Cthulu and Woody Allen walk through New York’s Central Park and discuss H.P. Lovecraft’s novella Pickman’s Model.

Woody: I mean, it’s art, it’s about an artist and his inspirations and what he sees and observed, so what if it’s ghoulish and murky.

Cthulhu: But don’t you think the subject matter is too dark?

Woody: What are you kidding me, dark? It’s H.P. Lovecraft, readers know what’s coming, it’s ordering Thai take out, and you know it’s spicy, right?

Cthulhu: Sure, they know it’s Lovecraft, but I mean an artist who produces occultist art can be a little, shall we say disconcerting for most viewers. I mean, death and destruction, it’s a lot for a person of today’s reading tastes.

Woody: I'm not afraid of death; I just don't want to be there when it happens.

Cthulhu: But don’t you think that Pickman’s Model, with a subject artist who paints pictures of ghoulish, otherworldly subjects is too much?

Woody: Too much? My therapist bill is too much, we’re talking about a short story here, a short story that a reader is going to be ready for. OK, when someone picks up a Lovecraft story, don’t you think they know what they’re getting into, I mean, no disrespect, but look at you, Great Cthulhu, with the tentacles and the flowing robes, you’re, I mean, you know, you’re very majestic, in a dark and creepy sort of way. No offense.

Cthulhu: None taken.

Woody: But don’t you think there was an absence of sex in Pickman’s Model? I mean, it was about an artist’s model and when I think of an artist’s model, I think of sex.

Cthulhu: Sex in Pickman’s Model? Woody, are you insane? His model was some kind of demon. That’s, I don’t know, that’s perverse, don’t you think?

Woody: Is sex dirty? Only when it's being done right.

Cthulhu: That’s funny, but don’t you think that in Pickman’s Model, you had more going on than dirty, perverse sex? I mean, there is an artist who is mesmerized by devilish images.

Woody: Sex is the most fun you can have without laughing.

Cthulhu: Ok, but what do you think was Lovecraft’s central theme in Pickman’s Model? And you can’t tell me it was sex. Was he trying to talk about the meaning of life and how dark it can be, outside of conventional mores and cultural norms?

Woody: I feel that life is divided into the horrible and the miserable. That's the two categories. The horrible are , I don't know, terminal cases, you know, and blind people, crippled. I don't know how they get through life. It's amazing to me. And the miserable is everyone else. So you should be thankful that you're miserable, because that's very lucky, to be miserable.

Cthulhu: But that’s terrible! Don’t you think that Lovecraft was on to more than that, was he considering the immortal? I mean, isn’t that a part of art, to create and thus become the immortal?

Woody: I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don't want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.

Cthulhu: Well, OK, I see your point, but I just feel that Lovecraft, especially in Pickman’s Model was searching for more than just a cheap, pulp thrill, I think he was suggesting more. Maybe he was onto some great philosophy, that art imitates life or that life suggests death, something more.

Woody: I took a test in Existentialism. I left all the answers blank and got 100.

123 s1 comment Glenn Russell1,427 12.4k



"The madness and monstrosity lay in the figures in the foreground—for Pickman’s morbid art was preëminently one of daemoniac portraiture. These figures were seldom completely human, but often approached humanity in varying degree. Most of the bodies, while roughly bipedal, had a forward slumping, and a vaguely canine cast. The texture of the majority was a kind of unpleasant rubberiness. Ugh!"

As authors Honoré de Balzac and Guy du Maupassant knew very well, a frame story, that is, a story within a story, can be an extraordinarily effective literary technique to heighten the drama and suspense of an otherwise memorable tale.

We encounter such a frame story in H.P. Lovecraft’s Pickman’s Model, a harrowing yarn about an artist and his diabolical art. Written in 1926, the tale’s narrator, Thurber, a Bostonian gentleman and art connoisseur, speaks of the paintings and drawings of artist Pickman in ways that anticipate how many modern artists employ graphics and digital technology to create their own dark worlds of horror and terror.

We join Thurber and his chum Elliot as the two men share an intimate evening over drinks and coffee. Both men have a keen interest in art and thereupon Thurber relates his last strange meeting with artist Pickman.

Right from the outset there’s a strong sense of foreboding and unease when Thurber tells how, after encountering the paintings and sketches and other mysterious events in Pickman’s hidden cellar studio, he’s lucky to be sane at all. Not only that, after such a traumatic, gut-wrenching, agonizing episode, Thurber neither knows nor cares what ever happened to his onetime friend, an inspired artist to be sure, but a creature he knows not be he human or non-human.

It all begins the night Pickman invites Thurber the gentleman art lover to his special studio in the slums of Boston’s North End, a locale, he confides, not without its dark, disturbing histories, dwellings and streets soaked in the macabre and past horrors, miles away from well-to-do neighborhoods, much better suited for the more recent style of ingenious work he has been moved to fashion. Ah, the importance location and atmosphere have for an artist’s studio - we hear echoes of the magic contained in certain Paris garrets and flats as detailed in Honoré de Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece.

