Rx 41 / The Masque — Rx/Museum

May 9

May 9 Rx 41 / The Masque

Charles Demuth, The Masque of the Red Death, c. 1918. Courtesy of Barnes Foundation. — Charles Demuth, *The Masque of the Red Death*, c. 1918. Courtesy of Barnes Foundation.

“It was toward the close of the fifth or sixth month of his seclusion, and while the pestilence raged most furiously abroad, that the Prince Prospero entertained his thousand friends at a masked ball of the most unusual magnificence.”
— Edgar Allen Poe, “The Masque of the Red Death.”

In this unfolding scene of chaos, an unwelcome guest intrudes. Set against an ominous black back- ground, crimson stained glass windows portend an ill-fated fête. Foreshadowed by inauspicious facial lesions at bottom right, figures that were carousing moments ago acrobatically contort in agony. As the ebony clock at top left tolls midnight, the cloaked figure of the Red Death emerges, herald- ing the revelers’ sudden demise.

American watercolorist Charles Demuth often painted interpretations of literary scenes, such as this painting. Produced during the 1918 Spanish Influenza, it depicts Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, “The Masque of the Red Death,” in which a prince holds extravagant balls for his inner circle who are left untouched by a plague that “raged most furiously” among the rest of the population. Demuth captures the final scene in the story, when the revelers find that the costumed performer dressed as the Red Death is in fact an incarnation of the plague itself:

And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revelers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.

Raised in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Demuth was afflicted by Perthes disease, a rare childhood disorder affecting the hip joints. Confined to the home for much of his childhood, he took up watercolor painting, with much of his oeuvre focused on performance and acrobatics—movement which his disability prevented him from engaging. He went on to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA) and made several study trips to Paris. In Philadelphia, he developed close friendships with Albert Barnes and physician-poet William Carlos Williams, then a medical student at the University of Pennsylvania. As Michael Brenson has written of the poet-painter friendship,“the interest that each had in the other was partly the interest he had in crossing artistic boundaries.” Both men worked at the intersection of the visual and the literary—whereas Demuth illustrated books and painted theatrical scenes, Williams viewed his writing as a kind of painting itself.

REFLECTIONS…

Demuth’s milieu was influenced by interdisciplinary relationships, such as those with Barnes and Williams, in which one translated his knowledge to the benefit of the others. Barnes advised Demuth on his illnesses and purchased several of his watercolors, forty-four of which remain in the collection of the Barnes Foundation. The three men moved fluidly between their respective disciplines of visual arts, poetry, and medicine, and Demuth’s friendships with Barnes and Williams offered him insight into his artistic practice, health, and livelihood. How can cross-disciplinary relationships engender identity formation and innovation that may not have been otherwise realized? How can institutions intentionally seek to foster these generative, translational relationships?

Just as Demuth learned from his contemporaries, he and many other Modernists also derived inspiration from Poe’s work. In the early twentieth century, Poe’s 1842 “Masque” offered both a stylistic model for writers and a cautionary tale from pandemics past. Demuth understood the parable not merely as a subject for representation, but a prescient perspective during his own pandemic. In Demuth and Poe’s work, we see human irrationality coming into tension with scientific rationality. How can a historical figure such as a writer or artist help us to negotiate challenges of contemporary life, as Poe did for Demuth, and perhaps Demuth can do for us? As the irrationalities and inequities of pandemics past persist, how can we be more attentive to history, and the history of suffering, as conveyed through the arts and humanities? How can contemporaneous engagement with the arts reveal fundamental truths about human nature and help us navigate the suffering that emerges?

Demuth’s Masque of the Red Death performs a number of translations. First, an epidemiological phenomenon is transformed into Poe’s allegorical work of literature; then, nearly a century later, that work of literature becomes a painting. Perhaps furthering this process, a contemporary viewer will doubtlessly translate the painting to their own experience, recognizing its parallel to the current COVID-19 pandemic. The Masque of the Red Death is a visual representation of the ways in which a plague, even if it may appear to not touch certain circles initially, can be an unpredictable equalizer of all human beings. It infiltrates. It spreads, like watercolor across canvas. Similarly, COVID-19, which has been taken more lightly by some than others, may ultimately come to affect all of us with as much force and devastation, before it ends. How can representations of pestilence such as The Masque of the Red Death convey the universality of the pandemic experience, no matter how different the context and demographics of those portrayals may be?

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, people have been impacted to varying degrees, with certain groups more vulnerable than others (e.g., the poor, the elderly, and those without access to healthcare). Compassion can help us understand the suffering of others. As Sandro Galea, MD, writes in The Lancet:

Compassion extends beyond empathy. It does not motivate our action because we may too be harmed. Compassion motivates action because the phenomena we observe are unjust . . . and pushes us to understand how we have structured the world, and to ask how we can structure it better, not because we may suffer but because others are suffering and that is not how the world should be. . . . Would our approach to COVID- 19 have been different were we accustomed to seeing health through the lens of compassion?

Demuth similarly visualizes the differential impact of pandemics, and the crises of empathy they can engender. How can compassion motivate us to uphold the social contract and support others?

sources

Carnduff Ritchie, A. (1950). Charles Demuth. New York, NY: The Museum of Modern Art.

Dolkart, J, Lucy, M. (2012). The Barnes Foundation: Masterworks. New York, NY and Philadelphia, PA: Skira Rizzoli and the Barnes Foundation.

Galea S. Compassion in a time of COVID-19. Lancet. 2020;395(10241):1897-1898. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(20)31202-2.

Phillips, Maya. The Rich Can't Hide from a PLAGUE. Just Ask Edgar Allan Poe. 26 Mar. 2020, slate.com/culture/2020/03/edgar-allan-poes-masque-of-the-red-death-is-an-allegory-for-the-age-of-coronavirus.html.

Poe, Edgar A, Basil Rathbone, and Howard Sackler. The Masque of the Red Death, and Other Poems and Tales of Edgar Allan Poe. New York, NY: Caedmon, 1988.