In the early Middle Ages in Europe, roughly between the 5th and 11th centuries, artists' palettes were significantly limited. Many pigments that were common in ancient times were lost with the Roman Empire because the knowledge of how to produce them disappeared or trade routes were interrupted. This included Egyptian blue.

Theoretically, there were some blue pigments available, such as azurite, a naturally occurring copper mineral, or indigo, a dye of plant origin. And they were also used, as in Irish book illumination (for example, in the Book of Kells). However, azurite was sensitive to moisture and alkalis, i.e. to the lime in frescoes, and could therefore discolour over time, from bright blue to greenish or brownish.

The only bright blue that has survived from this period can be found in Byzantine art. In the large church mosaics of Constantinople, Ravenna and Thessaloniki, the blue areas still shine today because they are made of coloured glass.

Lapis Lazuli – The Blue of the Gods

Lapis lazuli, a semi-precious stone, still comes almost exclusively from a single region: present-day Afghanistan, more precisely from the mines of Badakhshan in the north-east of the country, which have been in operation for over 6,000 years. From there, lapis lazuli travelled along long trade routes – through Persia, Mesopotamia, and Egypt – to the Mediterranean region. Even in ancient times, it was considered a symbol of the divine. The Sumerians, Egyptians and later also the Greeks used it for amulets, jewellery and artistic inlays.

After the collapse of the Roman Empire, lapis lazuli was virtually unavailable in Europe for many centuries. It was only with the flourishing of medieval trade with the Orient, mainly through the Crusades, Venetian trade networks and contact with Islamic cultures, that the material returned to the West. At the same time, a new understanding of colour and material began to develop around 1200–1300.

It was the era of Gothic cathedrals, rich manuscripts and fresco painting in Italy, and everywhere, bright colours played an aesthetic and theological role.

The knowledge of how to extract colours from stones was fundamentally available – pigments had been produced from minerals since ancient times. But lapis lazuli presented a particular challenge.

Simply grinding it produced a grey-blue powder because light-coloured rock particles and pure lazurite were mixed together. But only the fine lazurite grain contains the intense colour. So it had to be separated from the rest of the rock somehow.

When and where exactly someone came up with the idea of treating the ground substance with wax, resin and lye is not documented. Presumably in northern Italy, probably in the 13th century, but no one knows for sure.

In any case, the oldest written description can be found in Cennino Cennini's Libro dell'Arte (around 1400).

The result of this process was ultramarine, the purest and most vibrant blue known to painting – and also the most expensive pigment of all.

Its name is derived from the Latin ultra marinum – “beyond the sea” – a reference to its distant origin. In European painting of the 14th and 15th centuries, ultramarine was so precious that it was usually charged separately from the rest of the work. Clients specified in the contract which parts were to be painted with it.

Ultramarine did not fade in air or light. It could be mixed well with other pigments without reacting and had a special optical depth. A velvety, transparent glow that was unique in frescoes and tempera.

Because it was more expensive than gold, it was often used only for the central, most sacred or most valuable parts of a painting – such as the Virgin Mary's cloak or the sky in scenes with Christ.

This led to blue becoming the sacred colour par excellence.

How Blue Found its Meaning

In early cultures, blue was not a symbolically charged colour. Red, black, white and yellow dominated as carriers of fixed meanings. Red stood for life or power, black for death or fertility, white for purity. Since blue hardly ever occurred in nature in a stable form, it played only a marginal role in painting.

Many ancient languages, including Ancient Greek and Hebrew, did not even have a separate word for blue. In Greek, blue and dark shades were often subsumed under ‘kyaneos’ (dark, shiny) or ‘glaukos’ (greenish, shimmering).

In the Odyssey, Homer describes the sea as ‘wine-coloured’ (‘oinops pontos’) – i.e. shimmering reddish-brown, not blue. This has less to do with colour blindness than with a different understanding of colour. Ancient cultures classified colours according to brightness and material effect, rather than wavelength or hue. It was not until the Middle Ages and early modern times that a clear awareness of colour as a separate category emerged, with corresponding terms in European languages.

In the early advanced civilisations, i.e. in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Aegean world, art was not representational in the modern sense, but symbolic and functional. Landscapes were not depicted, but rather gods, rulers, rituals, symbols of power or the afterlife. The sky was not a motif, but a place that could be symbolically represented by gold or black.

Blue was therefore not a necessary ‘natural pigment’ because the sky, water or air were not understood as subjects, but as contextual surfaces that served a symbolic order. Landscape painting, in which one really had to paint the sky, simply did not exist. The idea that painting could create an illusion of space or nature did not arise until much later.

The production of Egyptian blue around 2500 BC was therefore more of a technical achievement than the result of a deliberate search for a ‘meaningful’ colour. The effort required to obtain it made it something special. And through its connection with the sky and water, blue gradually took on a spiritual dimension. In Egypt, it stood for the divine, the eternal, for protection and rebirth. These were qualities associated with the sky and the Nile.

In the 1st century BC and AD, artists began to depict depth, atmosphere, and sky tones. In the wall paintings of Pompeii and Herculaneum, blue actually appears as a room colour – mostly in the form of Egyptian blue or azurite, often mixed with white to achieve light effects.

However, after the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West, this type of representation also disappeared. In medieval art, the landscape once again had no significance. The pictorial space became flat, symbolic, divine. There was no need for pigment for the sky or horizon because this sky did not exist in a perspectival sense.

When lapis lazuli was used in European painting, it was initially primarily a symbol of prestige. The pigment was extremely expensive; those who could afford it demonstrated both wealth and piety. The blue stood for the sky, for purity. But it was not religious symbolism that led to the use of blue; rather, the rarity and preciousness of the material contributed to its becoming sacred.

A Coincidence with Consequences – Prussian Blue

From the 16th century onwards, as maritime trade expanded, indigo arrived in Europe in large quantities and also found its way into the workshops of local painters, initially as an additive for colouring glazes and inks.

It was not well suited for paste applications, but it mixed excellently with water or glue and produced a soft, hazy blue that remained transparent in thin layers. This is why indigo gradually found its way into watercolour painting.

However, it took another two centuries before watercolours became an art medium in their own right; initially, they were mainly used for sketches, maps, and illustrations. But long before that, a new blue appeared in the art world. How much of this story actually corresponds to the facts can no longer be said with certainty today. In any case, the legend goes like this:

In 1706, the colour maker Heinrich Diesbach wanted to produce a red pigment in his Berlin workshop. But he ran out of the potash he needed. The theologian, alchemist, physician, and naturalist Johann Conrad Dippel lived in the neighbourhood. Dippel was eccentric, searching for the philosopher's stone and experimenting with animal bones, blood, and chemicals. Incidentally, there are other legends surrounding him, which, it is said, came to Mary Shelley's attention when she travelled through Germany in 1814/1815 and also visited Frankenstein Castle, Dippel's birthplace …

But that's just a side note. In any case, Diesbach runs out of potash and Dippel gives him some of his own. However, due to his experiments with animal materials, presumably dried blood, it was contaminated. The organic nitrogen compounds reacted with iron compounds to form a complex iron cyanide. The result was a powerful, deep blue iron hexacyanoferrate – chemically stable, colour-intensive and completely new.

Unlike ultramarine from lapis lazuli, Prussian blue (also known as Berlin blue, iron blue or, after one manufacturer, Miloro blue) was easy to produce and inexpensive. The discovery quickly spread throughout Europe.

Around 1724, chemist John Woodward published a description of the pigment in London under the name Prussian Blue.

From then on, it was produced on a large scale in England, France and Holland.

The pigment was lightfast and had an intense cool tone. It made blue available to everyone and thus changed more than just art. A few decades after its discovery, it was ubiquitous in artists' palettes, printing shops and factories. The pigment is still used in medicine today. It binds metal ions in the body and therefore serves as an antidote to radioactive caesium and thallium.

From the 18th century onwards, Prussian blue became one of the most important pigments in art. In Japan, Katsushika Hokusai used it for his famous Great Wave off Kanagawa (around 1830). In Europe, it appears in the works of Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Antoine Watteau, Thomas Gainsborough, Caspar David Friedrich and many others.

Goethe also experimented with Prussian blue in his theory of colours.

From Craftsmanship to Chemistry 

The discovery of Prussian blue showed for the first time that colour could be obtained from chemical reactions and not just from grinding natural substances. But no one could fully explain the reaction, let alone derive new pigments from it in a targeted manner. Although it was known from experience that copper produces green or blue, iron produces ochre, reddish brown or black, lead produces white and mercury produces vermilion, there was no chemical explanation. People spoke of ‘metal spirits’ or ‘vapours,’ but they did not know what actually happened during the colour formation process.

It was not until the 18th century that people began to systematically investigate these experiences. This marked a transition from empirical knowledge to scientific understanding. Between about 1772 and 1789, Antoine Laurent de Lavoisier discovered that a substance increases in weight during combustion because it absorbs oxygen from its surroundings, thereby forming new compounds – oxides. Until then, it had been believed that a ‘fire substance’ escaped during combustion or rusting.

Lavoisier thus became the founder of modern chemistry. The new understanding of combustion led to improvements in metallurgy, in the manufacture of glass, ceramics, unfortunately also explosives, but also medicine and later to the development of the chemical industry in the 19th century. And it led to new insights into the manufacture of paints, as it was recognised that oxides are responsible for the colour effect of metals.

Cobalt Blue

Cobalt ores have been known since the Middle Ages, especially in the Ore Mountains, Saxony and Scandinavia. Miners hated them because they gave off foul-smelling, toxic fumes when smelted and did not yield any silver, even though they occurred in silver-bearing veins. They therefore considered them to be ‘bewitched’ and called them goblin ores (Kobolterze).

However, as early as the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, it was known that these ores could be used to produce bluish glazes (e.g. in Venetian glass or Meissen porcelain). At first, it was thought that the colour was a property of the mineral or the smelting process – not of a specific metal. Later, from around the 17th century onwards, the first assumptions arose that copper could be the cause, because many known blue pigments (azurite, Egyptian blue, copper green) were copper compounds.

But Georg Brandt, a Swedish chemist, discovered around 1730 that the blue colour was not caused by copper, but by a previously unknown metal. Brandt isolated it for the first time and named it cobalt.

This was one of the first discoveries of a ‘new’ metal ever.

Then, about 70 years later, Louis Jacques Thénard (1802) took up these findings. Thanks to Brandt, Lavoisier and general advances in chemistry, he now knew that cobalt was a chemical element, that oxides produced specific, reproducible colours, and that pigments could be produced in a targeted manner by controlling their composition.

So he experimented with cobalt oxide and aluminium oxide, heated them to high temperatures, and finally obtained stable, clear cobalt blue.

