By Salwat Ali
In this world crazed with aggression and turmoil, is love losing its magical properties of fostering peace and harmony? Arguably the inspiration for great art more than any other human emotion, love nevertheless presents a challenge to the visual artist. How do you depict love? How do you convey its complexity and intensity? In our art milieu the beloved pining for the absent lover is a common painterly exercise and is especially well depicted in the art of miniature painting. Eminent oriental painter Abdur Rehman Chughtai furthered this notion of unrequited love most poetically in his ëFlame of Love seriesí and the emotion is still being epitomised in Hajra Mansurs paintings. Our modernists like Moeen Faruqi interpret love in the age of alienation with enigmatic, bizarre paintings of estranged partners, distanced by self aggrandisement.
The sentiment is highlighted to grand effect in an exhibition currently on at the National Gallery in London. Comprising works of art from the 15th century to the present day, the show titled ìLoveî currently on at the National Gallery London explores how artists have represented this most powerful of emotions.
Encompassing divine and mortal love, chaste and unchaste love, family love and charity, it demonstrates how artists including Raphael, Cranach, Vermeer, Holman Hunt, Marc Chagall, Tracey Emin and Marc Quinn have described or responded to love in all its complexities, across the centuries and in a variety of styles. It sheds light on how different societies have represented sacred love, intimacy, the fun of flirtation or the sheer joy of finding new love. Unrequited feelings and the shock of loss or betrayal have also provided equally rich artistic subject matter.
Tracy Eminís says ìthose who suffer love (Iím ok now) connects the agony of the creative process and the intricacies of human relations.î Similar tensions seem evident in the iconic Astarte Syriaca painted by Dante Gabriel Rossetti over one hundred years previously.
Loveís power to beat all kinds of adversity is also revealed in the exhibition. In The Good Samaritan by Jacopo Bassano, as a traveler tends to the wounds of a total stranger, neighborly love overcomes racial and religious prejudice.
Paintings by the Singh Twins juxtapose the dissatisfaction of celebrity worship with the joy of love reciprocated; Lord Frederic Leighton paints two women whose friendship will be ruined by their love for the same man; these works serve to remind us that love is not always a source of happiness and can sometimes lead to jealousy and betrayal. In Medea, most dramatically, Anthony Frederick Sandys indicates how Jasonís rejection of the Scythian princess will result in deception and death.
Many classical paintings have immortalized this emotion. The subject of Bacchus and Ariadne is derived from the classical authors Ovid and Catullus. Bacchus, god of wine, emerges with his followers from the landscape to the right. Falling in love with Ariadne on sight, he leaps from his chariot, drawn by two cheetahs, towards her. Ariadne had been abandoned on the Greek island of Naxos by Theseus, whose ship is shown in the distance. The picture shows her initial fear of Bacchus, but he raised her to heaven and turned her into a constellation, represented by the stars above her head.
Source: The News
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