“I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” — Samuel Beckett, “The Unnamable.”

In a recent interview Rebecca Solnit talked about hope amid the climate chaos. She defined the term: “Hope, for me, is just recognizing that the future is being decided to some extent in the present, and what we do matters because of that reality.” She added the observation, “many people are very good at imagining everything falling apart, everything getting worse; they’re good at dystopia, they’re bad at utopia.” Sometimes, I thought, a word of consolation would help, rather than the exhortation for all of us to try even harder during times when despair sets in. The thought was probably triggered by my current reading – I came across the interview while starting a recent book by Michael Ignatieff, The Art of Consolation. How to find solace in dark times. (The link gives you an excerpt of the preface.)

I had liked Ignatieff’s brilliant biography of Isaiah Berlin, but am currently irritated, two chapters into these meditations, about his devotion to religious attempts at consolation with the imperative to just accept the unknowable. No takers for “all has a hidden meaning – only a higher power knows” on this end here. The chapters are organized around a summary and analysis, ordered along a historical time line, of famous people’s dealing with catastrophe and defining forms of consolation, a veritable gallery of the broken and bereaved, as a clever review in The Guardian phrased it. More skeptical review in the NYT here.

Maybe I am just currently irritated in general. Who knows.

In any case, I thought it would be interesting to find some examples of visual representations of consolation. How do you visually translate the moment when we attempt to help someone reverse or shift despair into something more resembling a somewhat normal life, if not hope? The moment when someone or something opens a perspective towards this shift, providing a sense that it is possible, or probable, or even guaranteed that life will be easier to bear at some point?

The search resulted in a mix. It arches from representations of the texts that governed the belief systems of different eras to impressionistic paintings that captured the human interaction associated with comforting, from mannerist paintings to some modern photography. What is art and what is Kitsch I leave to the eye of the beholder.

I’ll start with miniatures from The Getty relating to Boethius’ Consolation de Philosophie, around 1460-70. The Roman philosopher’s book was the most read in Europe after the bible. It contains “a dialogue between its author and the personification of Philosophy, in prison while awaiting trial for treason. Discussing the problem of evil and the conflict between free will and divine providence, Philosophy explains the changeable nature of Fortune and consoles Boethius in his adversity.”

Coëtivy Master (Henri de Vulcop?) (French, active about 1450 – 1485), Anicius Manlius Severinus Boëthius (called Boethius) (Italian, about 480 – 524/526),  Jean de Meun (French, about 1240/1260

Compare that with this:

Matthew James Collins The Consolation of Philosophy (2016)

Here is another consolation of the imprisoned:

Conrad Meyer Consolation of the Imprisoned – I could not find the date, in the collection of National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

More hollow eyes in a lithograph counterpart:

Georg Ehrlich Consolation (Tröstung) (1920) from the periodical Genius. Zeitschrift für werdende und alte Kunst, vol. 2, no. 1

Here is as academiscist a depiction as they come:

Auguste Toulmouche Consolation (1867)

And something, what can I say, 150 years later:

Laura Makabresku Consolation (2014)

There is Munch, there is always Edvard Munch, who we can count on.

Edvard Munch Consolation (1894)

Compare:

PDX photographer, now based in Brooklyn, Olivia Bee Consolation (2020.)

Any thoughts? And what to make of the image (“Consolation”) of a fetus…. at the center of the exhibition Colpo di Folmine (Struck by Lightning) by Dutch photographer Arno Massee?

I, personally, find solace in the somewhat sarcastic poetry of Heinrich Heine, who, in 1832, reminds a woman staring at the sea with setting sun, that the sun will rise again….translated by no other than Emma Lazarus!

Here is one of Kaspar David Friedrich’s back views, alternatingly titled: Woman in front of the setting sun, Sunset, Sunrise, Morning Sun, Woman in the morning sun. No sea in sight, but the solace of a world still turning. That’s my kind of consolation. Then again, that painting might also be a premonition of a burning planet due to unending fossil fuel consumption – wouldn’t you know it, despair is here to stay.

For music today: Here are Liszt’s Six Consolations.