DEATH IN ART Ars longa, vita brevis

(Art is long, life is short)

After losing a friend, Taiwanese-American artist Chang expressed her grief in a simple yet transformative way, writing “Before I die I want to _____.” on the wall of an abandoned New Orleans building.

Within 24 hours, the wall was filled with personal aspirations, hopes and goals — everything from “be myself completely” to “see equality for all.”

The project, illuminating the precious nature of life in an empowering and optimistic manner, has been recreated in over 500 cities and over 70 countries, including Iraq, China, Haiti, Brazil, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and South Africa.

“Before I Die” by Candy Chang

Death is one of the few experiences common to all people and all societies.

But how different people have conceived of death and how those conceptions have shaped their behaviors and practices has varied over time and across cultures.

Through art, people have expressed attitudes toward death that are in some respects universal, while in others personally and culturally specific.

They have, moreover, used a wide range of objects, images, and structures to negotiate the processes of aging and dying, grieving, and commemorating.

Funeral

Commemorative

Vanitas/Memento Mori

FUNERAL ART

Funeral Art Death, and in particular funerals, have long provided a major focus for artistic activity, since it was through art that the dead often remembered and honored.

From the earliest times, a portrait was usually an important part of a funerary ritual.

The gold mask of Pharaoh Tutankhamen was buried with him alongside sumptuous gold coffins, furniture, vases, jewelry, and sculpture to accompany him to the afterlife.

Unknown Artist. Tutankhamen’s Funerary Mask. 1330 BC. Ancient Egypt.

Bottle, Skeletal Couple with Child

3rd–7th centuryPeru Culture: Moche

Skeletal individuals are often depicted in Moche ceramics, probably symbolizing the interplay and complementarity between life and death.

It has been suggested that in Moche religion, a transitory stage between life and death is expressed by the existence of transitional beings such as simian individuals and the animated deceased.

In painted or sculpted vessels, animated skeletons dance, embrace, play music with flutes and rattles, carry funerary offerings, or engage in sexual activities.

This embracing skeletal couple with child perhaps illustrates death as a necessary stage for the renewal of life.

Early American Gravestones

A death's head, often with wings and/or crossed bones, was a stylized skull. Some have speculated that winged skulls were intended to symbolize a combination of physical death and spiritual regeneration. It is important to note that Puritans did not advocate using religious symbols, such as cherubs, Christ figures, or crosses in their meetinghouses, on church silver, or on their gravestones. Puritans were adamantly against attributing human form to spiritual beings such as God, angels, or spirits.

The death's head, a non-religious symbol was the first imagery employed in gravestone carving.

Other decorative motifs accompanying the death's head were the hourglass (and even a winged hourglass symbolizing the concept "time flies"), coffins, elaborately carved side panels with florets, finials, foliage, fruit, and imp-and-dagon figures

generally have solemn epitaphs which prompted passers-by to contemplate mortality and the fleeting nature of life on earth.

Sarcophagus of the Spouses

6th c. BC Etruscan It depicts a married couple reclining at a banquet together in the afterlife

The Etruscans shared general early Mediterranean beliefs, such as the Egyptian belief that survival and prosperity in the hereafter depend on the treatment of the deceased's remains.

Etruscan tombs imitated domestic structures and were characterized by spacious chambers, wall paintings and grave furniture. In the tomb, especially on the, was a representation of the deceased in his or her prime, often with a spouse.

COMMEMORATIVE ART

Commemorative Art

Western churches are filled with elaborate tombs of rulers, commanders, and religious leaders, as well as artists, statesmen, soldiers and businessmen.

El Greco’s painting of his burial was designed to hang directly above the Count of Orgaz’s tomb, so it appeared as if his body was being lowered into his resting place.

The picture shows a miracle in progress

El Greco. The Burial of Count of Orgaz. 1586-1588. Mannerism

MichelangeloPietà

1488-9Vatican

The statue was commissioned for the French Cardinal Jean de Bilhères, who was a representative in Rome.

The sculpture was made for the cardinal's funeral monument, but was moved to its current location, the first chapel on the right as one enters the basilica, in the 18th century. It is the only piece Michelangelo ever signed.

This famous work of art depicts the body of Jesus on the lap of his mother Mary after the Crucifixion

William Wetmore Story

Angel of Grief 1894

The 1894 sculpture, located in at the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, serves as the grave for Story’s wife.

