Abstract
Within the framework of the presentation of the personal fictive museum, I have decided to retain ten art pieces from the 20th C and 21st C in accordance with the problematic of the representation of, and the reflection on death in modern and contemporary art. In as much as the questioning about death – and thereby about life – is inherent in human nature, it is the object of an eternal and universal artistic inspiration. As a matter of fact, the relationship between the human being and nothingness has always and everywhere been sublimated by art, as it expresses man's consciousness of death.
The post-war epoch coincides with the disruption of the idea of death, and subsequently to the multiplication of its artistic interpretations that oscillate between a religious vision and a scientific perspective. The set of artistic creations in connection with this theme refers to an excessively vast range of responses on the part of the artists: from a nihilist fascination to an existentialist anguish. With a view to putting into relief the diversity of the artistic expression related to the topic, the collection of the museum is deliberately as heteroclite as possible, on the level of content and on the level of form. Indeed, although the thematic of death is – explicitly or implicitly – at the heart of the major part of the art currents of the 20th and 21st centuries, its treatment is fundamentally extremely different from one artist to the other. I have voluntarily chosen major as well as minor artists from diverse fields of artistic activities: cinema, drawing, music, painting, performance, photography, sculpture and theatre. There have been some changes with respect to the initial list, because some of the pieces originally selected are less adequate than the ones later encountered in the course of the research.
