A Cultural & Psychological Study On The Style Of Grotesque In Visual Arts

From the point of view of cultural and psychological study this dissertation observes how the art style of grotesque developed from its original form to its modern and post-modern forms, thus reveals the cultural and psychological nature of this art style, which is connotatively rich and also a variable aesthetic form in the content of cultural history. To establish my theory I take into reference the results of studies in many fields such as the primitive thinking, the theory of spiritual analysis, the theory of imagery and the vision psychology. I insist on looking at this aesthetic phenomenon historically in contrast with those traditional concepts which view on grotesque as a number of static individual phenomena, and I believe this is the true access to reach the true sense of the aesthetic style. What I try my best to prove is that grotesque, under its surface beyond comprehension, may have its special rationality.In the first chapter I make a diachronic and synchronic observation to the aesthetic realm of grotesque. Began with a linguistic study on how the word grotesque came into being I comb the different comments on grotesque and their contemporary contexts appeared in the past two thousand years and I classify those historical comments as four sorts: bizarrerie, clownery, danger and binge. The most evident common characteristic of those comments is that they deal with the aesthetic realm with an isolate way of thinking, thus give us only narrowly limited signs. That is why I stress the historical prospect in this study. I try to explore the most primitive expression and the most mysterious narration of grotesque to comprehend their significance.The second and third chapters adopted E.H.Gombrich's theory of context logic, which stresses the analysis to the concrete circumstances in comprehending the subjective way of action and its motivation. In a similar analysis I try to explore the grotesque in the primitive arts, which is the origin of the aesthetic realm of grotesque, and then try to reveal the psychological significance of it.After the exploration of the original forms of grotesque I continue the observation on the formation, evolution and the modern forms of the aesthetic realm. This observation is based on Jung's theory of collective unconsciousness and the aim of it is to find out the regularity of the change of the concepts of grotesque in different historical periods. Then I focus on modern arts, in which I try to translate the works of the greatestart masters with the help of Fraud's methods of spiritual analysis. My conclusion is that the grotesque in these arts is a double narration of both the individual unconsciousness and social-historical contents.My focus is then fixed to the significance of the variation from the ancient grotesque to that of the modern. I find that, in the ancient grotesque shape-changes, the objects were always given a kind of divine nature in obtaining a super power so that it became a kind of worship, with all the ways to enlarge, to add and to create positive torsion, while in modern arts the shape-changes became shrunk and negative ones. I want to point out that behind this change of grotesque there lie the deep social and epoch reasons, and also the sharp senses of the artists were always pumped into the works. In this study I've also observed context of the grotesque in postmodern arts.In the conclusion I make a simple-lined diachronic description of grotesque and point out the different characteristics in different periods as miracle, clownery, horror and secular. Finally I observe grotesque from the combination of culture and aesthetics and draw out the chief characteristics of the aesthetic concept as subjective imagery embodiment, life generalization, objective stranger embodiment, and polycentric aesthetic tendency, etc. I must point out at the same time that the characteristics mentioned above are referred only relatively; grotesque is still in a state of variation.