Trauma and Art

“Are there any signs of trauma?” The question, posed by Detective Chief Inspector (DCI) Cassie Stuart, emerges from the realm not of fact but of fiction. A British crime drama, Unforgotten draws each season’s plot from a cold case, a murder victim long buried, even if not forgotten. Her question is but one marker of the degree to which a language of trauma has permeated popular culture and the public sphere. Such was not always the case. In the aftermath of World War I, Freud’s analysis of victims of childhood sexual abuse dovetailed with his work on shell-shocked veterans, and the term trauma emerged as a clinical category. But it was not until the 1970s, when again, psychiatric work on victims of sexual abuse coincided with work on veterans, this time, from the Vietnam War, that notions of trauma, and the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), entered popular discourse and culture. In the 1990s, trauma began to animate humanistic inquiry, as both a theoretical framework and a structuring subject, in some instances, echoing and amplifying post-structuralist concerns with the limits of language and representation. Notably, post-Holocaust studies emerged as a particularly vital site for such early scholarship. In the decades that followed, the number of articles, monographs, and anthologies dedicated to trauma increased exponentially. That we can now name a discipline, trauma studies, is a testament to that work. That we can now assemble a bibliography dedicated to art and trauma speaks to the role that art historians have played in the foundation and furthering of that scholarly arena, if not in some small part for the primacy of visuality in the act of bearing witness. In 1998, five art historians presented papers in “Trauma and Representation,” a session organized by Lisa Saltzman for the annual meeting of the College Art Association: Griselda Pollock, Michael Stone Richards, Judith Rodenbeck, Eric Rosenberg, and Isabelle Wallace. The session, which filled a Toronto hotel ballroom to capacity, inspired Saltzman and Rosenberg to build on that session to produce an edited volume, Trauma and Visuality in Modernity, published in 2006 by Dartmouth College/University Press of New England. And it is that collaborative endeavor that grounds and motivates the bibliography that follows, one that aims to capture something of the field that took shape in and adjacent to the discipline of art history and to take stock of certain foundational, formative, and influential contributions.

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