Then, with a voice rattling with anxiety, Thurber alludes to how Pickman shared a sampling of his latest art and aesthetic theories along with speculations of a decidedly philosophical nature, such concepts and formulae “wild enough to qualify him for the Danvers asylum.” Cause for any levelheaded art lover to panic – not only is he in the company of a superb painter but an artist who in all lihood happens to be a madman.

H.P. Lovecraft draws on the longstanding tradition of romanticism - genuine artistic creation inextricably linked to madness, far distant from even the vaguest sniff of a conventional or humdrum mindset. And, as fans of the author have come to appreciate, Lovecraft takes such madness to the furthest extremes of terror.

To underline Thurber’s shock and alarm, his disgust and repugnance, when he finally takes a gander at Pickman’s new art, we come upon this revealing line: “Gad, I wouldn’t be alive if I’d ever seen what that man—if he was a man—saw!”

One of the things I love about this Lovecraft story is the fact that it is just that, a story – the manner in which the drawings and paintings are described leaves much room for a reader’s imagination; we can fill all the artist’s canvases and papers with creatures of our own devising – for myself, I envisioned hordes of diabolical, ghastly creatures crawling out of Hieronymus Bosch hell realms to fill modernistic science fiction landscapes. Thus, I can appreciate Thurber's widemouthed reaction in the above illustration.

“That nauseous wizard had waked the fires of hell in pigment, and his brush had been a nightmare-spawning wand.” Tell it it is, Thurber! Is it any wonder at this point our narrator asks Eliot to pass the decanter so he can take another swig of liquor. With Pickman the artist and Pickman the man (or non-human, perhaps), we are as far removed from a Sunday painter as possible. I’m with Pickman and Thurber – such art will not be exhibited on the wall of a respectable art gallery hosting a lady's tea.

But in any case, we have seen in our mind’s eye the work of an artist who defies all boundaries of sanity, an artist who can inspire us to expand our vision in unique ways so we are better postured to fuse our imagination with not only his art but also the wider spectrum of H.P. Lovecraft's literary artistry. Hold on there, Mr. Reviewer! Is it possible for a fictional character to so empower an author's audience? I myself see no reason why not.

Can it get darker and deadlier? Yes, it most certainly can, since, after all, this is H.P. Lovecraft. Finally, Thurber comes upon a depiction of this unforgettable creature: “It was a colossal and nameless blasphemy with glaring red eyes, and it held in bony claws a thing that had been a man, gnawing at the head as a child nibbles at a stick of candy. Its position was a kind of crouch, and as one looked one felt that at any moment it might drop its present prey and seek a juicier morsel.”

How could an artist’s mind travel down into horrifyingly ghoulish, morbid psychic tunnels? What does it take for a creator to trek through unspeakable, insane territories such that he can string together concatenations of vision and imagination that breathe life into such a creature? To find out where all this hair-raising art leads, take a deep breath and read the story for yourself.

Link to the complete story, Pickman's Model by H.P. Lovecraft: http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/t...


"Well, I should say that the really weird artist has a kind of vision which makes models, or summons up what amounts to actual scenes from the spectral world he lives in."
- H.P. Lovecraft, Pickman's Model104 s Sandra711 6

Short story, narrated by main character Thurber, who tells his friend Eliot why he dropped an artist he admired named Pickman. It seems Pickman fell out of favor with society after he created some extremely gruesome paintings. But Thurber still remained fascinated, until the day Pickman took him to his “secret place” where he has been working on his latest paintings…

A really creepy, atmospheric, and riveting tale.horror kb short-story96 s Peter3,315 560

In my opinion this is one of Lovecraft's creepiest stories. Thurber talks about Pickman, an exceptional artist of nightmarish works in the style of Goya or Fuseli ('Ghouls Feeding' is one of Pickman's latest works). Pickman invited him to his studios and show him incredible works in the cellar where tunnels lead to cemeteries, hills and to the sea. Pickman also has family ties to a witch who was hanged generation ago on Gallows Hill in Salem. Now Pickman is missing. What was exactly depicted on his paintings and what made them look so real? Here you really walk into a disturbing world full of monsters and uncanny pictures. Here you get shivers down your spine. This is the eerie stuff. Absolutely recommended!horror89 s Jamie287 137

Eh, this story was fine. It's not my favorite Lovecraft but it's not terrible either. I think maybe it just didn't age well – the narrator is completely freaked out over some realistic-looking scary paintings, which is hard to imagine when we see uber realistic monsters on the television every day. I mean, can you imagine screaming over the unveiling of a painting, even the creepiest painting in existence? Yeah, me neither. It's definitely an atmospheric and unsettling tale, though, and I enjoyed the twist at the end even if it was fairly apparent that it was coming. 3.4 stars, rounded down.audiobooks fiction87 s4 comments Cecily1,195 4,589

This little horror from the middle of the roaring twenties is not about plot (there isn’t much, and the ending is obvious), but about atmosphere.