Replicas of the heart wrenching statue sit everywhere from Luxembourg to Costa Rica to Stanford University.

Cuban-born artist Gonzalez-Torres created this quiet yet haunting billboard in 1991, the same year he lost his lover of eight years, Ross Laycock, to an AIDS-related illness.

The massive image of the empty bed conjures associations of rest, desire, death and loneliness, as a place of intimacy and comfort is suddenly transformed into a space of isolation.

Gonzalez-Torres mounted the image on 24 billboards to commemorate the day his love died.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled,” 1991. BillboardSan Antonio, Texas

At 10:40 a.m., pedestrians on 34th Street heard an explosive boom—what turned out to be the sound of Evelyn’s body crashing into a limousineA photographer happened to be nearby. He took several photos, one of which made it into Life magazine that week (right).The caption read “At the bottom of the Empire State Building the body of Evelyn McHale reposes calmly in grotesque bier, her falling body punched into the top of a car.”Still in her pearls, her legs crossed elegantly, Evelyn looked peaceful, as if she was asleep.She was dubbed “the most beautiful suicide” because of the eerie way her face and body were unbroken on top of the twisted metal of the limousine, even after a 1,000-foot fall.

Andy WarholSuicide (Fallen

Body)1962

Robert MontgomeryThe People You Love from Light Poem SeriesEngland 2010

Monjas Coronadas(Crowned Nuns)

Mexico During the eighteenth century, there were very few options for young women. They could either get married or enter the convent to spend the rest of their life there as nuns.

The cloistered nuns had a series of paintings representing them at two points in their life in the convent: the profession of their vows and their death.

In both, they were crowned with an enormous ring of flowers of bright colors and held a scepter and a bouquet of equally colorful flowers. These paintings represented a significant genre of art in Mexico at the time. While vibrant and colorful, the portraits also captured the sometimes stoic or perhaps resigned expressions of these young girls at a moment where they were professing their vow to God and the Church and the symbolic death of their life in the outside world.

Día de los MuertosDay of the Dead

is a Mexican holiday celebrated throughout Mexico and by people of Mexican ancestry living in other places.

The multi-day holiday focuses on gatherings of family and friends to pray for and remember friends and family members who have died, and help support their spiritual journey.

The intent is to encourage visits by the souls, so the souls will hear the prayers and the comments of the living directed to them. Celebrations can take a humorous tone, as celebrants remember funny events and anecdotes about the departed

Scholars trace the origins of the modern Mexican holiday to indigenous observances dating back hundreds of years and to an Aztec festival dedicated to the goddess Mictecacihuatl José Guadalupe Posada. La Calavera Catrina. 1903

VANITAS/ MEMENTO MORI

Juan de Valdés Leal

in ictu oculi1670

Vanitas: Paintings executed in the vanitas style were meant to remind viewers of the transience of life, the futility of pleasure, and the certainty of death

The phrase in ictu oculi is a Latin expression meaning in the twinkling of an eye.

This painting, an allegory of death

The central character is a skeleton; on the floor lies an open coffin and symbols of wealth and power.

The skeleton extinguishes a candle which represents life, and above the taper is written the Latin motto

Memento Mori("remember that you have to die") is a Latin expression, originating from a practice common in Ancient Rome.

as a means of perfecting the character by cultivating detachment and other virtues, and by turning the attention towards the immortality of the soul and the afterlife

In art, mementos mori are artistic or symbolic reminders of mortality.

In the European Christian art context, "the expression... developed with the growth of Christianity, which emphasized Heaven, Hell, and salvation of the soul in the afterlife."

Hans Holbein, The Ambassadors 1533

The Dance of Death

Dance of Death, also called Danse Macabre (from the French language), is an artistic genre of late-medieval allegory on the universality of death: no matter one's station in life, the Dance of Death unites all. The Danse Macabre consists of the dead or personified Death summoning representatives from all walks of life to dance along to the grave, typically with a pope, emperor, king, child, and laborer.

They were produced to remind people of the fragility of their lives and how vain were the glories of earthly life

Tsukioka YoshitoshiThe Hell Courtesan

Jigokuday Sees Herself as a Skeleon in the

Mirror of Hell1880s Japan

Jigoku-dayu of Takasu was a courtesan adopted by the Zen Priest Ikkyu (1394–1481), who converted her to a religious life and gave her a literary education.

