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![](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/6146b2e6-a6d1-4a03-9164-5b3dd50f0611.jpeg)
I took a philosophy of art course once, and the prof put an image of this painting up, and polled people in the class without foreknowledge of the context of the piece to write on a piece of paper & submit what they thought the emotion being conveyed in the painting was, and he’d read a few of them. One person wrote ‘crushing defeat’, and the class chuckled. I think about that often.
This seems interesting. What’s the context here?