When cobalt blue came onto the market at the beginning of the 19th century (1802), painters had three qualitatively different but technically combinable shades of blue at their disposal for the first time.

Ultramarine was warm, velvety, with a slightly reddish undertone
Prussian blue was deep, dark, almost black-blue, with a greenish sheen.
Cobalt blue was neutral, cooler, clearer, airier, a pure, medium sky blue.

Discovering the Landscape

Until the 18th century, landscape painting was considered a ‘lower genre’ in the hierarchy of academic painting. History painting was at the top because it was considered intellectual. Landscape was an accessory, decorative but not meaningful.

That changed. In the late 17th and especially in the 18th century, landscape slowly developed from a background motif to a theme in its own right. Painting schools in Holland, Italy and England began to show nature not only as a backdrop for mythological scenes, but as a space for experience.
When cobalt blue became available, it encountered a generation of artists who already understood light, air and atmosphere as central motifs.
The need to paint nature thus preceded the availability of colours.

For the first time, cobalt blue had the optical character of daylight, a medium, neutral, slightly muted sky blue that could be lightened in glazes without turning grey. This was ideal for the new themes of sky, distance and aerial perspective.
The new colour reinforced the trend. Technique followed artistic interest, and artistic interest in turn followed the new possibilities offered by technique.

After cobalt blue, chemistry began to systematically address pigment production. The major European laboratories – in Paris, London, Munich – sought ways to produce natural colours synthetically and more cheaply.

The aim was to create pigments that were lightfast, opaque, inexpensive and chemically stable. The next big step was synthetic ultramarine, developed in France in 1828.
With the artificial variant, ultramarine was now affordable for everyone.

New Connections

In the second half of the 19th century, new cobalt compounds were added, such as cerulean blue, a light, greenish-blue pigment (around 1860).

The clear, slightly greenish sky blue became particularly important for landscape and plein air painters. The Impressionists loved it because it could be used to paint atmospheric effects. Monet is said to have used cerulean specifically to capture the ‘cold freshness’ of light, a contrast to the warm tones of his sunsets.

Phthalocyanine blue (phthalo blue) was discovered in 1927 and has been on the market since the 1930s. It remains one of the standard pigments to this day. Phthalocyanine pigments are so colour-intensive that tiny amounts are sufficient. This makes them real workhorses in modern painting. Not only do they cover huge areas, they also remain stable for decades. Artists such as Pablo Picasso and David Hockney used it in their paintings.

The Colour Index International, the standard directory for pigments and dyes, currently lists around 170 shades of blue. In the modern artist's palette, however, only about 10–15 pigments play a constant role, mostly variants of cobalt, ultramarine, cerulean and phthalocyanine blue, plus a few special synthetic pigments.
These are used to create different shades through various recipes and mixing ratios. Some manufacturers offer 20–30 different shades of blue alone.

One could say that the old pigments (lapis lazuli, azurite, Egyptian blue, Prussian blue, cobalt blue, synthetic ultramarine, cerulean blue, phthalo blue) form the ‘main line’.

Everything that came after that are branches or variations – new recipes, but no fundamentally new discoveries. The last truly new blue that caused a sensation among experts was YInMn Blue, discovered in 2009 at Oregon State University.

It is the first new inorganic blue in almost 200 years.

It was not until 2020 that the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) officially approved the pigment for use in artists' paints. It is also approved as a pigment for artists' paints in the EU. The colour tone is clear and very pure, with no green shift. Despite its high opacity, the blue has a brilliant glow. Some artists describe it as a kind of ‘modern cobalt blue’, only slightly richer and even more stable.

The pigment is extremely expensive, significantly more expensive than cobalt blue or synthetic ultramarine. Therefore, production volumes are low.
Some manufacturers such as Gamblin, Kremer Pigments, Daniel Smith and Golden have released small batches.

Incidentally, blue is the most frequently cited favourite colour in almost all global studies. This applies to Europe, the USA, large parts of Asia, Australia and many African countries.
The percentage varies depending on the study, but in most cases between 30% and 45% of respondents answer ‘blue’.

This approach follows exactly the playbook of right-wing populist, authoritarian or autocratic governments. That's how they start! They restrict the rights and freedoms of women and marginalised groups, and censor the press and the arts.

Because whoever controls art and media determines which stories are told: about the past, present and future. Narratives shape identity and collective memory. When criticism disappears, all that remains is the image that those in power create of themselves.

But art can never be completely eradicated. It can be suppressed, censored, exploited or forced underground, but it will never disappear.
Even during the Nazi regime, art continued to exist in secret despite massive attempts at conformity. Artists such as Felix Nussbaum painted in hiding. Despite the danger to his life, he documented his reality without conforming or allowing himself to be silenced. Many of his works depict fear, persecution, isolation and the impending end.

In Eastern Europe (from the Soviet Union to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and the GDR), official art after the war was primarily propaganda, but an unofficial scene flourished in parallel. In samizdat culture, political writings, essays critical of the regime, banned literature (e.g. Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, Mandelstam's poems, Solzhenitsyn's works), but also Western literature, philosophy, religious texts and even song lyrics were secretly reproduced and passed on under the table.

Under military dictatorships in Latin America (Chile, Argentina), resistance art emerged, ranging from songs such as ‘El pueblo unido’ to murals painted at night. Many of these works became symbols of resistance and have survived to this day.
Even in North Korea, where state control is extreme, there are cracks. In private, caricatures and poems are created that are never allowed to be shown publicly. Refugees report secret satire, songs sung in secret, diaries documenting life in the shadows. Some who managed to escape, such as the painter Song Byeok, now process their experiences in open, critical art.

There is and never has been a regime so powerful that it could completely eradicate art. Even when paintings and book were burned, artists murdered and voices silenced, art remained.

Not all crises are political. Even during plague epidemics, famines and natural disasters, people painted, wrote and sang. Often because there was simply no other outlet. Art is – among other things – expression. And expression always finds a way.

Interaction

Art does not arise in a vacuum. It responds to social, political, religious and cultural developments. The end of the Byzantine Empire, for example, was not only a turning point between the Middle Ages and the early modern period.

After the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, many scholars fled to Italy, bringing ancient writings with them. Their arrival sparked a new enthusiasm for ancient knowledge. This had been forgotten in Europe for centuries, fragmented and, when available, mostly subordinated to theological purposes. Renaissance humanism brought this knowledge back to the centre of thought and linked it to a new, optimistic view of humanity.

The changed view of humans as self-determined individuals also gave artists a new role. Painters and sculptors were no longer mere craftsmen working on commissions, but intellectuals engaged in philosophy and science. They put their experiences and thoughts into their work and commented on their times.
And so it has been ever since.

But art is not only a mirror, it is also a tool that shapes our times.
It is a multiplier of thoughts. Art captures ideas in images, often making them understandable in the first place. Art puts its finger on the wound, is memorable and emotionally accessible. It has the potential to reveal what is meant to be concealed. Powerful systems know full well that paintings, literature, or theatre can be more dangerous than speeches or numbers because they appeal to emotions and thus unite resistance. This also makes art a target.

When a society enters a crisis, whether due to war, epidemic, dictatorship or climate catastrophe, the position of art in that society also changes. Art becomes more immediate, speaking more strongly of fear, grief, resistance or hope.

When resources are lacking, when materials are scarce or prohibited, new forms of expression emerge. Reduced means, improvised forms, coded messages. Crises put artists in situations where they have to become creative in order to be able to say anything at all. Styles and entire art movements can change radically as a result.

People need expression and communication to process their experiences. Art is an outlet, not only, but especially when experiences are marked by threat, uncertainty, or loss. And this in turn means that art becomes particularly powerful in times of crisis. If it is not captured and instrumentalised, it can offer comfort, but also condemnation. It can give hope or denounce injustices.

This does not mean that art automatically becomes heavier and more serious in times of crisis. There is also art that is deliberately light, playful, or humorous, precisely because the world is so bleak. Humour, irony, and lightness take the edge off fear by ridiculing it and creating a counterworld to the crisis.

Historical Crises: Art in the Face of War and Trauma

15th–16th Century

Let's stay with the Renaissance for a moment. With central perspective, anatomical studies and a new view of humanity, art became more realistic and immediate. Faces gained individuality and expression, bodies had volume and presence. Because art had become so realistic and impressive, it shaped ideas: what does a human being look like, what does God look like? What is beautiful?

But the patrons remained primarily the Church, princes and wealthy merchants. And so the themes also remained religious or representative. The depictions aimed at beauty, harmony and idealisation. This is precisely what created a discrepancy.
While magnificent Madonnas, immaculate saints or elegant patron families appeared in the paintings, the majority of the population lived in poverty, insecurity and, time and again, in the shadow of plague, hunger or war. Art shows how the powerful and the Church wanted to see themselves, thereby revealing how great the gap between this and the reality of the people was.

The noticeable gap between pomp and reality awakened both an awareness of social contrasts and a longing for change.
Human beings are no longer merely sinful creatures awaiting salvation, but curious, self-determined beings who are allowed to explore the world. ‘Sapere aude – have the courage to use your own understanding’ (Kant's formulation in his famous essay ‘What is Enlightenment?’, written in the 18th century but rooted in humanism, which is still worth reading today) describes this attitude.

And so the Renaissance, the rebirth, was characterised by a spirit of optimism and new beginnings. In 1498, Vasco da Gama reached India by sea. During the 16th century, the Portuguese established trading posts in Africa, India, Southeast Asia and Brazil.

In 1492, Christopher Columbus reached America. Spain soon controlled large parts of South and Central America. England and France also began voyages to the ‘New World’ in the early 16th century (e.g. John Cabot in 1497, Jacques Cartier in 1534), to name but a few.

It is not without reason that we refer to this as the Age of Discovery. This marked the beginning of colonisation, with all its catastrophic consequences for indigenous populations. Europe and the world underwent lasting change. Access to precious metals, spices, new plants (potatoes, corn, tomatoes, tobacco) and animals transformed structures of wealth and power.

People no longer accepted their circumstances as God-given; they began to question them. Humanists studied the Bible in its original languages (Greek and Hebrew), not just in the Latin Vulgate version. This return ad fontes (to the sources) revealed inconsistencies and called the Church's interpretation into question.

In 1517, Luther published his 95 theses against the sale of indulgences. This marked the start of the Reformation. Thanks to the printing press, the theses spread throughout Germany within a few weeks and, shortly afterwards, throughout Europe.

The schism in the Church was not only a matter of faith, but also a political one. Princes, cities and entire countries had to decide whether to remain Catholic or accept the new doctrine. This broke a centuries-old consensus and created a patchwork of alliances and enmities.

Europe sank into a century of religious wars. Of course, art alone was not the trigger for this, but it did contribute to it. For better and for worse.

