaped over ages by the environment and racial memory. He criticises those who neglect atmosphere through use of inappropriately prosaic prose or brisk pacing. The great creator combines feeling, craft, originality and an understanding of the sensibilities of his audience to produce outstanding work that evokes realms of infinite horror, strangeness or immensity of time and space. This formula is one which (appropriately tailored) Lovecraft applied to architecture and fine art, as well as to prose and verse.

Lovecraft took pride in being able to discern the aesthetic worth of cultural material through education (primarily self-education), refinement of his natural sensitivity and critical intelligence. He was also immersed in history, seeing himself as an eighteenth century English gentleman. He cultivated a detachment from modern American life and was hostile towards the rise of the commercial and industrial and disdained immigrants. He did not travel much but read voraciously. The extent of Lovecraft’s exact interactions with fine art, illustration, popular art and the photographic arts (including cinema) is a vast subject that cannot be undertaken here, even in a series intended to be numerous parts. This first part will look at the way Lovecraft treated pictorial art, as it appeared prominently in some stories.

“Pickman’s Model” (1926) concerns a narrator who visits the home of the painter Pickman, whose pictures of ghouls had disconcerted his colleagues due to its horrific content and disquieting intensity. He sees paintings that are amazing in their gruesomeness and accuracy. Pickman takes the narrator to his secret basement studio, which has access to subterranean tunnels. The narrator discovers a photograph in the studio which revealed that Pickman photographed ghouls and thus he worked from life and not imagination.

The unnamed narrator is dissimilar to that of “The Music of Erich Zann” (1921), who is ignorant of music but perceives deviations and weirdness. “I was haunted by the weirdness of [Zann’s] music. Knowing little of the art myself, I was yet certain that none of his harmonies had any relation to music I had heard before; and concluded that he was a composer of highly original genius.” Pickman’s interlocutor is an afficionado of art and can describe exactly why Pickman’s art is exceptional. “Pickman was in every sense—in conception and in execution—a thorough, painstaking, and almost scientific realist.”

It this realism which confounds the narrator, who cannot but be astonished at such naturalism being applied so faultlessly to the depiction of ghouls. He compares Pickman to painters of fantasy both real and fictional and finds both Pickman’s skill and his (supposed) imagination equal to each other, allowing a level of weirdness that is supreme. Here, Lovecraft needs us to consider realism (or verisimilitude) to be a remarkable attribute possessed by Pickman in order to permit the conceit of Pickman working from life and photographs rather than from imagination, which explaining how he could make such realistic depictions of extremities.

Lovecraft clearly admired the skill of artists who were masters of realism but, if we take the narrator of the tale as expressing Lovecraft’s taste, the author also admired masters of expression (Goya) and invention (Fuseli). There does not seem a hierarchy for Lovecraft other than that realists must (perforce) be limited by what is real. As seen in his essay on literature, Lovecraft appreciates all types of craft as a signifier of diligence, insight and distinction. In one sense this story presents Lovecraft’s aesthetic thinking in a relatively limited and limiting respect – Pickman’s art was so extraordinary because he was a talented craftsman who saw extraordinary things and made faithful transcriptions. This is in part because the story is a very simple one – one that gains its effect due to its simple conceit – but Lovecraft’s thinking on aesthetics was already incorporating a cosmic dimension.

Written at the same time as “Pickman’s Model”,  “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926) presents the emergence of entities of cosmic horror who have held sway over primitive peoples since the beginning of time. The emergence of the Great Old Ones is indicated by the transmission of visions to only the psychically receptive (namely certain artists) worldwide. These individuals record their visions through artwork which is wholly strange and distinctive. The narrator describes a recently made sculpture:

“The bas-relief was a rough rectangle less than an inch thick and about five by six inches in area; obviously of modern origin. Its designs, however, were far from modern in atmosphere and suggestion; for although the vagaries of cubism and futurism are many and wild, they do not often reproduce that cryptic regularity which lurks in prehistoric writing. And writing of some kind the bulk of these designs seemed certainly to be; though my memory, despite much familiarity with the papers and collections of my uncle, failed in any way to identify this particular species, or even to hint at its remotest affiliations.”

