nostalgia is a longing for the past. nostalgia and modernity

Nostalgia is a longing for the past.

NOSTALGIA AND MODERNITY

“I’m interested only in expressing basic human

emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.”

---Mark Rothko

Modernist artists respond to the inadequacies of representational art to convey emotion directly.

How do we react to this?

Sacrifice of Iphigenia, Marc Rothko, 1942

Pasiphae and the Bull, Jackson Pollock, 1943

Modernists also return to myth as a means of making sense of present catastrophe and potential annihilation.

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Self-Portrait, 1980s

Other important sources included primitive art, the art of children, and the art of the insane

closer to “the source” of life

reassuring

primitive

modern

• A society characterized by human misery, loss, oppression, deprivation, often created by a tyrant or tyrannical government.

• Usually futuristic. Although The Lord of the Rings creates a fictional past, Tolkien repeatedly emphasizes a future “falling,” and a passing of goodness that cannot be replaced.

DYSTOPIA

Historical ContextOne catastrophic world war over,

another about to begin

Inhuman horrors

British losses in WWI: Dead - 750,000, Seriously Injured - 1,500,000,

Claiming Disability - 2,500,000, Shell Shock Victims - 65,000

(Counting casualties from the entire British empire (India, etc.) the death toll rises to

947,023.)

Trench warfare

Gas attack

The Battle of the Somme, 1916

• A condition of pervasive hopelessness, of seeing the end as an absolute, which causes anguish and alienates us. Approximately 60 references to “despair” in LotR.

• To review: Humans have the freedom to defy this despair, with false hope, if necessary, and to act, even when we know such action is futile. The Master Soul would do this. A Slave Soul would blame others, feel self-pity, and ultimately abandon all hope.

MODERN DESPAIR

MODERN DESPAIR