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Where is it written that suffering requires grotesque mishappen faces and inhuman bodies? What about clear human faces or expressions?
Take this: https://old.reddit.com/r/PropagandaPosters/comments/69vilr/north_korean_museum_painting_depicting_torture_of/
It's perfectly clear what's going on, you can actually interpret it in justifiable ways. Korean wearing white for purity, the composition of how they're all staring at her with malign intent, the guy with the cigarette casually contemptuous and approving of his colleague's hard work. Tongs being heated up for more torture.
Or take half of Caravaggio's work, lots of suffering there! But it's also clear, you've got light and darkness, you've got colour, you've got proper human faces and emotions. His work is not a giant mess of disconnected, ill-shaped images.
Or this - clear emotion, realistic imagery.
https://media.timeout.com/images/105652224/750/422/image.jpg
It's far better than Guernica, which isn't saying much. Art should be intelligible, better yet readily intelligible. Guernica is not clear or intelligible, you see a bunch of warped, distorted figures and animals bashing eachother or scrabbling around. The interpretation is absolutely not 'perfectly clear'. If you showed it to someone who'd never seen or heard of Guernica, they couldn't tell you it meant 'war is bad'. Maybe it means that chaos is bad, that there needs to be strong leadership and rigid discipline in society. We only know what it means from context and the title.
If you show someone your art and their first instinct is 'what is this mess' then you've failed. Anyone could immediately tell you the meaning of the Nork propaganda or the other image I mentioned. Even more staggering is that the Nork actually bothered to use some artistic skills beyond throwing shapes on the page. Composition. Colour. Shadow. Vaguely realistic faces!
You're the one who's been saying that negative emotions need grotesque and deliberately broken imagery to be fully expressed, which isn't the case. A corpse can be aesthetically pleasing, if there's good composition and care shown in how its placed. Consider Napoléon on the Battlefield of Eylau.
No, I didn’t. Not once. I literally said the exact opposite in the post you are responding to. I said that the depiction of suffering cannot be uplifting and aesthetically pleasing. You are the one making claims about what types of images must be included.
The theme of Napoléon on the Battlefield of Eylau is not human suffering. It is a celebration of Napoleon.
You need to look more closely. It literally includes a depiction of a mother holding a dead child, which you said was the "correct" way to depict suffering.
Are you SURE that Guernica does not employ composition? And colour? That is a requirement of good art? Have you never seen a film noir film? Has it occurred to you that Picasso used greys and blacks to reinforce the tone of the subject? See, eg, Schindler's List.
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