Fear is connected to survival, irrational at times! Usually, we fear the unknown, yet I’d say the artists biggest fears are failure and oblivion. During this post, we’ll see how the human being deals with this freezing emotion and its consequences.
Kafka, The Metamorphosis famous author, felt fear, “fear” of the modern world, fear of what others thought of him and mostly, of his father, a severe and strict person. Among his little surviving literary work, Kafka wrote a 47 page long letter, front and back, to his father (entitled precisely Letter to His Father) explaining why he feared him and, ultimately to confront him. However, his mother got hold of it and made sure his father never read it…
An even more peculiar case, is the one of Paul Cézanne, one of the most influence artist in the 19th century and founding father of Cubism. Cézanne didn’t deal well with people or their touch. We can’t say he was afraid of his equals, but judging by his self portraits, he had quite an unfriendly look. He was so unsociable he didn’t even shake other artists hands! One of his most recurrent themes is nature, proof of that are the 80 pieces where he painted the Saint Victoire Mountain, in Aix en Provence, France. He stated “In nature there are only geometric forms.”, an opinion we can see in his art.
Right: Cézanne Portraits; Left: 4 paintings of Saint Victoire Mountain.
Someone who also lived fear in a unique way, were the romantic artists, especially when it came to their fear and pleasure relationship with nature. Here laid the idea of sublime, the two emotions running through their veins. A great, 18th/19th century, English romantic artist, who expressed that sublimity, was William Turner. To him, the motif which better represented that emotion mix were sea storms.
Speaking of fear, we can not not talk about some gothic/horror novel authors. Let’s start with the trio Mary Shelley, Lord Byron e John William Polidori. To spend time, they started a game where they had to write a horror story, the scariest of all would win. That’s how Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley and a talle called The Vampire by Polidori (which later inspired Bram Stroker to write Dracula), “were born”. What started out as a game, left us with two of the biggest literary books of gothic literature. The Portrait of Dorian Gray and The Strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde also belong to this style. All of these classical novels were later adapted to film.
Mary Shelley 
Lord Byron 
John William Polidori
Film and book- The Portrait of Dorian Gray; Film and book: The Strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
We probably know these pieces by the film versions and not the book. Some versions come out better than others of course, but still, I guarantee you there’s nothing like reading the real thing, to feel the shiver down your spine, after all our imagination is way more powerful than our sight! But why would we go to the cinema to be scared? Why pay to feel something so intense and breathtaking?! We do it, because we know it’s pure entertainment.
Directors don’t just base their films on books, when it comes the aesthetic, they are also inspired by classical arts like painting, with whom they idealise the characters, as we can see in the following images.
As I said, we fear the unknown and, something that ends up relating to that, death. But we can’t really do anything about that, can we? Well, Chopin the Polish-French composer and pianist did. He had a poor health so he knew death was near, as he suffered from tuberculosis , since he was 28 years old. So, he wrote two funeral marches, the second one being the most renowned (Sonata for piano Nº2). Though he didn’t fear death itself, but being buried alive, so his final wish was to have his heart removed and taken to his homeland, Poland. That’s what one of his sisters did, she took her brothers heart, preserved in alcohol, to the Holy Cross Church, in Warsaw, where it remains.
In short, fear has consequences that make us do things we normally wouldn’t. Fear isolated and pushed away Kafka and Cézanne from others, we shouldn’t let such things happen, we shouldn’t let them control us like that. Fear can dominate other emotions already mentioned on the blog, in previous posts. What about you, what do you fear? Have you ever felt dominated by it?
MARIA 