Nostalgia is a longing for the past. NOSTALGIA AND MODERNITY

“I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.” ---Mark Rothko Modernist artists respond to the inadequacies of representational art to convey emotion directly.

How do we react to this?

 Sacrifice of Iphigenia, Marc Rothko, 1942 Pasiphae and the Bull, Jackson Pollock, 1943  Modernists also return to myth as a means of making sense of present catastrophe and potential annihilation.

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Self-Portrait, 1980s Other important sources included primitive art, the art of children, and the art of the insane  closer to “the source” of life  reassuring

 primitive   modern

A society characterized by human misery, loss, oppression, deprivation, often created by a tyrant or tyrannical government. Usually futuristic. Although The Lord of the Rings creates a fictional past, Tolkien repeatedly emphasizes a future “falling,” and a passing of goodness that cannot be replaced. DYSTOPIA

Historical Context One catastrophic world war over, another about to begin Inhuman horrors British losses in WWI: Dead - 750,000, Seriously Injured - 1,500,000, Claiming Disability - 2,500,000, Shell Shock Victims - 65,000 (Counting casualties from the entire British empire (India, etc.) the death toll rises to 947,023.)

Trench warfare

Gas attack

The Battle of the Somme, 1916

A condition of pervasive hopelessness, of seeing the end as an absolute, which causes anguish and alienates us. Approximately 60 references to “despair” in LotR. To review: Humans have the freedom to defy this despair, with false hope, if necessary, and to act, even when we know such action is futile. The Master Soul would do this. A Slave Soul would blame others, feel self-pity, and ultimately abandon all hope. MODERN DESPAIR

Galadriel: You offer [the Ring] to me freely? I do not deny that my heart has greatly desired this. In the place of a Dark Lord you would have a Queen! Not dark but beautiful and terrible as the Morn! Treacherous as the Seas! Stronger than the foundations of the Earth! All shall love me and despair! Boromir: I will find no rest [in Lorien]. I heard [Galadriel’s] voice inside my head...she spoke of my father and the fall of Gondor, and she said to me: “Even now, there is hope left.” But I cannot see it...it is long since we had any hope.