Within the framework of the presentation of the personal fictive museum, I have decided to retain ten art pieces from the 20th C and 21st C in accordance with the problematic of the representation of, and the reflection on death in modern and contemporary art. In as much as the questioning about death – and thereby about life – is inherent in human nature, it is the object of an eternal and universal artistic inspiration. As a matter of fact, the relationship between the human being and nothingness has always and everywhere been sublimated by art, as it expresses man's consciousness of death.
The post-war epoch coincides with the disruption of the idea of death, and subsequently to the multiplication of its artistic interpretations that oscillate between a religious vision and a scientific perspective. The set of artistic creations in connection with this theme refers to an excessively vast range of responses on the part of the artists: from a nihilist fascination to an existentialist anguish. With a view to putting into relief the diversity of the artistic expression related to the topic, the collection of the museum is deliberately as heteroclite as possible, on the level of content and on the level of form. Indeed, although the thematic of death is – explicitly or implicitly – at the heart of the major part of the art currents of the 20th and 21st centuries, its treatment is fundamentally extremely different from one artist to the other. I have voluntarily chosen major as well as minor artists from diverse fields of artistic activities: cinema, drawing, music, painting, performance, photography, sculpture and theatre. There have been some changes with respect to the initial list, because some of the pieces originally selected are less adequate than the ones later encountered in the course of the research.
[...] Alles was ich in meinen Blättern biete, sind Berichte meiner Entdeckungen.” Thus, the original raison d'être of this drawing is mainly scientific: It is related to his numerous studies of reflection and refraction phenomena, such as Still Life with Spherical Mirror * (1934) Human Skull * (1951) by Salvador Dalί Human Skull, Salvador DALI (1904-1989) oil on canvas x Merz Collection, Pal A human skull composed of seven female bodies stands out against a black background. Salvador Dali stares at the viewer from the lower left-hand side of the artwork. [...]
[...] Indeed, the decorative treatment of the subject as well as the emphasis on sensuality is typical of the Art Nouveau aesthetical program. None the less, the canvas is not intended as solely ornamental, since its theme derives from the repertoire of Symbolism. The latter movement manifests a mesmerizing infatuation for the mystery radiated by death in a number of artworks, such as in Death: My Irony Exceeds All Others * (1889) by Odilon Redon (1840-1916). Here, the conventional attribute of death the scythe is replaced by a cudgel, which betrays a certain amount of heterodoxy in the artist's rendition of the quintessentially Symbolist rhetoric. [...]
[...] The fact that the selection of the ten artworks has been conditioned by the criterion of diversity of the media as well as of the movement results in a wide scale of artistic interpretations of the problematic of death in the modern and contemporary epoch. Yet it is possible to denote three main sorts of treatment of the subject: the representation of death, the reflection on man's mortality and the sublimation of life's brevity. The first approach corresponds to the process of becoming aware of the fact that one's existence has to come to an end. [...]
[...] The focus of the problem is shifted from the resistance of the person in front of his/her death and/or the death of a close relative to the refusal to reduce it to solely one single moment of life CONCLUSION The exhibition is only a sample of ten modern and contemporary artworks that have not been retained for their representativeness of the art evolution during the 20th and 21st centuries but, on the contrary, for their originality. Therefore, it is advisable to bear in mind the fact that this section does not draw any general conclusion on modern and contemporary Art History but just voices a few commentaries. [...]
[...] Ultimately, it will explain their arrangements within the museum for they are not set out in the order in which they are presented in part Indeed, regarded as the catalogue of the exhibition “Representation and Reflection on the Subject of Death in Modern and Contemporary the first chapter will list them chronologically, since it corresponds in the most accurate manner, to fulfill its didactic purpose. On the contrary, the second one has to be seen as the information carrier of the project. [...]
APA Style reference
For your bibliographyOnline reading
with our online readerContent validated
by our reading committee
