Art As Savior

This period of great pain, fear and uncertainty will surely result in great art, which is often born from tragedy.

We look to the artist to help us understand our grief and sadness and loss and give us a road map out. The artist tries to make sense of misfortune, from the personal to the global. Art can explain the timeless tragedy of a lost love, the unexpected death of a child, the unexplained act of nature or the insanity of war.

Art has been here since time began. And humanity’s reactions to tragedy have remained constant as people seek to understand and to survive.

The artist shows us the universality of people and how sadness and fear know no boundaries and excludes no one. Art offers us an orderly way to react to things that seem to be utterly out of our control.

But more importantly art teaches us to understand that there is beauty in the worst of times and more importantly that man can persevere in the face of the worst tragedy.

It is in “Night,’ the masterpiece autobiography by Elie Wiesel of his survival as a teenager in the Nazi death camps.

It is in Bruce Springsteen’s masterpiece, “The Rising,” his expressions of survival and bravery during and after the Sept. 11 attacks. Or it is “The Scream,” Norwegian Expressionist artist Edvard Munch’s attempt to understand the horror of man.

Painting can be intensely personal. Vincent van Gogh painted “Eternity’s Gate” to reflect his deep sadness. Two months later he committed suicide. Van Gogh was a master at evoking empathy and understanding of everyone’s frailties.

Or it can be more universal. “Consequences of War” was the painter Rubens’ response to the Thirty Years’ War that ended in 1648. The anguish on the faces, the pain in the bodies is no different than today. The war led to the destruction of large areas of Europe as well as outbreaks of both pestilence and famine. Talk about disasters.

The horror and grief is palpable in Annibale Carracci’s 1606 “The Dead Christ Mourned.” It helps put perspective on the world.

Pablo Picasso’s 1937 “Guernica” is considered one of the most powerful anti-war paintings in history. “Guernica” was Picasso’s response to the bombing of Guernica, a Basque Country town in northern Spain, by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy at the request of the Spanish Nationalists.

And there are so many novels that offer the reader a way to greater understanding of even the worst evils. Whether the reader follows the artist’s ways is an individual decision.

And Bob Dylan could have been talking about any of a number of calamities facing man in “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall.”

The artist’s purpose is to warn people about coming storms. British poet Wilfred Owen wrote from the front of World War I that , “All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true poets must be truthful.”

And there may be no more timeless passage of tragedy and hope than Hamlet in Act 3, Scene 1, when he says,

“To be, or not to be — that is the question:

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles

And by opposing end them.”