Hello, good readers, and welcome! Blessings and gladness to you all. Please, friends, step out of the gloom and the dark, and be gleeful in the firelight of Art, Literature, and creative thought. Thank you for joining me here to briefly contemplate H. P. Lovecraft’s “Pickman’s Model” and the “Pickman’s Model” segment of Night Gallery.  

See, what I like most about H. P. Lovecraft’s short story “Pickman’s Model” is its concentration on Art, its building up of an artistic and kinetic aura, its preoccupation with aesthetic thinking and weird aesthetics. In a manner that is close to but not, to my eye, truly philosophizing, Lovecraft theorizes, by means of the story and all its mad quasi-lecturing, on concepts of weirdness in Art. What’s more, there are mentioned in the tale several artists, each of whom I consider, if I am accurately inferring their identities, to be of artistic genius: Angarola, Clark Ashton Smith, Doré, Fuseli, Goya, and Sime.  

Ah! And yet, somehow, the artful styles and slippery moods that Lovecraft has beckoned therein strangely evoked to my mind the noteworthy artistic works of Italian Futurism (e.g., Charge of the Lancers, by Umberto Boccioni; The Funeral of the Anarchist Galli, by Carlo Carrà), Italian Metaphysical art (e.g., The Disquieting Muses, by Giorgio de Chirico), and Italian Decadentism (look to artists such as Gabriele D’Annunzio or Giovanni Pascoli)—apropos, devotees of the Weird, the Decadent, or the Abstract would do well to study, perchance appreciate, the most admirable works from those aforesaid movements and creators. Anyone genuinely determined to understand and follow the weird-fiction genre, furthermore, might benefit from reading “Pickman’s Model,” the characteristics in which unwittingly form a bridge, eldritch liminalities, connecting Decadent and Gothic themes with aspects of weird- and science-fiction.  

Distrust of technological and scientific progress, of Modernism, of Realism, et cetera: that sort of pessimism inhabits H. P. Lovecraft’s “Pickman’s Model,” the storyline of which expresses the wickedness engineered in the nightmare that it envisions, a world haunted by atrocities and fanaticism, a declining society racked with prejudice, inhumanity, insanity, morbidity, and devolution. While cautioning against seeking occult or forbidden knowledge, the story warns that cities can be interconnected to baneful forces too, portraying Modern societies as profane yet mundane. Within the materialist-nihilist framework of Lovecraft’s “Pickman’s Model,” things like an alley, a cellar, a painting, a photograph, a tenement, a slum, a subway, they are associated with malevolence and obscurity, and they can therefore be seen as snares of urbanization (i.e., symbols of monotony, urbanism, and the self-destructive influences such things have on humanity). Those symbols, in an artistic and philosophical light, represent some of the ways through which the modern world disconnects human beings from grace and nous; likewise, they signify how modernity undermines art, the sacred, and tradition. That mode of symbolism can also reflect angst regarding the subversive influences of things like anarchism, globalism, mechanization, naturalism, photorealism, deconstruction, the anticlassical, and anti-art.

“Pickman’s Model,” the H. P. Lovecraft short story, has various details that could potentially be interpreted as anti-Italian or xenophobic, in varying degrees, such as its problematic elements that are offensive especially against Mediterranean or Latin peoples; on top of that, it also possesses details that could be demonizing against individuals of polytheist or non-Abrahamic faiths. Meanwhile, “Pickman’s Model” from Night Gallery, with its wonderful Victorian costumes and interesting monster design, is generally refreshing and more enjoyable because it seems not to carry derogatory or bigoted features.

To my mind, the Night Gallery “Pickman’s Model” shows audiences a struggle of artistic ideologies and class war; in addition, it touches upon—perhaps allegorically, metaphorically, or symbolically—the suffering and pitfalls that can be caused by social elitism, classism, curiosity, obsession, and greed. Seeking truth from Art, or merely to input truth onto an artwork, it warns, can be dangerous, can deform, can destroy Art and Life.

Most of the variations in the “Pickman’s Model” segment of Night Gallery are thought-provoking refinements or thematic buttresses; ergo, it is a preferable work of more noble quality, and thus, I believe, it is loftier than Lovecraft’s composition. Both works are futilitarian, nonetheless, largely choosing to fear and to judge but forgetting to look for hope or healing; they fail to demonstrate the virtuous features of the past and the future. In the end, those two creations allude to the necessity for purification and reform in Art as well as in human existence.

Thank you so much for reading my informal and unorthodox yet, hopefully, aesthetic and philosophic article. If you have enjoyed what you read here, please also read my other articles on the DMR Books blog. You can support me by ordering my books. If you have read any of my writings, please write a valued and honest review of them on Amazon, the BookBaby Bookshop, a blog, or wherever appropriate and convenient. To contact me, please send me a courteous email: matthewpungitore_writer@outlook.com

May the best of times be yours.