The episode poster for “Pickman’s Model,” which can be viewed on Netflix and probably other places, too.

Cameron has, at different times, talked about how cosmic horror and related genres work. More lately, we’ve been watching Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities, an anthology series featuring hour-long tales of terror from some of the leading lights of the horror genre, each introduced by del Toro himself. And it was while watching one such installment – perhaps obviously, it was “Pickman’s Model,” based on the Lovecraft story of the same name, and directed by Keith Thomas. It’s a pretty great episode and features Crispin Glover doing one of the weirder accents I’ve seen on television or, indeed, in general. But as we were watching it, Cameron remarked that there had to be some kind of theory of art being expressed there – how does art operate? What does it do?

So, you know – bet.

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It’s worth noting, before we get all the way in, that “theories of art” are offered in lieu of a definition that can’t be punctured immediately. Rather than drawing a line and putting things that are art on one side and things that are not art on the other, a theory of art allows for discussion of your various edge cases, Fontaines, and what have you.

It’s also worth noting that a genre as a whole – and there’s a string of words to fractally unpack – espousing the same theory of art is, uh, misguided at best. So, a little lit review: the pieces discussed here were selected more or less because of proximity and, with the exception of the Lovecraft, because I like them. Let’s see where it gets us.

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We begin with “Pickman’s Model,” the Lovecraft story that inspired the Cabinet of Curiosities episode that sparked this piece. In the story, one Thurber tells his friend Eliot about an experience Thurber had with their mutual acquaintance, the titular Pickman. Pickman, after some ranting, took Thurber to a house he’d rented, and once there, into the cellar, where Pickman maintained that he did his finest work. Thurber is frightened by the bad vibes and, eventually, some loud noises, and further horrified when he realizes that Pickman’s terrifying paintings are drawn from life, as evidenced by Thurber’s acquisition of a photograph of one of the beasties. It’s also worth noting, right off the bat, that Lovecraft manages to get a bunch of ethnic and racial stereotypes in there, and at least one ethnic slur, and it’s not a long story – it’d be almost impressive if it weren’t so fucking vile, and this one’s relatively tame for him.

That said, in “Pickman’s Model,” Lovecraft seems to be operating in something like a Decadent mode: by positioning the photograph as something as good as having seen the thing in real life – the photograph uncritically accepted as reality, and bearing with it the terror that befits such a thing being really real – Lovecraft’s Thurber is doing what Huysmans’ des Esseintes does in À rebours. By visiting a neighborhood of Paris crowded with English immigrants, des Esseintes’ desire to experience England is sated; it’s as good as having gone.

Uncritically accepting the photograph as proof of reality, as well as privileging Pickman’s apparently nigh-photorealistic technique, suggests that, for Lovecraft, the representation of something and the thing itself are functionally one and the same. Pickman, of course, as a man either beginning to “devolve” or emerged from the darkness, is simply representing the world as it actually is. Which is weird, considering – but Lovecraft here pushes back against modernity while also offering a vision of art and artwork that is notably anti-Modern.

But if Lovecraft is anti-Modern, Thomas Ligotti is irretrievably a creature of despairing postmodernism. In “The Troubles of Dr. Thoss,” he offers Alb Indys, an aphantasic, insomniac artist, lured into pursuit of the titular doctor in hopes of, “a doctor who would hear, really hear you.” Indys practices two kinds of drawings: the trappings of his bedroom, and what he terms “collaborations,” in which he copies images from old illustrations and collages them together. Just before the character’s fatal sleep, he finds an image he did not create, and then perishes at the doctor’s hands (or whatever).

Similarly, in “The Lost Art of Twilight,” a young recluse paints abstract twilights, only to have the sense of the holy hour ripped away from him by his extended family (who are vampires, and it’s kind of funny). For Ligotti, the art is fundamentally tied to the artist, who is often led tragically astray from his artistic pursuits by the horrors. The art is rarely displayed, but in both stories, it is spoken of with a tenderness that is vanishingly rare for Ligotti – he even allows this tenderness to his writers, which is rare among other writers, too – and its deterioration or derangement often prefigures the artist’s tragic fate. (Both stories are in this collection, and I strongly encourage its acquisition.)

