ART 330

ART 330 Module 5 AVP Transcript Title: Calamity of World War II Slide 1 Slide Content: Theodor Adorno wondered aloud if it wasn’t “…barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz.” [Image] Hitler, Adolf (1889 - 1945). (2002). In World of Criminal Justice, Gale. Retrieved with permission

from http://www.credoreference.com/entry/worldcrims/hitler_adolf_1889_1945 Narrator: The calamity of World War II changed everything. Who could avoid the images of photographers such as Lee Miller documenting the atrocities: starvation, incarceration, forced labor, death camps? Slide 2 Slide Content: Jewish prisoners being forced to dig their own grave before being executed by Waffen-SS troops, USSR, 1942 [Image] Gale. Genocide. (2002). In World of Criminal Justice. Retrieved with permission from

http://www.credoreference.com/entry/worldcrims/genocide Narrator: Europe suffered through blitzkrieg and carpet bombing, and, as 1945 drew to a close, the world wondered how they allowed 6 million Jews were systematically executed by the most tortuous of methods. What was so dark in the heart of humanity that made such human devastation possible? Slide 3 Slide Content: First atomic bomb test, near Alamogordo, New Mexico, July 16, 1945 [Image] Atomic Bomb. (2006). In Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Retrieved with permission from

http://www.credoreference.com/entry/ebconcise/atomic_bomb Narrator: Certainly, the Nazis “Final Solution” and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had taken their toll on the consciousness of the age.

Slide 4 Slide Content: The wrecked framework of the Museum of Science and Industry in Nagasaki as it appeared shortly after the blast. [Image] Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (2005). In Science in the Early Twentieth Century: An Encyclopedia.

Retrieved with permission from http://www.credoreference.com/entry/abcscieth/hiroshima_and_nagasaki

Narrator: Nearly 100 years earlier, Karl Marx had warned, “All that is solid melts into air.” In the wake of World War II, this notion seemed to have manifested physically. What would happen to art? Slide 5 Slide Content: “Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. Such is the first principle of Existentialism.” -Jean-Paul Sartre [Image] Freund, G. Sartre, Jean-Paul. (2006). In Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Retrieved from

http://www.credoreference.com/entry/ebconcise/sartre_jean_ Narrator: In both Philosophy and Literature, authors explored the notion of the Absurd during these years. Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre proposed life was absurd—meaningless—on its own, and required humanity to make something of nothing. According to Sartre, humans must live with the emotionally painful realization that they are each free to choose, responsible for their choices, and that by their choices and actions, humans create their own individual “essence,” and the values or meaning for their life. Sartre claimed the emotion that resulted from the awareness of this awesome freedom to act--and responsibility for having acted--Anguish. Forlornness is the term he used to describe the sense of aloneness humans experience when they recognize that there is no God to show them the way to choose, and thus, recognize that values are created only through human actions. Lastly, Sartre argued that when faced with the idea that the world in which all humans live is completely out of his control, yet each is “condemned to be free,” responsible for choices, and on one’s own to create value for his life through actions; the conclusive emotion of this awareness is Despair.

Slide 6 Slide Content: Atomic cloud mushrooms over Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. It was the first time a nuclear weapon was used in warfare. [Image] Hiroshima Bombing. (2009). In The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and

Weather Guide. Retrieved with permission from http://www.credoreference.com/entry/heliconhe/hiroshima_bombing

Narrator: Sartre’s “anguish, forlornness, despair”….these are not difficult emotions to imagine in the aftermath of the Holocaust and World War II. Artists watched, as did everyone, during the war and after as human beings inflicted violent torture and agonizing death on one another. The evidence…concentration camps where people were worked to death, starved, were medically experimented with, tortured, gassed…the utter devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where skin melted off bone as people ran for shelter from the bombs dropped in August, 1945…surely left survivors and citizens with a heightened sense of anxiety and trepidation at what human beings were capable of doing...to each other. As demonstrated in these post-war photographs, it doesn’t seem much of a stretch to conclude, as Sartre and other existentialists did, that life is indeed Absurd. Slide 7 Slide Content: [Image] Dubuffet, J. Cow with the Subtile Nose. (1954). From Stokstad Digital Library. Reprinted with

permission Pearson Education/Prentice Hall. Narrator: In painting and sculpture, artists drew from the existential angst of the age, seeking authenticity. The art brut, or “raw art” of Jean Dubuffet demonstrates the formlessness and chaos of the age. Dubuffet used a scribbling gesture and collage materials including sand, coal, tar, gravel, dust, leaves and butterfly wings, mixed with paint to create spontaneous, primitive paintings, claiming “Art should be born from the materials and, spiritually, should borrow its language from it. Each material has its own language so there is no need to make it serve a language.” Dubuffet is perhaps best known for collecting the artwork of the untrained, children, and the mentally ill to guide him in his own endeavors.

