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The Task of Mourning – A Reflection on Mourning and

Melancholia through the work of Tomas Lundgren

Erika Larsson

To cite this article: Erika Larsson (2021) The�Task�of�Mourning – A�Reflection�on�Mourning�and

Melancholia�through�the�work�of�Tomas�Lundgren, Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History,
90:1, 1-12, DOI: 10.1080/00233609.2020.1852310

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The Task of Mourning – A Reflection on Mourning
and Melancholia through the work of Tomas
Lundgren
Erika Larsson *

The Swedish artist Tomas Lundgren’s (-)
series The Task of Mourning () consists of
nearly-but-not-quite perfect reproductions of
photographs from the first half of the twenti-
eth century. Through painting inexact copies
of photographic remnants from this time in
European history, the series can be seen as a
slow contemplation of this historical period.
As the title indicates, part of what the series
deals with has to do with the notion of
mourning. In Mourning and Melancholia,
Sigmund Freud describes mourning as a
kind of work that needs to be carried out in
and through time. In the necessarily slow
process of mourning that Freud describes,
each aspect, each memory, and each associ-
ation of the attachment to a lost object has
to be overcome bit by bit. One memory that
is processed generates the next and so on.
There are obvious differences between the
slow contemplation of the past that Lundg-
ren’s series involves, and the process of
mourning that Freud (and, as we will see,
others) describe. However, there are also
areas in which they overlap. In this article, I
will look closer at the points at which these
processes intersect.
Much attention has been given in the last
years to archival studies, and Lundgren’s
work can be seen as part of a tendency of
artists seeking to make historical information
physically present to be engaged with.
However, connections between such archival
work as a way of working-through cultural
memory, and the notion of mourning that
are opened up by Lundgren’s series, has yet
to be explored. In this article, I examine the
dynamics between images, mourning and

*Erika Larsson obtained her doctorate in Art History and Visual Culture at Lund University in  with a
thesis exploring the notion of belonging in contemporary photography from an affective, embodied and
non-representational perspective. Today, she has a postdoc position at HDK-Valand Academy, Gothen-
burg University and The Hasselblad Foundation, researching contemporary photographers’ and artists’
engagements with the interwar period. She also lectures on photography theory and globalisation in
relation to visual culture.
This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of
the article.

©  The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives
License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/./), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction
in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.

ISSN 0023-3609 KONSTHISTORISK TIDSKRIFT/JOURNAL OF ART HISTORY 2021

Vol. 90, No. 1, 1–12, https://doi.org/10.1080/00233609.2020.1852310
2 ERIKA LARSSON

collective memories. In relation to these

notions, I also look at how the series can be
understood as a reflection on mourning past-
ness itself. Building on theories of mourning
of Freud and others, I discuss mourning as
an emotional and embodied process, in
which cognitive associations are intertwined
with affective and visceral forces. In the same
way, I look at the process of painting and the
work of art as material and bodily acts. From
this perspective, what takes place in The Task
of Mourning comes across as at the same
time a working-through, and a holding on to,
ideas and affective associations related to the
collective history to which it relates.

The Task of Mourning

The paintings of the series The Task of
Mourning are all larger than the photographs
that they stem from, but not by much (they all
measure  ×  cm). I begin my discussion
by briefly describing four of the images of
the series, before moving on to reflect on the
notions that they collectively evoke. In one
painting we see Albert Speer, Hitler’s chief
architect and the Minister of Armaments
and War Production in Nazi Germany
during most of World War II (Fig. ). A few
facts about Speer: Unlike many other Nazi
leaders, Speer did not commit suicide after
the war. After his court hearing, he spent 
years at Spandau Prison in Berlin. When cap-
tured by the Allies in , Speer claimed to
have no knowledge of the Holocaust or the
war crimes against Jews labouring in his fac-
tories. Toward the end of his life, he admitted
that he did in fact know about these crimes, as
well as “the final solution”. The photograph
from which the painting was made is of
unknown origin – from part of Lundgren’s
own private collection of photographs. It
Fig. 1. Tomas Lundgren, The Task of Mourning, 2019,
oil on canvas, 21 × 29 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
was taken during Speer’s captivity before he
was tried at Nuremberg. In the image, Speer
is not wearing a suit and tie as in earlier archi-
val photographs of him. Instead, he wears a
simple black jacket and his thin hair is slightly
dishevelled. The background appears to be a
stained stone wall. The focus of the image is
on his turned-down face and on his hands,
which are in the process of drawing some-
thing with a pencil on paper. His focus
seems to be on the task at hand. As I will
discuss below, in all of the images in Lundg-
ren’s series, there are some parts of the paint-
ings that bring attention to them specifically
as paintings, in contrast to the photographs
from which they were copied. In the image
of Speer, this includes the hands and fingers –
as a result of the brushstrokes that mark the
creases in the hands and the roundness of
his fingers, knuckles, and pencil.
 THE TASK OF MOURNING 3

