Black and White Classic Art Black and White Self Portrait by Kahlo

The narrator of Edgar Allan Poe'southward 1835 short story "Berenice" asks a disturbing question: "How is it that from beauty I take derived a blazon of unloveliness?" What if the narrator had asked this question in reverse, every bit "How is information technology that from unloveliness I accept derived a type of beauty?" How much more agonizing might have been the research?

This list of x eerie works of art inspired by horrific events offers an respond to our question, and the respond is disturbing, indeed

Related: x Crazy Things That Brand The states Love Or Hate Art

10 Ten Breaths: Tumbling Woman II by Eric Fischl

Eric Fischl, "Tumbling Woman"

The "Tumbling Adult female" role of the title of Eric Fischl's statuary sculpture, Ten Breaths: Tumbling Adult female II (2007-2008), seems self-explanatory. Withal, it poses several significant questions. Why is the tumbling adult female naked? If she is a gymnast, why isn't she clothed? Why are her earthen peel tones streaked with crimson-orangish? Why is she tumbling? What accounts for her awkward landing on her head, neck, and upper left shoulder? Such questions indicate that at that place is more to Fischl'southward portrait of the tumbling woman than meets the eye.

The mystery is solved one time the context, the painting's origin, is revealed. The text on the plaque that accompanies the statue reads: "We watched, disbelieving and helpless, on that savage day. People nosotros love began falling, helpless and in atheism." "That savage day" was September eleven, 2001, when al-Qaeda perpetrated a serial of attacks against the United States.

In one of these attacks, the terrorists piloted 2 hijacked airplanes into the World Trade Centre in New York City. As a result, some people leaped from the towers' upper floors to avert burning to death inside the buildings. As the Smithsonian American Art Museum points out, the sculpture's depiction of "the vulnerability of the man body…takes on special significance in this tragic context."^[1]

nine The Raft of the Medusa by Theodore Gericault

Gericault, Raft of the Medusa

The pyramid of drastic human figures in Theodore Gericault's oil painting The Raft of Medusa (1818-1819) calls attention to the pathos of their plight, every bit does the steep pitch of the approaching wave, the force of which can virtually be felt. Some of the figures are clothed. Others are half-dressed. All the same, others are naked. Their lack of attire suggests that their departure was headlong and sudden, underscoring the panic they felt every bit they'd piled onto the raft, a precarious perch amid tempestuous seas. Closer attention to the passengers suggests that one or 2 among them are dead or dying. In a corner of the planks, a trunk lies, supine and listless, its head back. Another lies half-on, half-off the raft, caput underwater.

As Dr. Claire Blackness McCoy observes, the discipline of the painting, which was exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1819 and is now displayed in the Louvre, would have been recognized by those who saw it in the Salon. The July 1816 upshot it depicts, which had recently appeared in the news, would become "a political scandal." Officials aboard the French naval ship Medusa, including the governor of Senegal and his family, McCoy explains, were headed for the colony to secure its French possession and assure the continuation of the covert slave trade, even though France had officially abolished the practice. En route, the captain accidentally ran the send aground on a sandbar off the coast of West Africa.

When the ship's carpenter was unable to repair the impairment, the governor, his family unit, and other high-ranking passengers boarded the six lifeboats. The remaining passengers—nearly 150—were left backside to fend for themselves aboard a raft the carpenter constructed from the ship'due south masts. Of their number, 15 were rescued, of whom merely 10 "survived to tell the tale of cannibalism, murder, and other horrors aboard the raft."^[2]

8 Grey Mean solar day past George Grosz

Part of the Struggle – Fine art and Politics in the Weimar Republic

At offset glance, George Grosz'south art frequently suggests ordinary incidents of everyday life. Even so, the grotesquery of his portraits, a common characteristic of his piece of work, hints that the occasions he depicts may involve more than than is initially apparent. His postal service-World War I painting Grey Day (1921) is no exception. A worker conveying a shovel strides briskly past a manufactory and its smoking chimney, while a businessman walks toward the viewer, down a narrow sidewalk alongside a building.

