Death in Art
- Diamond Zhou
- 1 day ago
- 14 min read
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SATURDAY EVENING POST
December 13th, 2025
There is no language that truly expresses death. To the living, it remains only a concept, the thin line marking the end of a finite span. It is neither glorious nor tragic. It is silent, unremarkable, indifferent. It shrouds itself in mystery, dressed in the garments of the divine, and allows us, out of necessity, to imagine some continuation of the self. We speak of souls ascending toward a place of greater light or serenity. These comforts exist because the truth is too stark. We have no tether beyond the fragile limits of our bodies, and the great beyond is an unanswered question with no inclination to resolve itself.
Yet death is not only an abstraction. It is also an experience, one that unfolds at the threshold between here and then.
In the moment of death, when that threshold begins to open, what rises within the mind? Is it peace, or the soft settling of resolve. Is it regret, or the tremor of fear. Does consciousness linger long enough to recognise that the words never spoken will remain unspoken forever, that no new memory will ever be made, and that time, as it was once faithfully measured, has already slipped beyond reach. And within that unravelling, is there a final instant of clarity, a quiet clearing in the fog of confusion, when one understands that this crossing is the last release, and that everything, at last, will be well.
For those who remain, death is encountered differently. Those left behind become custodians of the story’s final chapter. They are the witnesses of our suffering, the ones who find us drowned in water, seized by addiction, taken in sleep, or eroded by illness. What remains for them is the body, the last physical credential that ties us to earth, gravity, and every space we ever inhabited. Their grief summons a retrospective of memory. Bitterness, tenderness, regrets that can never be revised, and at times something luminous, a fleeting mercy that allows the heart to loosen its grip.
For the living, letting go becomes a profound ritual. It is the rare moment when emotion assumes full authority, when there is no exit and no refuge, only immersion. Grief binds tightly, suffocating and electrifying in equal measure. It carries us between exaltation and despair, between remembering and resisting, between the urgent attempt to preserve a single perfect moment and the certainty of losing it to time’s undertow. We cling to memory the way the drowning cling to anything that floats, knowing that once it slips away, it can never be recovered. And so, we seize the memory. That is grief. Yet grief does not remain still. It presses outward. It demands expression.
It is here that art enters. Art enters not as consolation but as a form of translation. Death in art has always been remarkable, not because artists resolve its mysteries but because they articulate the silence that surrounds it. Art becomes a second body for what has vanished. It gives shape to the unholdable and colour to the unspeakable. It offers structure to the emotional free fall that so often unfolds in isolation.
Across centuries, artists have approached death not as a closed door but as a fertile subject, something that reveals who we are when life’s most basic certainty draws near. The artist, by recording the presence of death, returns us to life with new clarity.
Some of the most powerful images in the history of art are not allegories or fantasies, but direct encounters with the body at the threshold. These works do not flinch from the reality of death. They look at it with the stillness of someone who knows that meaning is not found in grandeur but in intimacy.
Few paintings reveal this intimacy with greater tenderness than Claude Monet’s painting of Camille Monet on her Deathbed, created in 1879 as he watched his first wife slip away. Her face, rendered in delicate purples and cool blues, dissolves into the surrounding cloth. Monet later wrote that he was overcome with both love and a strange artistic clarity in that moment. He knew he was painting the woman he loved while also observing the effect of death on colour and light. The painting reveals this tension. Camille is both herself and already beyond herself. Her death is presented not through drama but through quiet transfiguration.
A very different kind of deathbed appears in Gustav Klimt’s Ria Munk on her Deathbed from 1912. Klimt turns the tragedy of a young woman’s suicide into a dreamlike composition. Ria lies surrounded by flowers that bloom with almost unnatural intensity. Klimt imagines the boundary between life and death as porous. The living world still crowds around her, unwilling to recede. The riot of colour suggests that death, in the artistic imagination, may intensify presence rather than erase it.
The great tragic actress Sarah Bernhardt was also a formidable sculptor. In the aftermath of her husband’s death, she carved a haunting marble memorial to the actor Jacques Damala (1855–1889), who died from a drug overdose. Bernhardt depicts him as though resting on his deathbed, his youthful features softened into a state of uneasy calm. His eyes are closed, his expression suspended between sleep and finality. The sheet drawn across his neck reads not simply as bedding, but as a shroud, while the cut flowers laid beside him begin to wilt against the cold marble surface, which evokes the weight and permanence of a tomb. The sculpture is neither sentimental nor theatrical. It is an intimate confrontation with loss, rendered in stone, where tenderness and mortality are inseparably bound.
The deathbed becomes metaphor in Ferdinand Hodler’s Night, completed in 1890, where a figure representing death crawls across a tangle of sleeping bodies. The body that brings death is dark and inevitable. Yet the living bodies, though vulnerable and unaware, remain luminous. Hodler suggests that death is always present within life, a shadow across the sheet, a hand reaching in without warning.