The oddity of this object resides in its stylistic uniqueness. “No recognised school of sculpture had animated this terrible object, yet centuries and even thousands of years seemed recorded in its dim and greenish surface of unplaceable stone.” The narrator, who in his desire to categorise and analyse is very much a man in Lovecraft’s own mould, is confounded by the aesthetic incomprehensibility of the sculpture. It is clearly not only modern, it is freshly made, but its peculiarities are not due to intentionally extreme forms of Cubism or Futurism, rather due to the alien qualities of the subject.

What was Lovecraft’s familiarity with Modernist art? Lovecraft, who never travelled to Europe, probably became aware of Modernism because of the Armory Show of 1913. It was held in New York. We have no record of Lovecraft attending the exhibition but he would have seen the press coverage. The press discussion of this exhibition caused Americans of a general level of education and attentiveness to the arts to become aware of developments in Modern European art, mainly Cubism, Futurism, Orphism and other developments in the School of Paris. Lovecraft was extremely sensitive to current affairs and the year 1913 marked Lovecraft’s entry into amateur journalism and criticism in print, which gave him a greater impetus to inform himself through the local and national (syndicated) press. The mixture of ridicule, anger and incomprehension in the newspapers and journals was tempered by some admiration. We can guess Lovecraft had little sympathy for the more abstract, angular and non-representational art, but we can also assume that Lovecraft understood the significance and adventurousness of the European artistic avant-garde. In other words, Lovecraft did not dismiss art he did not like as the production of bizarre freaks to gain attention.

Associated with Lovecraft’s attachment to order and comprehensibility were other ideas of correctness. In “The Call of Cthulhu” a character encounters geometry of the unearthly, that is “all wrong”, in that it defies the laws of Euclid, Pythagoras and other ancients. “[…] Johansen swears he was swallowed up by an angle of masonry which shouldn’t have been there; an angle which was acute, but behaved as if it were obtuse.”

For Lovecraft, if true paths or traditions – namely, language, culture, art, religion and race – are comprehended, then the defiance, perversion or severance of such paths must impart shock and horror to the educated. This is why his stories contain so frequently description of appalling transgressions against such paths. Although Lovecraft was without religion, he has the hyper-developed sense of the sacred found in the pious. (This is related to his revulsion regarding sea life and marine creatures, a form of cleanliness complex; these complexes often accompany a heightened sensitivity to the sacred.) Lovecraft experiences and conveys revulsion by describing a subject that defies taste or logic (as understood by the man knowledgeable about history and culture) in a manner that treats the subject as an obscene transgression, similar to desecration.

As in “The Call of Cthulhu”, “At the Mountains of Madness” (1931) describes the uncanny in terms of weird architecture and pure art, as well as strange creatures and a history of unimaginable magnitude. William Dyer is a geologist who takes part in an Antarctic exploration in the 1930s. He is one of the few survivors who can recount the discovery of an ancient city built by the Elder Things in previously unknown mountain range, erected in an era before the emergence of homo sapiens. As the city is abandoned, the characters have to piece together the history of the inhabitants by studying bas-reliefs on the walls.

“The prime decorative feature was the almost universal system of mural sculpture; which tended to run in continuous horizontal bands three feet wide and arranged from floor to ceiling in alternation with bands of equal width given over to geometrical arabesques. There were exceptions to this rule of arrangement, but its preponderance was overwhelming. Often, however, a series of smooth cartouches containing oddly patterned groups of dots would be sunk along one of the arabesque bands.
“The technique, we soon saw, was mature, accomplished, and aesthetically evolved to the highest degree of civilised mastery; though utterly alien in every detail to any known art tradition of the human race. In delicacy of execution no sculpture I have ever seen could approach it. The minutest details of elaborate vegetation, or of animal life, were rendered with astonishing vividness despite the bold scale of the carvings; whilst the conventional designs were marvels of skilful intricacy. The arabesques displayed a profound use of mathematical principles, and were made up of obscurely symmetrical curves and angles based on the quantity of five. The pictorial bands followed a highly formalised tradition, and involved a peculiar treatment of perspective; but had an artistic force that moved us profoundly notwithstanding the intervening gulf of vast geologic periods. Their method of design hinged on a singular juxtaposition of the cross-section with the two-dimensional silhouette, and embodied an analytical psychology beyond that of any known race of antiquity. It is useless to try to compare this art with any represented in our museums. Those who see our photographs will probably find its closest analogue in certain grotesque conceptions of the most daring futurists.”