17th Century

The Church took advantage of this in the 17th century. At the Council of Trent (1545–1563), it decided to use art as a means of strengthening faith and obedience. This marked the beginning of the Baroque art period and the emergence of overwhelming, dramatic imagery designed to strike an emotional chord with the faithful. Paintings became more monumental, full of movement and contrasts.

The Thirty Years' War raged and devastated large parts of Europe. The experience of death and destruction is reflected in art through an abundance of vanitas depictions. Skulls, extinguished candles, wilting flowers, precious objects alongside symbols of decay.

In a time of existential uncertainty, the Church used art as propaganda to regain its power. While the symbols of vanitas omnipresently depicted both death and the emptiness of all earthly things, religious splendour painted the past as beautiful and peaceful as it never was. ‘Your turning away from God is to blame for the world sinking into chaos. Come back into the bosom of the Church, be humble and stay in your place, and everything will be fine again.’

Even today, this is still a popular stylistic device of authoritarians (‘great again’). Progress is bad, and as long as the rich get richer and the powerful get more powerful, you don't have to be better off: it's enough if others are worse off.
And when nothing else helps, God will surely help. Just believe in it firmly.

The current TikTok trend ‘Jesus glow’ works in a similar way. Faith is staged as a lifestyle transformation, made visible and shareable, emotionally effective, instantly consumable. This works because these strategies target human psychology – sensory overload, narrative coherence, iconography, and rituals create belonging and trust. In times of crisis (uncertainty, identity issues), people are particularly receptive to powerful images and simple narratives.

The Baroque period is a textbook example of how power uses images, space and ritual in a targeted way to direct emotions and shape the masses.
For a while, this was quite successful. But ultimately, the Counter-Reformation was unable to stop progress. Backward-looking movements never can. They only cause a great deal of damage along the way.

After more than a hundred years of religious and religiously framed wars (from the Peasants' Wars to the Huguenot Wars to the Thirty Years' War), Europe was bled dry. The experience that religion constantly brought war led to scepticism towards dogma and calls for tolerance.

The discoveries of Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton, for example, showed that the world cannot be explained by ecclesiastical authority, but by natural laws that can be explored. This encouraged people to apply reason to other areas as well, such as politics, society, and morality.

18th Century

The 18th century was marked by the Enlightenment, which focused on reason, science and progress (once again Kant: ‘Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.’). This did not protect it from crises and upheavals. In France, in America, and later throughout Europe, questions of freedom, civil rights and equality were raised.

After the end of the Thirty Years' War, mistrust of religious repression ran deep. In the 18th century, trade flourished, prosperity grew in many regions, and a middle class gained influence. This class wanted more rights, not only economically but also politically and culturally, and questioned ecclesiastical and feudal structures.

However, the new wealth was concentrated in the hands of a few. In rural areas, the majority of the population continued to live as dependent farmers. Agriculture was dependent on the weather and had undergone little modernisation. Crop failures quickly led to food shortages. Bread was the staple food – when the price of bread rose, it simply meant hunger for the masses.

Many countries had once again been embroiled in decades of war during this century (the War of the Spanish Succession, the Seven Years' War, etc.). France was particularly heavily indebted. Nevertheless, the nobility and the church clung to their old privileges. They remained largely exempt from taxes, while peasants, citizens, and merchants footed the bill.
In England and the colonies, too, trade restrictions and taxes led to anger against the Crown.
Economic hardship greatly increased the willingness to embrace radical change.

The ideas of philosophers such as Locke, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Montesquieu had enormous explosive power because they offered an alternative to the existing system. Suddenly, it was conceivable that ‘we could live differently’. The second half of the 18th century saw several revolutions. The American Revolution (1775–1783) was the first, followed later by the French Revolution (from 1789) and the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), the first successful slave revolution.
In addition, there were movements in the Netherlands (Patriot Movement, 1780s) and attempts at reform in other countries, but these often failed or were suppressed.

At the beginning of the 18th century, art turned away from the moralising themes of the Baroque, but still made use of its opulence. Rococo was frivolous, playful, light, decorative and full of pastel colours. It was all about pleasure, eroticism and the gallant life (e.g. François Boucher, Jean-Honoré Fragonard).

In the second half of the 18th century, however, art responded with clarity to reason and with pathos to the revolution. Classicism became the visual language for a new political and moral aspiration, a conscious departure from Baroque splendour and ecclesiastical representation. Instead, it often served explicitly to mobilise political support. Jacques-Louis David, for example, made his works symbols of republican virtue, martyrdom and civic oaths. Art thus became part of the language of the revolution.

19th Century

The Enlightenment changed the way people thought. People no longer relied solely on traditional authorities; they sought verifiable knowledge. This gave the natural sciences a tremendous boost and paved the way for technical innovations in fields such as mechanics, chemistry and physics. Inventions such as James Watt's improved steam engine would have been inconceivable without this new understanding.

Political upheavals, above all the revolutions, had weakened the old feudal structures and made way for a society that was interested in progress and had sufficient resources to invest in new technologies. Thus, new ways of thinking, scientific discoveries, economic interests and social changes flowed into one another and led to the Industrial Revolution becoming possible in the 19th century.

And yet, the 19th century was almost entirely marked by crises, upheavals and contradictions. Politically and socially, it began with the Napoleonic Wars, which shook the whole of Europe. This was followed by the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, the great famine in Ireland, colonial expansion, national movements and, at the end of the century, the social conflicts of industrialisation.
Almost every generation experienced a new crisis.

Artistically, the century was almost as diverse as its crises. Each movement responded to the times in its own way.
Romanticism (c. 1800–1850) emerged during the Napoleonic Wars. It sought emotion, the sublime, nature as a counterworld to war, industrialisation, and rationality. Caspar David Friedrich depicts lonely figures in endless landscapes, while Goya looks into the abyss of human cruelty. His ‘Black Paintings’ and the series of etchings The Horrors of War show what remains of the ideal of reason when violence and power take over. Romanticism was both escapism and a way of processing trauma.

Realism (from around 1850) was a reaction to industrialisation and social inequality. Artists such as Gustave Courbet did not paint heroes. Or at least they painted different heroes: workers, farmers, the hard life. Invisible worlds were thus made visible.

In the 19th century, Paris was the centre of the art world. And Paris was changing, with modern city life emerging. Artists such as Monet and Renoir depicted transience, light, and movement. Impressionism (from 1870) was less about crisis and more about rapid change and new perceptions. But even here, there was criticism of the times. Artists no longer painted ‘eternal truths’, but rather the moment.

Symbolism and Fin de Siècle (late 19th century) were a kind of counter-movement to sober modernism. Artists immersed themselves in dream worlds and myths. They were primarily concerned with inner crises. Much of it seemed melancholic, almost decadent. A reflection of uncertainty and the search for identity in an accelerated world.

20th Century

The First World War (1914–1918) is considered the first industrialised mass war in history.

For the first time, war was no longer fought primarily with horses, rifles and cannons, but with the full force of an industrialised society. Factories produced weapons, ammunition, tanks, aeroplanes and poison gas around the clock. As a result, the front was no longer just a place of military conflict, but a gigantic technical apparatus.

Logistics were also industrialised: railways transported troops and supplies on an unprecedented scale, and means of communication such as telegraph and radio made war more predictable – and at the same time more dehumanised. Millions of soldiers became part of a system of machines, steel and trenches.

After the First World War, nothing was the same anymore. Millions of people were dead, entire regions were devastated, states collapsed – and all in the name of progress and reason. People realised that if this ‘civilised’ world was capable of such a war, then something fundamental was wrong.

The idea that technology and reason automatically lead to a better world was shattered. Art and literature reacted radically to this after 1918: Dada, Expressionism, New Objectivity – they all attempted to process this experience of loss of meaning and destruction.

Dada was a direct response to this shock. Artists wanted nothing more to do with the logic that had made war possible. When reason leads to mass murder, all that remains is absurdity.
In Zurich, Berlin and New York, artists such as Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara and Hannah Höch created collages, sound poems and absurd performances. Dada deliberately destroyed language, form and meaning in protest against a world that had lost its meaning. It was not an escape, but a form of refusal: if everything is absurd, then we will openly show the absurdity.

Expressionism emerged before the war, but the experience of war radicalised it. Expressionist artists wanted to show what was inside, pain, fear, turmoil. Not external reality.
Artists such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Franz Marc and Egon Schiele distorted forms, exaggerated colours and broke with perspective. After 1918, Expressionism became a cry against the old order. The shock was particularly felt in Germany, where artists such as Otto Dix and George Grosz captured the disfigurement and brutalisation of war in unsparing images.

After all the chaos, a counter-movement emerged: New Objectivity. Artists wanted to return to a ‘sober’ and ‘realistic’ depiction of reality – but without idealisation.
Otto Dix, who had served in the war, painted soldiers, cripples, prostitutes and war invalids in the 1920s. No heroism, no hope, just the naked post-war misery. George Grosz caricatured the double standards of a society in which war profiteers and corrupt politicians flourished while others starved.

After the First World War, there was no real peace in Europe, but rather a period of instability and violence. Peace treaties followed (Versailles, 1919, etc.), but they created new tensions instead of lasting peace.
The economic crises of the 1920s and 1930s, the rise of authoritarian and fascist regimes in Germany, Italy, Spain and other countries, and the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) were all harbingers of the next great war.

With Guernica (cover image), which was shown at the Paris World Exhibition in May 1937, Picasso responded to the bombing of the Basque city of Guernica by the German ‘Legion Condor’ during the Spanish Civil War.
The painting condenses the horrors of modern warfare into an iconic anti-war panorama.

During the Nazi era, art was systematically turned into propaganda. Anything that did not fit into the image of the ‘German national community’ was defamed, banned or destroyed. Art was no longer to be free, but to serve ideology, myth, and the staging of power.

The modern avant-garde movements that flourished during the Weimar Republic were replaced by a style that appeared to be based on ancient and classical ideals. Heroic bodies, rural idylls, depictions of mothers and children, ‘healthy’ landscapes. Men were portrayed as athletic warriors, women as fertile mothers. Symbols of strength, purity, self-sacrifice.

At the same time, works by modern artists such as Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc and Emil Nolde were branded as ‘degenerate’. Many of them were removed from museums, confiscated, destroyed or sold abroad. The 1937 exhibition ‘Degenerate Art’ in Munich was the culmination of this campaign. Millions of people flocked to the exhibition to express their outrage at ‘depraved’ modernism. It was a public display of censorship.

Many artists went into exile in Switzerland, France, the USA or South America. Others fell silent or were forced to adapt. Some, such as Käthe Kollwitz, remained, continued to work quietly and recorded the suffering of the population without currying favour with the regime.