Slide 8 Slide Content: Giacometti’s figures, with their seeming emaciation, anonymity and isolation in space, immediately struck a responsive chord in critics and collectors. His sculptures were perceived as appropriate metaphors for the human condition of post-war Europe: the horror of the concentration camps, displaced persons, destroyed lives. On a more philosophical level, critics also viewed Giacometti’s art as Existentialist, an interpretation introduced by Sartre in his two essays on Giacometti’s art (1948 and 1954). [Image] Karsh, Y. Giacometti, Alberto, 1965. (2006). In Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Retrieved with

permission from http://www.credoreference.com/entry/ebconcise/giacometti_ Narrator: Alberto Giacometti, a sculptor who, like many Abstract Expressionists of the post-war years, had formerly worked in a Surrealist fashion, demonstrated in a new, bronze sculpture the existential plight of humanity…their sense of alienation and isolation, their doomed quest for the Absolute, their will to live despite the meaningless of it all, and their need to create meaning. Feelings of existential pessimism seem prevalent in his piece titled “City Square.” Slide 9 Slide Content: [Image] Giacometti. City Square, 1948, Bronze, 8 ½ X 25⅜ X 17¼. The Museum of Modern Art, New

York. From Stockstad Digital Library. Reprinted with permission Pearson Education/Prentice Hall.

Narrator: “Frail yet erect, a man gestures with his left arm and points with his right. We have no idea what he points to, or why. Anonymous and alone, he is also almost a skeleton.” For the Existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, in fact, Giacometti's sculpture was "always halfway between nothingness and being." Such sculptures were full of meaning to Sartre, who said of them, "At first glance we seem to be up against the fleshless martyrs of Buchenwald. But a moment later we have a quite different conception: these fine and slender natures rise up to heaven. We seem to have come across a group of Ascensions." In the years leading up to World War II, Giacometti abandoned his earlier Surrealism. Dissatisfied with the resource of imagination, he returned to the resource of vision, focusing on the human figure and working from live models. Under his eyes, however, these models seem virtually to have dissolved. Working in clay (the preparation to casting in bronze), Giacometti scraped away the body's musculature, so that the flesh seems eaten off by a terrible surrounding emptiness, or to register the air around it as a hostile pressure. Recording the touch of the artist's fingers, the surface of Man Pointing is as rough as if charred or corroded. At the same time, the figure dominates its space, even from a distance. (The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004, originally published 1999, p. 214 )

Slide 10 Slide Content: [Image] Fautrier, J. Otages fond noir (Hostages Black Ground), 1944-47, MoMA. Retrieved from

http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=59718 Narrator: Not all artists in the post-war period drew explicitly from the Existential philosophers and writers of the time, but many produced pieces that often suggested the trauma experienced by their recent histories. Jean Fautrier, one of the foremost French painters of Tachisme, after having been picked up by the Gestapo, fled Paris for a small refuge in Chatenay-Malabry, near the site of a sanatorium. The Nazis used the forest surrounding the clinic to torture and execute prisoners and, although their actions were out of sight, the screams of the victims could be heard by those in residence, including, presumably, by Fautier. In 1945, he exhibited a number of works under the title “Otages,” or Hostages. Slide 11 Slide Content: [Image] Herold, J. Figure. Pencil on paper. Retrieved from

http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=59718 Narrator: What became of Surrealism, the mode of expression that had so enraptured Europe at the time WWII broke out? It continued, with some artists fluttering on the fringes. Jacques Herold joined the Surrealists late in 1936, and broke with them by 1951. During the early days of his work, his canvases were populated by flayed animals. In his own words he claimed to be moving towards “a systematic flaying, not only of characters, but also of objects, landscapes, the atmosphere.” He even wanted “to tear the skin from the sky.” Slide 12 Slide Content: Portrait of Leonor Fini, 1936. Fini’s first exhibits in Paris (1936) attracted the surrealists’ attention. [Image] Fini, Leonor (1908-1996). (2005). In France and the Americas: Culture, Politics, and History.

Retrieved with permission from http://www.credoreference.com/entry/abcframrle/fini_leonor_1908_1996

Narrator: Perhaps the most notable of the artists on the fringe of Surrealism in the post-War years is Leonor Fini. Fini drew from Italian Mannerism for inspiration and Max Ernst for influence. Her sense of independence and her dislike of the Surrealists’ authoritarian attitudes kept her from officially joining the movement, although she did participate in the International Surrealist Exhibition of 1936. It has been said of Fini that she is the only woman who painted women without apology.

Slide 13 Slide Content: Portrait of Leonor Fini, 1936. Fini’s first exhibits in Paris (1936) attracted the surrealists’ attention. [Image] Matta. The Vertigo of Eros. (1944). In France and the Americas: Culture, Politics, and History.

Retrieved from: http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=78651 Narrator: Many European Surrealists fled to the United States during the Occupation and found in the studios of New York City new means by which to produce their work. For those who didn’t, including Victor Brauner, Matta, Clovis Trouille, Felix Labisse, and Andre Masson, Surrealism continued. However, from 1945 to 1960, the hold Paris had on claim to the title “Epicenter of Art” gradually began to slip away. End of presentation