The Fall of Europe and the end of Modernism

Photos from World War One: Europe 1914-1918

The promises of modernization led to massive murder and

destruction

Worker and Kolkhoz (Collective Farm) Woman by

Vera Mukhina, 80 ft high

Paris World’s Fair, May 25 to November 25, 1937

Totalitarian art and architecture: Paris World Fair 1937 (left) German Pavilion by Albert Speer with Comrades, by Joseph Thorak, one of Hitler’s favorite sculptors(right) USSR Pavilion, Vera Mukhina, The Worker and The Collective Farm Woman, welded sheets of stainless steel over wood frame. Notice gigantic scale, signaling the insignificance of the individual relative to the state.

Joseph Thorak’s studio near Munich, designed by Albert Speer and paid for by the government

Picasso, Guernica, 1937, Paris Worlds Fair, for the Spanish Pavilion(137.4 in × 305.5 in) Muséo Reina Sofia, Madrid

ANXIOUS VISIONS for anxious times – Spanish Civil War and impending World War

Salvador Dali, Soft Construction with Boiled Beans: Premonitions of Civil War, 1936, oil on canvas, 39 x 39” (Spanish Civil War), Surrealism

Hitler and Goebbels visit the Degenerate Art Exhibition, Munich, 1937 (insert below) German Expressionist, “degenerate” artist, Max Beckmann at

MoMA NYC in 1947 with 1933 painting, Departure

(left) Nazi 1937 music poster for degenerate art exhibition. Jazz was despised as Jewish (Star of David) and Black.(right) Degenerate art show installation – “Dada” with confiscated works by modern masters, Kurt Schwitters and Paul Klee artworks visible

National Socialist (Nazi) Realism Arno Breker, (left) Comradeship, 1940; (right) The Party, 1938

Adolph Hitler (Austrian-German,1889-1945) Photograph sent to Eva Braun after occupation of Paris,

June 14,1940. Hitler’s tour of ParisThe Fall of Paris marks “the end” of Modernism

1940 - Occupation of Paris signifies the “end” of Modernism “Before the occupation and after, hundreds of refugee European artists, scholars, and scientists fled. Many came to the United States. Surrealism is the last European art movement. Center of world of art shifts from Paris to New York City.

Photo of émigré European artists included in the 1942

exhibition, “Artists in Exile” at the Pierre Matisse gallery,

New York

Nazi (Axis) Blitzkrieg of London, beginning in 1941, inaugurating the ceaseless bombing of civilian populations throughout the war by both sides

Soviet (Allied) bombing of Berlin, August 11, 1941

Dresden, September 1945after fire bombings by British &

American air forces – 30,000 deaths

(left) Francis Bacon (British), panel from Three Studies for a Crucifixion, 1947(right) Alberto Giacometti (Swiss), Pointing Man, 1947

Europe after the War: Existentialist Expressionism

Neo Rauch, Das Neue (The New), 2003

"We came from the people, we remain part of the people, and see ourselves as the executor of the people's will.“ (left) Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Minister for People's Enlightenment and Propaganda: 1938 Nazi propaganda rally in Graz.(right) Hans Haacke, And You Were Victorious After All, Graz, Germany, 1988, a reconstruction of 1938 Nazi propaganda, a public art work attacked and destroyed.

The atrocities of the Holocaust threw Western humanism, with its premise that man is essentially good and perfectable, into profound crisis. Auschwitz, near Warsaw Poland, largest of the Nazi concentration camps, was liberated by Soviet troops in January, 1945

German Jewish philosopher Theodor Adorno, self-exiled to New York, famously asserted after this that "writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric."

"Selection" on the unloading ramp at Birkenau, May/June 1944. To be sent to the right meant assignment to a work detail; to the left, the gas chambers.

United States atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, August 6, 1945

Aftermath of Hiroshima bomb – estimated 90,000–166,000 deaths

The total estimated human loss of life caused by World War II was roughly 72 million people. The civilian toll was around 47 million. The Allies lost about 61 million people, and the Axis lost 11 million.

The U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima (August 6, 1945) and Nagasaki (August 9). Japan surrendered six days later and ended WW II.

The bombs killed 90,000–166,000 people in Hiroshima and 60,000–80,000 in Nagasaki, with roughly half of the deaths in each city occurring on the first day and the rest within four months. Almost all were civilians.

Right: Nagasaki before (top) and after (the atomic bomb).

Post-colonialism is one of the most important historical contexts for today’s global culture

Decolonization of Europe’s empires occurred after World War II. Ghana gained

independence in 1957, the first in sub-Saharan Africa.

The Algerian War of Independence from France (1954 -1962), one of many anti-colonial wars for national identity.

De-colonization characterized the post-modern/post-Europe period.

Bomb blast, Algiers, 1957Poster for film about the Algerian

War of Independence from France.

World map in 1980: The Cold War (1947-1991)

Berlin Wall, August 13, 1961, the German Democratic Republlic (Communist East Germany) began under the leadership of Erich Honecker to block off East Berlin and the GDR from West Berlin by means of barbed wire and antitank obstacles. Construction crews replaced the provisional barriers by a solid wall.