end of the Nazi reign. But, unlike the image

Fig. 2. Tomas Lundgren, The Task of Mourning, 2019,
oil on canvas, 21 × 29 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
of Speer, it is also an image of shame, of
hiding one’s identity, of no longer wanting
to be identified with the symbols once sewn
onto the uniform as a sign of pride. I am
told that the photograph that the painting
was made from was published (in Life Maga-
zine) at a time during which the full extent of
the atrocities of the Holocaust were being
revealed to the world – marking the beginning
of an era of the surrounding world trying to
grasp the meaning and the consequences of
these events.
The images of the series relate to each other
not in some structured way, but through
association, in which a detail in one image
leads to the choice of the next. The third
image mirrors the action of the Nazi soldier
above of hiding one’s face, but in an entirely
different context (Fig. ). The photograph

Another painting in the series shows an

anonymous Nazi soldier arrested during the
end of the Second World War (Fig. ). The
soldier turns his face away from the camera,
and holds his hand up to cover his face
further from being seen. The details that
remain to be seen – the palm of his hand,
his ear, and his thick well-groomed undercut –
give an appearance of youth. He is wearing an
unbuttoned coat, leaving the symbols of his
uniform to be seen: three stripes on the
collar; a badge with a swastika and an arrow
pointing upward (A Hitler Youth Proficiency
Badge); and a Luftwaffe Paratrooper Badge
given to parachutists. Once again, the paint-
ing is not an exact copy of the original photo-
graph. Differences are found in particular in
the way the texture of the hair and the skin
are depicted. As in the image of Speer Fig. 3. Tomas Lundgren, The Task of Mourning, 2019,
above, it is an image of defeat taken at the oil on canvas, 21 × 29 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
4 ERIKA LARSSON

that modelled this painting is from the begin-

ning of the last century. It portrays a woman
with her face resting in her hands, her
spread-out fingers hiding her eyes and nose,
only showing her mouth in the shade of her
hand. Apart from the gesture of placing her
hand across her face, there is nothing in the
image that relates to the image of the Nazi
above. The woman’s long hair is held up by
a clip in the style of the early twentieth
century. The material of her neoclassical
looking robe is creased as she leans on the
elbow of her other arm. Behind the woman
we can see the cluttered wall of what we
may assume to be the studio of the Czech
painter, illustrator and graphic artist Alfonse
Mucha, who lived in Paris during the early
twentieth century. What is known about the
image is that the woman is one of Mucha’s
models (unnamed), whom he would photo- Fig. 4. Tomas Lundgren, The Task of Mourning, 2019,
oil on canvas, 21 × 29 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
graph with the further purpose of making
paintings, posters and illustrations. While
the gesture of the woman mirrors that of the show the face of the girl from the front but
Nazi soldier above, the context in which it is at a slight angle. She appears to be looking
taken is not so much suggestive of an act of at something at the side of the camera – or
shame, but rather an experimentation with perhaps looking into space. There seems to
gesture and posing, which was an important be a contrast between the youthfulness of
part of Mucha’s artistic practice. The image her face and the seriousness of her expression,
of the soldier is taken at the end of the with a slight furrow of contemplation between
Second World War, while the image of the her brows. She seems deep in thought, and
woman precedes the wars, and marks rather with the title of the series as well as along
a time of experimentation, challenging tra- with the other images of the series, it is easy
dition and looking for the new. to make the assumption that she is involved
The final image of the series that I will in contemplation of the memories of all the
discuss shows a young girl, Fränzi Ferman losses yet to come, in her own life as well as
(Fig. ). The photograph, taken around in the society of which she is a part. Ludwig
, comes from a catalogue of the Kirchner, who most likely took the photo-
German expressionist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, graph and who came to paint several paint-
but apart from the fact that the girl was fre- ings of the girl, was one of the founders of
quently portrayed in his work, there is little the expressionist artist group Die Brücke
information to be found about her. The (The Bridge) in Dresden in . During
photograph and its painted reproduction the First World War, Kirchner suffered

