Creative Expression and Communication of Emotions in the Visual and Narrative Arts

Abstract Art is social communication. Although one can imagine a lover improvising a poem privately into her lover’s ear, for the most part art is expressed in the form of objects that endure through time, and travel beyond the immediate. In this way, the emotions expressed in art can be thought of as extensions of the ephemeral and local expressions discussed elsewhere in this volume. This chapter is based on the movement of romanticism, by which emotions came into primacy in art and politics. Think of the Western history of ideas as having various phases: pre-classical, Greek, Roman, medieval. The modern period in Western history, which follows the medieval, began around 1400 with the start of Renaissance. Until the introduction of the printing press, around 1450, almost no one could read or write. With printing there occurred a great burgeoning of education and literacy. European life came to be dominated by commercial cities like Venice, London, and Amsterdam. World exploration and communication began. The Renaissance in art, architecture, and literature, as well as the beginnings of science, transformed the intellectual life of Europe and started to transform everyday life. About 1750, there began the era of romanticism, felt first in literary arts and politics. Scientific interest in emotions can be dated to more than a hundred years later, to Darwin’s book of 1872, The Expression of the Emotions. Romanticism started, let us say, when Jean-Jacques Rousseau, citizen of Geneva—he who coined that ringing phrase “Man is born free and is everywhere in chains”— came first to public notice with an essay that won a prize. In this essay he argued that the natural is far to be preferred to the artificialities of civilization, which promote inequality and idleness. He wrote: “Human nature was [in former times] basically no better than it is now, but men found security in being able to discern each other’s feelings and intentions, and this advantage . . . spared them many vices” (1750, p. 208). So, the romantic movement, as well as giving primacy to the emotions, was associated with the betterment of humanity. Its mood was responsible for the slogan of the French Revolution, “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.” Liberty was freedom from political repression and, as we might now say, from repression of emotions. It was freedom to create one’s own life. (Its modern versions are ideas of being oneself, even of being what one really wants to be.) Earlier, the American Revolution, influenced by these same currents, led to the Declaration of Independence, drafted by Thomas Jefferson, which includes the pursuit of an emotional state among human rights: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

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