In Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1943 film Le Corbeau – The Raven – a small French town is torn apart by anonymous letters that claim to expose the citizens' crimes. Made during the German occupation, it is a disturbing, claustrophobic drama of secrets, lies and paranoia. It is also one in a long series of works of art that invoke the spectre of Edgar Allan Poe – right up to the new film The Raven that stars John Cusack.
In Le Corbeau, the poison-pen letter-writer signs his or her sinister missives with the title of Poe's most famous poem. A French audience in 1943 would have instantly recognised the reference to the American gothic writer because he had a immense influence on French modern art.
Poe was illustrated by no less a modern master than Edouard Manet, as well as the symbolist visionary Odilon Redon, and was such an icon for the avant garde that totemic quotations from him appear in the unlikeliest places. In Gauguin's painting Nevermore in the Courtauld Gallery, the chorus from The Raven becomes the title of a brooding Tahiti scene.
As soon as cinema started, the fascination of artists with his heightened world was translated into a gory stream of horror films that has never stopped – as early as 1909, DW Griffith made a film of The Raven that incorporates Poe's life. But it was avant garde French artists who led the way. What makes Poe such a haunting presence?
The French artists and poets who idolised Poe saw him as an image of the artist estranged from bourgeois society: he was the artist in America, alienated from a country they imagined as a brutal land of gunfights and gaslight. In fact, Poe invented the idea of the bohemian type. The British poet Byron led the way, and French painters doted on him, too. But it was Poe who made Romanticism modern, walking the streets of America in an alcoholic haze and writing of laudanum and derangement. He is a dark inspiration behind a painting like The Absinthe Drinker by Degas. Poe helped the first modern artists to discover squalor.
The avant garde associations of Poe survive in horror films – the archetypal Poe actor is Vincent Price because he suggests arty depravity. Meanwhile, Poe's shadow is still large in the art of today – what would he have made of Damien Hirst's Tate show?