After the end of the Second World War, art – like the world – lay in ruins. And the question arose: how can art still be created after Auschwitz, after Hiroshima, after everything that has happened?

Many artists felt that language and traditional forms of expression had been exhausted. What had been revealed in the world wars – the unleashing of technology, dehumanisation, the silence of so many – made it impossible to trust in old values. Art thus became a testing ground for new forms of expression.

In the USA, Abstract Expressionism developed with artists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. They believed that only a completely new, non-representational language could do justice to the experience of the 20th century. Pollock's gestural painting, the rhythmic dripping, flinging and pouring of paint, was no longer representation, but action: a physical, almost existential act. Art became a kind of trace of human existence itself.

In Europe, especially in Germany, dealing with the past was much more difficult. After National Socialism, it was not just a question of making a new start, but also of guilt, memory and responsibility. Artists such as Joseph Beuys attempted to create something out of this wound that could enable healing or transformation, using materials such as fat, felt or wax, which symbolise warmth, protection, but also vulnerability. In his actions, Beuys understood art as a social process, as an attempt to change consciousness.

A generation later, Anselm Kiefer took up this debate again. His large-format, heavy paintings, featuring earth, straw, ash and lead, are reminiscent of burnt landscapes, ruins and myths. They raise the question of how memory can be materialised. In his work, German history is literally inscribed on the surface.

At the same time, art emerged that was linked to the political movements of the post-war period. In the 1960s and 1970s, art became political and physical: the civil rights movement in the USA, feminism, the anti-war and environmental movements found expression in performance, photography, text and conceptual art. Artists such as Judy Chicago and Martha Rosler used art as a means of visibility, as a language for those who had previously been overlooked or oppressed.

Artistic remembrance took the form of memorials, installations and later photographic works that attempted to capture the unspeakable – the Holocaust, displacement, loss – without aestheticising it. Artists such as Christian Boltanski, Gerhard Richter and many followers of Käthe Kollwitz sought to make silence, absence and gaps visible.

The Present – Identity, Climate Crisis and Global Issues

After the end of the Cold War, i.e. from the 1990s onwards, the major political fronts shifted. The world was suddenly open. Borders fell, communication became global, and the internet created a new public sphere. Art responded to this by focusing less on form or style and more on position, perspective and context.

The focus of many artists shifted to questions of identity, belonging, gender roles and perspective. Who is allowed to tell stories? Whose stories are shown? And what happens when you reverse the perspective?

Art became a medium for feminist and queer self-assertion. Works by Cindy Sherman, Zanele Muholi, Tracey Emin and Mona Hatoum, for example, explore identity through the body, vulnerability and self-presentation.
Postcolonial voices became more visible, for example in the work of Yinka Shonibare, El Anatsui, Kara Walker and Shirin Neshat, who deal with power relations, migration and cultural memory. And with the advent of social media, the self became increasingly virtual. Artists such as Amalia Ulman and Hito Steyerl began to address precisely this blurring of the real and digital self.

Since around 2010, art has once again become more socially and ecologically political. The climate crisis has become a global symbol of a new sense of vulnerability. Many artists are addressing the question of how much intervention the earth can withstand.
In doing so, they are not simply showing the destruction of nature, but the relationship between humans and the planet. It is about traces, materiality, and responsibility.

After the financial crisis of 2008, social inequality became one of the most discussed topics in the art world. Artists show precarious living conditions, exploitation, and economic power relations. At the same time, they reflect on the fact that the art world itself is part of this inequality. Who can afford art? Who is shown, who is overlooked?

Artists address migration, flight, and uprooting in their works. Not as a political issue, but as an existential one. What does home mean when it is not safe? How can one talk about loss without exploiting it?

Today, art is also an arena for social tensions – populism, nationalism, and extremism. The digital public sphere has radically changed the relationship between truth and image.
Artists are responding to the loss of shared realities, to fake news, social media filter bubbles and the manipulative use of images.
Contemporary art is attempting to create new forms of testimony, solidarity, and memory.

Contemporary art is decentralised, global, networked, but at the same time deeply personal. Despite the many voices of today's crises, at its core it is about the loss of trust and belonging. And so the exploration of identity remains crucial in art – now as part of these crises.
It asks: How is identity changing in a world that is simultaneously networked and divided?

Of course, I'm not alone in this. Wherever artists come together, whether in person or online, whether professional or amateur artists, tips are exchanged in the summer and people discuss what they need and whether they need it at all.

In any case, I wondered whether this has always been the case. Paintings like the cover of this article (by the way, Max Liebermann, On the beach at Noorwijk) capture the incomparable holiday mood. For me, art and travelling are inextricably linked. It's clear that I want to know more about it. So let's get to researching.

Travelling as a source of inspiration

Artists have actually almost always been on the move. Even in ancient times, they travelled wherever there were commissions. In the Renaissance and Baroque periods, Italy was the place of longing par excellence for artists. Of course, Italy also has a lot to offer. Ruins, landscapes, the special light ... For artists, the greatest attractions were the works of the Old Masters, which could only be admired there.

Travelling back then was mainly educational. People travelled to see the world, learnt about the customs and cultures of other countries and marvelled at the treasures and works of art of the finer world. Anyone who was anyone travelled to Rome, Florence or Venice. Like so many other things, daughters were not allowed this privilege back then. But for sons from upper-class families, the Grand Tour was part of the compulsory programme in the 17th and 18th centuries.

The young men were enchanted by the beauty and took home sketchbooks full of impressions, ideas or even entire works of art. Travelling was not only about bringing back impressions, but also about distributing ideas. Art could wander, change and give rise to new centres elsewhere.

The Grand Tour contributed to the spread of artistic styles, architecture and knowledge in Europe. Sketches and studies made in Rome or Florence later found their way into workshops north of the Alps. Even furniture, gardens and urban architecture were characterised by Italian features. Flanders, for example, became an artistic stronghold in the 17th century because the knowledge it brought with it was combined with local traditions.

Once you had seen the light in Venice, you looked at the sky differently at home. Those who had marvelled at ruins got a different sense of history. And those who had learnt about foreign customs and cultures didn't come back quite the same as when they left. Travelling was good for the mind, the spirit, the body - and for the personality. Incidentally, this is still the case today if you do more than just sunbathe on the beach in your holiday destination.

From Compulsory Programme to Summer Retreat

The Renaissance and the 19th century are real tipping points in art history, when almost everything shifts: the world view, social structures, the role of artists, themes and techniques. I always write about this in my articles. This time is no different.

The advent of the railway was a revolutionary technical development that opened up a whole new chapter in travel. But it wasn't just that you could now travel faster and further. The railway had more of an impact on people's lives than you might think today.

With the start of industrialisation a few decades earlier, many people moved from the countryside to the cities because factories were being built there. Cities like Manchester or Berlin grew explosively. But factory work was completely different from working in the fields or in the workshop. Suddenly there were fixed working hours, machine rhythms and shift work.

As a result, life became more synchronised, more strenuous, more monotonous and usually unhealthier. The cities could barely keep up with the influx. Cramped housing, poor hygiene, air pollution from coal firing. Diseases spread rapidly.

A new class of workers emerged who had little recreation in their everyday lives. At the same time, however, an urban middle class was growing that demanded education, culture and travelling in the first place. The railway increased industrialisation and at the same time created the opportunity to escape the cramped, noisy everyday life.

Previously, travelling was only possible with carriages, but these were slow. Depending on the route and road conditions, you travelled at 6-10 km/h. Travelling long distances took days or even weeks. Horses could not travel long distances in one go.
There were post stations where fresh horses were harnessed. Wealthy travellers could provide their own horses or carts along the main routes, but this was extremely expensive.

Those who did not have these means had to rely on stagecoaches. These were cramped, uncomfortable and often reeked of sweat and dust. You were at the mercy of bad roads, the weather and often robbers. Travelling was exhausting and still expensive.

Travelling for pleasure (to the city in season, to the countryside in summer and to visit relatives at Christmas) was reserved for the few who could afford to pay for horses, carriages and accommodation. But travelling spontaneously was hardly possible and the expense was only worthwhile for longer stays.

Travelling was almost never an option for poorer people. People may have travelled if they were forced to change their place of residence out of necessity (job search, emigration), but certainly not for pleasure. There was no such thing as a ‘holiday’ in the modern sense. That changed when the railway arrived.

The journey time between Liverpool and Manchester, the world's first long-distance railway line, fell from four hours to around an hour and a half. A train ticket was significantly cheaper than a carriage journey over the same distance and you were no longer squeezed in between other travellers. For the first time, people from the growing middle class - and later even workers - were able to travel for a day or a weekend to places that were previously inaccessible.

This gave rise to something completely new: the short excursion. On 5 July 1841, Thomas Cook organised the first publicly advertised rail excursion - from Leicester to Loughborough. Around 485 people took part, with bread, tea and musical accompaniment for the price of a shilling. Of course, the return journey was also included.

The meeting of the Temperance Movement, a temperance and reform movement, took place in Loughborough. The idea was simply to bring members from Leicester to the meeting. But this trip laid the foundations for modern mass tourism.
Thomas Cook recognised the potential of making travel affordable and plannable for many people. In the decades that followed, he offered excursions for working-class families, clubs and Sunday schools. The railway companies provided special trains and Cook took care of the organisation and catering.

He called these trips Cheap Trips - cheap excursions that were also affordable for people who would otherwise never have travelled. Day trips to the sea or the mountains were particularly popular. For many, this was their first encounter with such landscapes and was simply unimaginable before.

Initially, only Sundays or the occasional church holiday were suitable for this. But the machines in the large factories had to be serviced. Entire factories closed for a week at a time, often in summer. Workers used the time for family visits, local festivals and, thanks to the railway, increasingly for trips to the seaside.

The consequences were quickly felt on the coast. In England, seaside resorts such as Blackpool, Margate and Brighton boomed. Piers, promenades, bathhouses - infrastructure for leisure time was created, not just for spa guests. Separate bathing areas and bathing machines organised the new public beach life.
These were small, wooden changing trolleys on wheels that were pulled into the water on the beach, usually by horses. Bathers (especially women) could change in them undisturbed and enter the water directly through a small door without having to walk across the public beach in their swimming costumes. They only disappeared when mixed bathing slowly became the norm.

On the continent, too, the map of places of longing shifted. In France, Paris and Normandy were suddenly close together: The line to Trouville/Deauville was completed in 1863 and transformed the Côte Fleurie into a summer paradise for modern leisure activities.

Sea and Coast

And artists were right in the centre of it. Eugène Boudin painted elegant parties on the beach from the early 1860s. He is considered the ‘inventor’ of the beach picture. After all, elegant ladies and gentlemen in colourful dresses at coastal resorts such as Trouville or Deauville were new. Until then, hardly anyone had chosen the banal pleasure of the beach as a worthy subject.

