The Conqueror Worm, Claude Buck

This painting is about a giant red worm eating people in Hell. Or is it? At first glance, that sure appears to be what it looks like. However, as you look closer, you notice more and more details. The angels, fleeing in terror from the carnage. The small, twisted trees, growing out of the cracked rocks. The moon—or is it the sun?—obscured partially by clouds, setting or rising in the background. As you take in everything around the worm, you begin to forget that the worm itself is there. Is this a side effect of Claude Buck’s vivid painting style? Or was it, in fact, what was intended? Claude Buck, born 1890 in the Bronx, New York, was an artist best known for his hyper-realistic paintings. He began painting at the age of four, taught by his father, William Robert Buck. When he was fourteen years old, he started studies at the National Academy of Design and stayed there until he was twenty-two. After graduating, he studied in Munich, Germany for seven years before moving to Chicago. There he became a leader of an Avant-Garde Symbolist group known as the Introspectives. His work was often influenced by writers such as Edgar Allen Poe and William Blake, as well as Classical Mythology. The hyper-realistic portraits and still-lives for which he is best known were created to support himself and his family. He died at age 84 in Santa Cruz, California. The Conqueror Worm is based on a poem of the same name by Edgar Allan Poe. This poem describes a scene very similar to that of the painting—humans being devoured by a gigantic, red worm in a hellish world. I feel like this painting is meant to make you feel a sense of desolation and terror, which is evidenced by the dark colors, bleak landscape, and swirling clouds. You may feel scared for the faceless mass of people being slaughtered and eaten by the worm. Or maybe you feel helpless, like one of the angels who run away from the terrible scene. You may even feel happy, as though you are the worm itself enjoying a nice, normal meal of tortured souls from the pits of hell. As you can see, each of the “main” characters in this picture has a different perspective of the events and thus feels differently about them. The humans are not necessarily innocent here—maybe they angered the worm earlier. Maybe the angels are running to get more food for the monster. Maybe the worm is dying, and in its death inadvertently killing everyone. Though it is possible to guess the artist’s intentions, we can never know for sure exactly what he meant by this piece.

The Conqueror Worm is a dark depiction of a seemingly apocalyptic scene of a large red worm immediately demanding your attention upon first gazing at this painting. Ignoring the main focus of the piece there is a lot to see, Such as the dark gargantuan beasts stealing away the trees and mountains from the earth. There is a lot to question about the nature of these creatures along with many other things like if they are collaborators of the worm or if they are simply just additions to the chaos of this apocalyptic scene. Looking at the main focus you can see a giant snake-like creature spiraling outward from the abysmal sky coming to devour the people helplessly scattering about before it. Witnessing this carnage are 5 angels watching hopelessly in terror at the worm before them. Without doing any research on this piece most would immediately assume that this is a religious scene. A fair assumption this would be to make given the angels and the devilish worm presenting a rapturous scene, but upon looking further into it the piece is based on a poem by Edgar Allen Poe. After reading it (admittingly with difficulty) it has become much clearer what is going on in this painting. The poem starts with a “throng” of angels sitting in a theater before a play. The play starts and depicts puppets portrayed as people/ people portrayed as puppets being moved around aimlessly chasing a phantom by dark figures without shape. Suddenly amid the “madness, and more of sin” a blood red writhing worm emerges and devours the people. Upon the bodies the curtain of the play falls, and as it closes the angels in tears dub the worm the hero of the story they name “Man”. The poem is open to speculation on the meaning of the poem but the most probable intent and most common idea is that the worm is a metaphor of death coming to bring an end unto the pointless struggle of people to reach some goal that they never reach. Edgar A. Poe did an amazing job in this poem of displaying this idea and especially at the time, it had great meaning but today it would be easy to interpret a new meaning. In the 21st century we can see new ideas easily being inserted into the context of this story. Seemingly now more than ever we can empathize with the puppets because many people's lives can feel like they are working their whole lives towards a goal that they feel they may never reach. Chasing phantoms of dreams never to be reached. The thing most we can attribute to today are the shapeless beings restricting the puppets and moving around the land and taking it away, one would assume I meant the government. Fair idea but I think that the best way to describe the shapeless beasts would be “Man”. For there is no one else to blame for the controlling of man to believe in false hopes, to run around in circles of sin and madness only to wind up at the same spot but the man himself. No Evil Gods, No Tyrannical Kings, Only Man. But I have forgotten, forgotten about the center of this poem. All this had distracted me from this. The Worm, In the end the worm devours all. The curtains fall and another show begins. So does it really matter? Does it really matter in the end what happens? Does it matter? This has been Andrew Neuenswander with another Bulldog Art Tour.