Tragedy is a literary and theatrical genre, as defined historically by the models of its key practitioners and philosophically by a breadth of thinkers across Western history. Its structure relies upon the dramatics of the stage and the linear narrative of literature. On these grounds it cannot exist in painting.
Tragedy is dead. George Steiner is the leading thinker to propose that Tragedy is a genre confined to a particular historical period, roughly ranging from the Ancient Greek dramatists through to the great European Renaissance writers, most notably Shakespeare and Racine. The enlightenment and the rise of rationalism are cited as key players in its inevitable demise, stating the demise of Kings, Heroes and God’s as central examples.
Tragedy in the 21st Century and Tragedy in Painting are both anachronisms, so how can Tragedy possibly exist in painting today?
The notion that Tragedy is purely a literary art is false. Tragedy can find autonomous incarnations in other art form, notably in the work of great History painters, from Titian through to Gericault. These two painters, and many between, played on qualities independent to painting to explore notions of tragedy. Titian’s moments in flux, Caravaggio and Rembrandt’s use of paint and light to generate pathos and David and Gericault’s staging of painterly drama are all exercises in exploring themes central to tragedy, the expression of pity and fear, the inevitability of a particular outcome and emotions central to horror and suffering.
The end of figuration as the dominant form of painting, and the rise of abstraction, did not bring an end to this exploration, but instead encouraged painters to find new ways to express the tragic. Rothko’s Seagram Mural’s pulse and throb, inducing a tragic experience almost perfectly in parallel with John Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, Francis Bacon’s Crucifixion Triptychs and Gerhard Richter’s October Series both provide different responses to the role of photography in painting, harnessing the interplay between the two mediums as a central player in their exploration of tragedy.
Yet even if Tragedy could exist in painting, if Steiner is to be believed it has long since died and can therefore find no incarnation in any form. Steiners claim is founded on the belief that Tragedy necessitates the belief in a god figure, because it is the play between this universal structure and our own mortality that tragedy is based. Without it is dead. Fair and perhaps true, but if as an individual or a society we remove belief in a divine power then in its place we are left with equally grand notions. Nothing comes after death. We are infinitely small in relation to the universe. A belief in either of these notions, or a more generalised belief in the loss of value and meaning, provides a new universal structure around which our own sense of self and mortality can respond to with horror, pity and fear. Hamlet is one of many characters whose musings on life and death resonate in new and equally powerful ways today as they ever have. Macbeth’s final mutterings could also be a manifesto for French Post Structuralism.
“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.“
Tragedy may not be able to exist in the same form it once did, but it is capable of constantly reinventing itself, manifesting itself in new ways which echo, like Hegel’s Zeitgeist, with the spirit of the age. Tragedy, much like the Kings and Heroes who are often the central protagonists, will keep being killed off but will rise like a zombie. The paradox of the waking dead form of tragedy is that its life force is the very loss of meaning and value which killed it.
Painting has suffered a similar din of empty accusations proclaiming its last rites. The closest painting came to death was the martyrdom of the dead end philosophy if Greenbergian formalism. Yet like tragedy it has continued to be reborn, often finding a pulse digging through the corpse of its past. For both death brings life, in a constant process of renewal.
‘Tragedy is dead, Long live Tragedy’
‘Painting is dead, Long live Painting’
