COLLECTION NAME:
Graduate Thesis Collection
Record
Title:
Death, the Ruin, and Arnold Böcklin
Creator:
Wanderman, Meredith Helena
Subject:
Thesis (M.A.) – Art History
Subject:
Savannah College of Art and Design -- Department of Art History
Rights:
Copyright is retained by the authors or artists of items in this collection, or their descendants, as stipulated by United States copyright law.
Abstract:
“Arnold Böcklin’s (1827–1901) paintings reflect a shift in European society, from a reverence for the passage of time in agrarian life to the fast-paced and impermanent industrialized society of the nineteenth century, which reduced people to the value of their labor. The ideal of being part of a past or future through art and architecture became a near impossibility in a century when factory work instilled the values of quantity over quality and left little free time to devote to skilled craftsmanship. In Böcklin’s work, this shift is marked by the movement from the motif of the ruin to a skeletal figure symbolic of death that represents themes of time and the ephemerality of life. The ruin and the personification of death have similar meanings. They both represent the past and the present, the passage of time, the transitory quality of life, and the inevitability of death. However, the ruin can also signify humanity’s longevity and connectedness with the past. It embodies the concept that the people of the past have left their mark on the land and on time. The skeleton suggests that death is the only inevitability and the only constant. Thus, where the ruin suggests continuity and memory, the skeleton suggests loss. Böcklin utilized both the ruin and the personification of death within his work. His oeuvre consists of melancholic landscapes, striking mythological scenes, and harrowing portraits that evoke feelings of nostalgia and yearning for an idealized past. Böcklin’s artworks were often dominated by the macabre and he frequently portrayed death as a skeleton. But even in those works where death is not present, its specter remains. By comparing his ruin pieces to his works depicting death, the ruin in The Chapel (fig. 16) emerges as representative of the skeletal figure that appears in Self-Portrait with Death Playing the Fiddle (fig. 1), War (fig. 2), and Plague (fig. 3).” –Abstract
Keywords: Arnold Böcklin, death, Germany, Industrial Revolution, industrialization, Romanticism, ruin, Social History of Art, Symbolism, urbanization.
Keywords: Arnold Böcklin, death, Germany, Industrial Revolution, industrialization, Romanticism, ruin, Social History of Art, Symbolism, urbanization.
Publisher:
Savannah, Georgia : Savannah College of Art and Design
Date:
2024-05
Format:
1 online resource: 1 PDF (Thesis, 60 pages, color illustrations)