Hey, Moon: Lunar Art Through the Ages
Tags: Moon, Art, Painting, History, Visual Art

Hey, Moon: Lunar Art Through the Ages

50 years ago this month, human beings first set foot on the Earth’s moon. To mark the occasion, MutualArt looks back on the moon’s presence and significance in art throughout history

Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night (1889)

Some time in the 2nd Century AD, the Greek-Assyrian author, Lucian of Samosata, wrote what is widely considered to be the first science fiction novel. Lucian was an excoriating satirist, and A True Story was intended to skewer the Classics, denouncing storytellers like Homer for presenting fantastical events as though they were factual. In the ironically titled book, Lucian tells of his travels to strange islands with rivers of wine and anthropomorphic tree-women, sending up the exploits of Heracles and Odysseus.

The events are tweaked to seem ridiculous, but the opening episodes are recognizable fair for a gung-ho hero. But then, in Lucian’s narrative, something happens which is entirely unprecedented in the human imagination up until that point: the travellers are caught up in a whirlwind, and journey to the moon.

It’s by far the earliest known story to include such things as interplanetary travel, alien creatures, and space warfare. As so often proves the case throughout the history of art, philosophy, literature, and even science (we should all remember that Schrödinger was trying to ridicule, not explain, quantum theory with his cat-in-a-box), the impulse to exaggerate in order to satirize prompted leaps of imagination and faith, which changed the actual fabric of the human experience. Thanks to Lucian, as lucid as he was ludicrous, space travel had been invented.

Illustration by Aubrey Beardsley from 1894 edition of Lucian’s book

Lucian’s moon is populated by threatening creatures and armies of hybrid lifeforms engaging in colonial warfare between planets. Though it is an unforgiving environment, Lucian was unique in his time in imagining the moon as a ‘destination.’ Broadly speaking, until the most recent stages of human history, the moon was an inherent symbol of an unreachable unknown, the lord and herald of night — which meant cold, darkness, danger and, in the quiet oblivion of sleep, an intimation of mortality.

In Western art the moon as a symbol has developed interestingly. In the 18th century, an artist like Goya took it to be the guiding light of ‘the other,’ the celestial ceiling under which supernatural entities took form and thrived. Witches’ Sabbath (1789) depicts a horned devil-goat, garlanded and attended upon by a coven of witches. Perhaps one figure is offering an infant for sacrifice. A curve of bats swoops beneath the blasted light of the crescent moon.

Francisco de Goya, Witches’ Sabbath (1789)

However, for an artist who has elsewhere so forcefully and directly communicated horror (see, of course, Saturn Devouring His Son (1819–1823)), Goya is curiously non-judgemental in this image. Indeed, the horrifying picture of Saturn was painted alongside another of the Black Paintings which shows a similar subject matter to Witches’ Sabbath, a horned goat and a crowd of followers. The later painting is more ominous and complex, the devil’s back turned to us and the faces invisible. The earlier picture is granted a strange attractiveness precisely because it includes something the Black Painting doesn’t: the moon.

In his later, more successful depiction of cultish horror and the inner human turmoil it can represent, Goya recognised that he needed to remove the moon. Even when operating as a symbol of darkness, it seems, the moon can’t help but imbue an atmosphere of yearning and wonder.

Caspar David Friedrich, Two Men Contemplating the Moon (1819)

In Berlin, 1975, the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett stood before a large painting. Alongside him was the theatre critic, Ruby Cohn. After the two figures had contemplated the canvas a while, Beckett said, referencing his own famous 1953 play, “This was the source of Waiting for Godot, you know.”

The painting, according to Cohn, was Caspar David Friedrich’s Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon (c.1824). It is more likely to have been the earlier canvas, Two Men Contemplating the Moon (1819–1820) — Cohn either misremembers, or chooses the version featuring the man and woman because of its visual echo of herself and Beckett in front of it, contemplating the contemplators.

Caspar David Friedrich, Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon (c.1824)

Friedrich’s series (he painted a third of the same subject between 1825 and 1830) figures the moon as a trigger for philosophic inquiry. The distances and sizes involved in contemplation of the moon are far enough removed from ordinary human experience to draw the mind out beyond itself and its immediate surroundings.

Friedrich advocated a Romantic view of the ‘sublime.’ For the Romantics, logic and reason had to be overcome by some experience beyond human understanding for the mind to achieve its highest state of knowledge. Elsewhere, Friedrich has famously shown a Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog (1818) to communicate this sense of the sublime. Little did he imagine that, 150 years after his moon painting, people would wander near the Sea of Tranquility, looking down on not just the clouds, but the entire Earth itself.