several mental breakdowns and just before the
outbreak of the Second World War, he took
his own life. It is a lot to extrapolate all
these events from the image of the girl in
deep contemplation. Nevertheless, the image
seems to express the focus of the series as a
whole, namely the task of engaging in a
process of mourning.
An embodied task
As I have touched upon, in all of the images
above, there are aspects of the paintings that
bring attention to the process of their repro-
duction. While at first glance they may seem
like exact copies of the originals, a closer
look reveals the brushstrokes through which
they were created. Lundgren himself describes
the manner in which they are created as a slow
process of contemplation of the images them-
selves as well as of the events in history that
they relate to. In the book Art in Mind,
Ernst van Alpen discusses how art visually
“thinks” about difficult cultural issues.
Rather than representing traumatic or chal-
lenging historical events, he considers par-
ticular art works in terms of how they
actively create new relationships, ideas and
understandings in relation to these events.
Similarly, in Empathic Vision, Jill Bennett
describes a particular mode of understanding
that is engendered through the visual. Here,
she refers to the painter Francesco Clemente
who suggests a kind of “thinking through
the body” as essential to this process.
Bennett describes this act as “a process experi-
enced not as a remembering the past but as a
continuous negotiation of a present with
indeterminable links to the past”. In other
words, the art work (its mode of creation as
well as, potentially, its perception) is seen as
THE TASK OF MOURNING 5
a kind of working-through particular
relationships with history, which takes place
as much in the mind as in the body. Signifi-
cantly, Bennett points to vision as having a
different relationship to embodied under-
standings from words, in particular when it
comes to the kind of experience, which may
not have words that can describe it, but can
still be felt in the body. Writing specifically
about this kind of experience and the
process of painting, she refers to the philoso-
pher Gilles Deleuze’s reflections around
“painting the sensation”. For Deleuze, rather
than representing particular events or issues,
the task of painting is defined as “the
attempt to render visible forces that are not
themselves visible”. The process of rendering
visible such energies becomes at the same
time a transformation of – or, as I suggested
above, a kind of working-through – these
forces. In Lundgren’s paintings, it is in par-
ticular the brushstrokes that draw attention
to this process. They make visible the labor-
ious and embodied process of re-creating
the images in a new media – and the kind of
“thinking through the body” that is involved
in this task. They bring attention to the art
works as an altogether material and bodily
affair, which is fundamentally rooted in
sense perception.
As described above, the images of Lundg-
ren’s series do not pertain to one particular
event, nor one particular nation or group of
people. Rather, they concern a number of
events and people. What they all have in
common, however, is that they relate to the
first half of the twentieth century in Europe.
As such, in addition to the situations that
the particular images relate to, what is being
engaged with in the series is a historical era,
including the consequences of the events
and ideologies of this time. In each
6 ERIKA LARSSON
photograph that is being worked through,
some aspect of this common history is pro-
cessed – leaving a new, slightly altered
version, in a new medium, in its place. As is
also discussed in the theories of van Alpen
and Bennett, in this embodied process there
is no separation between collective memory
and personal experience. They exist within
the same dimension, and the body and its
material surrounding is the site at which this
process takes place. Imagination, memory
and affective experience are equally of the
same importance. In “Archival Impulse”,
Foster asks if archival art might emerge out
of a sense of failure in cultural memory and
points to a will to “connect that which
cannot be connected” – or a “will to
relate”. Furthermore, he describes how
archival art “assumes anomic fragmentation
as a condition not only to represent but to
work through, and proposes new orders of
affective association, however partial and pro-
visional, to this end”. In this way, The Task
of Mourning has in common with other archi-
val works a sense of disorientation in relation
to the events that the archival material relates
to. From this position, there is a wish to reach
another kind of engagement with this
material and history. This is done through
processes that resonate as much in the body
as in the mind – in the realm of personal as
well as in collective imagination and memory.
In The Spirit of Mourning, History, Memory
and the Body, Paul Connerton argues against
a view of history-writing as legitimation, in
which that which does not fit into the narra-
tive schema is excluded, and looks at ways
that history is engaged with as processes of
mourning. He reflects on how the memory
of traumatic events is inscribed in human
bodies, and how these embodied memories
are expressed and worked through in
particular manifestations and events. Artistic
practices such as cinema, painting, photo-
graphs, songs, plays and festivals are discussed
in terms of how they mourn for historical cat-
astrophes. Significantly, he argues for a view
of memory in relation to such events as
more cultural and collective than individual.
As I will return to below, he writes about
“the work of mourning”, as something that
is actively engaged with through different
kinds of embodied acts. In particular, he
discusses the kind of large scale historical
events “so widely recurrent in the histories
of people that pose questions of identity”
and that demand ways of “coming to terms
with the losses they impose and the legacy
they leave”. He goes on to describe how it
is a distinctive feature of such historical cata-
strophes and traumas that they lead to kinds
of cultural bereavement for which processes
of mourning are often difficult to find or
create. On its own, the photograph turned
painting of Speer depicts him as a defeated
individual, trying to architect his way out of
being sentenced to death. Together with the
other images in the series, however, the
image becomes a detail of a larger picture por-
traying the atrocities in Europe in the first half
of the twentieth century, and the ideologies
that underlay these events. The slow process
of its production, which Lundgren describes
as an ongoing and always unfinished process
in which new paintings can be produced at
any time, can be seen as an example of the
kind of embodied cultural practice that Con-
nerton discusses.
Mourning and emotions
The theories of embodiment and affective
experience that I have considered thus far
are in some ways incompatible with Freud’s

