Disease, Morbidity, and the Dark Feminine

The author analyses the oeuvre of the German expressionist painter Gabriel von Max to trace 19th century imaging practices in European visual art. Von Max’s paintings operate on several registers, dealing with themes of venereal and tubercular contagion, spiritualism, and feminine containment. Deploying the foundational texts of Edmond Burke, Julia Kristeva, Mary Douglas, Elizabeth Bronfen, Lynda Nead, and others, the author constructs a new framework for viewing and understanding images that picture female occult practitioners. Using such art-historical and critical theory, along with comparisons with von Max’s contemporaries (artists such as Felicien Rops and Albert von Keller), the author examines how the feminine body was a locus of multivalent anxieties throughout the long nineteenth century, and suggests that the occult subject, as pictured by von Max, contains the potential to circumvent the traditional punitive function that visual art exercises against the non-normative female subject