She is seated in meditation with a ghostly vision of a procession of the skeletons of a courtesan and her entourage, thus showing her the impermanence of life.

Hans MemlingTriptych of Earthly Vanity and Divine

Salvation15th century

Memling, a 15th century German-born painter who worked in the tradition of Early Netherlandish painting, created this epic triptych comparing the beautiful luxuries of earthly existence with the looming prospects of death and eternal hell.

The haunting image is a prime example of a memento mori, an artwork hinting at the mortality that taunts us all.

Gustav KlimtDeath and Life

1910allegorical Grim Reaper who gazes at “life” with a malicious grin. This “life” is comprised of all generations: every age group is represented, from the baby to the grandmother, in this depiction of the never-ending circle of life. Death may be able to swipe individuals from life, but life itself, humanity as a whole, will always elude his grasp.

Theme: Human destiny

The human group make a dreaming impression

Solitary figure of death staring at humanity

Death is a dark garment. Open eyes unlike the human figures except for the baby and the woman in the left

Life takes no notice of death. Their fearlessness is an illusion

Generations of humankind come and go with bereft of meaning

Vincent van GoghSkull of a Skeleton

with Burning Cigarette

1860s?This undated painting, which currently lives at the Van Gogh Museum in Antwerp, renders a macabre vision of a smoking skeleton in a muted, monochromatic palette.

It remains somewhat ambiguous whether the artist van Gogh was making a serious commentary on the brevity of life, or a sardonic jab at the seriousness of morbid art.

Saṃsāra (Buddhism)Saṃsāra in Buddhism is the beginning-less cycle of repeated birth, mundane existence and dying again that all beings pass through.

Samsara is considered to be, unsatisfactory and painful, perpetuated by desire and ignorance, and the resulting karma.

Rebirths occur in six realms of existence, namely three good realms (heavenly, demi-god, human) and three evil realms (animal, ghosts, hellish).

Samsara ends if a person attains nirvana,

the "blowing out" of the desires and the gaining of true insight into impermanence and non-self reality

The highest degree of evil deed will cause a soul to be reborn as a denizen of hell

Section of the Hungry Ghosts Scroll depicting one of the thirty-six types of hungry ghosts who constantly seeks water to drink and explaining how those who have been born as such are saved by the offerings of the living

Hungry Ghosts realm of Buddhist samsara, a 12th-century painting from Kyoto JapanHungry Ghosts have huge, empty stomachs, but their thin necks don’t allow nourishment to pass. Food turns to fire and ash in their mouths. Greed and jealousy lead to rebirth as a Hungry Ghost. Hungry Ghosts are associated with addictions compulsions and obsessions.

Damien HirstThe Physical

Impossibility of Death in the Mind of

Someone Living1991

“I’ve got an obsession with death,” the contentious British artist once said. “But I think it’s like a celebration of life rather than something morbid.” His massive 1991 piece consisted of a tiger shark preserved in formaldehyde in a vitrine.

In 2007, a New York Times review captured the all-powerful effect of the work: “In keeping with the piece’s title, the shark is simultaneously life and death incarnate in a way you don’t quite grasp until you see it, suspended and silent, in its tank.

It gives the innately demonic urge to live a demonic, deathlike form.”

Andres SerranoThe Morgue (Killed

by Four Great Danes)1992

This photograph was taken, as you may have guessed, inside a morgue, by prolific provocateur Serrano.

The chilling series brings the viewer in such close proximity to corpses it feels as if you are bending over their lifeless bodies.

Every blemish, every scratch, every discoloration is disturbingly conspicuous, making the deceased feel at once more and less human.

Cleon PetersonA World of Cruelty, Suffering and Senseless Violence.

Peterson alludes to mass extinction of humans as a result of domination of violence, characteristic of today’s society.

A World of Cruelty, Suffering and Senseless Violence.

His paintings graphically explore chaos, power struggles, and the human condition in a calculated set of shifting, figural lines. Sometimes the bodies are patterns floating amongst their own viscera in space. Other times, they are within the context of a city. Throughout, the lines and colors are always very clean. He narrates explosive scenes through characters representing authority and subject, individual and society. And though there is a lot of brutality, there's never any sign of death—just action-packed struggle and disorder

Rule of Law. 2014