Mourning and Commemoration

Tombs, memorials, grave markers and mourning objects made to honour the dead and give shape to grief, private and public.

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Grief has produced some of the most carefully made objects in any culture. Athenian grave stelae such as the Stele of Hegeso (c. 410 BC) show the dead in quiet domestic moments, and the painted mummy portraits of Roman Egypt kept a face present at the burial. Germain Pilon's figures for the tomb of Henri II and Catherine de' Medici at Saint-Denis show the couple kneeling in prayer above and lying naked in death below. Victorians wore their grief, in black jet and brooches worked from a loved one's hair.

Modern public memorials often avoid triumph. Augustus Saint-Gaudens's hooded bronze Adams Memorial (1891) broods in Washington, Edwin Lutyens's plain Cenotaph (1920) stands in Whitehall, and Käthe Kollwitz made The Grieving Parents (1932) for the Belgian cemetery where her son lay. Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz's Monument Against Fascism (1986) in Hamburg was lowered into the ground until it vanished.