1.

Empathy: unconscious mimicry

The beholder’s response to a painting of a person recruits not only the beholder’s
perceptual and emotional capability, but also the capability for empathy. We respond so
readily to a certain portrait because we are intensely social and empathic creatures and our
brain is programmed to experience and express emotions. When we look at a portrait we
are experiencing for a moment the emotional life of the person in the painting. We are able
to recognize emotional states and respond to them. this social capability makes possible our
response to works of art and our ability to communicate that response to others but permits
also our ability to enter the mental state of another person. Observing the emotional state
of another person in art we automatically and unconsciously activate in our brain a
representation of that emotional state (including bodily responses).

Oskar Kokoschka: described his emotional response to a person whose portrait he was
painting, and he affirm that the “ sitter whose face he found so hard to unriddle he
automatically pulled a corresponding grimace of impenetrable rigidity.”
Gombrich: “the understanding of another person’s physiognomy took the way over his
own muscular experience.”

In Kokoschka’s paintings of Ernst Reinhold and Rudolf Blümner the artist distorts the
surface of the face and exaggerates the details of the hands to depict the underlying mental
states that he has perceived empathically.

When we look at these powerful portraits, we automatically imitate subtle movements of

their faces - unconscious mimicry (Ulf Dimberg, professor of psychology at Uppsala
University, Sweden)
Dimberg found that when a person is shown the facial expression of an emotion, even
briefly, it elicits small contractions in the person’s facial muscles that simulate the expression
he or she has just observed. Moreover, social psychological studies have found that
unconscious mimicry tends to evoke a sense of rapport and perhaps even friendliness
toward the person being imitated.

This aspect of mimicry may also occur when looking at art, and the authors questioned :
How does this work? Do we interpret the expressions of others or the expressions in
portraits, and do those expressions then drive our own facial expression? Or do we
automatically mimic the expressions of others as a means of comprehension?
Chris Frith gives a particularly simple example of the mimicry process that we gonna
apply at the class

Experience:

There is an easy way to feel happier even if you don’t see a smiling face. Hold a
pencil between your teeth (withdrawing your lips). This forces your face into a
smile and you feel happier. If you want to feel miserable, hold the pencil
between your lips.
 Half-Hour Portrait, Jessica Miller - 2014

Roy

Lichtenstein: Crying Girl (1964)

 Happiness Needs No
Money, Gideon Fasola- 2015

2. Truth in art

One of the phenomena that attract people to see the work of art is to see the truth even if
this truth is complex or not beautiful. And the authors conclude that the same truth can be
beautiful and ugly and they try to understand why our response to art is so different, and why
are we genuinely fascinated by a work of art that expose for example death, or a
representation of Judith as a castrating female. And the answer is that art enriches our lives
by exposing to us new ideias, feelings and situations that we never experienced before, so
art serves like a chance to experience things and emotions with our imagination. So the
beautiful and the ugliness doesn’t really matter, because it’s so much beyond that; it doesn’t
define our appreciation in a work of art, a certain work of art can be ugly (aesthetic) and we
can’t stop staring at him, because is so real and it’s the truth. And in this way it was done
some studies to understand the areas of the brain that were activated at different emotions.
Founders of the vienna school of art history argued that aesthetic judgments appear to follow
the same rules as the evaluation of emotional stimuli.
 Some examples that we can use as images:

Hey! It’s Imran: I made this about the ambiguity of exageration reality:
Good evening everybody ;)
Exaggeration: to accentuate a reality (hyper-realism) to transmit a stronger emotion. Some
artists use hyper-realism to immerse the audience more intensely in emotions.
An example strongly used in painting is the accentuation of ugliness: artists will increase the
features of old age in order to evoke the proximity of old age with death:
blacken the eyes
green the skin
make the eyes more globular
put dark circle under them
accentuate wrinkles
make bones more visible

This exaggeration of ugliness is sometimes only a simple realistic representation but seems
exaggerated because it goes against the habits in terms of art: a representation of a
shocking reality (thinness, poverty, opulence...) can be interpreted under the guise of
exaggeration because shocking. It is also a way for the observer to make the show more
emotionally bearable.
The artist strives to be realistic, is perceived as hyper-realism exaggerating the features and
the spectator interprets him as exaggerating to simplify his emotions.

It is safe to assume that in a consciousness devoid of knowledge, observing a painting

representing the aweful Shoah could be perceived as an imaginary work, because it is too
contradictory to the norms of humanity, as an imaginary work in order to make it bearable.
Illustration of phenomena
And here,