The narrator descends to a metaphorical and possibly literal netherworld that wasn’t “merely made, but actually grew”.
“It isn’t so very far from the elevated as distance goes, but it’s centuries away as the soul goes.”

Lovecraft carefully ramps up unease at the unknown. As the light dims, darkness dawns. Realisation dawns too: ghastly, rather than ghostly.


Image: “Insight into Hell 3” by Hieronymus Bosch, c1500 (Source.)

“Only a real artist knows the actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of fear… It’s my business to catch the overtones of the soul.”

Setting a horror story in the context of Bostonian artists creates an excellent disconnect that Lovecraft milks an expert but sadistic dairymaid.

“The awful, the blasphemous horror, and the unbelievable loathsomeness and moral foetor came from simple touches quite beyond the power of words to classify… I never elsewhere saw the actual breath of life so fused into a canvas.”

More

I think this was my first taste of Lovecraft’s macabre world. “” is not quite the right word, but it’s excellent - thanks, Apatt.

You can read the story, free, HERE.

I read it in parallel with Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell Tale Heart (see my review HERE), which also opens with an anonymous narrator declaring their sanity.

Several authors and artists came to mind as I read it, though it’s not much any of them:

* Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray from 1891.
* Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein from 1818.
* Dorothy L Sayers' short story The Unsolved Puzzle of the Man with No Face, published in 1928, the year after this! (see my review of it in an anthology of mysteries HERE).
* China Mieville’s The City and The City (see my review HERE).* Lucian Freud, which is most unfair, as his portraits are not really grotesque (though rarely flattering), but I had recently been to an exhibition of his works.
* Hieronymus Bosch.

See also “uncanny valley”: entities (monsters, robots, conversations) that are almost indistinguishable from real humans are far more unsettling than ones that are clearly not human.fantasy-faeries-magic horror short-stories-and-novellas63 s2 comments Steven Serpens48 32

Richard Upton Pickman es un talentosísimo pintor, que carga con una peculiar fama entre su círculo artístico. Sin embargo, esta notoriedad se debe a la gran aversión que él suele causar, ya que sus pinturas son conocidas por ser una oda a lo mórbido, inhumano y grotesco. Gracias a Thurber, quien es el narrador de este título y última persona en tener contacto con el desaparecido Pickman, podremos conocer más detalles y pistas sobre este artista de lo repulsivo; y así comenzar a desentrañar, teorizar y vislumbrar cuál pueden ser los misterios que ocultan sus lienzos y su posterior e hipotético destino.

Primero que todo, debo dejar en claro que no leía a Lovecraft desde hace un par de años, y sigue tal cual como lo recordaba. Acá se nos presenta una historia bastante atrapante e interesante, y en cierto grado, también es ambiental y algo sugestiva. Si bien es una lectura que fluye ágilmente, el cómo se desarrolla El modelo de Pickman y su narrativa son bastante simples y sin más: una conversación en la que Thurber narra su experiencia con Pickman, ya que estuvo en su principal estudio y conoció algunas obras inéditas. Eso es todo. Un concepto bastante sencillo, pero efectivo.

Antes de comenzar esta lectura, creía que El retrato oval podía haber sido una inspiración para este relato (y a lo mejor lo es), ya que me esperaba una similitud considerable entre ambos títulos, pero no. Ambas son historias con planteamientos muy diferentes, que solo coinciden en la presencia de un pintor. Eso sí, es innegable la influencia de Poe como autor en Lovecraft y eso se nota en esta obra; aunque esta vez eso se demuestra sin caer en la densidad, el avasallamiento, el barroquismo y embellecimiento de las palabras que suelen caracterizar sobremanera a este otro maestro que le heredó tales cualidades al presente.
Se nota el aire y para bien, no obstante, me adelanté y me puse a hablar sobre Poe antes de tiempo…

Por otra parte, quiero destacar al autor, ya que se pone basado y le da un claro mensaje a la generación de cristal, de forma totalmente aplicable a nuestros tiempos: ‘’Hoy, en cambio, las mentes se han aguado tanto que incluso un club de pretendidos artistas se asusta y conmociona si un cuadro traspone los sentimientos que pudo experimentar un feriante de la calle Beacon en la mesa de t钒. Mensaje sublime, con décadas de anticipación para la chaviza de hoy en día.
A esto también hay que sumarle su ya conocido racismo, que en esta oportunidad se refleja en indicar que ‘’los morenos no saben nada’’. Yo personalmente, no tengo absolutamente ningún problema con esto y separo la obra de su autor con total normalidad, pero sé que muchos no pueden hacer eso y se ofenderán por culpa del gran Lovecraft y eso me parece ¡fascinante!
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