DISTURBING ART:  Historical Origins

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The main influence for Western Disturbing Art probably comes from the Symbolist Art Movement that thrived in Europe throughout the 18th and 19th Century, and into the beginning of the 20th.  This art movement was an outgrowth of the Romantism Art Movement (which had strong emotional and idealistic tendencies), and went onto influence the Impressionists, Art Nouveau, and Les Nabis.

Throughout this period you find artists using imagery and symbolism from mythology, religion, and dream psychology (as developed by Jung and Freud for example) in order to create art that was psychologically suggestive and often disturbing in content and message (as defined in the Intro page).

There were so many truly astounding artists in this genre in Europe, but here are a few:

While in this stage of construction, this page consists of just links.

On the World Wide Web, there are some amazing webpages covering the fine arts.  The main ones that I have found so far are:

"Artcyclopedia" (AA),  "Art in Context" (AC),  "ArtMagick" (AM),  "CGFA" (CG),  "Chimera Publishing" (CP),  "The Colors of Stories" (CS),  "Ibiblio" (IB),  "Loggia" (LG),  "Multimannia" (MM),  "Shameless Productions" (SP),  "Slawek's Guide to SF, Fantasy, Space, & Surreal Art" (SG),  "The Virtual Museum" (VM) (VM).

If you find any others worth listing, please let me know at [email protected].

For each of the Symbolist Artists listed below, I list the links to their bibliographies on these webpages, and many others, and many of these links include images of their works as well.  The Letter Codes refer to the Webpage as seen in the list above.

Austria

Belgium

Dutch

England

Flemish

France

Germany

Norway

Switzerland

But you also find similar trends in other times and places.  Most well known of these is probably the Hindu religious movements worshipping the Goddess Kali, and the God Shiva, in India.  Both movements are distinguished by religious art that is both terrifying in content, and highly philosophical in meaning.  These movements are having influence today as Eastern philosophical thought has become  more widely accepted throughout the West mostly since the 1920's (with the introduction of Vendanta by Swami Paramahansa Yogananda), but especially since the  late 1960's (by the Beatles and their involvement in TM).

REFERENCES

Gibson, Michael.  SYMBOLISM.  Publisher:  VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany (1994), and then Benedikt Tanschen, Koln, Germany (1995).

Gibson, Michael.  THE SYMBOLISTS.  Publishers:  Nouvelles Editions Francaise, France (1984; in French), then Harry N. Abrams, NY (1988).

ArtMagick, 1999-2001.

Shameless Productions, Atlanta GA.

Slawek's Guide to SF, Fantasy, Space, and Surreal Art, (C) Slawek Wojtowicz, 2000.

SF art catalog, Chimera Publishing. (C)Syntheverse, Hamilton, NJ, 1995-2001.

Ibiblio: The Public's Library. Chapel Hill, NC University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and The Center for Public Domain

Artcyclopedia: The Fine Art Search Engine. (C) Artcyclopedia, Inc. 1999-2000 Calgary, Canada

The Colors of Stories Art Gallery(C) 2000.

CGFA: A Virtual Art Museum, created and maintained by Carol Gerten-Jackson.

Art in Context, © 1995-2001 Art in Context Center for Communications NYC, NY

Virtual Museum Copyright © 2000 by Virtualology®.

Loggia: Exploring the Arts and Humanities copyright © 1997-2001 Loggia.com

Multimania (C), 2001.

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