Before them, but backside some other figure, a grim, angular, scar-faced, one-armed veteran in uniform walks forth, conveying a cane. There is a partially-constructed brick wall between him and the figure before him, a wealthy, cross-eyed man who struts by in the opposite direction. He wears an expensive suit and carries a briefcase and an Fifty-shaped ruler. His tool suggests that he may be a carpenter engineer. Outwardly, he is a man of respectability. Notwithstanding, his crossed eyes and the scars on his egg-shaped head, implying, perhaps, that he is an "egghead," suggest that he, too, has experienced violence personally.

Co-ordinate to an commodity past the Tate, the British fine art institution, Grosz's painting "illustrates how the wealthy profited from state of war [while] the disabled and forgotten veteran was left poor and divided from society." This is revealed by the partially-congenital wall indicating the separation of "the two groups." The wall itself, the Tate commodity suggests, is cryptic to the extent that "the viewer [must] decide whether this half-built wall is being constructed or brought down."^[iii]

7 Big Electrical Chair past Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol's Technicolor Large Electric Chair

After their confidence for espionage confronting the United States, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were electrocuted on June 19, 1953. Although Julius succumbed chop-chop, dying later on the receipt of one shock, his married woman survived three applications of electricity. The fourth charge finally killed her but caused a "ghastly plume of smoke [to ascension] from her head." Irene Philipson notes, in Ethel Rosenberg: Beyond the Myths. Ethel experienced a much harder death than her husband had.

Andy Warhol pioneered silkscreen painting, which allows "the artist to translate photographs every bit multiple, 'mass produced' works." Initially, he used this mechanical printmaking process to marketplace pictures of celebrities and everyday objects. Still, his work later depicted more macabre subjects in his Death and Disasters series.

Ane of these paintings, Big Electric Chair (1967-1968), was inspired by a press photograph of the execution device taken within Sing Sing Correctional Facility in New York, where the Rosenbergs were put to decease. Mayhap Warhol'south gruesome series was intended to desensitize viewers to the horrors of existence his paintings depicted. "When you come across a gruesome picture over and over once more," he maintained, "information technology doesn't really have an effect."^[4]

half dozen Guernica by Pablo Picasso

Picasso's Guernica: Slap-up Art Explained

A bull, a horse, bodies and trunk parts, terrified faces, a cleaved sword clutched in a dying homo's fist, a woman in agony—these are some of the macabre images in Pablo Picasso's nightmarish Guernica (1937). According to a website devoted to the artist, the commissioned work represents Picasso's immediate reaction to the Nazis' devastating casual bombing of the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939).

The mural, painted in black, blue, and white oils, is an amalgamation of pastoral and epic style showcasing "the tragedies of war and the suffering it inflicts upon individuals, especially innocent civilians." The lack of colors expresses the "starkness of the aftermath of the bombing." Although interpretations of the painting differ, the rampaging bull is idea to symbolize fascism, while the horse represents the people of Guernica, a stronghold of the Republican forces who resisted the Nationalists led past Francisco Franco.^[5]

v The Form of Empire: Destruction past Thomas Cole

Art History: Thomas Cole & "The Grade of Empire"

For hundreds of years, starting in 27 BC, the Roman Empire essentially was the Western world. Although the Empire was by no means an earthly paradise, it did provide constabulary and guild, protection, and a style of life for a vast region of the Middle Due east and Europe. During the Pax Romana, or "Peace of Rome," which lasted near 200 years, art and civilization flourished in the Empire. To Roman citizens, it probably appeared that the Empire would exist forever. However, when Rome finally fell to barbarian invaders, information technology must accept seemed to them that life itself had come to an end. Indeed, life every bit they had known it had changed drastically.

