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'Passionate Suffering' - Paintings by Brazilian artist Monica Grohmann
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Stephen F. Eisenman. The Abu Ghraib Effect (London, 2007)
The term
Pathosformel 'pathos formula' originated in the work of cultural historian Aby Warburg (1866-1929). Eisenman transforms it into 'passionate suffering' to describe the long tradition in Western art, stretching back through the Renaissance to Hellenistic Greece, whereby violent and sexual motifs show victims taking pleasure in their own chastisement and pain.