The early Netherlandish painter Hugo van der Goes (c.1440-1482/83) is not as well-known as he should be. He has a renown—although largely for his biographical peculiarities. In c.1475-7, at the height of a successful career in Ghent (about which we know little excepting decorative commissions, notably for Charles the Bold), Hugo became a lay brother at an Augustinian foundation known as the Roode Kloster. Shortly before his death, as related by the monastery's carer, Gaspar Ofhuys, Hugo suffered ‘frenesis magne’ (a serious mental illness) (cat. 44 for Ofhuys' c.1509/13 text and a translation). Ever since Hugo has been made to embody—avant la lettre—the mad artist-genius sacred to Romanticism. For Rudolf and Margaret Wittkower, Hugo's life was one of the earliest ‘reliable records of a mentally ill artist’.1
Beside these biographical dramas, Hugo's artworks risk fading into the background. But visitors to The Uffizi will recall the sudden apparition of his gigantic Portinari Altarpiece, commissioned by the Italian banker Tommaso Portinari. The Scottish National Gallery boasts another marvel: Hugo's tall and enigmatic Trinity Panels (a Royal Collection loan), needing conservation treatment.2 His few other surviving works are spread throughout Europe and North America. Before the Gemäldegalerie's display, they had never been gathered together.
The exhibition's original motivation was a desire for completion: the latest of a decades-long succession of museum projects on canonical early Netherlandish painters. As divulged by Kemperdick and Till–Holger Borchert in a 2018 preview talk, Hugo was the only significant early Netherlander without an extensive monographic show. One might speculate as to why. Two of Hugo's most celebrated works, the Portinari Altarpiece and Trinity Panels mentioned already, are unlikely ever to travel (represented in Berlin by to-scale reproductions—useful but ghostly—and in the catalogue by Emma Capron's and Lorne Campbell's essays). Perhaps, however, other factors made Hugo less attractive: his name's unfamiliarity to non-art historians, the issues surrounding his oeuvre, and the sheer visual strangeness of his work.
The organisers had a difficult task. The exhibition subtitle was Schmerz und Seligkeit, for which the English catalogue (the version reviewed here) uses ‘pain and bliss’. ‘Bliss’, however, falls short of Seligkeit's theological and beatific connotations. These same spiritual reverberations distinguishing Hugo's aesthetic are foreign to modern viewers. Many of us lack the deep religious sentiment—the Schmerz und Seligkeit—the works demand.
Furthermore, sources linking Hugo's name to surviving paintings are almost non-existent; the Portinari Altarpiece is the closest thing to a documented work. Kemperdick remarked before the exhibition opening, parodying the art world's attributional terminology, that ‘every Hugo van der
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