John McDonald Art critic
With COVID-19 rampaging its way across the globe, it is timely to look back at the Spanish flu of 1918-20.
In Pale Rider (2017), a compelling history of that earlier pandemic, Laura Spinney writes: “Between the first case recorded on March 4, 1918, and the last sometime in March 1920, it killed 50-100 million, or between 2.5 and 5 per cent of the global population – a range that reflects the uncertainty that still surrounds it.”
Harold Gilman's Tea in the Bedsitter (1916).
In trying to prevent a repeat of such horrors, we have resigned ourselves to an extended public health crisis and an economic black hole. The alternative, as shown by the outbreak of 1918-20, is so unthinkable that even those who lived through this period seem to have struggled to accept the scale of the disaster.
In October 1918, Australia showed great prescience in introducing quarantine measures that forestalled the second lethal wave of the virus, allowing us to celebrate the November armistice without risk of infection. Pleased with this success, authorities lifted the protections too soon, allowing in a third wave which cost 12,000 lives. Could history be repeating itself?
To forget the past is to risk making the same mistakes, but for one of the greatest human tragedies of all time, the Spanish flu has left a remarkably small cultural imprint. One obvious reason is that it overlapped the collective trauma of World War I. We are urged to never forget that man-made bloodbath, but the flu became unthinkable almost as soon as it was over.
Among artists, writers and composers, the pandemic’s two most famous strikes came in Vienna. Gustav Klimt, whose works rank among Austria’s major tourist attractions, died at the age of 55 in February 1918 after suffering a stroke and catching pneumonia in hospital. He is now thought to be an early victim of the virus, but this can’t be verified.
Gustav Klimt’s 1908 painting, The Kiss.CREDIT:ALAMY
Klimt was visited in the morgue by his young admirer, Egon Schiele, who made sketches of his friend’s exhausted face. By October that year, Schiele’s wife, Edith, who was six months’ pregnant with the couple’s first child, had caught the flu. She died on October 28. Her husband would follow three days later, aged only 28.
Their deaths are commemorated in Schiele’s painting The Family, which he had shown at the Secession show earlier that year. It depicts the artist, naked, skinny and jaundiced, sitting behind Edith, his “good angel”, who looks much healthier, displaying the serenity of a nude Madonna. The model for their own never-to-be-born child was Schiele’s nephew, Toni.
Although Schiele was known for his provocative, erotic works, The Family is an exceptionally tender painting. It marks the artist’s embrace of domestic stability as he bids farewell to the turbulent, bohemian existence for which he had become notorious. Because of his untimely death, we’ll never know if he would have actually settled down, instead of remaining fixed forever as a wild child of the fin de siecle.
Other notable casualties of the flu included British painter Harold Gilman (1876-1919) and young Portuguese modernist Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso (1887-1918). Both had promising careers cut short.
Gilman, having fought his way clear of the dun-coloured influence of his mentor, Walter Sickert, had fallen under the spell of Van Gogh and begun painting with a bright, post-impressionist palette. In the work he was producing at the time of his death, we see an Englishman with a feel for colour unmatched by any of his contemporaries. In Gilman’s hands, a staid subject such as Tea in the bedsitter (1916) becomes an orgy of blue and red.
As for Souza-Cardoso, a Parisian friend of Gertrude Stein, Modigliani and the Delaunays, he was a prolific painter in a range of styles. After his death at the age of 30, he seems to have been remembered only in his native Portugal, but in 2016, the French celebrated his rediscovery with a retrospective at the Grand Palais. The busy surfaces of paintings such as Pintura or Entrada (both 1917) suggest an artist of abundant energy willing to experiment with the cubist, futurist and abstract tendencies emerging around him.
Perhaps the most famous artist who contracted the illness and survived was Edvard Munch. In Self-portrait with the Spanish flu
Self Portrait with the Spanish Flu by Edvard Munch.
(1919), one of several pictures on this theme, he shows himself in a dressing gown, slumped in an armchair by an unmade bed.
Munch thought the end had come but managed to resist the shadow of death that had haunted him since childhood. His most recent biographer, Sue Prideaux, imagines the artist sitting in his chair like a king on his throne, abandoned by all his habitual ghosts and visions. Munch’s neurotic youth had given way to a stoical middle age. He would live on for another 24 years, dying in 1944 at the age of 80.
The greatest loss to Australian art was Ruby Lindsay, one of the more appealing members of that notable family of artists. Although never as famous as her brother Norman, Ruby was no slouch, being the first woman in Australia to work as a full-time illustrator and graphic artist. In 1909, she married Will Dyson, the legendary black-and-white artist, and the couple departed for London. It was there that she caught the virus and died on March 12, 1919, aged 33.
Ruby had shown tremendous determination to succeed in a male-dominated profession and carve out a career for herself in England. The virus, however, was as indifferent to this promising tale of female achievement as it was to the potential of artists such as Gilman or Souza-Cardoso, or indeed the young American modernist, Morton Schamberg, who died of the flu in October 1918 in Philadelphia.
The pandemic also accounted for composer Hubert Parry, best known for Jerusalem, his memorable setting of William Blake’s poem. Bela Bartok survived, but was left with a severe ear infection that made him fearful of ending up as history’s second-most-famous deaf composer.
Among writers, the virus didn’t discriminate between literary genres, taking out avant-garde poet Guillaume Apollinaire and playwright Edmond Rostand, author of the immensely successful Cyrano de Bergerac. Among survivors, neither Raymond Chandler nor Franz Kafka felt compelled to write about the flu. It was left to Katherine Anne Porter to produce the best fictionalised account of the illness in her novella Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939).
Porter was 28 when she caught the flu in Denver. Her black hair fell out and grew back white. One of the most striking symptoms she describes is an impaired colour vision: “It was in itself a melancholy wonder to see the colourless sunlight slanting on the snow under a sky drained of its blue.” It may be worth noting that the word “melancholy” appears six times in a story of roughly 90 pages, a testament to the depressive force of the virus.
Porter’s story paints a far more evocative picture of the Spanish flu than anything produced by an artist. When she writes “the body is a curious monster, no place to live in, how could anyone feel at home there?” she shows how mere existence has become a burden of pain.
It may be impossible to understand another person’s pain but it’s no less difficult to convey the experience of severe illness in a work of art. Of the painters who recovered from the flu, only Munch paused for reflection. Did the mind-boggling scale of the pandemic, joined with the carnage of war, make it too daunting or depressing a subject for most artists? It would have required a Pieter Bruegel to paint another Triumph of Death, but Bruegels were scarce in 1919.
Artistically, the years 1918-20 feel like a massive anti-climax — a return to earth after the feverish balloon ride of the Belle Epoque. As the virus subsided, the party would start again, but nobody wanted to think about the ordeal so recently concluded. The dance of death was over and it was time for the Charleston.
John McDonald is an art critic and regular columnist with Good Weekend.
