Negative Human Emotions through Art
Emotions in art affect humans, both on a personal and bodily level. They influence the appealing assessment of art. Art is the emotional expression of human personality, and it can arouse emotions in audiences in a natural way. Trying to express a negative feeling artistically has been scientifically proven to be somewhat rewarding, perhaps being the reason Van Gogh cut his ear? Nevertheless, when artists create art that is related to a negative historical event, art has the power to bring out emotions such as sadness, remorse, loss, and many more that have been long forgotten. This essay provides examples of how negative emotions are expressed through art by focusing on three artworks, the Eternal City by Peter Blume, A Street in Paris in 1871 by Luce and The Crowds, Sculpture Bronze by Magdalena Abakanowicz.
The painting A Street in Paris in 1871 was first shown in the year1905 in Salon des Inde´pendants. This painting depicts a historical moment, the Paris commune. It depicted a historical moment that seemed distant, and it showed such an openly political subject. In May 1871, the commune was brutally ended, and the government retook the city. The painting show chimney stacks at the upper left, symbolizing the working-class areas, to which the supporters of the commune retreated to when they were defeated (Wright). The scene shows a few defenders through together from the paving stones that are gotten from the road. The affair is a small one, happening in the street, as the painter points out.
A Street in Paris in 1871, as the name suggests, shows events of May 1871, when commune came to an end in a brutal way. The shadow in the painting suggests that the events occurred during late morning hours. The settings show 5 dead people, which are depicted as innocent victims (Wright). Additionally, three guards symbolize the hundreds and thousands to fight against the Prussians in 1870. The guards had sided with the Commune since March 1871. There is a woman in the painting, a proletarian amazon.
Scholars argue that the painting was inspired by the artists’ memories as a young man, of what he had witnessed during the commune (Wright). The Paris Commune 1871 occurred when France got defeated in the Franco-German War, which saw the collapse of Napoleon III’s Second Empire. The national guards were disarmed as a precaution to ensure there was the order in Paris. The National Guard was composed of a large number of workers who took part in the fight during the siege of Paris (Brittanica.com). However, resistance broke out in the city, in an attempt to get rid of the cannons of guards that were overlooking the city. The March 26th elections saw the revolutionaries victorious, who then formed the commune government.
This new government was comprised of the Jacobins, who were traditionists and wanted the commune to take control of the revolution, the Proudhonists, who were socialists in support of several federations of communes across the country and the Blanquistes, a group of socialists who called for violence (Brittanica.com). The commune campaigned for the end of support to religion and use of revolutionary calendar instead, 10 hours of work, and end of night work for bakers. The Versailles government highly opposed the commune. On May 21st, the government troops attacked an unprotected part of the city. Approximately 20000 insurrectionists were murdered and about 750 of the government troops. The government, in turn, arrested about 38000 people and deported around 7000 others (Brittanica.com).
Luce Maximilien has, however, been critiqued for the painting being outdated since it was done in 1905, while the commune occurred in 1871. Art, by then, was used to raising awareness of societal issues, and this painting was seen as being years too late. It has been argued, though, that the painting was Luce’s way of mourning the happenings of the commune. This piece of art was Luce’s way of doing a memorial for the victims of the 1871 commune, although most critics have called the painting a massive fail. Although he felt the need to idealize the commune, he has been accused of not recalling the events of the commune correctly, thus the many errors with the paining. Nevertheless, the painting did mark a very negative part of the history of Paris, where there was a lot of bloodshed, fear, tear, and distraction, which are all negative emotions. When one looks at the painting, it is easy to tap back into those negative emotions, as the painting is a good reminder.
Magdalena Abakanowicz, the artist, uses bronze, wood, and sisal as metaphors to point out the weakness and strength of human beings and nature (Clarke). She attributes her art to her personal experience during the destruction of Poland during the Second World War. Her art is a perfect example of how art can and is used to express negative human emotions. The artist intends to express deep personal emotions, although the art allows for a comprehensive range of interpretations (Clarke). She reaches deep down within herself to find emotions that she can apply to shapes that people across cultures can find a commonality to (Muchnic). She uses the nature of materials to express feelings of isolation, ostracism, destruction, perseverance, and endurance in a way that is relatable to the viewer.
When crowded together, the sculptures represent feelings of isolation and loneliness. The crowds may have alluded from the horrific events of World War II, but also spread beyond that to express human conditions. Magdalena, her childhood experiences as lonely and spent in isolation (Muchnic). Although her family was privileged, she usually felt like she didn’t fit, like she was in a crowd. Her mother would tell her that she bought her from a Jew, and the artist recalls how her mother always wanted a boy child instead of her. She felt alone and unwanted by her family, throughout her childhood, even though she was always surrounded by servants in her house. When her country was invaded by Nazis, her family was forced to leave their ancestral land, and Magdalena witnessed her father. The latter was so proud of the history of his family coerced to keep his ancestry hidden. He had to start a newspaper shop to support the family so that the family would not be recognized. Seeing her family go through that, Magdalena is said to have drawn her use of ostracism in her work (Clarke).
