fine art and existentialism

EXISTENTIALISM IN THE VISUAL

ARTS

» Many philosophers, Paul Tillich among them, assert that “most creative art, literature and philosophy in the twentieth century is in its very essence existentialist. Tillich describes existentialism as “ a mirror of the situation of sensitive human beings in our twentieth century.”

The PersistenceOf Memory

Salvador Dali

• “The essential categories, time, space, causality, substance, have lost their ultimate power. Mankind does not feel at home in this world any more….There is no safety in the world.” –Paul Tillich

CRUCIFIXIONPablo Picasso

Roots in the Industrial Revolution• Existentialism “was a protest against the

world view in which man is nothing but a piece of an all-embracing mechanical reality, be it in physical terms, be it in economic or sociological terms, or even be it in psychological terms.” (Tillich)

Existentialists “wanted to save human existence from being swallowed by the essential structure of industrial society in which man was in danger of becoming a thing.”

Marcel Duchamp“The Bride”

Cézanne

• The movement of modern existentialism in visual art starts with Impressionist painter Cézanne in France. “The forms of our existence are no more organic. They are atomistic, disrupted. …..(Existentialist artists) “ reduce the colorful world of the impressionists and of the beautifying idealists of the past to more and more cubic forms.”

The following slide depicts his “Still Life With Skull”

Van GoghVan Gogh’s, although painting in the mid 1800s, frequently reflected existentialist themes in his art. "Night Cafe." Here you see an emptiness; the patrons sit apart lost in their isolation. There is irony here, too: in all the beautiful colors you see, Van Gogh captures the horror of emptiness.

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“Skull With Cigarette” is another picture with strong existential themes– among them, death and absurdity.

Munch

• The Norwegian Munch could be added here. He has painted pictures not so much of emptiness -- although this factor is also in them, but of horror, crime, shock, that which is uncanny, that which you cannot grasp.

• His most well-known painting is “The Scream”.

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A WOMAN SEATED

NUDE IN AN ARMCHAIR

PICASSO

GUERNICA

• "Guernica” is a picture Picasso painted to express the horror of an incident of “saturation bombing” of a small town in Spain by the Italians and Germans.

• “it shows what is now in the souls of many Americans as disruptiveness, existential doubt, emptiness and meaninglessness.” –Paul Tillich

Chagall

• Chagall’s picture, "River Without Banks." Here again we have nothing which can be understood from the naturalistic point of view. However, everybody feels here the metaphysics of time in the wild moving clock and the animal above it and the whole constellation of colors and forms. Time is a river without banks.

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Giacometti

• Man Walking (1960) is isolated and exposed.

Francis Bacon

• Francis Bacon (1909-1992) He seems the most unforgiving and anguished of the existential artists. expression of a blood-spattered pope imprisoned in a tubular structure

• Study After Valasquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953). We see the tortured expression of a blood-spattered pope imprisoned in a tubular structure resembling an unpadded throne.

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• Existentialist art emphasizes the uniqueness and isolation of the individual experience in a hostile or indifferent universe.

• The paintings that follow are Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks”, Andrew Wyeth’s “Christina’s World”, Andrew Baines’ “Existential Angst”, and Chirico’s “The Anxious Journey”.

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