Not surprisingly, this catastrophic issue became the subject of several paintings, one of which, Thomas Cole'southward The Grade of Empire: Devastation (1836), dramatically envisions this monumental event. Displayed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the painting pictures swell armies contending for victory during a dark storm against the backdrop of the city in flames. A flotilla of enemy ships (of unlikely Viking origin) besieges the defenders. I of their vessels is used to cross a gap between sections of a bridge leading to the steps and rooftops of buildings where Roman centurions have made a desperate stand.

Although a ship sinks, it is clear that the invaders take gained the upper mitt. Many Roman soldiers are expressionless or lie dying. The city has been put to the torch. At the edge of a rooftop, 1 of the barbarians arrests a terrified Roman lady intent upon casting herself into the sea. A larger-than-life statue of a Roman soldier, rushing forward with shield aloft, symbolizes the fall of the legion and the imminent fall of Rome itself: office of the sculpture's head lies broken on the rooftop below. The panoramic painting is a sweeping vista of the disaster that has befallen the Empire and its citizens.^{[half dozen]}

4 Human Laundry by Doris Clare Zinkeisen

The Nazis' dehumanization of Jews is indicated by the title of Clare Zinkeisen'southward stark 1945 painting Human Laundry: Belsen, 1945, which is displayed in the Imperial War Museum in London. Painted mostly in grays and whites, the work shows a row of skeletal figures laid out, on their backs, atop rough tables. German nurses, supervised past a uniformed High german military machine physician, bathe them with lather and the water kept in pails at the ends of the tables. A pair of bearers has just arrived with the covered body of some other item of "human being laundry." Or, possibly, they are removing a body that has ceased to survive the harsh extremes of the Belsen concentration campsite.

As a set up of notes apropos the painting states, "Zinkeisen finds an effective motif in the dissimilarity between the well-fed, rounded bodies of the German medical staff and the emaciated bodies of their patients." This consequence is heightened by the unconcerned looks on the nurses' faces as they go about their duties; by the resigned and hopeless postures of the prisoners they handle, whose faces are not shown, further heightening their dehumanization; and by the nurse who nonchalantly carries a pair of buckets by the tables beside a long puddle of spilled h2o that has nerveless on the flooring. The medics are nurses and doctors from a nearby German military hospital pressed into service to wash and de-louse the prisoners to forbid the spread of typhus earlier they could be admitted to the makeshift Reddish Cross infirmary nearby.

Another set of notes offers additional information concerning the plight of the World War Two prisoners and the theme of the painting: "The 'human laundry' consisted of about twenty beds in a stable where German nurses and captured soldiers cut the pilus of the inmates, bathed them, and practical anti-louse powder before their transfer to an improvised hospital run by the Red Cantankerous."(LINK 9) ^[7]

3 Stories Behind the Postcards past Jennifer Scott

Jennifer Scott's 2009 series of paintings and collages, Stories Backside the Postcards, was exhibited in America'south Black Holocaust Museum (ABHM) in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The inspiration for them, she said, were gift postcards which, according to the museum's website, "depicted images of lynching [and were] mailed around the state." Such lynchings occurred betwixt the 1880s and the Second World War. Upon seeing the cards, Scott wondered near what she did not see in them, such as "the family unit members left behind to take downward the victim, to mourn and bury the remains—if at that place was enough to coffin."

Her objective in creating the serial, she said, was to encourage viewers to relate to the plight of the victims and to "try to imagine the victim's life earlier death was captured in a postcard." In addition, she hoped to move the viewer "beyond typical politically correct thoughts and feelings about race and race relations" so that their reflection on her work and its subject thing might have a lasting affect on the side by side generation.

