The most famous paintings that embodied the gloom of man and the absurdity of existence

in art •  7 years ago 

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This article was written by @abdellkarim

"No one today has an answer to the question of how we can extricate ourselves from the total absurdity of such a situation"
(Hanna Arent, Violence)

Since the early nineteenth century, and perhaps before, the world has witnessed the decline of metaphase in the production of meaning versus the emergence of other scientific and philosophical theories such as the theory of evolution of the British natural world Charles Darwin (1809 - 1882), and the effects of the ideas of Adam Smith (1723 - ) The father of the modern economy on the free market, this is not the emergence of nation-states in the modern sense, add to that, the world wars and atomic bombs and millions of innocent people who died without guilt.

All this has contributed to the disintegration of man with his beliefs and traditional way of life to enter the endless channels of nihilism and non-meaning. The world seemed to be running towards the abyss. Numerous theories, philosophies, and ideologies did not appear to be as rich a guide as they were to be interpreted. In order to escape this disintegration or in line with it, modern art reflected in a number of his paintings the concern of the existential person and his helplessness and psychological fragility.

New Window on the Holy and Metaphysics
In fact, the approach of many painters in the 20th century to represent modern human anxiety can be seen as an attempt to open a window on the sacred and metaphysical. Indeed, even the appearance of a whole artistic doctrine reflects this concern that the sacred and the metaphysical have become essential dimensions of art.

This artistic window was the result of an urgent need for meaning in the face of the crisis of meaning. It created an expansive space for the Absolute and the Metaphysics not as religious symbols but as artistic emphases in power and counter-revolution in the whole Enlightenment. The emergence of new doctrines, such as expressionism, Cubism, Surrealism and others, was a "mystical tendency" in art and a window on everything that is spiritual and transcendent.

he painting "The tragedy" by the Spanish painter Pablo Yepkasu - 1903 (communication sites)
Perhaps one of the first to overlook us from that window is Edvard Munch with his iconic "Cry". Which he drew in 1893. This reflected not only the weakness and fragility of modern man, but the depression of Monch himself and his personal illness, which made him an unceasing guest on mental health clinics.

The scream, also known as The Cry and The Scream of Nature,[1] The height of the turmoil, anxiety and spiritual breakdown that has dominated the life of Munch since the death of his mother tuberculosis as a child. And anxiety and spiritual breakdown that modern man has as a whole. Munch portrayed this disorder in the form of a man shouting with astonishment and despair.[2]

"I was walking along with two friends, and the sun was leaning toward sunset, when I felt depressed, and suddenly the sky turned red with blood. I stopped and turned my back to the iron bars. I was overcome with a sense of tiredness and tiredness. I know its cause or source, and suddenly I heard the sound of a great cry echoed long through the surrounding nature. "[3]

  • Munch

In the painting, we see an abnormal sky swirling in orange and yellow and flowing with dark blue. Tossed on a long bridge standing at the ghost of Ola. Do the ghosts cry? Or is man a ghost? He glances in open space and gives his eternal cry. In the painting we see nothing natural, neither heaven nor heaven nor man is human. Everything is anomalous about its body and an overwhelming horror runs out of the painting.

This horror is not recorded by Monch, in 1893, returned and recorded by the Spanish Cubist painter Pablo Picasso , 1881 - 1973, in his painting "tragedy" painted in 1903. One of the blue period paintings that followed the suicide of Picasso's friend, French poet Carlos Casigmas, began in 1901 and ended in 1904. Picasso's paintings in that period were dominated by sad tragic themes. The blue color and its degrees were used in an expansive manner and for this reason it was called blue.[4]

painting by the French painter Paul Gauguin: "Where did we come from, who are we, and where are we going?" (communication Web-site
"The bright and vibrant shadows may not be suitable for bodies lacking vitality, dark faces and fear of human beings wither under the agony of torment they can not understand ... Blue Verde more in tune with the world of the tormented and the disadvantaged .."[5]

French art critic Frank Elgar

The painting is saturated with many readings. Did Picasso mean tragedy? Or tragedy of death? Or tragedy of loss? Perhaps the tragedy of poverty and destitution? Or is it, without standing on a particular tragedy, a depiction of the sense of defeat associated with human existence on earth!

There is a great narrative imposed by the painting, from the mere mention of the name, the narrative of the eternal tragedy inherent to human existence. The narrative is not limited by time. Tragedy Picasso was a kind of travel, traveling into the human interior, no matter how alienated this interior by the modernity and cruelty of modernity. A journey in the faces of the painting, with a cold and a long metaphysical silence, as if they had been silent for ever and forever. No one knows a solution or an answer.

There are tormented and humiliated souls that surround themselves in sorrow and silence. Tragedy of Picasso, like the mirror, reflects our pure sorrow, our sadness, which has left nothing in the chest. Our blue sorrow is very cold. Our sadness, in which nothing is shining, and we do not count on anything.

"Where do we come from, where are we from and where are we going?"[6] Perhaps the existential concerns of modern man are formulated in the simplest of those words. These three questions were entirely the title of a painting by the French impressionist Paul Gauguin, 1848 - 1903, who recommended that the painting be read, drawn in 1897, from right to left.

"The Cry" by Edvard Munch (1893 AD )
From right to left, we see a baby boy around him on the far right, with three women behind her and two women wearing a purple dress and speaking as friends. Sitting behind them on the ground is someone who puts his hand on his head and looks towards them. In the middle of the painting stands a man picking a fruit, then two cats and a child eating his fruit and then a goat leaving behind a statue of one of the gods. On the left, we see a woman scratching the ground next to another old woman or old man.

Gauguin, who attempted suicide in December 1897 with a dose of arsenic, was sick and poor and found no money for psychotherapy. Although the attempt failed, it produced one of the most prominent existential existential concerns. The full age stages of man appear in that painting, from birth to death, in a primitive tropical paradise.

The people of this painting, metaphorically for all of humanity, witness profound existential questions that penetrate the painter and the whole human race and turn to an answer about the religious doubt that has engulfed modern man, and even uncertainty about the mystery of life, what happens after death, Tangible to another world not visible and absolute.

"All this speaks of the sadness in my soul and in all that surrounds me. I dream and draw at the same time without metaphors or metaphors, perhaps because of the weakness of my literary culture."[7]

  • Paul Gauguin

Boards of blues or prayers for survival?
These, and many other painters, believed that the paintings of souls. And those paintings / spirits as they screamed or imagine tragedy or ask about the origin and separation of man and existence are not just the paintings of sadness or sadness. But the prayers of distress, which set out from the exhausted souls to express other exhausted masses. If you improve hearing you will find it says: "Maybe one hears us"!

These prayers were a bridge trying to reach the absolute that was blocked by the era of world wars and nuclear bombs. That bridge has certainly succeeded as a window on the sacred and the transcendent. The Sufi tendency of the paintings of sadness in modern plastic art was a reshaping of relations with the invisible and metaphysical, without rites or sacrificial instruments, which invites us to view a spiritual region of ourselves damaged.

The artists, who shaved away from the classic concepts of perspective, objects, dimensions, shapes and colors, highlighted the idea that "there is something you do not see behind what you see." This progress, this modernity, and all the lights of the Enlightenment have created a deficit, anxiety, depression and an undeniable sense of loss. "Does anyone hear us
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All art similiar.