Disaster
Earthquakes, floods, fires, shipwrecks and crashes, and the problem of showing catastrophe without spectacle.
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About
Disasters, whether earthquakes, floods, fires, shipwrecks or crashes, test art's ability to show catastrophe without turning it into spectacle. Nineteenth-century painters leaned towards drama. Karl Bryullov's The Last Day of Pompeii (1830–33) freezes families beneath toppling statues, and J. M. W. Turner, who watched Parliament burn in 1834, painted The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons (1834–35) as a sky of flame. Théodore Géricault based The Raft of the Medusa (1818–19) on interviews with survivors of a real shipwreck.
The 20th century met disaster through the media. Andy Warhol's Death and Disaster paintings of 1962–64 repeat newspaper photographs of car and plane crashes until they numb. Jake and Dinos Chapman's model hellscapes stage atrocity in miniature, and Gideon Mendel's Drowning World series, begun in 2007, photographs flood victims in many countries standing in the water that has filled their homes.
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Engagement with Mass Media
Equestrian
Erotic
Eye Contact
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Face
Failure
Family
Femininity
Figure from the Back (Rückenfigur)
Figure Studies
Figures in Nature
Figures of the Art World
Flora
Focus on the Social Margins
