Artists are generally carefree, of sunny disposition, rarely given to dark or macabre thoughts. I don’t know if you knew that. But a few of them, at least, have created these fantastic images of ghosts found in the MIA collections. Some are more stereotypically Halloweeny than you’d expect to find in an art museum, others take an unusual twist. What they get up to in the vaults we’ll never know.
Richard Holzschuh’s drawing inserts a kind of normalcy–it’s daytime, no one’s up to anything spooky–into a typical graveyard scene.
This classic townspeople chase scene by Pierre-Félix Wiesener, circa 1850, was an illustration for Gottfried Burger’s ballad ‘”Lenore.”
This Japanese color woodblock print from the mid-19th century is called “Two Ghosts from the Famous Ghosts Series”–and there are a lot of famous ghosts in Japan.
“The Lantern Ghost, Iwa,” a color woodblock print from 1831 or ’32.
Katsushika Hokusai
(Japan, Asia), c. 1831-1832
Another Richard Holzschuh drawing, called “Disconsolate Ghost (no one in the village was scared of him).” Poor guy.