Eugène Boudin was born in Honfleur, at the mouth of the Seine in Normandy, in 1824.
His father was a sailor, and the sea, harbour, sky and changing weather were subjects that Boudin would never let go of.

He was one of the first to consistently paint ‘en plein air’. Instead of composing idealised landscapes in the studio, he sat down on the beach, on the harbour, in the open air. His contemporaries called him the ‘king of the sky’ (roi des ciels) because he painted the changing moods over the sea so vividly.

The young Claude Monet came into contact with Boudin in Le Havre. Boudin encouraged him not only to draw caricatures, but also to observe the play of light outside. Monet later said that he owed a great deal to Boudin - and so do we. For who knows, without Eugène Boudin as a pioneer, Impressionism might never have existed

.

„If I have become a painter, I owe it to Eugène Boudin. ... My eyes were opened and I finally understood nature.“

— Claude Monet

In 1870, Monet and his wife Camille spent their honeymoon in Trouville. There he also painted the beach as a place for summer holidays: pleasure, leisure, fashion, light. Camille Monet and Madame Boudin sitting on the beach, fluttering dresses and parasols, other small beach scenes with walkers and the shimmering sea atmosphere.

Nevertheless, Monet focussed less on social scenes and more on light, movement, and the moment. A decade later, Monet once again turned his attention to the Normandy coast, this time not to the fashionable bathers but to the rocks of Étretat. In general, people disappeared more and more from his paintings. His preoccupation with light and weather became more intense.

Monet painted the chalk cliffs of Étretat in countless variations: in sunlight, in fog, in storms, at high and low tide. The focus was clearly on nature and its changes. The coast as a sublime natural phenomenon — almost like a cathedral of stone and light.

France was certainly the artistic centre in the 19th century. But summer holidays by the sea also became a theme elsewhere. Thanks to England's head start in the development of the railway, the beaches there had developed their own culture early on.

In 1858, William Powell Frith painted the Victorian seaside culture in all its facets in his large social panorama Ramsgate Sands — densely packed figures, parasols, bathers and walkers, a swarming picture of the modern seaside resort.

Beaches also became a motif on the North Sea coast. In the Netherlands and later in Germany, painters were drawn to Scheveningen and Noordwijk. Max Liebermann, for example, also captured beach and bathing scenes there, as in the cover painting. Even further north, in Denmark, an artists' colony gathered in Skagen from the 1870s onwards. Painters such as Peder Severin Krøyer depicted fishermen, bathers, and walks by the sea, flooded with light and bright.

The motif even appeared in America at almost the same time. In 1869, Winslow Homer painted Long Branch, New Jersey — elegant ladies with fluttering dresses by the Atlantic, in the same spirit of summer holidays that had also become a pictorial theme in Europe.

Mountains and Lakes 

But summer holidays did not always mean the sea. The mountains had their own attraction. And with the railway, they were suddenly within reach.
German and Austrian Alpine associations organised the new way of going up into the mountains. In 1871, Europe's first cogwheel mountain railway ran on the Rigi in Switzerland. From here, the model spread further. New cogwheel and cable railways opened up the Alps, and Alpine clubs with their huts and trails made it possible to experience the high mountains. Those who had previously only read about peaks could now see them with their own eyes.

The French Alps with Mont Blanc became a destination not only for mountaineers, but also for those who wanted to marvel at the glaciers and peaks from a safe distance. Painters such as Alexandre Calame captured the Alps in imposing views. But it didn't always have to be so monumental. Artists also captured glaciers and mountain scenery more easily and directly in sketches and watercolours.

The smaller mountain panoramas of the south became a motif just as often as the mountain massifs of the Alps. Paul Cézanne devoted himself tirelessly to the Montagne Sainte-Victoire near his home town of Aix-en-Provence. Paul Guigou had also discovered the Provençal landscape for himself. In his works, he depicted nature in the south of France with villages, hills and sparse vegetation, sunlit and austere.
No heroic peaks, but an ever new encounter with form, colour and light.

At the foot of the mountains, the lakes beckoned. Not only were they scenic, with the sky and peaks reflected in the water, they were also a social meeting place. Steamboats, seaside resorts, lakeside promenades — the perfect place to see and be seen.

Painting picked up on this attitude to life. In addition to atmospheric landscapes, paintings were created in which boats, bathers, and lakeside houses formed the motif. The lakes were shown as natural idylls, but also as places where people spent the summer.

Whether on Lake Geneva or on the lakes of northern Italy, on Tegernsee or Attersee, everywhere the landscape was combined with the new leisure culture. Artists captured how water surfaces caught the light, how the sky and mountains blurred into the lake, and how social life became part of this backdrop.

Forests and Rivers

In hot summers, it was not only the haute volée who were drawn to the shady coolness of the woods and the banks of the rivers. People spent their time in these quiet retreats on walks, picnics or horseback rides. Artists captured these moments - forest clearings, winding paths, plays of light between the trees.

Rowing boats with day trippers, couples drifting along, people looking for relaxation away from work and city life. Picnics in the forest and boat trips on the rivers in the neighbourhood were affordable, uncomplicated and at the same time ‘fine enough’ to be socially acceptable.

Painters gratefully took up these motifs. Instead of historical and mythical scenes, they wanted to show modern life. A picnic or a boat trip provided an opportunity to depict fashion, behaviour and social roles: Who sits how? Who is looking at whom? Who is standing outside? These scenes thus became almost small-scale social studies.

At the same time, these activities were exactly what people expected from a summer escape: light-heartedness, closeness to nature and socialising.

A Summer that Lasts

The world got bigger in the 19th century. And that changed art forever. Until then, landscape had only been the location of events, but it became the main protagonist in Impressionism at the latest. Real places could be travelled to, painters depicted landscapes that actually existed and determined the mood of the painting.

The railway created the possibilities, but it was art that awakened wanderlust. Art responded to new leisure habits, but it also shaped them. Paintings of picnics, flowing dresses and imposing mountain peaks made people want to go to a river or hike in the mountains themselves. Summer holidays as a social phenomenon became visible, comprehensible and permanent through art.

The art of the 19th century was groundbreaking and the fascination with it continues to this day because we understand what we see. No encoded meaning, no need for religious or historical knowledge. This is life as we know it. Fashion has changed, the cities are bigger. But the paintings speak our language. And when we look at the light in them, they awaken the summer in us.

The question “What is art?” isn’t as innocent as it seems. It's political, economic, cultural – and psychological.
It draws lines: between art and non-art, between what’s seen as valuable and what’s (supposedly) worthless, between what gets funding and what’s dismissed.
So why does this question keep coming up? Who benefits from defining what art is?

Who Defines Art?

I’m often asked whether it’s even possible to make a living as an artist – the old “starving artist” cliché.
But has anyone ever wondered whether publishers make a living from their job? Or music producers, agents or gallery owners?

Sure, building your own business from scratch is never easy – no matter the field. And the fact that art as a profession still isn’t taken seriously doesn’t help. But let’s take a closer look:

In 2024, the global art market – through auctions, galleries, art fairs and dealers – generated 57.5 billion USD in sales of drawings, paintings, sculptures, and objects (Art Basel/UBS Art Market Report). And that doesn’t even include direct studio sales, digital art, NFTs, antiques (estimated at 552 billion USD) – let alone music, books, theatre, film, or performance.

The creative industries as a whole are among the world’s largest growth sectors. UNESCO estimates the global value of the cultural and creative sector at around 4.3 trillion USD – that’s about 6.1% of global GDP. In many countries, it even surpasses sectors like agriculture or hospitality – by a long way.
Enough with the numbers. The point is: the question isn’t whether money can be made from art – but who’s making it.

Because secondary players often can make a good living from art. Sometimes a very good one. And to keep it that way, the definition of art has to remain vague enough to allow leeway – but also specific enough to exclude. It has to remain in need of explanation. After all, if buyers could just decide for themselves what counts as art, they wouldn’t need a middleperson.

Who Owns Art?

Art matters to me. As an artist and as someone who's moved by art. Art has comforted me, inspired me, made me think – and in many ways, it has saved me. It plays a special role in my life, and I believe it does in society too. But it doesn’t need a pedestal.

We don’t need to wrap art in the aura of the undefinable or unattainable. It’s more than what hangs in museums, more than admiring skills we don’t have ourselves. Museums shouldn’t be gatekeepers – they should be places that make great works of art accessible to everyone.
Art should be close, tangible – not something that needs defining.

Isn’t it ironic that the legal (German) definition of art – “Art is a free creative expression in which impressions, experiences, and events are made directly perceptible through the use of a specific formal language” (BVerfGE 67, 213) – is meant to protect the diversity of art and the freedom of artistic expression, while the (institutionalised) art world tries to tighten the frame?

A Brief History of the Concept of Art: From Temple Walls to TikTok Art

Ancient cave paintings show that humans have always created art. The rock paintings in the Lascaux Cave in France, for example, date back to the Magdalenian period of the late Paleolithic and are estimated to be around 17,000 to 20,000 years old.
The paintings in the Altamira Cave in Spain are even older – and more varied. Over thousands of years, people added to and continued them. The oldest sections (such as the red handprints) are at least 36,000 years old, while the most recent ones date from around 14,000 to 18,000 years ago.

Many of these paintings show remarkable powers of observation, rhythm, and symbolic force. They are rightly considered art today. But the people who made them probably didn’t have a word for it. Their paintings, carvings, or clay figures were part of rituals, communication, magic, identity – not something separate from function or life. Art was an action, not a theory.

The first concept of art as a conscious understanding of what art is emerged in ancient times. It was called technē and meant skill, craft, or know-how.
It included all forms of creative activity – painting and poetry as well as rhetoric, medicine, shipbuilding, pottery, architecture, or even statecraft. There was no hierarchy between “high” and “low” art. The idea that art was a distinct field with its own kind of “truth” came later.

Even though early thinkers like Heraclitus or Pythagoras may not have explicitly used the term, their ideas of proportion, skill, and worldview significantly influenced later reflections on what we now call art. The concept itself, however, was philosophically developed above all by the Sophists, and later by Plato and Aristotle:

Plato was highly critical of art. In his work Politeia (The Republic), he argued that art was merely an imitation of reality – and thus twice removed from truth: once because reality itself is only a copy of the ideal, and again because art is a copy of that copy. Plato believed that art seduced the soul by appealing to emotions rather than reason.

Aristotle, Plato’s student, saw things quite differently. For him, art was a form of knowledge – especially in relation to poetry and drama. Art, he believed, did not simply imitate reality but condensed and interpreted it. Aristotle saw art as part of the human process of understanding, a meaningful element of experience – not truth in the Platonic sense, but emotional veracity.

