Trauma and Struggle

About

Pain, fear and survival have been subjects of art for as long as there has been suffering to record, but the modern period turned toward inner wounds. Edvard Munch's The Scream (1893) gave anxiety a shape: a skull-like figure clutching its face under a blood-red sky. Frida Kahlo's The Broken Column (1944) splits her torso open to show a crumbling column in place of a spine, after years of surgery following a bus accident.

Artists caught up in historical catastrophe often painted to bear witness. Felix Nussbaum, hiding in Brussels, made Self-Portrait with Jewish Identity Card (c. 1943) before his deportation to Auschwitz, and Ceija Stojka, a Romani survivor of the Nazi camps, began painting her memories of them in the late 1980s. Binh Danh prints archival photographs from the Vietnam War onto leaves using sunlight, so that the images seem to grow from the land.