psychoanalytical reflections on mourning.
However, in the processes involved in Lundg-
ren’s series, there are also aspects in which
these disparate perspectives can be combined.
Lundgren himself describes how he was
inspired by Freud’s reflections on mourning
when making the series. In Mourning and
Melancholia, Freud describes mourning as a
process that needs to be carried out in and
through time. He describes the difference
between a “healthy” process of mourning
and the pathological condition that he
names melancholia. One difference between
mourning and melancholia is that while the
former involves some level of consciousness
in terms of the object-loss, the latter involves
a loss which is not altogether known to the
ego. As such, while mourning is more often
caused by a real loss of the object, often by
its death, the causes of melancholia have a
much wider range. As opposed to the more
problematic condition of melancholia, Freud
describes the process of mourning as some-
thing that is “overcome after a certain lapse
of time”.  He points out that it is useless
and even harmful to interfere with this
process. In fact, it is interfering with it that
risks turning it into a more pathological con-
dition. The task of mourning needs to run its
course. It is, for Freud, a slow process taking
place as much, if not more, in the unconscious
as in the conscious mind, through which the
ego frees itself “bit by bit, at great expense of
time and cathectic energy” of different levels
and forms of attachment to the lost object.
As Freud describes, the orders of this
process “cannot be obeyed at once” but have
to be advanced gradually as each attachment
is released, and eventually replaced. As
suggested, it is possible to see connections
between the process of mourning as Freud
describes it, and the process of contemplation
THE TASK OF MOURNING 7
of the images of the past in Lundgren’s series.
In both cases, there is a process of working-
through events or attachments of the past, in
which one image or memory begets the
next, and so on. At the same time, the series
seems to involve a state of melancholia, or a
refusal to severe certain attachments, which
is expressed rather as a kind of romanticizing
of the past. Below, I return to the notion of
melancholia in relation to the series, as
well as in relation to images of the past in
general.
So far, I have discussed affect and emotions
as important aspects of the embodied pro-
cesses of both art and mourning, without
having elaborated further on what they
entail. Freud thought that the pain of
mourning, the feeling of grief, was explained
by the psychic severing of ties with a loved
one. He says that he is unable to describe
why this process has to be “so extraordinarily
painful”, but declares nonetheless that this is
necessarily the case. In The Contingency of
Pain, Sarah Ahmed poses the question of
what it means to be in pain. She then
immediately follows her own question with
a statement about the difficulty of talking
about the experience of pain. She goes on to
make reference to Elaine Scarry’s book The
Body in Pain, in which the author describes
how pain resists or even “shatters” language
and communication. The result is that, in
Ahmed’s words, “that which seems most
self-evident – most there, throbbing in its
thereness – also slips away, refuses to be
simply present in speech, philosophy or
forms of testimonial address”. While to
some extent, pain is an inevitable part of the
processes that are being explored, it neverthe-
less seems to resist being grasped by the voca-
bulary that we have available. Furthermore, as
Connerton argued above for recognizing “the
8 ERIKA LARSSON
work of mourning” as more cultural and col-
lective than individual, Ahmed similarly chal-
lenges the view on emotions that they are a
private matter; “that they simply belong to
individuals, or even that they come from
within and then move outward toward
others”. Rather she presents a view of
emotions as “circulating between bodies and
signs”. In such a system, there is no
working-through that is strictly personal.
While the particular engagements of Lundg-
ren’s series (of the artist as well as the percei-
vers) are individual acts, the shared references
that come across in the images relate rather to
a cultural and collective process of mourning.
In this process, the emotions and affects that
appear are not just contained within one par-
ticular subject, but circulate (as Ahmed puts
it) between individuals, images and the
subject matter that is explored.
In Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy
and Literature Martha Nussbaum compares
the emotion of grief with the sensation of
hunger, explaining how, while the latter
tends to be relatively impervious to changes
in beliefs, the emotion of grief is sustained
by a range of beliefs – such as that a loss has
taken place and that this loss has some value
to the person experiencing the grief. Unlike
hunger, a change in the belief will lead to a
change in the emotion. As directly connected
to the value judgements that we have about
the world, Nussbaum describes emotions as
“upheavals of thought” (as in the title of her
perhaps most well-known book). As such,
grief becomes the process through which the
cognitions that we have about certain
objects and subjects in the world are forced
to be revalued, or in Freudian terms, redir-
ected. Emotional upheaval is not only the
consequence of this transformation, but an
essential part of the process itself. She
describes how “the pursuit of intellectual
reasoning apart from emotion will actually
prevent a full rational judgement – for
example by preventing an access to one’s
grief”. In other words, the process cannot
be carried out without engaging also with
the emotions that come up. Since emotions
have “this cognitive dimension in their very
structure, it is very natural to view them as
intelligent parts of our ethical agency, respon-
sive to the workings of deliberation and essen-
tial to its completion”. Nussbaum makes
clear that emotions need to be seen as not
only an essential part of the process of mourn-
ing, but also as crucial aspects of our inner life
in general.
Mourning pastness
When asked about if there is a returning
theme in his works, Lundgren’s own answer
is “perhaps death”. In addition to the events
and atrocities of the first half of the twentieth
century in Europe, Lundgren’s series is also
about the passing of time in general, of irre-
vocable loss and un-recoverability. In particu-
lar in relation to the engagement with the
found photographs of people that I describe
above, there is a sense of a life having
passed, or having once been but now being
no longer. While there is no common theme
as such in the subjects of his images, what
they all have in common is that they once
were, but are no longer. In this way, each
encounter with the archival photographs,
and the slow process of reproducing them
through another medium, is time spent not
only with particular objects and subjects of
the past, but with pastness itself. There is a
contrast between the traces of the past that
stand out precisely because of their pastness,
and the working-through of these traces