In The crowds, the artist creates identical humanoids standing to each other. The sculptures are not meant to represent something positive as they have no heads. The artist aims to show the dark side of human existence. The lack of heads and faces of these sculptures represent the lack of identity, and the right to express themselves. The artist uses crowds as they signify a mass action that is repetitive. A crowd becomes one organism that possesses the functions that are not easy to point out but can be felt by the power of intuition (Muchnic). The artist wrote that she was obsessed with crowd images, as crowds could get manipulated like organisms without brains. Crowds’ would worship leaders who turned out to be responsible for the deaths of masses.
Another good example of how the artist’s sculpture bronze show negative emotions were in 1991 when she was commissioned by the Hiroshima City Museum requested her to do her sculptures for the museum (Muchnic). The residents of the city signed a petition to have the authorities of the city to request her to do a permanent installation of her sculptures, Becalmed Beings, which symbolized the massive pain and suffering from the nuclear bomb attack on Hiroshima city. The bronze sculptures were made to represent the massive loss that the residents suffered during the nuclear bomb attack on Hiroshima city.
Peter Blume is said to have gotten the inspiration to do the painting Eternal City from traveling to Italy, whereby he becomes a member of the Guggenheim fellowship. It took his three years to finish the painting, from October 1934 to July 1937. The painting, on competition, provoked negative feelings in New York and was highly unfavorable. The Corcoran Gallery even refused to accept the admission of the painting to its biennial exhibition of 1939 (Cozzolino). The painting shows Mussolini’s head painted looking harsh and in green color (The Museum of Modern Art, 1-2). Under the head of Mussolini, the residents of Italy are seen through the underground corridors, away from the duce’s henchmen, the capitalist, and the gangsta in a black shirt. The capitalist is wearing leather gloves, which signify hypocrisy, as he pretends to not want to dirty his hands by association with a dictator, yet looks up to him. Towards the sunlight, fascism armies are seen breaking ranks (The Museum of Modern Art, 2-4). The men, exhort the troops from afar, while the women crawl to them under the bellies of the officers, as they did during the Russian Revolution. On the balcony, priests are depicted running away from the disaster that is spreading below.
The painting’s iconography also comprises references to catacombs, an early Christian shrine, and the coliseum and abounds in transfigurations of the architectural style (History of Art.com). The art is organized in an ancient principle of division, whereby the picture is divided into a light and dark triangle. There is a shrine on the left side of the painting, which is decorated with swords, jewel, and epaulets (Museum of Modern Art 1-2). These decorations are meant to symbolize the cruelty of human beings, vanity, and greed. A woman is kneeling, distracted in prayer at the nearing alter, that covered in half-darkness (The Museum of Modern Art, 1). The act is meant to show the conventionality of church attendance in Italian society. Behind the peeling wall of, there is a beggar woman, who is deformed and paralyzed by arthritis, which is used to mock the fascist legislation, on matters of social security. The painting also shows vines growing over the church, which were used by the painting to show romance. On the foreground lies a shattered sculpture, which according to the painter, when assembled, they would be a sculpture of two lovers (History of Art.com). This sculpture is used to symbolize the lack of humanness and love in a fascist regime.
The ruined scenery is a symbol of moral degradation. The line of men, women, and children crawling up at the end of corridors represents the longing the Italians have for freedom (Cozzolino). The transition from the forefront to the distant candy-sugared alpine landscape represents the passage of fascism in Italy, to the paradise outside Rome, via a progressive awakening of consciousness and popular revolt.
To conclude, it is evident, in this essay, that art inspires negative feelings in humans. Artists who have experienced loss, isolation, death, horrors of war, hopelessness are more likely to engage in art that gives rise to negative emotions. As seen in this essay, art has the power to make people feel sad, alone, hopeless, disgusted, and angry, only to mention a few. Artists have used art to point out injustices in society, the cruelty of human beings, and another negative side of humans, as demonstrated in the mentioned works of Magdalena Abakanowicz, Peter Blume, and Luce Maximilien.
Works Cited
Brittanica.com. Commune of Paris. March 2020. https://www.britannica.com/event/commune-of-paris-1871.
Clarke Catherine. How Materials Inform Metaphor In The Work Of Magdalena Abakanowicz. January 2020. Retrieved from: http://hdl.handle.net/10217/179724.
Cozzolino Robert. Battling over the Eternal City. Peter Blume Nature and Metamorphosis Philadelphia, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014. Retrieved from: https://www.academia.edu/40069185/Battling_over_the_Eternal_City
History of Art.com. Art of the 20th Century. Peter Blume.2020. Retrieved from: http://www.all-art.org/art_20th_century/blume1.html.
Muchnic Suzanne. She’s Turned Her Backs on the World. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-mar-25-ca-42311-story.html. March 2001.
The Museum Of Modern Art 11 West 53rd Street, New York. Article From The Forthcoming Museum Bulletin, March 1943 Eternal City. Retrieved from: https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_press-release_325370.pdf. January 2020.
Wright, Alastair. Mourning, Painting, and Commune. Maximilien Luce’s A Paris Street In 1871. http://oaj.oxfordjournals.org/.January 14, 2013.