Complicating Melancholia: The Hopelessness and Redemptive-Potential in Alfons Mucha’s Late Paintings (original) (raw)

Art History With(in) Crisis: “Communovirus” and Class Conflict, College Art Association, 2021

Abstract

“Oh, [there is] plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope—but not for us.” - Franz Kafka to Max Brod Sigmund Freud’s work on mourning and melancholia (1856- 1939) transformed the study of melancholia from its medieval perception as a consequence of imbalanced humors, and into a condition of the mind. These psychoanalytic studies situate melancholia within the individual psyche, which reacts to external pressure by retreating into itself, where it then becomes trapped. Escape becomes impossible. Working concurrently with Freud, the Czech artist Alfons Maria Mucha (1860-1939) and Polish artist Jacek Malczewski (1854-1929) created paintings that allow us to either confirm Freud’s notions of melancholia or question his findings. The two Slavic artists created artworks responding to the precarious national situations of their people, celebrated their eventual freedom after WWI, and then saw their hard-fought freedom come under fire as WWII drew closer. In the face of war, oppression, and threats from abroad, Malczewski and Mucha’s artworks engaged with melancholia in distinct ways. The unresolvable tension between the secular and the theological typified both artists’ relationship with melancholia. In this paper, I intend to show that Malczewski’s paintings can be defined by the Freudian, psychoanalytic version of melancholia. Conversely, Mucha’s intense study of mysticism and theology ultimately resulted in a worldview that denied the Freudian variant of melancholia. By contrasting Malczewski and Mucha’s versions of melancholia along the secular-theological divide, I intend of analyze Mucha’s struggle with melancholia through the lens of Walter Benjamin’s (1892-1940) understanding of the term, which combines the hopelessness of melancholia with the potential for a later redemption. This mixture of hopelessness and redemption offers a constructive model for artists responding to societal rupture.

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