In the Middle Ages, art primarily served a communicative and narrative function. The majority of the population could neither read nor write, so stained-glass windows, frescoes, and sculptures were often referred to as the Biblia pauperum – the Bible of the poor. Through them, stories became visible. Art acted as teacher, comforter, moral guide – and as an instrument of power.

Art in this period was firmly tied to religion. It visualised order, hierarchy, sin, and salvation – always in line with official doctrine. The aim was not to raise questions, but to illustrate the answers. The Greek term technē gave way to the Latin ars (meaning “art”), though it still referred to technical or rule-based skill.

A distinction was made between the artes mechanicae – the “mechanical arts,” which included practical, manual trades – and the artes liberales, the “liberal arts.” These were considered intellectually superior and comprised the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, dialectic) and quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy). Visual arts like painting or sculpture were regarded as applied crafts and ranked clearly below the “liberal” arts.

With the Renaissance, the focus began to shift. It marked the beginning of what we now look back on as the emergence of a modern concept of art. Art was no longer merely a craft in service of the Church or the powerful – it began to stand on its own. Artists became individuals with a personal style and vision. The idea of the "genius" entered the stage. Names like Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, or Albrecht Dürer no longer stood only for skill.

Of course, Renaissance art still had to meet certain expectations – ideals of beauty, harmony, religious or political messages – but it gradually broke away from its purely functional role and began to claim its own value. Two developments were key: the renewed interest in classical antiquity and the rise of humanist thought, which placed not God but the human being at the centre. And then: the discovery of linear perspective.

This changed everything – it made paintings appear more realistic. Earlier works had idealised their subjects (popes, apostles, kings) to such a degree that they all looked the same, no longer recognisable as real individuals. Now, the proportions were right, the space had depth, and the people within it were identifiable, real human beings. Viewers could recognise themselves in them, empathise with them. People saw the world differently – and art reflected that. Art was no longer just executed – it was conceived.

And for the first time, a painter’s name began to matter. Yes, there are isolated instances of signatures from the Middle Ages, but they had little to do with artistic self-conception. They were modest inscriptions, along the lines of “Whoever sees this work, please pray for me.” Only in the Renaissance did the signature become a mark of individual authorship.

Over the next two to three hundred years, the concept of art doesn’t change much. Styles shift – from the Renaissance to Baroque, later Rococo, Classicism, Romanticism, and so on – but the understanding of what art is remains very academic. And, it’s worth noting, very male.

It isn’t until modernity that we see the next turning point. With the invention of photography, painting was no longer needed to depict reality. Freed from a fixed function, art became more open, experimental, wild – sometimes radical. Abstraction, conceptual art, Dada: suddenly it was about rupture, about questioning, about inner worlds. Art became something not just to be seen, but to be felt.

Today, anything seems possible. Digital formats, TikTok performances, everyday objects on pedestals – the definition of art is more open than ever. Anything can be art. Maybe that’s exactly why the desire for a clear definition feels stronger than ever. What gives us orientation?

Looking back, it seems as though the differing views of Plato and Aristotle on art formed an almost archetypal blueprint that still echoes today. The question “What is art?” can be approached on a factual level – focusing on technique, skill, tradition, and the credibility of academic training – or on an emotional level that asks: “What does it do to me?”

What is art – to me?

I’m aware that this text is strongly shaped by European art history. In other cultures, entirely different forms, meanings, and functions of art developed—often deeply interwoven with religion, daily life, and identity.

And beyond geographical borders, art is always a matter of perspective. The concept of art can shift over time and from person to person. What is art? This question deserves more than a supposedly universal answer. It’s a deeply personal question. Almost intimate.

To me, art is expression, dedication, exchange, and encounter—with others and with myself. I love seeing art in museums or as street art on walls. Art is everywhere. You just have to look. And of course, it goes far beyond painting. Even those who claim they’re not touched by art have probably been moved to tears - or to dance - by a piece of music.

Creating art myself makes me happy. My soul finds calm when I paint. It feels like something inside me clicks back into place.

Everyone Can Make Art

If you spend any time online these days, it might seem like suddenly everyone’s an artist. Everyone’s painting, making music, writing. And that’s a good thing!

Art was never meant to be reserved for academies or galleries. Creating it isn’t an act of Insolence – it’s a need. A way to connect with the world. A way to meet yourself.

Does it matter whether the result is a masterpiece or a blotchy watercolour experiment? It’s not about perfection. If you paint, dance, write or build, you feel yourself. Our world becomes a better place when there’s more art in it.

Maybe I never would’ve written this text if Dana’s blog challenge hadn’t nudged me to reflect on it out loud. So here’s a thank you for that little push in the right direction.
At the end, may I ask you a very personal question: What is art to you?

Across many European countries, right-wing parties are gaining strength and increasing their influence on the political landscape. Elon Musk plays a significant role here as well. On X, he is not only attempting to control public discourse, but is also deliberately constructing an alternative media ecosystem that amplifies right-wing narratives while silencing critics. Musk fuels disinformation, provides a platform for extremist voices, and undermines democratic structures—whether through his support for Trump or his efforts to delegitimize institutions like the EU and independent journalism.

In Germany, the AfD is polling at over 20 percent ahead of the federal election on 23 February—a party that has been classified as firmly far-right by the domestic intelligence service in parts. CDU leader Friedrich Merz has abandoned his previous stance of distancing himself, openly courting the far right and cooperating with the AfD in parliament. As democracy teeters, conservative politicians prefer to normalize far-right positions rather than take a firm stand against them.

Shift to the Right: Causes and Mechanisms

Whenever societies begin to falter, radical forces thrive. Historically, it has never been times of stability that brought extremists to power. The common claim is that the shift to the right is merely a response to social discontent—but that view is too simplistic. In reality, right-wing and authoritarian movements actively pursue strategies to destabilize societies, exploiting chaos and uncertainty for their own gain.

Right-wing and authoritarian forces do not benefit from stability—they thrive on fear, division, and weakness. They know that the greater the crisis, the louder the call for a 'strong leader.' A well-worn pattern:

• Crises bring populists to power (1930s: The Great Depression → facilitating the rise of fascism in Europe).
• Terrorist attacks or social unrest are used to justify restrictions on civil liberties (USA post-9/11 → Patriot Act).
• Political instability is exploited to push 'law and order' policies (2015 refugee crisis → criminalization of NGOs and the deliberate stoking of fears over 'migration waves,' e.g., in Hungary).

The more chaotic the situation, the easier it is for authoritarian forces to present themselves as the saviours in times of need.

Division Over Unity: The Destruction of a United Europe

Right-wing movements despise the EU. Why? Because the EU stands for multilateral cooperation, democracy, and shared values. A strong, stable Europe with functioning democracies and relative social security is the greatest obstacle to their ideology. That is why they actively work to undermine this stability.

When every country is fighting for itself, there can be no collective resistance against authoritarian tendencies. This is why right-wing parties deliberately push nationalism:

• "Our country first!" instead of European cooperation.
• "Brussels is the enemy!" (while simultaneously benefiting from EU funding).
• Attacks on international institutions.

Far-right forces do not just seek to defeat political opponents—they aim to change the rules of the game. A strong, stable democratic system makes it difficult to seize absolute power. That is why they weaken institutions by:

• Attacking the judiciary: Discrediting or replacing critical judges (Poland, USA under Trump).
• Dismantling independent media: Branding critical journalism as "fake news" and putting public broadcasters under political pressure (Hungary, Italy, USA).
• Restricting civil rights: Criminalizing protests and branding opposition figures as "enemies of the people" (Russia, Turkey, USA under Trump, and more recently, Germany).

Culture Wars and Identity Politics as a Distraction

The claim that German culture is under threat from migration and "leftist elites" is not about real problems—it is a deliberate strategy to stoke fear and mobilize voters.

• Blaming migrants as scapegoats ("The refugees are to blame for everything!").
• Anti-'woke' debates as a distraction ("Gender-inclusive language is destroying society!").
• Criminalizing minorities (trans people, Muslims, refugees).

Why? Because it works. The more people argue about culture wars, the less they focus on real politics. While voters debate whether German traditions are being "erased" by migration or whether individuals should be able to choose their pronouns—an issue that affects no one but the person themselves—right-wing politicians quietly consolidate their power behind the scenes.

These manufactured outrage debates resurface time and again—from supposedly "banned" Christmas carols in schools to demands for a "dominant culture." They serve one purpose: to distract from the real issues that politics should be addressing.

The Power of the Lie

Never before has it been so easy to manipulate the masses. While traditional media (at least in theory) fact-check and maintain a certain level of objectivity, social networks have become the perfect playground for populists and demagogues.

Fake news spreads faster than reliable journalism. Algorithms push the content that generates the most outrage and fear. A sensationalist lie can reach millions—while a correction barely registers with a fraction of that audience.

People are increasingly trapped in digital echo chambers, where they only hear what reinforces their existing beliefs. Right-wing populist movements have mastered this tactic: they create parallel realities in which they are the victims, and “the others”—migrants, leftists, feminists, scientists—are the enemy. The new authoritarians no longer need to abolish free speech outright—they simply have to distort it so thoroughly that truth and lies become indistinguishable.

The Normalization of the Far Right – How Conservative Parties Pave the Way

Far-right parties are nothing new in post-war Europe, but for decades, they remained on the fringes. Germany, in particular, believed it had learned from its past—or so we thought. Today, they have become an established political force—not just because their voter base has grown, but because conservative parties have adopted their positions.

Under Friedrich Merz, the CDU flirts with AfD talking points, echoes far-right rhetoric (“asylum tourism”), and thus shifts the political discourse further towards extremism. The barriers to racist, misogynistic, or authoritarian narratives are gradually being lowered. What was once considered a political taboo has now become an accepted campaign strategy—allowing democratic parties to drift rightward, while far-right rhetoric embeds itself deeper and deeper into the political mainstream.

Neutrality Is Not an Option

Why Do I, as an Artist, Write About Politics on an Art Blog?
I often see people in forums claiming that art should be neutral. But it never was. Well, maybe back in the days of cave paintings—when people pressed their hands onto stone walls or carved hunting scenes into rock. But since the dawn of civilization, art and power have been deeply intertwined.

Rulers—whether the pharaohs of Ancient Egypt, the Catholic Church, or the Habsburgs—have always used art to legitimize their rule, glorify their victories, and etch their narratives into the collective consciousness.

But politics isn’t supposed to be about who holds power. Or at least, it shouldn't be. Politics determines how we live—what rules shape our society, what values we uphold. Our bodies, our thoughts, our way of life—everything is political.

That’s why art, in turn, cannot help but be political. Artists have always reflected the issues of their time. They have exposed injustice, questioned societal shifts, and criticized those in power—even when their art did not seem overtly “political” at first glance.