which is always a process that takes place in
the present – a process of intense aliveness,
as opposed to the subjects of the images that
are necessarily dead. Lundgren describes
how the time that is invested in observing
something at once brings him closer and
further away from that which is observed.
The process of engaging with the archival
image, and the time spent observing and
recreating it, is a process of moving closer –
while the creation of a new image, which is
an almost, but not exact, copy of the archival
photograph, becomes another layer that
covers the time or the life that once was.
Just like there is an unbridgeable gap
between the time of the photographs and
the time in which the paintings were made,
there are, as I discuss above, small discrepan-
cies between the photographs and the paint-
ings. Inevitably, textures, surfaces, and hues
are rendered differently in the two mediums.
As each memory, or image, is worked
through it shifts slightly with the process,
leaving a new version in the place of the old
one. As the photographs that he works with
come from an archive of historical remnants,
the paintings that he produces from these
photographs can be said to make up a differ-
ent kind of archive, an archive of processed
associations.
In the process of slowly creating new
images from the photographic archives that
Lundgren carries out, something is gained
but something always remains missing. In
the article Mourning and Method, Michael
Ann Holly talks about mourning (and melan-
choly) as an intrinsic part of dealing with
images and objects from the past. In her dis-
cussion, she quotes Richard Stamelman who
writes about that aspect of the past that
remains missing, as “that which cannot
return, that which cannot again become
THE TASK OF MOURNING 9
present”.  Stamelman continues to describe
how “the image indeed returns, but it
emerges from a past whose pastness adhering
to it like some dark shadow, accompanies it
into the present … ”. In this sense, Holly
goes on to describe the discipline of art
history in general as “eternally fated to be a
melancholic one, primarily, because the
objects it appropriates as its own always and
forever keep the wound open”. The
wound, here, is that distance between the
present and the past, the aliveness of the
former and the apparent deadness, or past-
ness, of the latter that can never be closed.
Bringing also a Freudian perspective into his
reflections, Holly points out melancholy, or
unresolved mourning, as that which keeps
the wound open. Just like Holly describes
how it is never possible to “capture” or
“enliven” the object of the past in (art histori-
cal) writing, the process that Lundgren
engages with does not let him bring back the
subjects and objects of the past in the
images that he engages with. However, it
does let him spend time with them, to
process a loss which, in Freudian terms, is
not altogether known to the ego. As Holly
writes, “(w)riting never cures, but healing
comes in degrees”, I suggest the same can
be said about painting.
Furthermore, Holly writes about a kind of
“contemplative paralysis”, which stems from
the recognition of the ultimate impossibility
of making one’s words in the present
connect with historical images. This reaching
for correspondence or understanding – but
not quite succeeding – is the same kind of
gap that can be found in Lundgren’s meticu-
lous and almost-but-not-quite precise
copying of the images of the past. Also for
Walter Benjamin, who writes about melanch-
