Visions in catastrophe; conflict and the creative mind by The Luxury of Protest

Visions in catastrophe; conflict and the creative mind, is a computational art historical analysis of cataclysm, war, and artistic production.

One hundred and twenty three of history’s most important artistic creations when mapped in relation to the incidence of wars, massacres and genocide, reveal reoccurring patterns of creative human output that flourish after cataclysm.

The dataset was constructed using consensus analysis by collating data from 10 “100 most important artworks” surveys from sources that represent authoritative voices in art history. From this analysis, a list of the 123 of the most important works of art was created including painting, sculpture, design and architecture. Historical data exists of the date and national affiliation of creation of the artworks, and how proximate in time the artwork was created since conflict – eg. Picasso’s eponymous Guernica was painted only a few months after the 1937 bombing of the city by German and Italian fascist forces. Using this method, each artwork is assigned a calculated value of 0, 1, 2, 3, etc. (reading from the bottom – up) years creation date since conflict.

To visualise the data, a light refraction metaphor was used. The proximity of artistic output to conflict is coded using a colour refraction scale where white represents those works of art produced during the year of the conflict (0 years), while colour bands refracting away from white – yellow, orange, red – represent works of art created, one, two, and three years respectively post conflict. The further away from white, the greater the time separation of the date of creation from the conflict event.

The graph is divided left/right where the artworks are listed on the right with the name of the artwork along with artist name, and date and place of creation. On the left is shown the creation time since conflict, artwork category type and cluster analysis of the number of entries per colour category.

A significant proportion (55/123) of history’s most important works of art were created during conflict (white entries) – 82 out of 123 artworks were created five years or less post conflict (white + yellow + orange + red + magenta).



The visualisation reveals a statistically significant increase in creativity after periods of social upheaval, with a pronounced peak in artistic production that occurs during conflict.