User:Lilac Roux

Early Life
Lilac Roux was born on 10 October 1890, in Paris, France, the only child in the family. Her mother died while giving birth to her and so her father raised her while he was teaching at the School of Paris as an art teacher. In 1905 when Lilac was 15 years old, she attended the School of Paris as her father’s wish. It was since then she began to have an interest in painting and started taking the artistic painting course with her father. In 1911 when Lilac was 21 years old, World War I started, German invaded Paris and bombing were all over the city. Unfortunately Lilac’s father died during the bombing and she witnessed everything, including the moment when her father was bombed by the attack. It was since then she developed Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and this psychological trauma had had a significant influence to her early and later works.

PTSD
Lilac’s anxiety disorder became worse after her father’s death and therefore she was diagnosed with PTSD after a month. She had persistent recurring of flashback memories of the war and dreams of her father’s death; she had persistent avoidance and emotional numbing - inability to feel certain feelings and she experienced persistent symptoms of increased arousal not present before. Her thinking became distorted and was unable to recall major parts of the trauma, which led to the creation of cubist paintings. PTSD lasted until her death.

Early work
Lilac Roux work is filled with the fractured emotions of family life. Her early work is similar to the cubist movement in France at the beginning of the 20th century. Her works from this period evoke family portraits that have been blown apart and confused in the confusion of war. The segmented and disjointed imagery of bodily dismemberment is a reoccurring theme in Roux’s early work and she utilized the cubist style of multiple viewpoints to draw conclusions about the presence of war in her memory. Some scholars have alluded to Roux's past war trauma in which she witnessed her entire school perish in a German bombing as a possible source for the reoccurring theme of dismemberment in her early work but others have attributed her fracturing to her extensive and troubled family life. She is often concerned with the way family is the unity of people who are different in all aspects but share blood in common. “I never understood why we were a family, all of us were so different, we were never the same except for the liquid flowing through our veins. My work is often about how we were not a family at all”. This disparity is often reproduced in her use of the color red, but again, this can be contributed to the trauma she experienced during the war. ​Sigmund Freud is said to have found a special interest in Lilac Roux when he met her briefly at a mutual friends dinner party in Paris in 1912. After discussing her work Freud is said to have reinterpreted his idea of the Oedipus complex in the context of the female relationship to the father. He eventually reformed his idea of the female aspects of his theory and created a separate complex called the Electra complex.

Later Work
Paris had been the classical capital of the world since impressionism in the late 19th century, but things started to change when people started to issue manifestos, organized demonstrations, staged performances and journals that destroyed traditional culture. Dada in Paris surged in 1920 when many of the originators converged there. The first introduction to Dada artwork to the Parisian public was at the Salon des Independats in 1921. Jean Crotti exhibited a work entitled, Explicatif bearing the word of Tabu. In the 1921, Lilac was walking down the street on Paris when she encountered several artworks from Marcel Duchamp. The artworks were some of Duchamp’s readymades, which experiment the products of a conscious effort to break every rule of the artistic tradition, in order to create a new kind of art. When Lilac looked at Duchamp’s readymade, she saw the artwork in ways she had never did before. She engaged the mind instead of the eye, and it made her think many different things. After seeing this artwork she thought that she could alter her own paintings to make something new. She could transform them by adding or changing some elements of the artwork. So she went back home and added mundane utilitarian objects to her artwork, and created new pieces of art. From this point on, Lilac started doing “anti-art”, which ignored aesthetics and destroyed traditional culture. She was also still depressed and mad from his father death, so she had very strong anti-war feelings too. She wanted to modify her painting that showed her experience with the death of her father, the painting showed body parts all over the place, and she wanted to put this body parts together in order her to feel her dad was alive again. Lilac is considered one of the most important dadaist artists along with Marcel Duchamp.

Early Painting, Cubism and the Abstract:
Lilac's purpose in the painting was to bring to the world's attention the pain and torture she endured through witnessing the horrific massacre of everyone in her school. This emotional experience is displayed through the consistency in the use of red color throughout the painting. This large canvas covered in red is a symbol for the overwhelming loss in human life during the war and during the disturbing moment that she crawled out of the wreckage of the demolished building. The style used in Roux's earlier work is well suited with the artistic movement know as Cubism. In cubist works of art, items are broken up into pieces and rearranged on the canvas. Re-assembled in an abstract form, the painting Papa, 1911, is a chaotic and traumatic depiction of the bomb that killed her father and destroyed her mind. Lilac's personal issues of trying to live with posttraumatic stress disorder is reinforced in this image by the use of depicting the objects from a large number of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater complex and abstract context.

Later Painting, Dadaism and Cutting & Pasting:
Later in her life Rouxs paintings began to change and take on a whole knew meaning. The pieces she generated seemed to arise from a whole knew perspective and contain a whole new set of emotions. Her later works of art were tailor-made to fit in with a post World War I cultural movement in visual arts known as “Dadaism” Inspired by ‘readymade works’ and Marcel Duchamps, Lilac Roux’s style of painting seems to flow with artistic movements that were occurring in Europe at the time. Her images are no longer scattered chaos and the abstract, the pieces on the canvas are uniform and put together, and there is order and sense of understanding between Roux and the reader. Although these concepts of not typical of ‘Dadaism’, the restructuring of her paintings through cutting and pasting in an artistic manner allows you to see the father pieced back together in a collage form. This peaceful painting of her father put back together again arose from the anger and the hate that was directed toward everyone who she felt had contributed to a senseless war.

Death
After spending sometime without sleep and proper meals preparing for her next artwork in 1927, Lilac suffered a mental collapse again. Despite having a regular medication for her PTSD, she still suffered from this psychological trauma. On 6 June 1927, Lilac committed suicide by hanging herself at home.

Lilac Roux Quotes
"the end of war will only be when the life of people stops getting in the way of bombs."

"Duchamp changed things for me. He showed me that museums could no longer tell artists what was art."

"family was never real for me. It was always an illusion that let others feel like they were a part of something, part of a larger whole. I always knew that was a lie that kept the weak comfortable."

"What is cubism? Does it make sense? Cubism doesn't need to make sense, cubism is sense. It's the world without the illusion that the world should make sense. This is my sense, the sense of art."

"Dada is nothing and everything at once, it is meaningless just like the world around us. You will never know what it is unless you believe in it. But is it possible to believe in the disruption of everything? For me that is the only way to believe. Belief is destruction in its purist form. To believe in nothing is to be pure"