Melancholia: “The Dark Side of Genius” [] Béa Aaronson PhD/JC3

MELANCHOLIA: THE DARK SIDE OF GENIUS
METAMORPHOSES OF THE ARTISTIC TEMPERAMENT
By Béa Aaronson PhD

THURSDAY FEBRUARY 18th
3pm central time

ZOOM PRESENTATION LINK

https://www.shalomsanmiguel.org/upcoming-highlights/bea-aaronson-s-lectures/

If you encounter difficulties to register and pay (200 pesos or 10 US $)

Please email: shalomsanmiguel@gmail.com

Melancholia is not an emotion. It is a mood that may lead to emotional disorders. But these emotional disorders are the fertile humus from which artists, poets, writers, musicians draw their creative power. Usually defined as an abnormal state attributed to an excess of black bile, characterized by either a pensive mood, irascibility, depression or dejection, melancholia is more familiar to us as “having the blues,” despondence, unhappiness, the spleen, which by the way, is also the name of the organ where the black bile resides.

Melancholia thus begins its life as a chemical imbalance. Bi-polarity, manic depression, a condition which afflicts many artists, are her children. The artistic temperament is imbalanced, moody, but this “moodiness” will enthrall the creative juices. Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Goya, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Munch, Soutine, would not have created their masterpieces if they had not touched the bottom. Excess builds up different kinds of energy, ranging from apathy and sadness to violence and rebellion. These energies get transferred to the canvas, the stone, the music sheet, the poem, the book, and mate with matter, mind and soul. This tensed organic process gives the work of art its power and authenticity.

I will show you hundreds of images from the Antiquity right up until today, to illustrate Melancholia’s pictorial and sculptural metamorphoses. The melancholic pose has become an iconographic standard:  head bent, resting on one’s hand, and a gaze lost into an endless horizon.

I shall reveal for you all the mysteries of Melancholia, from its Hippocratic beginnings and the famous theory of the four temperaments or humors, to the Christian Acedia describing a state of torpor or negligence.

The most famous representation of Melancholia is of course Dürer’s  Renaissance engraving Melancholia I –the “I” standing for “imaginative.” I shall decode for you most of its symbols. During the Baroque Age, Melancholia seems to grow into a meditative awareness of mortality represented by the presence of skulls. In the 18th century, the Age of Rococo, we find Melancholia transformed into landscapes at sunset, heralding the Romantic era of “soul-scapes,” but also in portraits of women in love and longing for love. The blossoming of Melancholia truly happens in the 19th century with the Romantic “Mal de vivre,” and also with its association to madness. The dark side of genius assaults the senses and Imagination is made “queen of faculties” by Charles Baudelaire, the poet of The Flowers of Evil.

With Impressionism, Melancholia leaves the stage, although she shows her face in some of Degas’ works. She powerfully reappears in the Victorian era with the Pre Raphaelites. The fear and the desire of the unknown, the melancholy of bitterness also invaded the rebellious souls of Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, while Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon developed a Melancholia of dreamy poetry.

With the 20th century, we shall meet Modigliani, “the angel of melancholy,” and many others, from Picasso’s “blue” period, to Mark Rothko’s physiological color melancholia, to the loneliness of Edward Hopper’s urban melancholia, which exudes the hell of modern alienation, and many more. I invite you to discover the power of Melancholia, a mood without which there would be no history of art.

https://vimeo.com/371791970/43cb39dd6b

trailer movie Observar Las Aves

director Andrea Martinez Crowther

Protagonist Béa Aaronson

http://rhuthmos.eu/spip.php?article2600

text and collages published in the International Philosophical platform RHUTHMOS funded and directed by Pascal Michon

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUrK1-UmHMw

Pasiones Profundas Humans on my phone

by Gregor Collins (The Accidental Caregiver)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYrkCfBtKU8

Amigos The Life Dance

Collages by Béa Aaronson

Music written and performed by Chico Sanchez and Jorge Gonzalez

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uz-5xt5jxVs&feature=youtu.be

(ars poetica dysraphic poetry)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2zQFbMWQ_0&feature=youtu.be

(Impressionism lecture excerpts)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydRKTi3kPxY&feature=youtu.be

(The Thing is….Ode to Baudelaire)