olia specifically in relation to history, this
10 ERIKA LARSSON
discrepancy is what is found at the core of the
condition that he refers to as acedia. Benjamin
describes acedia as “the heaviness at heart (…)
which despairs of mastering the genuine his-
torical picture, which so fleetingly flashes
by”. He goes on to describe how the theolo-
gians of the Middle Ages considered this the
primary cause of melancholy. In the version
of the historical materialist position that he
proposes, the focus is not on adding to or
revising existing narratives of history. In
fact, the focus is not on any kind of narrative
or storytelling at all. Rather, the aim of the
historical materialist is to engage in encoun-
ters with remnants of the past, of “holding
fast to a picture of the past”, and not letting
it just “flash by” in a stream of forgotten
images, or get buried in the narratives of
history telling. Just as Freud describes the
task of mourning as necessarily time-consum-
ing, Benjamin talks of halting the whizzing by
of history, and engaging with its remnants in
moments of Stillstellung (translated as stand-
still or zero-hour), “where thinking suddenly
stops in a constellation overflowing with ten-
sions”. This is not a moment in which some-
thing is identified and categorized, but a
moment to remain in and in which whatever
appears (within or beyond thought) is
worked-through. For Benjamin, acedia des-
pairs of grasping and holding the historical
image as it flashes by, precisely because this
is the process through which its energies are
resolved.
Conclusion
Elaborating on the title of Tomas Lundgren’s
series The Task of Mourning, in this article I
have explored ways in which the slow
process of contemplation of the past that
the series involves is akin to a process of
mourning as Freud and others describe it. I
have described this task as a kind of
working-through events or attachments of
the past, in a process in which one image or
memory begets the next, and so on. At the
same time, I have described how the process
can be seen rather as consonant with a state
of melancholia, or a refusal to severe certain
attachments. In any case, both mourning
and melancholia – and the work of art itself
– are seen as emotional and embodied pro-
cesses, in which cognitive associations are
intertwined with affective and visceral
forces. Like Gerard Richter’s (-) early
paintings from photographs, Lundgren’s
paintings include both the blurriness and
the sharpness of the original photographs.
While some of Richter’s paintings are
altogether blurry, in Lundgren’s work, the
forefront of the images tend to be sharp
while the background recedes into different
levels of blurriness. The lack of sharpness
serves as a metaphor for memory, or rather
the limitation of memory. In this way, the
paintings become public memorials of
history, including both the image (the
memory) itself, and the impossibility of
remembering the past. In the case of both
Richter and Lundgren, the significance of
these acts of remembering/forgetting lies in
their carnality and affectivity rather than in
terms of conscious processing. Observing
the acts that make up these processes bring
to the forefront dynamics around embodi-
ment, materiality, mourning, and images –
and how these notions interact in relation to
collective memories. From this perspective,
what takes place in Lundgren’s series
appears as, at the same time, a process of
letting go, and a clutching onto, ideas and
affective attachments related to this collective
history.