J.M.W. Turner, The Fighting Temeraire (1838)

Later in the 19th Century, and in the hands of a staunch Englishman rather than a German Romantic Idealist, the moon took on a different significance. In J.M.W Turner’s famous picture, The Fighting Temeraire (1938), the moon rises in the left of the deliberately imbalanced canvas, its ascendency signalling the death of the great warship, which is tugged to the harbor to be dismantled. The sliver of moon is reflected in the sea at the bottom left of the frame, meaning the entire left (or sinistral) side of the picture becomes a lunar domain. The pearly, ethereal light of the thin crescent moon mirrors the pale composition of the large boat, angelic and/or ghostly in its final journey.

Contrasted to this, the belching fire and smoke of the blackened tugboat chimes with the embers of the setting sun. Turner’s moon is a light source, a chromatic event. It’s as far away from being walked upon as the water in which it is reflected. In its motions of waxing and waning, in its doomed and reflected light, the moon is a mood-setter and a symbol for Turner’s colorscapes, hardly even an ‘object’ at all.

James McNeill Whistler, Nocturne, Blue and Gold — Southampton Water (1872)

The turn of the 19th Century, and the dawn of the 20th, saw attitudes towards many things shift. It was a moment of significant change in the human consciousness. One such change of perspective involved night.

Van Gogh’s star-swirled nightscapes should not go unmentioned here. The Starry Night (1889) has not become one of the most famous and well-loved paintings in history for nothing. Its sweeping patterns and bold palette have struck generations as an apt and accurate correlative for the motions of a troubled mind.

But Van Gogh is something of an anomaly. A better barometer of how night and the moon changed over the turn of the century is Whistler’s Nocturnes. They’ve been written about at length in the MutualArt Magazine (here), so suffice it to say that their double-attitude of repulsion and compulsion captured the mindset of America and the West at the dawn of the Modern Age.

At around this time, electricity became a viable commodity in homes and urban centers in America and Europe. Night, and by extension the moon, became places which human beings could imagine themselves inhabiting. In the Fin de Siècle mind, the moon represented a strange new opportunity, and this was reflected in the visual art of the time. Georges Méliès’ 1902 film, A Trip to the Moon, has become an iconic example, around 1800 years after Lucian imagined the same trip.

Still from Georges Méliès’ Voyage to the Moon (1902)

Then, of course, came the first lunar landing. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first human beings to walk on the surface of a celestial body other than our own. With their small steps came a unifying surge of emotion. What made the moon landing so important was not some vague idea of human ‘progress’ — the colonial or utilitarian possibilities are relatively slim. The achievement was important because it was the culmination of an imaginative impulse that was millenia-old. As an act of self-expression it united the people of the globe in one moment of fulfilled wonderment. It was, itself, a work of art.

Between 1969 and 1973 a total of 12 humans walked on the moon. Since then, our perception of it in our culture has morphed again. To speak of the moon now is an act with all the same yearnings of its first invocations, but without the ‘otherness.’ Instead, it’s a kind of nostalgia for when humans overcame otherness itself, turned the frightening unknown into the known, and mankind was united in watching.

Molly Nilsson’s 2008 pop song, ‘Hey Moon!’ (brilliantly rearranged by John Maus in 2011) is a love song to the Earth’s only natural satellite, the orb’s lonely figure invoking a call for a tenderness which can overcome difference and distance: “Hey, moon, it’s just you and me tonight.”

And in contemporary art, this strange mixture of yearning and progress is beginning to be codified into a new symbolic lunar language. Concluding in January of this year, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art hosted an exhibition entitled The Moon: From Inner Worlds to Outer Space, exploring what the moon means to us both ‘out there’ and ‘in here.’

Works by artists like Katie M. Paterson and perhaps in particular a Virtual Reality installation by Laurie Anderson and Hsin-Chien Huang (To the Moon (2018)) broke new material frontiers whilst also harking back to the unifying wonderment and mystery the moon once represented.

In Act One of Beckett’s play, one of his two philosophizing tramps, Estragon, “gets up and goes towards Vladimir, a boot in each hand. He puts them down at the edge of the stage, straightens and contemplates the moon.”

“Pale for weariness,” he says, paraphrasing the poet Shelley, “of climbing heaven and gazing on the likes of us.” Nilsson imagines a much more tender back-and-forth between moon and human: “I would hate for you to hang there all alone the whole night through. / And I would love to spend the whole night just looking at you.”

But whether it’s a psychosexual excitement about witches, a sublime contemplation, a joke at our own absurd expense, or a 21st-century yearning to overcome the loneliness of our divisive age, the moon has always symbolized whatever it is we feel is just beyond our reach. “Hey moon,” sings Nilsson at the end of her song, “come back soon.”