Once again, Lovecraft reaches for the Futurists as a measure of stylistic complexity and strangeness. The mural contents not only provide narrative but also indicate the conditions of their production through fluctuations of style and quality. Later reliefs are distinctly inferior and indicate decline. “This new and degenerate work was coarse, bold, and wholly lacking in delicacy of detail. […] In nature it was wholly decorative and conventional; and consisted of crude spirals and angles roughly following the quintile mathematical tradition of the Old Ones, yet seeming more like a parody than a perpetuation of that tradition. We could not get it out of our minds that some subtly but profoundly alien element had been added to the aesthetic feeling behind the technique—an alien element, Danforth guessed, that was responsible for the manifestly laborious substitution. It was like, yet disturbingly unlike, what we had come to recognise as the Old Ones’ art; and I was persistently reminded of such hybrid things as the ungainly Palmyrene sculptures fashioned in the Roman manner.”

Here, Lovecraft posits a civilisation-wide decline of the Elder Things. The carvings are “aesthetically advanced” and move the characters, even though they find it impossible to frame in terms of human art. From an ascent to a high point, the carvings had later descended to a degraded phase, characterised by a culture of imitation and intellectual vacuity. The later generations have become deracinated and no longer match the greatness of their forebears. Indeed, they have forgotten the purpose and language of their ancestors’ murals. They have been polluted by an “alien” intrusion, which has hybridised the formerly noble Elder Things and made them insensible and incapable of reaching the level of their forebears. This conforms to the cyclical view of civilisation, most recently (in Lovecraft’s time) proposed by Oswald Spengler in his The Decline of the West (1918-22, trans. 1926).

Such is Lovecraft’s sense of taste that he displays repugnance towards for the degenerate later phase of the Elder Things by writing of a “blasphemous tunnel with the greasily smooth floors and the degenerate murals aping and mocking the things they had superseded”. We get a glimpse of the author’s attachment to proper form and respect for tradition, even though here it is a wholly alien and inhuman civilisation. This rejection of the hybridised or diluted culture is wholly in character with Lovecraft’s chauvinism and racism, as evident in his writings.

Lovecraft’s narrator mentions the dramatic landscape of the Antarctic as resembling the landscape paintings of Russian artist-adventurer Nicholas Roerich (1874-1947). Lovecraft references Roerich’s paintings of Tibet. Lovecraft was familiar with Roerich’s art due to seeing some paintings in New York. Roerich was in the USA 1920 to 1923 and in New York over 1924-5. Lovecraft himself lived in Brooklyn, New York from 1924 to 1926, which was when he saw some of Roerich’s paintings. Roerich’s images of steep Himalayan mountains, blue through atmospheric recession, have a severity and clarity that Lovecraft considers suitable for Antarctic mountains. The spiritual connotations of the beautiful landscapes would not have been lost on Lovecraft, even if he was primarily concerned to suggest to readers the height and coldness of the (fictional) Antarctic mountains. Roerich’s sense of wonder at the majestic expanses of isolated nature fit perfectly with Lovecraft’s incredible setting. Roerich’s Buddhist monasteries echo the ramparts and parapets among the mountains described in Lovecraft’s story. The role of architecture in Lovecraft’s writing will be a topic for a later article.

Lovecraft’s emphatic cleaving to the conception of discernment and refined sensibilities (both attributes of an aesthete and gentleman) made him finely attuned to distinctions within the field of aesthetics. Judging with informed taste and attentive eye could reveal cultural material to be couth or uncouth and readily comprehensible or grotesquely bizarre. Additionally, Lovecraft’s writing style relied upon the dense layering of his prose and the escalation of incredulity and repugnance; it effectively rested upon straining (and transgressing) the boundaries of the credible and comprehensible to achieve a supreme aesthetic effect. We can see that Lovecraft’s aesthetics has intellectual purpose as well as influence over his subjects and style, never more obviously so than when art itself makes an appearance in his fiction.

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