Fuseli at the Courtauld

Although getting to London yesterday was more problematic than usual, requiring catching the train at Woking rather than anywhere further down the line, I made the journey so I could visit the Fuseli show at the Courtauld along with Ms Mauritia. Henry Fuseli has a relationship with the Gothic tradition especially via the various versions he painted of The Nightmare, but also his treatments of scenes from Shakespeare, and other fantasies - including his fantasy women, who are on display in this exhibition. In fact, they are not complete fantasies, but I'll come to that.

I was already familiar with most of the images, but hadn't seen them in the flesh before, and gathering them together creates a slight sense of oppression as Fuseli obsessively repeats poses and ideas, using swirly dress to experiment with form and movement. He hardly ever drew from life: the story went that he would mark a paper with four random dots and use them to dispose the limbs of his figures. Many of his subjects are (imagined) sex workers, but far more erotic and striking than the exposed breast or six is what seems to be the main object of the artist's obsessive interest, hair. During the earlier part of Fuseli's life, wealthy women did indeed have towering hairstyles, but he creates weird, geometric and elaborate shapes for his figures to wear, curls, fringes, sculptured structures, decorated with beads and papers, which must often, surely, be completely unreal. Ms Mauritia remembered the 20th-century fetish artist John Willie who drew women in impossible high heels - another way of simultaneously depicting women as powerful while defusing that power with disabling dress, shoes you can't walk in, or hairstyles you can't move without disarraying. 

But the ladies in this show aren't entirely unreal. Gazing from many drawings, the dramatic features of Fuseli's wife Sophia are unmistakable even when she's not acknowledged as the model. Her hair is the most fantastic of all, but she, the young English model who became the artist's spouse, is real enough, and there's something very odd going on psychologically in the way her husband depicts her: he adores her and fears the fact he does. He shows her next to a head of the Medusa; he draws her making the corna gesture that signals cuckoldry. What kind of a person was she? Of course you get no clues from this art: Fuseli wasn't interested in showing real people, just moments from his own imagination. She's supposed to have had quite a temper, but perhaps that was just from being married to him.