Photography introduces another dimension. Hippolyte Bayard’s Self Portrait as a Drowned Man from 1840 may be one of the first conceptual artworks about mortality. Bayard, overlooked in the early history of photography, staged his own death as a protest against the lack of recognition. He lies limp, eyes closed, drenched in imagined seawater. The photograph satirizes bureaucratic neglect, yet its emotional power is real. It raises a question that shadows the medium itself. If a photograph can preserve a body, does it also counterfeit death, or prepare us for it.
Death does not always appear as stillness. In Cristóbal Rojas’s The Misery, painted in 1886, illness has already done its work. The woman is no longer struggling. Her body has collapsed, her skin drained of warmth, while the man beside her is left to absorb the moment’s full weight. Rojas, who would himself die young from tuberculosis, renders the slow erosion of the body with an intimacy shaped by lived proximity to disease and loss. There is no allegory here, no promise of transcendence, only the unembellished truth of human fragility as it unfolds in real time.
Betty Goodwin, one of Canada’s most profound artists of the twentieth century, rejected prettified images of death. Her drawings, such as the Swimmers series, convey the body in states of vulnerability, suspension, and disappearance. Goodwin’s figures appear weightless yet burdened, present yet fading. Sometimes death is not dramatic, sometimes it is the quiet erosion of the self. Death here is not depicted. It is implied through absence.
Goodwin experienced profound personal losses throughout her life, including the deaths of close family members and friends. She rarely spoke publicly about these events, and she resisted autobiographical readings of her work. Instead, grief appears sublimated. The restraint in her drawings, the thinning lines, the partial erasures, reflect a temperament that understood mourning as something internal, slow, and often wordless. Her art suggests that death does not always arrive loudly. Often it withdraws, leaving traces behind.
Another significant voice is Käthe Kollwitz, whose depictions of mothers, widows, and children remain some of the most uncompromising images of grief in Western art. Works such as Woman with Dead Child from 1903 present death not as an aesthetic occasion but as a raw human calamity. Kollwitz experienced the death of her son in the First World War. Her art embodies grief in its heaviest form.
If the deathbed reveals intimacy, allegory reveals our longing to understand what lies beyond it. Artists have long imagined death as a figure that moves through the world with intention, sometimes as tormentor, sometimes as companion. This is strikingly clear in Gustav Klimt’s Death and Life, begun around 1908. Death appears as a cloaked figure watching a cluster of living bodies entwined in colour and pattern. The living do not notice him. Life and death occupy the same world, yet move according to different rhythms.
A different vision emerges in Odilon Redon’s Death: My Irony Surpasses All Others from 1888. Redon paints death as a floating figure, radiant and uncanny. The pronounced chiaroscuro draws the subject into a shifting field of illumination and darkness, where what is seen and what is withheld mirror the uneasy coexistence of life and its end. His work suggests that death might be an idea rather than an event, a force that reshapes reality without warning.
In Marianne Stokes‘ 1908 painting Death and the Maiden, she brings the ancient motif into a quiet, Christian-inflected register. The maiden does not dissolve into water or drift amid floral excess. Instead, she is shown confronted by a solemn, cloaked figure of death, her posture marked by stillness and acceptance rather than fear. The encounter unfolds without spectacle. The atmosphere is devotional rather than theatrical. Stokes strips the scene to its essentials, leaving only the intimate moment of recognition between a single soul and its visitor.
Modernism brought catastrophe into the frame. Pablo Picasso’s Guernica from 1937 stands as one of the most powerful anti war images in human history. Death is not allegorized here. It arrives as violence, fracture, and the shattering of ordinary life.
Art has long served as a space in which death can be approached before it is lived. In some instances, the artist does more than depict mortality from a distance. The act of making becomes a form of participation, where representation and experience converge. In Sarah Bernhardt interpretation of Ophelia, completed in 1880, presents the drowned heroine not as a passive victim but as a suspended presence, hovering between stillness and awakening. Her eyes remain almost closed, her lips parted, as water gathers her body without violence. Bernhardt’s Ophelia is neither alive nor gone. She occupies a liminal space in which death becomes performance, and performance becomes a meditation on mortality.
John Everett Millais offered an earlier interpretation of Ophelia in 1851, a painting that became one of the enduring icons of Victorian art. Millais created it from direct observation of nature and from a model who floated in a bathtub heated by candles beneath. The result is an image where beauty and tragedy coexist with startling clarity. Flowers drift around Ophelia’s body with the delicacy of a ritual offering. Millais does not shy away from the horror of her fate, yet he surrounds her with a vision so exquisite that the viewer becomes transfixed. The painting suggests that death is not the negation of beauty but one of its most unsettling expressions.
Bernhardt’s work, Millais’s work, and other images of theatrical death reveal the way performance and mortality intertwine. The staged body becomes a proxy for the real body. The act of pretending to die prepares both artist and audience for the moment when pretending is no longer possible.
The conceptual turn of the twentieth century brought another form of self staging. Andy Warhol’s Gold Marilyn Monroe from 1962 presents the actress as an icon lifted from her own tragedy. The brilliant gold background recalls the sacred panels of early Christian painting, yet Monroe’s image is flattened through silkscreen. Her face becomes a relic of celebrity culture. Warhol understood that modern death is often mediated through reproduction. The person disappears but the image remains, multiplied until it loses connection to the human life that produced it. In this sense, Monroe’s death becomes part of the artwork.