Art doesn’t have to be loud to take a stand. It doesn’t need to be overtly protest-driven to challenge the status quo. But if it refuses to engage with the world—if it reflects nothing, questions nothing, makes nothing visible—then it is nothing more than decoration.

And art has never been just decoration.

The Strategy of Power: Why Authoritarian Regimes Control Art

That is why authoritarian systems target art first. Whoever controls what people see, hear, and feel ultimately controls what they think. Authoritarian movements fear creative freedom—because it escapes their grasp, because it brings things into the light, and because that makes it dangerous.

At the same time, they use art as a tool of manipulation. Because to control a society, one must first control its narratives.

Those in power do not want open questions; they want definitive answers. Not uncertainty, but clear-cut stories. Not plurality, but control. That is why artists have always been among the first to come under attack when political systems begin to shift. Painters, poets, musicians, filmmakers—anyone who exposes social injustices, voices criticism, or refuses to conform becomes a threat.

Freedom of art is freedom of democracy. And when one falls, the other follows.

Censorship and Control

History is full of examples of governments attempting to suppress art or use it for their own purposes. Some have wielded the blunt force of outright repression, while others have employed more subtle methods—but the goal has always been the same: to control art in order to control society.

For a fascinating exploration of this topic, take a look at the interview with “Peter Hope (or not)” on this website.

Nazism: “Degenerate Art” – Art as the Enemy of the Regime

One of the most infamous examples of art censorship is the “Degenerate Art” exhibition in Nazi Germany. In 1937, modern works by artists such as Paul Klee, Emil Nolde, Otto Dix, Hannah Höch, and Max Beckmann were publicly denounced. Their art was branded as “sick,” “non-German,” “subversive.” The reasoning was never about aesthetics. It was about power.

Modern art stood for individuality, for new perspectives, for diversity. All of this was anathema to the Nazis—then as now—because their ideology relied on uniformity and control. “Degenerate art” had to disappear to make way for monumental statues of heroes and idealized depictions of the so-called Aryan race—art as propaganda.

But the vilification of modern art was only one part of the attack on cultural diversity. As early as 1933, shortly after the Nazis seized power, the infamous book burnings took place. Works by Bertolt Brecht, Erich Kästner, Heinrich Mann, Bertha von Suttner, Sigmund Freud, and many others were thrown into the flames—because they did not fit into the Nazi worldview. Literature that encouraged critical thinking had to be erased.

Heinrich Heine’s chillingly prophetic words capture this reality with devastating accuracy:

“Where they burn books, they will also, in the end, burn people.”

Socialist Realism: The Art of Obedience in the Soviet Union and China

Under Stalin’s Soviet Union and Mao’s China, art became a tool for maintaining power. Paintings had to depict workers in heroic poses, poetry had to praise the party, and films had to illustrate the glorious future of communism. Anything that sowed doubt was branded bourgeois, reactionary, or subversive. Artists who resisted were persecuted, imprisoned, or even killed. The message was clear: art was allowed—as long as it didn’t think.

Trump and the War on “Leftist” Artists and Cultural Figures

Donald Trump has repeatedly lashed out against artists, intellectuals, and cultural figures who criticized him. Hollywood, he claimed, was “far-left,” journalists were “enemies of the people” (those who didn’t toe the line were sidelined), and the arts didn’t deserve public funding.

He had already attempted to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts—the most significant public arts funding body in the U.S.—during his first term. Back then, he failed. But since January, his administration has significantly weakened the institution: cutting funding for diversity and social projects, shutting down politically inconvenient programs, and installing a new leadership that is steering it in a more ideologically aligned direction.

Hungary, Poland, and the Slow Creep of Cultural Control

What began as a culture war under Trump (avoiding the term coup d'état) is already taking more concrete shape in parts of Europe. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán has systematically expanded his control over the cultural sector. Independent theatres and museums have been financially starved, while institutions loyal to the government have received millions. School curricula have been rewritten to emphasize patriotic values.

A similar pattern emerged in Poland, where the PiS government sought to steer arts funding in a political direction. Critical artists were excluded from state funding, while nationalist narratives were promoted. Freedom of art was not officially abolished—it was simply replaced.

This list of examples could go on indefinitely. Whenever authoritarian systems or right-wing populist governments gain influence, art is among the first targets. Sometimes it is openly suppressed, sometimes subtly redirected, sometimes defamed or starved of funding. But in the end, it is always about the same thing: control over the narrative.

This is not just a historical problem—it is a current one. And it affects all of us.

Art as Resistance – When Images and Words Become Dangerous

In times of political repression, art becomes an act of resistance—because it speaks the truths that cannot be spoken. Images linger in the mind, words echo long after they are read, melodies unite people across borders. Where politics often remains abstract, art creates something immediate, something emotional.

History is full of artists who refused to bow to oppressive regimes—many of whom were persecuted, banned, or censored for their defiance. And yet, it is their work that endures, becoming symbols of resistance that outlive the rulers who sought to silence them.

Francisco Goya: The Third of May 1808 – Art as an Indictment

The painting depicts a scene from the Spanish War of Independence against Napoleon. A group of Spanish resistance fighters stands on a barren hillside. In front of them, French soldiers with rifles at the ready, prepared to execute them.

The soldiers' faces remain hidden—they are faceless enforcers of a brutal system. At the center of the composition stands a man in a white shirt, his arms raised in a gesture of defiance and surrender. He is the innocent, the martyr, the symbol of all those who dare to resist an overwhelming force—and pay for it with their lives.

The lantern casts its light directly on him—not on the soldiers, not on the background. Goya deliberately draws our focus to this moment of terror and sacrifice, making him the emotional and visual centerpiece of the painting.

Goya is not merely documenting a historical event—he is making an accusation. He does not portray war as a heroic struggle but as a cold-blooded execution. The powerful remain faceless, while the victims are human—full of expression, emotion, fear, and despair.

It is no coincidence that this painting has been repeatedly used as a symbol of political resistance, appearing in protests against fascist regimes and within modern peace movements. The Third of May 1808 remains a timeless reminder of the brutality of oppression—and the courage of those who stand against it.

Picasso: Guernica – A Cry Against Fascism

While Goya concentrated the brutality of war into a single moment, Picasso created a complex collage of chaos, fear, and destruction. His painting was a response to the bombing of the Spanish town of Guernica by German and Italian warplanes—an attack that helped General Franco secure his fascist rule.

We see mutilated bodies, screaming faces, a mother clutching her dead child. A bull—often interpreted as a symbol of Spain—stands motionless amidst the chaos, as if the horror had already become normality. The colour palette is deliberately limited to black, white, and grey—draining all life from the scene.

"Guernica" is not just a war painting—it is an emotional indictment. Picasso shows war as profound human suffering.

Anecdotes claim that in 1936, a German officer in Paris looked at the masterpiece and asked Picasso, “Did you do this?”
Picasso allegedly replied, “No, you did.”
There is no solid evidence for this encounter, but as the saying goes: Se non è vero, è molto ben trovato—if it’s not true, it’s still well invented.

The phrase originates from Giordano Bruno, a doubter of religious dogma, who himself was burned at the stake in Rome in 1600 for challenging the Catholic Church. A fitting historical parallel to the fate of those who dare to question authority.

Returning to Guernica: In February 2003, shortly before the start of the Iraq War, a tapestry of the painting was covered at the UN headquarters in New York. The artwork, a loan from the Rockefeller family since 1985, hangs at the entrance to the Security Council chamber and is one of the most powerful anti-war symbols in modern history.

The covering took place during a press conference by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, who was presenting the case for military intervention in Iraq. Official UN spokespeople explained that the artwork’s complex background was unsuitable for television broadcasts. However, many diplomats suspected the real reason: the striking anti-war imagery of Guernica clashed too strongly with the message of an impending war and was therefore concealed.

The fact that a powerful former U.S. general and Secretary of State had to fear being exposed by a painting speaks volumes about the power of art.

Käthe Kollwitz – The Chronicler of Suffering

Hardly any artist has depicted the pain, grief, and despair of war as hauntingly as Käthe Kollwitz. Her works are a cry against violence, social injustice, and the human cost of war.

In 1914, her youngest son, Peter Kollwitz, volunteered as a soldier—just weeks later, he was dead.
His loss shook her to the core and shaped the rest of her artistic career. Even before that, she had been deeply engaged with social issues, focusing on the harsh living conditions of the working class. She explored themes of poverty, hunger, and oppression, as seen in her print cycles A Weavers’ Revolt (1893–1897) and Peasants’ War (1902–1908), which depict the struggles and suffering of the disenfranchised.

The death of her son Peter marked a profound personal and artistic transformation. This traumatic event deepened her pacifist convictions and turned her focus even more strongly toward themes of grief, loss, and the futility of war. Her work became more emotional, reflecting both her personal sorrow and a broader anti-war stance.

Her art was now infused with deep mourning—but also with rage. Rage at a system that sent young men to their deaths. Rage at militarism, which had robbed generations of mothers of their children. Her work became an indictment of a world in which the weakest always paid the highest price.

In her print series War (1921–1922), she confronted the devastation and sorrow left in the wake of conflict. The woodcuts are dark, raw, and unfiltered. There are no heroes, no soldiers in uniform—only widows, orphans, and grieving mothers.

When the Nazis seized power in 1933, Käthe Kollwitz quickly became a target. Her art was too antimilitarist, too socially critical, too uncomfortable. She was forced to resign from the Academy of Arts, her works were removed from museums, and she was banned from exhibiting publicly.

Until her death in 1945, she continued to draw—often only for herself, often just in sketches. But she refused to be silenced.
Today, her works hang in memorials and museums around the world—as a reminder and a warning.

Art as Resistance After 1945 – A Weapon Against Forgetting

The Question of Responsibility for the Past: Art as a Weapon Against Forgetting. In postwar Germany, the question of how to reckon with the past became a central challenge for artists. How do we remember? How do we deal with guilt? And where does forgetting begin?

Joseph Beuys confronted these questions in ways that were not always well received. His actions and installations were often unsettling, provocative—exactly as he intended.

Beuys was not a traditional moralist with a brush and canvas. He believed that art was a social process, that it had to intervene directly in life. When he famously said, “Everyone is an artist,” he didn’t mean that everyone should paint. He meant that every person bears responsibility for shaping what happens around them.

His art was never meant to be comfortable, and that is what made it so powerful.

Anselm Kiefer painted the past on a scale too large to ignore. His works are monumental, typically dark, built up from thick layers of paint and material. He uses ash, charred wood, lead—materials that evoke destruction but also transformation.

