There’s a moment in fourteenth century painting, in Giotto, when human emotions suddenly surface.  Figures are no longer just standing in groups, they’re looking to one other.  And they no longer possess a blissful indifference; they’re frightened and despairing, elated and surprised.  They reach out to one another, so desperately and so tentatively, with outstretched limbs and contorted faces that the artist seems to be rendering for the first time ever.  Is what we’re witnessing an art historical advance or a psychological one?  That is, is this the first representation of emotions in western art, or the invention of emotion itself?

I felt a similar shift, although on a much smaller scale, at an exhibit of work by the early twentieth century sculptor Wilhelm Lehmbruck.  The statues, all female busts and nudes, are starting to stir.  These are conventional figural works, finely-proportioned and well-observed .  (You sense that the artist was looking at a real, live, flesh-and-blood woman while he modeled the clay.)  And yet each one is also slightly perturbed, averting the eyes.  That slight movement disturbs, perhaps more so than the outright emotionalism of Kathe Kollwitz’s sculpture and the inward, abstracted rage of Alberto Giacometti’s.  The works on display were completed by Lehmbruck between 1911 and 1918, during World War I, when the artist was living in Germany.  Yet they’re suspended in a pre-modern innocence.  While each woman the artist has sculpted know it’s impossible, she tries to maintain a classical repose.