The Death of Death in Art.

In 1950, in an essay , “Variations on a Baroque Tomb”, Aldous Huxley writes

"...in any given period, preoccupation with death is in inverse ratio to the prevalence of a belief in man's perfectibility through and in a properly organized society. In the art and literature of Condorcet, of the age of Herbert Spencer and Karl Marx, of the age of Lenin and the Webbs there are few skeletons...We reach maturity only to decline into decrepitude and the body's death. Could anything be more painfully obvious? And yet how rarely in the course of the last two hundred and fifty years has death been made the theme of any considerable art.  Among the great painters only Goya has chosen to treat of death, and then only of death by violence, death in war"

From Goya to Manet and on to the newspapers.