When the body is gone, death persists through memory, shaping how absence is felt and understood. This register comes into sharp focus in Pablo Picasso’s Self Portrait Facing Death from 1972. In the painting, the artist confronts his own mortality with unflinching directness. His face is gaunt, his eyes alert, his outline rendered in vibrating strokes. Picasso depicts himself as both fully present and already receding, as though existing in two states at once. It is not a portrait of fear, but one of recognition.
Art does not bring the dead back. Yet it alters the terrain on which we meet death. It teaches us that mortality is not only the end of a life but a condition that shapes the living. It enters our days quietly, sometimes as fear, sometimes as tenderness, sometimes as a strange clarity that opens the world for a moment before it closes again. We do not understand death. We do not need to. What matters is that through the centuries, artists have approached it with a steadiness that the rest of us often cannot manage. They look directly at what we can bear to glimpse only in fragments.
What these works reveal is that death is not an event that waits for the final hour. It is present in the light that falls across a quiet room, in the softening edge of a body, in the breath that lingers in memory long after it has left the lungs. Death is the shadow that gives form to everything we see. Without it, meaning would have no weight. Feeling would have no urgency. Beauty would drift without anchor.
Art makes this truth legible, it does not console, it does not explain, it offers instead a companion, something that stands beside us when words fail. A painting does not tell us how to grieve, but it shows that grief has been lived before, and that it left a trace strong enough to reach us across centuries. A drawing does not solve despair, but it shows that despair has a shape, and that the human hand has traced that shape with care. An abstract field can feel like the long breath after sorrow, when silence becomes a place to rest rather than a void.
Perhaps this is the secret function of death in art. It reminds us that to be alive is to be permeable, and that everything we love will one day be carried beyond our reach. Yet it also shows that nothing entirely vanishes. A face rendered in charcoal holds a presence greater than its lines. A figure painted on a deathbed glows with a softness that defies erasure. Even the faintest grid can carry the sensation of a life dissolving into calm.
Art cannot protect us from loss. It can, however, protect us from indifference. It urges us to look closely at the world we inhabit and the people we love, because it knows that all presence is temporary. It asks us to honour the fragile, the fleeting, the nearly invisible. It asks for attention, and in giving that attention, we come closer to understanding what it means to be here at all.
Death enters every life, but art gives us a way to remain in conversation with it. Not as adversary, not as mystery, but as the quiet force that shapes our longing, our memory, and our capacity to feel. To look at these works is to stand in that conversation, not with fear, but with recognition. The recognition that we are part of a long and continuous human effort to face the inevitable with courage, imagination, and an unbroken curiosity for the world that remains.
This post is written in loving memory of my father, Zhou Daosheng, who passed earlier last month. Born in Beijing in the 1940s, his family lived through the tumultuous transition from the Republic of China to Mao’s newly established People’s Republic of China, and later endured the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution. Despite the uncertainties of the time, he was fortunate to receive a higher education through the support of his family.
He became not only an accomplished and influential artist in China, but also a widely respected authority in the restoration and replication of Buddhist art and cultural heritage. He devoted more than six decades to the arts, contributing significantly to the public art landscape of China. He was known for his openness, sincerity, dedication to his work, and wholehearted focus on creation.
His greatest passion was drawing. He filled entire sketchbooks with figures, horses, and birds. His pen never stopped moving, even when illness weakened his hands. He adored nineteenth century Russian landscape painters such as Isaac Levitan and Ilya Repin, and the family home was lined with his careful copies of their works. He was generous in spirit, giving away most of his early paintings to friends and family as gestures of affection. His artistic sensibility gravitated toward Art Nouveau and Art Deco, and in doing so, quietly shaped my own love for those eras and my affinity for drawing. He often returned from his travels with books on Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and his favourite, John Singer Sargent, nurturing my early and continued admiration for these artists. He loved giving long public speeches, thrived in the spotlight, and carried himself with the confidence of a natural leader. He was also a devoted lover of the saxophone and of Michael Jackson, and he prided himself on being an excellent dancer.
He shaped my artistic upbringing in ways I could never fully measure. During my university years, when my interests drifted, he guided me back toward art with gentle insistence, fearful that I might lose touch with the one thing that had always animated me. In this, he stood apart from many traditional Chinese parents. He encouraged me to study art and art history, believing that a life grounded in beauty, goodness, and curiosity was worth pursuing.
Death is often filled with fear, yet what we fear is not the end itself, but the memories we will no longer have the chance to make. Still, we remain the survivors of every trace left by those who shaped us. We carry their gestures, their hopes, their flaws, their loves. And here we are, living, learning, loving, and giving back in the best ways we know how.
I write today as I have for the past two and half years. Saturday Evening Post has been a generous place to learn and grow, a modest refuge for those who come here to imagine, to think, and to sit with a sliver of quiet. I am deeply grateful for its readers, and I will continue to write toward what feels necessary, curious, and unresolved. For me, writing is not only work but also solace, a way of tending, carefully, to what life leaves tender.
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