Artists around the world take on this responsibility, and not just in painting or performance art. The song Blowin’ in the Wind by Bob Dylan, later a Nobel laureate, became an anthem of the American civil rights movement. With seemingly simple questions (“How many roads must a man walk down?”), the song exposes the hypocrisy of a society that claims to uphold freedom while maintaining systemic racism. And Bella Ciao, originally an Italian partisan song, became a symbol of anti-fascist resistance—sung at protests worldwide to this day.

George Orwell’s 1984 presents a dystopian world where language is manipulated, history is rewritten, and thoughts are monitored. Whenever surveillance laws tighten or disinformation becomes a weapon, the novel resurfaces in public debate. Bertolt Brecht used theatre as a political tool, deliberately breaking the illusion of storytelling. He had actors step out of character, addressing the audience directly—because he wanted them to think, not just be entertained.

Brecht himself called this the Verfremdungseffekt—the alienation effect. A technique through which art forces us to see reality from a new, unfamiliar angle, allowing audiences, readers, listeners, and viewers to uncover hidden aspects of the world around them.

Resistance in the Present Day

The art of resistance has evolved – but its essence remains the same. Not only artists like Ai Weiwei and Banksy demonstrate that art continues to be a sharp instrument in the digital age. Protest no longer takes place solely in museums or on the streets – it unfolds in real-time, online, visible to the entire world.

Countless known and unknown artists use their work to amplify marginalized voices, raise awareness about mental health, fight against racism, or bring the climate crisis into focus. Their art speaks of personal pain and collective struggles, of resistance and hope.

A society without art is a society without memory, without critique – and without a future. We need these voices; they serve as a corrective, a counterpoint to what is sold to us as inevitable. Especially in times of political upheaval and societal division.

Art must not remain silent. It reminds us that resistance is possible – and that it remains necessary.

Do artists tend to be more creative in the kitchen? Picasso's dinner parties are said to have been legendary. Frida Kahlo was a passionate cook and hostess. Monet was a gourmet, and for Ólafur Elíasson, food is even a meaningful element.

Some artists are really passionate about cooking, while others barely know what they're eating. But what fascinates me is that art and cooking have a lot in common. Both require dedication and the ability to enjoy.

“I think everything in life is art. What you do. How you dress. The way you love someone, and how you talk. Your smile and your personality. What you believe in, and all your dreams. The way you drink your tea. How you decorate your home. Or party. Your grocery list. The food you make. How your writing looks. And the way you feel. Life is art.”

- Helena Bonham Carter

Creativity as the driving force

The creative force is a key driving force in art - this also applies to the art of cooking. Just like an artist on a canvas, a chef carefully selects the colours and textures of the ingredients. Both artists and chefs draw on their inner wealth of ideas and emotions.

Both must know what they are doing. They have to master their craft. To do this, they need to know their ingredients, and they need to know how to treat them. Both art and cooking are about pleasure, exchange and sensuality.

Aesthetics and presentation

Visual appeal is important in both art and food. We know this from museums and exhibitions, as well as from restaurants: We judge art and food not just on their content or flavour, but also on how they look. This is because how something looks affects how we perceive and experience it. Colours, shapes, composition and textures are elements that are carefully selected and combined to trigger certain emotions and thoughts in the viewer. A painting or sculpture can tell a story, convey a mood, or simply provide aesthetic pleasure through its visual design.

The situation is similar in the kitchen. The presentation of a dish is more than just an aesthetic extra – it is an integral part of the culinary experience. Chefs also use colours, shapes and arrangements. The way a dish is presented can whet the appetite, raise expectations and influence the overall perception of the food.

This starts with the choice of plates, continues with the placement of ingredients and ends with the use of garnishes. It's not just about making the food look good, but also about creating a harmony between appearance and flavour.

In both areas – art and cookery – it's about communicating ideas in a visual way.

A Love of Experimentation and Innovation

Chefs and artists are always on the lookout for new ways and fresh ideas. Creativity is about coming up with something new and extraordinary, pushing the boundaries of what we know.

In art, experimentation means trying out new techniques, styles and materials in unusual combinations (bricolage, "crossover").

"To think is to transcend"

- Ernst Bloch

Artists push themselves to try new things in order to improve and expand their way of expression and discover new perspectives. It's no different in the kitchen. Chefs experiment with surprising ingredients, innovative preparation methods and creative presentations.

Examples? I'm thinking of Ferran Adrià, who popularized molecular gastronomy with his experimental approach; or of Jackson Pollock, whose innovative dripping technique revolutionized the art world. Both have shown in their respective fields that true mastery is about more than technical perfection. It's also about being willing to try new things and take risks.
Innovation in art and cookery also means being open to mistakes and failures. It's often the unexpected results that lead to the greatest discoveries. Trying things out, failing and improving (failing upwards), playing with the possibilities and enjoying the new are essential aspects of the creative process.

The drive for creativity is fuelled by passion, the desire to be part of something bigger than yourself, and the deep desire to contribute. This can manifest itself in many different aspects of the tray or tableau. Here is just one example, albeit a spectacular one: colour.

What's the Taste of Colours?

Have you ever eaten in a dark restaurant or blindfolded? How did this affect the flavour? Did it taste more intense or less intense?

Colours have the power to arouse emotions and influence our senses. In the visual arts, as in cookery, colours can be used to convey moods. Just like ingredients in a recipe, colours can also be combined in a painting to achieve a certain effect.

People with synaesthesia experience this particularly strongly. Synaesthesia is a special form of perception in which two or more senses are linked together. For example: seeing sounds, hearing smells or tasting colours.
In literature, synaesthesia is used as a rhetorical stylistic device. One of my favourite examples of this comes from Adalbert Stifter: "The murmur of dawn ..."
Even for people without synaesthesia, colours play a subtle but powerful role in eating. Colours can stimulate the appetite and enhance the taste experience. Our expectations have a major influence on what we taste - and colours (like smells) arouse our expectations.

Which expectations these are in detail depends on our personal experiences, cultural influences, but also with evolutionary factors. Red can take on many meanings, but as far as food is concerned, almost everyone associates the colour with ripe fruit, albeit usually unconsciously.
These kinds of expectations get our taste buds ready for what's to come, which makes the flavour experience even better.

A rainbow of fresh ingredients makes us feel alive and fresh. What do the different colours make us think of?

Effects of colour

Red is for sweetness, like strawberries or red-cheeked apples.
Blue is for cool, refreshing flavours like mint or blueberries.
Yellow is for sour flavours like lemon and pineapple, but also for vitamin richness.
Green is for freshness, like cucumber. It can also be for bitter flavours like rocket or rosemary.
Brown makes us think of rich flavours, like chocolate, coffee or nuts. Or toasty flavours, like roasted meat or bread.
White evokes creamy and mild flavours, like dairy products or vanilla. 

By boldly preserving and at the same time breaking with tradition - whether in the kitchen or in the studio - not only in terms of colour, but also in terms of atmosphere, cultural references, habits and/or aesthetic expectations, artists create new, extraordinary works.

Craftsmanship and Techniques

Anyone who wants to create such extraordinary works needs a high degree of skill, precision and dedication. This is true in all areas of life - and it is no different in art and cooking. Brush or spoon, you have to master your craft in order to break new ground; you have to know all the rules to break them.

Cultural Meaning and Identity

Lalla Essaydi, a Moroccan artist and photographer, looks at the complex roles and identities of women in the Islamic world in her work.

The culture, tradition and identity of a community is reflected in its art - and in its cuisine. Both preserve memories and pass on cultural values. They reflect the influences of the time and place from which they originate and form the collective memory of a society.

A country's art and cuisine preserve the diversity and uniqueness of its culture. Every work of art, every ingredient, every spice and every cooking technique tells a story about the people and their way of life. They help us see the world through the eyes of others and understand different lifestyles and traditions in a deeper and more meaningful way.

A home-cooked meal can make us feel at home or make us want to travel. Longing, security, a holiday feeling, feeling love and giving love – the practice and enjoyment of art and cuisine evokes these and other feelings in us.

With its regional specialities and traditional recipes, Italian cuisine reflects the diversity and history of Italy.

If you love cooking and watching cooking shows as much as I do, I have a suggestion for you. In the series "Gordon Ramsay: Culinary Adventures," Ramsay travels to different countries to explore their local cuisines and culinary traditions. He learns from local chefs and culinary experts, discovers regional ingredients and traditional preparation methods. In the process, he immerses himself in the respective culture. You can currently catch up on three seasons on Disney Plus.

Art and Cooking: Passion and Dedication

Summarized, passion and dedication are what drive both artists and chefs to be creative. Both fields require not only technical skill and knowledge, but also a deep emotional connection.

This dedication and passion is not only evident in their work, but also in their ability to inspire others. They create works that evoke emotions, tell stories and connect people. Their passion is contagious and encourages others to follow their own creative paths and pursue their dreams.

My favourite summer recipe:

Obviously, I can't just write about culinary delights here and stay in theory! So, I'll finish with one of my favourite recipes for the summer. If you like, have fun cooking it!

Cold yoghurt soup with prawn skewers and grilled mango

This soup is a breeze to make, super refreshing, and tastes incredible. It's the perfect thing to have on a hot day.

Ingredients

Preparations

Peel and grate the cucumber. Grate the lemon zest and then squeeze the lemon. Finely chop the garlic. Clean the green onions and cut them diagonally into rings. Deseed and finely dice the chilli. Peel and deseed the mango and cut the flesh into pieces.

How it works

1. Put the yoghurt, buttermilk, oil and ice cubes in a bowl and blend with a hand blender until it's nice and creamy. Then add the grated cucumber, garlic and grated lemon zest and season with salt, pepper and lemon juice. Pop the soup in the fridge to chill.
2. Thread the prawns onto wooden skewers, drizzle with oil and season with salt and pepper. Then grill for a few minutes on both sides.
3. Thread the mango onto skewers and grill on all sides. Drizzle with honey and sprinkle with chilli flakes.
4. Divide the soup into bowls, garnish with spring onions, chilli and mint and serve with a fruit skewer and a prawn skewer.
   Enjoy your meal!

Exchange is Inspiration

Are you Team Art, Team Cooking, or just creative in both worlds?
If you liked my article, please leave a comment. I'd love to hear your thoughts. I'm always happy to receive feedback. I'm also always on the lookout for new recipes. Do you have one for me?
See you soon! Lea

It is not easy to ask for help when you are suffering from depression. This is partly due to the many prejudices that you are just too weak, too lazy, too self-pitying .... That is why it is so important to talk about depression. These misconceptions need to be cleared up. The stigma that adds to the suffering needs to be removed. Professional help is important for depression, and people need to know that it is OK to ask for, need and accept support.

Along the way, we can also raise awareness of the benefits of art as a form of therapy. I believe we all benefit from the power of art. My story shows the power of art. And I am not alone.

Let's talk about it, because the more we talk about it, the more we can learn about it and the more we can help others.