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When a civilization loses its center, its art is the first place the wound shows. This lecture from Academy of Ideas reads modern painting as a mirror of a sick West. From Friedrich’s cold, empty landscapes to Munch’s isolated figures and Picasso’s shattered human forms, it traces how the loss of a shared god left artists face to face with chaos. Surrealism, in this view, is not mere experiment — it is the celebration of confusion. But the diagnosis ends in hope: if the sickness is in us, then we — as individuals — hold the power to heal it.
Full Video Transcript
We live in an age where our extensive scientific knowledge and our love of all things objective
and measurable has placed religion in a precarious position. Our scientific worldview tells us that
religious dogma is illusory and full of falsehoods and that as enlightened men and women we do not
need it to live. But while we may not need a god to fill in the gaps of our knowledge of the natural
world, does religion have nothing to teach us about our existential dilemma? Are we really
better off psychologically, with the picture that science paints for us of an infinite
cold and random cosmos lacking in objective human values and offering us nothing but the
finality of death? Or could it be that, in abandoning the Christian worldview, the West
placed itself in a psychological void of confusion and disorientation?
The time has come, wrote Nietzsche, when we have to pay for having been Christians for
2000 years. We are losing the center of gravity by virtue of which we lived. We are lost for
a while. One of the most revealing ways to grasp the significance of this transition
from Christianity to the scientific worldview is to look at it through the prism of art,
and to examine the changes in the masterpieces produced before, during, and after the fall
of the Christian worldview. For great artists in all ages are what Carl Jung called the
unwitting mouthpiece of the psychic secrets of the times. They are men and women who are
acutely sensitive to the spirit of the age, and who, through their creations, give form
an expression to the underlying atmosphere of the culture in which they live.
As Rollo-May explained,
In the beginning of the 19th century, the decline of the Christian worldview reached
a critical point of no return.
Just a few years earlier, the French Revolution had staged an all-out attack on the Christian
Church, resulting in the dechristianization of France.
And throughout the West, the scientific worldview was rapidly rising in stature as science continued
to yield phenomenal fruits.
At this same point in history, the subject matter of art underwent a curious and dramatic
change.
Prior to the 19th century, the great artists focused on works that beautified the world
and transfigured the human being.
Through their creations, the human form was imbued with dignity and hope.
Even paintings which depicted extreme suffering portrayed the human being as heroic.
In art, wrote Nietzsche, man takes delight in himself as perfection.
When the art of past ages glorified the human being and beautified the world, it had a civilizing
effect which enriched entire ages.
In the 19th century, art, by and large, still performed this life-enhancing function.
But alongside paintings which depicted the human being as heroic and the world as sublime,
many artists began to portray the world in forms which elicit anxiety, confusion and
dread.
The picture of the ideal man disappeared from the 19th and 20th centuries, wrote Nikolai
Berdyaev.
Instead of fashioning works of supreme beauty which save us from what Nietzsche called the
horrors of the night, some modern artists started to introduce the world to them.
In isolated instances, these horrors were represented in the art of previous centuries,
but with the fall of Christianity, for the first time in history, they gradually became
the main event.
There has never been anything similar in history, wrote Eric Neumann.
Each modern artist is a world in himself, endeavoring alone to ward off the chaos that
menaces him or to give it form, each with his own characteristic desperation.
It is no accident that we hear so much today of the void and forlornness of the individual,
And the profound anxiety, the sense of insecurity, uprootedness, and world dissolution at work
in these painters also move modern composers and poets.
The chaos which modern artists suffered and expressed through their art assumed various
forms in the works of 19th century painters.
In its subtlest and most aesthetically pleasing form, it can be seen in the masterpieces of
Caspar David Friedrich and Edvard Munch.
Through their works both these artists gave visual representation to the ethos of desolation
which was spreading across Europe at the time. In Friedrich’s paintings, the setting for this ethos of desolation is nature.
His landscapes portray a world grown cold, in which Mother Earth elicits the feelings of dread
associated with being alone and homeless in the midst of its vast empty spaces.
In 1810, the German poet Henrik von Kleist described Kaspar’s painting, The Wreck of Hope, in the following manner,
The solitary spark of life in the boundless kingdom of death, the lonely center point in the region of loneliness.
This picture with its two or three mysterious objects opens out before us like the apocalypse itself.
In the works of Edvard Munch, this ethos of desolation is transferred from nature to the social world.
The subjects in Munch’s paintings suffer from unbearable isolation.
They are lonely souls, unbridgeable islands unto themselves, unable, in their anxiety and sorrow, to reach out to, connect with, and find solace in others.
Never, it seems to me, was man so molten and fluid, and yet never was he so shut up within himself, never so walled about as he is today, and never was he so cold of heart.
Alongside this ethos of desolation, many other 19th century works of art are charged with a demonic force.
