If you’ve been spiralling on a drunken rebound rampage, plagued by nightmares, or fantasising about revenge, you’re in the right place. Feast your eyes on four of The Split’s favourite artworks that capture the messy breakup aftermath.
The Nightmare (Henry Fuseli, 1781)
Fuseli’s The Nightmare is a portrayal of love lost: his marriage proposal to his beloved was rejected by her father, and she married another man soon afterwards.
As if it’s not enough to spend every waking hour grieving a breakup, ex lovers can haunt us in our dreams, too. Particularly traumatic heartbreaks can lead to clammy tossing and turning, as though an incubus – a folkloric demon that has sex with sleeping women, plaguing them with nightmares and sleep paralysis – is crouched on your chest.
While it can feel jarring, the bedtime spectre of your ex might actually be your brain’s way of healing – it’s when our head hits the pillow that the knots loosen and unravel, making sense of unresolved traumas. Over a century ago, Carl Jung was already writing about the shadows that lurk within the unconscious, which can be grasped through dream analysis. Today, a widely held theory is that at night, our brains work through unprocessed emotions and worries, bringing you peace during the day.
Portrait of My Lover (Niki de Saint Phalle, 1961)
In this cathartic sculpture, De Saint Phalle places a dartboard on top of a man’s shirt to represent a lover she was fuming at. “I enjoyed throwing darts at his image,” she said. While we can’t show the actual artwork here, we did have a go at recreating our own. Will we unleash our rage on it? Absolutely.
My Bed (Tracey Emin, 1998)
One reaction to the emotional upheaval of a messy breakup is to go on a sex, drugs and booze rampage to numb the pain until we sober up and realise we were only postponing staring reality in the eye. And who can blame us? We lose the reins to our life for a moment, our future is walking on stilts, and we get intoxicated by a bittersweet sexual freedom that doesn’t come in half pints.
Emin’s postmodern sculpture My Bed is a squalid depiction of the violently shambolic rebound-binge. Her life had reached rock bottom, and she plunged into depression brought on by relationship difficulties. What followed were four days spent in bed, ingesting nothing but drugs and alcohol. When she sobered up, the sight she beheld was a bed stained by bodily secretions, covered in used condoms, lube, blood-stained knickers, cigarette butts, and empty bottles of vodka.
The Death of Marat (Edvard Munch, 1907)
Sometimes a breakup feels like a harrowing crime scene. The person you trusted most betrays you or walks away without a backward glance, leaving you blindsided and bleeding on the floor.
Edvard Munch’s indelible relationship with Tulla Larsen ended with him mysteriously suffering a gunshot wound to the finger. After the violent breakup, he even sawed an earlier painting of the one-time couple in half. The Death of Marat is a macabre nude. It depicts him lying wounded on his bed and Larsen walking away as the victor.
“I felt as if there were invisible threads connecting us,” Munch said. “As she disappeared completely beyond the sea, I still felt it, felt the pain where my heart was bleeding – because the threads could not be severed”.