Ch 1.6 Art History The catharsis of releasing your pain.

Most people spend their lives hiding their deepest emotions behind social rituals, masks, and daily responsibilities. Yet artists throughout history have done the opposite. They reveal what others conceal. When I was young, I believed painting was about learning technique. Later, I realized technique was only the language, and the real question was, what inner necessity compels a person to paint at all?

“My real and deepest motives for making art go back to the experience of my own sorrow… I want to have an effect on this time in which human beings live so difficultly and need all the help they can get.” -- Kathe Kollwitz. Her younger son died after he volunteered in WW1 to fight for the German army. She started as a patriot but saw the horror of war sweeping over her nation and witnessed many people she knew who were killed either in battle or in the Holocaust.

“Art is the blood of our heart.” --Edvard Munch. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was just 5 years old, soon followed by his sister, Sophie. He transformed his early trauma into paintings that impact those who see them. They were authentic.

The existential suffering of Kollwitz, Munch, and others defined avant-garde Expressionism of the early 20th century, which also arose from an emerging visual language informed by science and global awakening. It started as a form of catharsis, a way to heal, but morphed into the dark paintings from Germany and Austria and into the growing horror movie genre in films like “Nosferatu.” The audience gasped in shock from the violence and delighted in the monstrosity depicted. From the 1970s onward, it reincarnated into Neo-Expressionism. Their paintings caught the attention of art critics, who celebrated their creativity…their daring, bold, dark, and violent images. Their works were based on a worldview different from the Expressionists of the early 20th century…the dark twin fascinated, not horrified, by the dark side of human nature. Which side will you stand on as an artist?