Whether it be the chilling figures of the great Francisco Goya, the malevolent compositions of Franz Stuck, or James Ensor’s works including Masks Confronting Death,
in 19th century art nocturnal and thonic powers rise to the surface.
The artists of this era confronted the monsters of the abyss, and the only thing which saved them from descending into madness was their capacity to externalize their horrific visions, to give them artistic form.
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.
And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.
But the chaos of 19th century art pales in comparison with its manifestations in the first half of the 20th century.
As modern art progressed, the chaos menacing it only became more explicit and pronounced.
In Picasso’s paintings, for example, the human being is broken into fragmented parts,
and then pieced together again in disjointed, abstract, and often hideous forms.
Picasso’s art no longer seeks the complete human being at all, wrote Nikolai Berdyaev.
It has lost the faculty of seeing things as wholes.
It tears off one cover after another in order to lay bare the structure of nature,
and in doing so, penetrates even further into the depths, disclosing images of things truly monstrous.
In the movement of Surrealism, the chaotic is not only represented visually, but explicitly exalted as a principle of life.
Salvador Dali declared painting to be the colored instantaneous photography of concrete irrationality and the systematization of confusion.
Andre Breton, in his second manifesto, declared Surrealism to have attained a point of view from which
life and death, the real and imagined, top and bottom, are no longer experienced as contradictory opposites.
When reading this latter statement, one cannot help but remember Nietzsche’s warning of the existential disorientation
he thought would manifest following the decline of the Christian worldview.
Are we not continually falling? Backwards, sideways, and in all directions? Do top and bottom still remain?
Are we not wandering through infinite nothingness? Is not the breath of empty space in our faces? Has it not grown colder?
Yet, Surrealism was not just motivated by a love of chaos,
but also by a desire to annihilate the human form by merging the human with the inorganic realm.
In many Surrealist paintings, the line demarcating the human from the object and the living from the dead is blurred,
and entities which have no intrinsic connection to each other are brought together in a senseless embrace.
This impulse to absorb the human into the inorganic can also be seen in the movements of Cubism and Futurism.
The human becomes lost, a thing among things, dissolved in the surrounding world of inanimate objects.
In Futurism wrote Berdyaev,
at all. Man collapses into the world of objects. If the creations of great artists reveal the
underlying psychological and spiritual atmosphere of the times, then an honest survey of modern art
must lead one to consider the possibility that modern civilization is suffering from a spiritual
sickness, a deep existential loneliness, an eruption of the demonic, a negation of human
nature and a fragmentation of the human form, a celebration of chaos, and thus perhaps even a
sickness unto death.
It is characteristic of all these movements, wrote Nikolai Berjeev, that the human form
should be shattered to pieces and utterly dismembered.
And indeed, in modern art, we have a sort of ending to man as an entity.
Yet as Eric Neumann points out, as children of the times, we must recognize that this
sickness also lies within us.
But let us be careful.
We are speaking of ourselves.
If this art is degenerate, we too are degenerate.
For innumerable individuals are suffering the same collapse of the cultural canon, the same alienation, the same loneliness,
the rising blackness with its shadow and devouring dragon. The disintegration and dissonance of this art are our own.
To understand them is to understand ourselves.
Despite this grave diagnosis, there is room for hope. Since the beginning of the 19th century, the chaos menacing the world has appeared to only grow stronger.
But if this sickness which afflicts the modern world also exists within us, we have the power to heal it.
For most individuals, such healing cannot be achieved by a return to the past.
The solutions offered by the Christian worldview are no longer available to the individual who exists, in a psychological sense, at the precipice of the modern world.
Nor can psychological renewal be achieved by adhering to the contemporary worldview and cultural canon.
canon, if such a worldview is corrupted, as modern art seems to suggest. Instead, renewal
today seems to require what Nietzsche called a revaluation of values. We must become physicians
of culture, and not only diagnose the sicknesses of our age, but also heal their manifestations
in ourselves, by discovering a new set of values and worldview which can reinstate the
dignity and potential grandeur of the individual. We must, in the words of Nietzsche, apply
the knife vivisectionally to the chest of the very virtues of the time, in order to
know a new greatness of man, a new untrodden way to his enhancement.
For when a body is sick, it is individual cells which heal it, and so too, when a civilization
is sick, it is up to individuals to heal themselves, and in so doing, contribute to the healing
of the whole.”
In reality, wrote Jung, only a change in the attitude of the individual can bring about
a renewal in the spirit of nations.
begins with the individual or as he further explained the development of modern art with
its seemingly nihilistic trend towards disintegration must be understood as the
symptom and symbol of a mood of universal destruction and renewal that has set its
mark on our age this mood makes itself felt everywhere politically socially and philosophically
we are living in what the greeks called the right moment for a metamorphosis of the gods
of the fundamental principle and symbols.
This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing,
is the expression of the unconscious man within who is changing.
Coming generations will have to take account of this momentous transformation
if humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science.
Source: Academy of Ideas