Concerning three of her paintings, Three Generations, The Impossible (pictured), and My Son, My Grandson, Scott explained that unlike the postcards—which were in black and white or sepia-toned, her paintings are in full color. Without the color, the viewer might be able to altitude themselves from the disturbing images. Nevertheless, her versions remind the world that "these horrors took identify amidst the dazzler of nature and often in clear daylight." Three Generations shows a eye-anile woman comforting an anguished older woman who is "abreast herself with anger and sadness" as she leans over the victim, a immature woman who, Scott explained, was lynched after being raped.^[8]

ii The Price by Tom Lea

Tom Lea's World State of war Two Sketchbook at El Paso Museum of Art

The Price (1944) is a gruesome reminder of the cost that private fighters paid on the Earth War Ii battlefield. A U.S. Marine advancing across a field in Peleliu in 1944, amid thick smoke on the ground and in the air, seems to stagger. The left side of his face, his left shoulder, the left side of his chest, and his left arm are shredded and bright red with his blood. That Marine, the creative person, Tom Lea, explained, was "striking with a mortar blast, staggered a few yards similar that, and merely fell down." The Price hung exterior of Eisenhower'south role at the Pentagon later on the war, the artist added, "to remind him of the price of state of war."

Adair Margo, a gallery owner and friend of the El Paso, Texas, creative person, said, "He was the but bystander painter of the state of war who depicted shots being fired and U. S. soldiers being blown autonomously with blood and guts on the ground." Lea'south artwork, Margo added, represents honest portrayals of the truth of war, so and today. Two reasons that Life dispatched Lea to paint the war, Margo said, were that Lea "could paint battle in color, when photography was in black and white," and he had the skill to "piece together parts [of the fighting] to communicate the whole of boxing."

Larry Decuers, the curator of The National World War II Museum in El Paso, said that the Life and World State of war II exhibit of Lea's paintings from the U.Southward. Ground forces's art collection, on loan from the U.South. Army Center of Armed forces History, included 20-half dozen images which Lea painted during the war. The paintings in the exhibit were the ones that appeared in Life mag during the disharmonize itself, offering readers a no-punches-pulled glimpse of the state of war. During the U.S. operation against an entrenched Japanese force at Peleliu, 1,100 Marines died and v,000 were wounded, while virtually all eleven,000 Japanese soldiers on the island were killed."^[9]

one The Cleaved Column by Frida Kahlo

The Broken Column | Frida Kahlo | Artwork Review

Not all catastrophes are criminal, martial, social, or political, and they don't all affect entire groups or nations. The tragedy that befell Mexican creative person Frida Kahlo was accidental and personal. It was also responsible for the vast majority of her work as an artist. Her paintings largely depict her physical disabilities and suffering and their effects on her personal life.

Kahlo, who suffered from polio equally a child, well-nigh died in a bus accident as a teenager. She suffered multiple fractures of her spine, collarbone, and ribs, a shattered pelvis, a broken foot, and a dislocated shoulder. Soon after this devastating accident, Kahlo adopted painting as a way to cope with and overcome her ordeal, the effects of which continued throughout her life. "From the start of her recovery," a website dedicated to the artist explains, "she began to focus heavily on painting while in a body cast." Despite having 30 operations, she persisted in painting largely autobiographical, if symbolic, portraits of herself.

The Broken Cavalcade, a 1944 portrait of the artist, shows Kahlo topless, her arms at her sides, weeping every bit she gazes toward the viewer. A canvas is wrapped around her hips, and an orthopedic corset equanimous of straps over her shoulders and effectually her body binds her abdomen. She is split by a big, wide scissure that shows, in identify of her spine, the somewhat broken column of the painting's title. The fissure, or scissure, writes art historian Andrea Kettenmann, author of Kahlo, becomes a symbol "of the artist's hurting and loneliness." Some other symbol of Kahlo'southward hurting is the nails that pierce her face and trunk. What Kettenmann states nearly another of Kahlo's painting The Landscape (1946-1947) is also true of The Cleaved Column: "The desolate and fissured landscape [suggestive of the artist's broken torso] provides the background for Frida Kahlo's work."^[10]

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Source: https://listverse.com/2022/03/20/10-disturbing-works-of-art-inspired-by-horrific-events/

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