Endnotes
. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” in The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud, Vol. XIV (-), London: The
Hogarth Press, , pp. –.
. A tendency which Hal Foster observed already in ,
and which has since then only grown in intensity. See Hal
Foster, “An Archival Impulse”, October, Vol. ,
Autumn , pp. –.
. While the paintings are larger than the original
photographs, Lundgren describes how he doesn’t usually
have a direct relationship with the originals. In fact, he
usually works with a digital version of them. His work
with archives began at the same time as many archives at
museums and different institutions were in the process of
being digitized. In addition to making the material more
readily available, this process brings up a number of
questions around reproduction, original copy and so on –
questions that also appear in Lundgren’s process of
copying though painting.
. The photographs that are reproduced in The Task of
Mourning come from the artist’s own collection of
images, which he has slowly gathered throughout the
years. When exhibited, some information about the
original images are given in the catalogue text. In the
discussion to follow, this is supplemented by further
information given by the artist as well as my own research
around the topic of the images. In my discussion around
embodiment in relation to both the process of mourning
and visuality below, I maintain how cognition, carnal and
affective aspects are intertwined. In this way, information
around the subjects of the images are significant aspects
of the processes of contemplation of both creating and
observing these works.
. Die Brücke played a major part in forming Expressionism
as a movement in twentieth century art.
. A year before, his work had been included in the
Degenerate Art Exhibition, which was organized by Adolf
Ziegler and the Nazi party in Munich in . It showed
art confiscated by German Museums that would,
according the Nazi ideology, “insult German feeling, or
destroy or confuse natural form or simply reveal an
absence of adequate manual and artistic skill.” Quoted by
Frederic Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics.
Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, . Before this,
Kirchner had been forced to resign from the Prussian
Academy of Arts that he had been a part of. In a letter
from around this time, he describes being upset (but
incredulous) about the rumours of the torture of Jews
going around, as well as about how “the hard-won
cultural achievements of the last  years are being
destroyed”. Quoted by E. W Kornfield & Christine
E. Stauffer in “Biography of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner”,
Kirchner Museum Davos, . http://www.
kirchnermuseum.ch/fileadmin/Inhalte_Redaktoren/
Bilder_Inhalt/E.L.Kirchner/Biography_E.L.Kirchner_
english.pdf Retrieved April , .
THE TASK OF MOURNING 11
. Ernst van Alpen, Art in Mind: How Contemporary Images
Shape Thought, Chicago & London: Chicago University
Press, .
. Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: affect, trauma, and
contemporary art, Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, , p. .
. Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon, the logic of sensation,
London & New York: Continuum, , p. .
. It might seem like a long step from Deleuze’s philosophy
of immanence to the phenomenology of Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, but I suggest this process can also be
described in the terminology of the latter – as drawing
attention to the ground of our embodied experience. In
Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological reflections, both
perception and artistic expression are thoroughly bodily
affairs and our entire being-in-the-world is a sensuous
and embodied mode of being. See Maurice Merleau-
Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, London &
New York: Routledge, .
. Foster, , p. .
. Ibid (my emphasis).
. Paul Connerton, The Spirit of Mourning, History,
Memory and the Body, Cambridge University Press, .
. Ibid. p.  (my emphasis).
. Ibid. p..
. In psychoanalysis, there exists an idea of a return to some
kind of normality, which pre-existed the event(s) that
caused the trauma or grief that need to be processed. In
the theories of affect and embodiment mentioned above,
the is no final resolution to be reached. Rather, in the
language of Deleuze and Felix Guattari for example, there