In The City We Became, the first installment in N. K. Jemisin’s Great Cities duology, one of the opening salvos from the eldritch horrors comes in the form of a display pitch at the Bronx art space at which Bronca, one of the main characters, works. After being subjected to a number of puerile, hateful pieces that are also poorly executed, the coopted artists present a piece which, while leagues better in terms of technique, is rapidly revealed to be a psychic trap. Drawn in by the work’s execution – “A lot of Neo-Expressionism, but some of the grace of graffiti,” she notes, before comparing it to Basquiat – Bronca escapes the devouring painting only because her friends call out to her. It’s only then that she recognizes that the painting’s title is a reference to one of Lovecraft’s more notably racist works, and expels the pseudo-artists from the gallery.

For our purposes, though, a key part of the scene involves Bronca’s recognition that none of the men presenting their work to her could have created such a piece: their other works show that their technical abilities are not equal to the task. As bad as the work’s intention is – and its purpose is less be an art piece and more be a magical attack – its execution is beyond the prowess of its creator’s minions, and must have been made by someone, or something, else.

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There’s something there – something in the use of representational art works and artists in a genre virtually defined by the unrepresentable quality of its subjects – but where are we? A genre that shies from representation (the tentacles are less frightening than a wet, writhing glint you almost miss, after all); some varying approaches to the role (or, in Jemisin’s case, lack thereof) of the artist; ekphrastic modes that shy from real analysis, describing – or not describing – the art works in question in much the same way that they describe or do not describe the horrors (which is fair, but come on). If, as Cameron has argued, one of the defining features of cosmic horror is individual disempowerment, what do we do with the individually-created art work?

Lovecraft’s artist is a symptom of a world going directly to hell; Ligotti’s artist is, like roughly fifty percent of Ligotti’s protagonists, helpless in the face of malign forces (the other fifty percent are big fans of the malign forces and want to help them get a leg up); the “artists” in Jemisin’s novel are mere agents of the monstrous hand that made the work.

But, as William Gaddis says in a book I haven’t read, “What's any artist, but the dregs of his work?” What about the art, then, in these stories? As discussed, Pickman practices what sounds to me at least like photorealism, or something very like it, in depicting his horrors. The narrator of “Lost Art…” acknowledges that he paints abstractly, but equally acknowledges that this is capture some sense of a Platonic-ideal twilight; “Dr. Thoss”’s eventual victim does not have visual imagination, but instead uses observation and imitation to realize his artistic drives. The art work in The City We Became is described as almost fractal in its construction, but nonetheless features humanish figures trudging through a nightmare city. In all cases, the artists in question are wedded to representation: they are portraying something, depicting something in the most fundamental sense of the term.

Look, I wanted one more image, so here’s Durer’s *Melencolia I*. Also the floating legend bearing only the word “melencolia” feels a propos somehow. Via Wikipedia.

As mentioned above, to suggest that the genre as a whole accepts a theory of art is a bigger stretch than I’m willing to make, but I think it is worth noting how frequently cosmic horror hinges on a single work of representational visual art. While slightly less common than the found manuscript as an inciting incident for the plot, a painting, or an artist’s oeuvre, is nonetheless common to many works. And while the genre hinges on things that cannot be represented, whether in word or image, those things can nonetheless be seen.

And it’s this, I think, that’s the real key here: what cannot be represented or displayed or described can nonetheless be seen – and the problem with seeing is that looking at things offers them, if they are alive, the opportunity to look back. That’s always been the terror of the portrait, of the representation, isn’t it? The painted eyes look back at you, no longer merely represented, but, themselves, looking at and into you, a spark of disturbing liveliness in every zinc-white stroke.

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A Painting of Lot's Wife and She's Looking at You: Artworks in Cosmic Horror