Jean-Paul SartreSimone de Beauvoir1938 Paris

European Postwar Existentialism

1949 – a foundingfeminist text rooted in Existentialism’s questionsabout the nature of Being. “One is not born a woman, one becomes one.” (De Beauvoir)

1943

Jean Fautrier (French, 1898-1964) Art Informel, tachisme, Head of a Hostage, 20," oïl on panel, 1944, one of over thirty “hostage” paintings and sculptures made during the occupation of Paris that allude to the Nazi atrocities Fautrier is said to have witnessed there.

“These paintings addressed the most important issue of their time, epitomizing a 'new human resolve' against the horrors of war."

- Jean Fautrier

Jean Fautrier, Large Tragic Head, bronze, 15 in. high1943, Tate MA, London

Jean Fautrier, Nude, 1960, oil on canvas, tachism, 35 in. x 57 1/2 in.

Germaine Richier (French, 1904-1959) Crucified Christ, 1950, Notre-Dame de Tour Grâce d'Assy, France. Post-humanist? (below right) Compare Richier’s teacher, Emile-Antoine Bourdelle, Hercules, 1909. What became of the heroic human body in Western art in the hands of WWII generation artists? Why?

Germaine Richier, (left) The Shepherd of Landes, c. 5 ft high, bronze, 1951 (cast 1996), Tate Modern, London; (right) Le Griffu, 1952, bronze, c. 39 in high

Shepherd’s head is cast from a piece of eroded building rubble that Richier found

on the beach.

Germaine Richier, Praying Mantis, 1949, bronze, 47” height, Middelheim Sculpture Museum, Antwerp

Germaine Richier in her studio, 1951 / Gordon Parks, photograph (for Life magazine)

“Life does not always belong to serene things.” (G. Richier)

Alberto Giacometti (Swiss, 1901-1966), (left) City Square, 1948, bronze, c. 8 x 25 x 17“(right) Giacometti, Portrait of a Seated Man (Diego), 1949, oil on canvas, 80 x 64 cm.

2 of 5 casts. Guggenheim collection photos. Lower one is artist’s preferred viewpoint (eye-level, close up), which alters the viewer’s perception of scale

Portraits are the stopping point of an agonized struggle with

perception as proof of existence

(left) Poseidon, Greek, c. 575 BC, bronze, National Archaeological Museum, Athens. Gods represented as men. The sculpture was a source for Giacometti.(right) Giacometti, Man Pointing, 1947, bronze, 70 inches high, Existential man: “thrown naked into the void” (Heidegger, German WWII-era existential philosopher).

February 3, 2010, Striding Man I, bronze, 72” high, (1961, 2nd of six numbered editions plus four artist

proofs) by Alberto Giacometti sold for $104,327,006: the most expensive

work of art ever sold at auction to date.

Jean Dubuffet (French, 1901-1985) Art Brut (left) Large Sooty Nude, 1944, o/c, 64”H; (right) Tree of Fluids, 1952

“Art addresses the mind, not the eyes.” (Dubuffet)

Jean Dubuffet, Fleshy Face with Chestnut Hair, 1951, Oil & mixed-media, 28”H, Art Brut. Compare the head of the Apollo Belvedere (Roman copy of

Greek original c. 350 BC) and Jean Fautrier’s 1944 Hostage

Brassai, (Gyula Halasz, French b. Brasso, Romania, 1899 - 1987)(left) Swastika Graffiti; (right) Passion Graffiti, both Paris, 1939

Henry Moore (English 1896-1986),Tube Shelter Perspective, 1941, ink, pen, wax, and watercolor, 8 1/2 x 6 1/2 in., one of many such drawings Moore made during WWII Blitz of London by Nazi Germany.

Henry Moore, working model for Reclining Figure for Lincoln Center, New York, 1963-65, plaster

Henry Moore, Reclining Figure for Lincoln Center, New York, 1963-65, bronze

Francis Bacon, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1944, oil and pastel on canvas, triptych on wood fiberboard, each 37 x 29 inches. The crucifixion was for Bacon a symbol of humanity’s sadism. (right) Picasso, On the Beach (La Baignade) 1937. Picasso was a crucial source and personally encouraged Bacon.

Francis Bacon (British, 1909 -1992), (left) Painting, 1946, oil and pastel on

linen, 6' 6" x 52”, MoMA, NYC

The black umbrella was the symbol of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, and his policy of Nazi appeasement before WWII. “An attempt to remake the violence of reality itself” (Bacon)

Francis Bacon, Study after Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 5 x 4 ft, 1953; (right top) source: Velazquez, Pope Innocent X, 1650; (right below) a still from Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 film, The Battleship Potemkin, Odessa steps sequence

Francis Bacon, Head Surrounded by Sides of Beef (Study after Velasquez), 4’3” x 4’, oil on canvas, 1954, Art Institute Chicago

(left) Francis Bacon, Three Studies of figures on Beds, 1972, oil and pastel on canvas, triptych, each panel 6’6” x 4’ 10”(right) source: Eadweard Muybridge, photograph from The Human Figure in Motion, 1887

Sotheby’s May 14, 2008, a 1976 Francis Bacon Triptych sells for $86,281,000: from existential anguish and social disaster to prize art market commodity