Nostalgia
Art that longs for a lost or idealised past, from medieval revivals and pastoral dreams to old snapshots and keepsakes.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
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About
The word nostalgia was coined by the Swiss physician Johannes Hofer in 1688 to describe the homesickness of soldiers serving far away, and it has kept an ache inside it ever since. Art has often looked back to a past that seems better for being gone. Samuel Palmer's moonlit Shoreham pastorals of the late 1820s and early 1830s imagine an unspoiled English village, and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, founded in London in 1848, turned to medieval legend and early Italian painting as an antidote to industrial Britain.
In the 20th century nostalgia often attached itself to things. Joseph Cornell filled glass-fronted boxes with Victorian trinkets, old maps and pictures of film stars, and Christian Boltanski gathered found photographs and used clothing into memorials to vanished lives. Look for faded colour, outdated clothes and objects chosen for the memories they carry.
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More in Subject Matter
Nude
Obsolescence
Outer Space
Parties and Celebrations
People at Home
Performing Arts
Personal Histories
Personal Writing Systems
Personification
Political
Political Events
Political Figures
Popular Culture
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Portrait
Portraits without a Face
Provocative
Psychoanalysis
Racial and Ethnic Identity
References to Art History
