Art and Context: Hernandez, Munch, and Lange Analyzed

Introduction

Exploring the world through visual means is a versatile process of gathering information about human experience. The context from which one engages with art, along with personal factors, shapes that dynamic process of exploration. Art and context are inseparable: meaning is derived from the information that accompanies a piece of art. Aspects such as a work's title, its authenticity, and its historical background all contribute to that meaning. These factors determine how one evaluates a piece of art and how sensitively one responds to it (Brieber).

Sun Mad by Ester Hernandez

The skeleton figure in Hernandez's Sun Mad demonstrates the deadly effects of pesticides while firmly situating the work within the Mexican tradition of printmaking that dates back to José Guadalupe Posada. The skull motif evokes a Mexican society portrayed satirically at the close of the nineteenth century. Many Mexican artists have borrowed heavily from Posada's work, and his imagery has become the signature visual language associated with the Day of the Dead celebration observed around the world (Bain, 28–29).

Sun Mad is deeply connected to Hernandez's own life. She was born in 1944 in Dinuba, a rural community in California's Central Valley. Her parents were immigrants from Mexico who came to California to work on grape farms during the Great Depression (Bain, 28–29). Over the course of her studies, Hernandez shifted her interests toward visual art, working closely with emerging Chicano artists and eventually joining the collective of female artists known as Mujeres Muralistas. Together they created large-scale murals intended to portray the everyday lives of Mexican Americans in San Francisco's Mission District.

Mexican Americans also sought political and social change in the wake of the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s. Restrictions on voting, discriminatory labor practices, and unequal access to housing were among the injustices that Mexican Americans and Chicanos regularly faced in the United States. Hernandez was a prominent participant in the activities of the United Farm Workers of America (UFWA). This involvement, combined with her time in Berkeley's politically charged community during the 1970s, cemented her identity as an activist and deepened her commitment to sociopolitical art. The UFWA organized a series of successful strikes and boycotts against American grape growers, demanding better wages and working conditions (Bain, 28–29). These campaigns helped place labor rights on the agenda in America's most powerful boardrooms.

It was against this backdrop that Hernandez discovered the pesticides used on nearby grape farms had leached into the town's groundwater, poisoning local water sources. Feeling a strong obligation to speak out on behalf of herself, her friends, and her family, she created Sun Mad as that act of protest. She directed the work at the Sun-Maid Growers of California, a private cooperative, because the raisin grapes harvested in her hometown were sent there for processing (Bain, 28–29).

The Scream by Edvard Munch

Painted in 1893, The Scream is a nineteenth-century work produced at a peculiar transitional historical moment often referred to as the fin de siècle. In it, Edvard Munch crafted a genderless, contorted figure with a gaunt face, its mouth and eyes wide open in a horrified expression. The image grew out of a vision that overtook him during an evening stroll with two friends. He later recalled that the sky seemed to turn blood-red, his companions' faces took on a pale, yellowish hue, and he heard what he described as an endless scream piercing through nature ("Art Analysis").

By Munch's own account, the most devastating event of his life was the premature death of his mother from tuberculosis when he was only five years old. His older sister, to whom he had grown especially close after their mother's death, also died from the same illness when Munch was thirteen. These losses were compounded by his father's descent into psychotic depression rooted in religious obsession, and by the grinding poverty that afflicted the family despite his father's work as a doctor ("Art Analysis").

The Scream is fundamentally an expressionist work — an autobiographical piece shaped by a real experience in which Munch felt nature tearing through him while his friends, visible in the background, had moved ahead. The scene fits the interpretation that the sensation arose when his mind was in an altered state. In his visual rendering, Munch presents the experience in a way that seems to strip the human figure of its individual integrity (Friedlaender and Friedlaender, 2002). The flowing, curvilinear lines associated with Art Nouveau impose a subjective, organic rhythm on the landscape. The many distinct elements of the scene are drawn into a single organic whole charged with a fluid, almost feminine quality. Yet human beings are part of nature too, and being absorbed into such a whole threatens to obliterate the individual entirely.

Conclusion

The context which forms the basis for the creation of a piece of artwork, and the artist's own position within it, is intrinsic to what the work means — whether that context is social, philosophical, or cultural. A work originally understood as a universal human statement can be reframed as cultural appropriation when its context of creation and presentation changes. Artists cannot control the passage of time, but many are increasingly attentive to cultural and presentational contexts, to their own complicity within those contexts, and to how that complicity shapes the meaning their work carries.

Sun Mad is an outstanding example of artistic appropriation that succeeds in redirecting the imagery of agribusiness advertising toward an activist cause. The Scream, on the other hand, captures something of how modern people experience their age — shaped by uncertainty and anxiety. Munch reveals a raw, even unsettling view of his deepest fears and anguish. The meaning is ultimately more personal than technical, which represents a defining purpose of expressionist art. Migrant Mother, for its part, stands as one of the most powerful visual documents of the Great Depression. The photograph's widespread circulation did not resolve the financial hardships that drove Thompson's family into seasonal agricultural labor, but the image came to embody the despair of an entire era — while Thompson herself remained a figure of active resistance within that same history.