is an idea of continuous becoming, in which affective
energies are changing and transforming in never-ending
processes of becoming. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
New York: Viking Press, .
. Freud, , p. .
. Ibid. p..
. Ibid.
. This aspect becomes especially problematic in relation to,
for example, the images of Speer and the unnamed Nazi
soldier above, who, although depicted in moments of
defeat and shame, represent the perpetrators of the
atrocities committed during the historical era that the
series engages with.
. I use the terms emotions and affect in order to cover both
emotions that are already defined as well as bodily
phenomena beyond human perception and cognition.
According to Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth
affect “is the name we give to those forces-visceral forces
beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious
knowing, vital forces insisting beyond emotion – that can
serve to drive us toward movement, toward thought and
12 ERIKA LARSSON
extension (…)” The Affect Theory Reader, Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press, , p. .
. Sara Ahmed “The Contingency of Pain”, Parallax, Vol ,
Issue , , pp. –.
. Ibid, p..
. Sara Ahmed, “Affective Economies”, Social Text, Vol ,
No , , p. .
. Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, The
Intelligence of Emotions, Cambridge University Press,
.
. Ibid. p. .
. Ibid. p. .
. Michael Ann Holly, “Mourning and Method” in The Art
Bulletin, Vol , No , December , p. .
. Ibid. p. .
. Ibid.
. Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History, Gesammelte
Schriften I:. Suhrkamp Verlag. Frankfurt am Main,
, Thesis VII http://www.arts.yorku.ca/soci/barent/
wp-content/uploads///benjamin-concept_of_
history.pdf Retrieved Nov , . The notion of acedia
in relation to history appears already in Benjamin’s
earlier text The Origin of the German Tragic Drama,
which he completed in , and which then remained a
critical aspect of his reflections on history. In The Origin,
he carried out a cultural history of mourning and
melancholia, and describes the latter as essential to
understanding modernity. Discussing Benjamin’s notion
of acedia in relation to history, Tatjana Jukić states
Benjamin’s positions that “the modern world cannot be
processed except by mourning”. Jukić also describes how
“Benjamin could be said to have amplified Freud’s
argument by insisting on a structural, not occasional,
association of death and mourning in modernity, as the
association which concerns the formation of the modern
subject”. Tatjana Jukić “Melancholia for Modernity.
Notes on Walter Benjamin” in Ivica Raguž, Šimo
Šokčević (eds.) Melancholy Between Creativity and
Depression, Djakovo: Katolički bogoslovni fakultet u
Djakovu, p.  & p. , .
. Benjamin On the Concept of History, Thesis XVII.
. In the case of Richter, a quote from the artist expresses the
unconsciousness of this process: “When I paint from a
photograph, conscious thinking is eliminated. I don’t know
what I am doing”. Dietmar Elger & Hans Ulrich Obrist,
Gerard Richter, Text, Writings, Interviews, and Letters -
, London: Thames & Hudson, , p. .
ORCID
Erika Larsson http://orcid.org/--
-
Summary
The Swedish artist Tomas Lundgren’s series
The Task of Mourning () consists of
nearly-but-not-quite perfect reproductions of
photographs from the first half of the
twentieth century. Through painting inexact
copies of photographic remnants from this
time in European history, the series can be
seen as a slow contemplation of this historical
period. In this article, I discuss theories of
mourning – as well as of the associated notion
of melancholia – and explore ways in which
these notions can be understood as processes
that take place in the physical body as much as
in the mind. In the same way, I look at the
process of painting and the work of art as
bodily acts. With Lundgren’s series as access
points, the article engages with both
mourning and visuality as embodied and
affective processes – in which collective
memory and personal experience co-exist
within the same dimension. From this
perspective, I discuss what takes place in the
series as both a working-through, and a
holding on to, ideas and affective associations
related to this collective history.
Erika Larsson
HDK-Valand Academy
University of Gothenburg and The Hasselblad
Foundation
Box ,  Gothenburg, Sweden
E-mail: erika.larsson@gu.se