Der Engel im Spannungsfeld zwischen sakraler und profaner Motivik

This new monograph on the rich history of the motif of angels not only deepens the sacral meaning of angels in art with highlights such as the systematization of the angelic motif in ikon painting in the analysis of their typology but also researches the role of the depiction of angels during the epochal changes involving alterations of the sacral architecture of the great cathedral in Paderborn. This fresh approach reaches from art historical analysis to contemporarily discussed topics of art, which have not gotten any amount of attention like popular spiritual art. In the process, the methods of this cultural phenomenon get defined and exemplary paintings (af Klint, Wall etc.) since the beginning of visionary art get decoded under the lens of formal criteria for the first time.

Quantistica — and style and gender in the superposition of quantic art

The author of the paper is based on the provisions of the “Quantum Art” manifesto, created in 2008 by Roberto Denti, an Italian theorist, architect, artist, computer graphics and designer. In his opinion, the avant-garde styles of the twentieth century, which are based on a spontaneous image of a religious, meditative, psychedelic and narcotic trance seen in an altered state (such as visionary art, abstraction, surrealism, etc.), should be perceived as special cases of quantism, fixing random images of altered consciousness, but the authors are not aware of the causal relationship with the galactic information field, the quantum structure of the Universe, confirmed by the latest discoveries of the world scientific community in the field of cosmogony and quantum mechanics.

German Cinematic Expressionism in Light of Jungian and Post-Jungian Approaches

Prerogative of what Jung calls visionary art, the aesthetics of German Expressionist cinema is “primarily expressive of the collective unconscious,” and – unlike the psychological art, whose goal is “to express the collective consciousness of a society” – they have succeeded not only to “compensate their culture for its biases” by bringing “to the consciousness what is ignored or repressed,” but also to “predict something of the future direction of a culture” (Rowland 2008, italics in the original, 189–90). After a theoretical introduction, the article develops this idea through the example of three visionary works: Arthur Robison’s Warning Shadows (Schatten, 1923), Fritz Lang’s The Weary Death aka Destiny (Der müde Tod, 1921), and Paul Leni’s Waxworks (Wachsfigurenkabinett, 1924).