Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945-1965 3791355848, 9783791355849

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876 543 21 POSTWAR: ART BETWEEN THE PACIFIC AND THE ATLANTIC 1945 – 1965

PRESTEL

MUNICH · LONDON · NEW YORK

876 543 21 EDITED BY OKWUI ENWEZOR KATY SIEGEL ULRICH WILMES

TABLE OF CONTENTS

10 Johannes Ebert Secretary-General, Goethe-Institut 11 Hortensia Völckers Artistic Director, Kulturstiftung des Bundes Alexander Farenholtz Administrative Director, Kulturstiftung des Bundes

340

Yule Heibel Germany’s Postwar Search for a New Image of Man

344

Sarah Wilson New Images of Man: Postwar Humanism and its Challenges in the West

350

Homi K. Bhabha Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche, and the Colonial Condition

CURATORS’ ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

140

Stephen Petersen “Forms Disintegrate”: Painting in the Shadow of the Bomb

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146 Ariella Azoulay The Natural History of Rape

Okwui Enwezor

Okwui Enwezor, Katy Siegel, Ulrich Wilmes

INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS

4. REALISMS

20 Okwui Enwezor The Judgment of Art: Postwar and Artistic Worldliness

418

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58 Ulrich Wilmes Postwar: Denazification and Reeducation 68 Mark Mazower Postwar: The Melancholy History of a Term 74

Dipesh Chakrabarty Legacies of Bandung: Decolonization and the Politics of Culture

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Visual Essay: Social and Political Events

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Chronology of Social and Political Events

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Visual Essay: Arts and Culture

116

Chronology of Arts and Culture

Section Introduction

420 Alejandro Anreus Whatever happened to Realism after 1945? Figuration and Politics in the Western Hemisphere

Katy Siegel Art, World, History

VISUAL ESSAYS AND CHRONOLOGIES Compiled by Damian Lentini and Daniel Milnes Installation view of the Ninth Street Show, New York, 1951.

Section Introduction

Yasufumi Nakamori Imagining a City Through Photography

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PREFACES

338

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7 Dr. Frank-Walter Steinmeier Federal Minister for Foreign Affairs

Dr. Ludwig Spaenle Minister of State for Education and Culture, Science and Art

1. AFTERMATH: ZERO HOUR AND THE ATOMIC ERA Section Introduction

DIRECTOR’S FOREWORD

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3. NEW IMAGES OF MAN

132

PATRON’S STATEMENT

BAVARIAN STATE MINISTER’S STATEMENT

EXHIBITION SECTIONS

Tanaka Atsuko wearing her Electric Dress (Denkifuku) at the 2nd Gutai Art Exhibition, Tokyo, 1956.

2. FORM MATTERS 212

Section Introduction

214

Emily Braun The Dirt Paradigm

220

Salah M. Hassan When Identity Becomes “Form”: Calligraphic Abstraction and Sudanese Modernism

226

Geeta Kapur Material Facture

232

Richard Shiff 0 to 1

238

Terry Smith Abstraction and Ideol- ogy: Contestation in Cold War Art Criticism

424 Ekaterina Degot Commitment to Humility 430

Anneka Lenssen Exchangeable Realism

436

Gao Minglu The Historical Logic of Chinese Nationalist Realism from the 1940s to the 1960s

442

Nikolas Drosos and Romy Golan Realism as International Style

Jewad Selim’s Monument of Freedom at Tahrir Square, Baghdad, 1962.

5. CONCRETE VISIONS 476

Section Introduction

7. NATIONS SEEKING FORM

478 Pedro Erber Out of Words: The Spacetime of Concrete Poetry

624

Section Introduction

626

Galia Bar Or Channels for Democratic Iteration

484 Andrea Giunta Simultaneous Abstractions and Post- war Latin American Art

632

Atreyee Gupta After Bandung: Transacting the Nation in a Postcolonial World

638

Chika Okeke-Agulu Fanon, National Culture, and the Politics of Form in Postwar Africa

490

Mari Carmen Ramirez The Necessity of Con- creteness: A View from the (Global?) South

6. COSMOPOLITAN MODERNISMS 558

Section Introduction

560

Zainab Bahrani Baghdad Modernism

566

Catherine Grenier Plural Modernities: A History of a Cosmo- politan Modernity

570 Courtney J. Martin Exiles, Émigrés and Cosmopolitans: London’s Postwar Art World 574 Tobias Wofford The Black Cosmopolitans 580 Damian Lentini Cosmopolitan Contaminations: Artists, Objects, Media

Lygia Clark’s first major European exhibition takes place at Signals, London, 1965.

APPENDIXES 759

Selected Documents

776

Artists’ Biographies

806 Bibliography 812 About the Contributors 816

List of Works

826 Index 834 Hermann Nitsch’s first Aktion (‘Action’) takes place on December 19 at the flat of Otto Mühl, Vienna, 1963.

List of Lenders

836 List of Acknowledgments 840 Image Credits

8. NETWORKS, MEDIA & COMMUNICATION 682

Section Introduction

684

Ješa Denegri Art in the Network of Technological Media and Mass Communica- tion: New Tendencies

688

Walter Grasskamp True Grid

692

Anne Massey Reframing the Independent Group

696

Pamela M. Lee and Fred Turner The Cybernetic Vision in Postwar Art

844 Colophon

PATRON’S STATEMENT

Dr. Frank-Walter Steinmeier · Federal Minister for Foreign Affairs

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n examination of the global development of modern art between the end of World War II and 1965 is an ambitious but highly worthwhile undertaking. Haus der Kunst has taken on that challenge. The result, in my opinion, is impressive: an exhibition that aims to offer its visitors new perspectives on the artistic development of the period worldwide. The show presents works by 218 artists, many of them barely known in Europe, from more than sixty countries. Postwar makes possible a change of vantage points and introduces us to things of which we were previously unaware. Both are urgent necessities, because—in politics but also elsewhere—to insist that one is in possession of the absolute truth only leads to deadlocks and conflicts. If we want peaceful global development to have a chance, we must all strive to acquaint ourselves with different perceptions of the same reality. Only if we succeed in accepting different viewpoints and then uniting them in dialogue will we succeed in true mutual understanding.

In a world that seems to be coming apart at the seams, cultural politics has a decisive role to play in this process. Both inside and outside our country, we must learn to see the whole picture. The more we trust the social capacity of culture and education to keep differences from leading to misunderstandings, misunderstandings to conflicts, and conflicts to wars, the more possible that will be. This is precisely the aim of Postwar: to contribute to exploring and understanding other perspectives. That is why I was glad to take on the show’s patronage. I would like to extend my sincere thanks to all involved in the realization of this exhibition for their outstanding work, in particular Okwui Enwezor, Ulrich Wilmes, and Katy Siegel. I wish all of the exhibition’s visitors new insights and new impulses for lively discussion.

Dr. Frank-Walter Steinmeier

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BAVARIAN STATE MINISTER’S STATEMENT Dr. Ludwig Spaenle · Bavarian Minister of State for Education and Culture, Science and Art

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hat art unifies society at its core is clear in our rich, diverse, and vibrant cultural scene. We accord special status to art that crosses boundaries, and Haus der Kunst, with its prominence and reputation, makes a valuable contribution in this context. That is why it is the right venue for the exhibition Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965, which follow the coastlines of two great oceans, the Pacific and the Atlantic: from Germany to Japan to South and North America. The exhibition lays out the postwar era by perceiving it as a global phenomenon. A study project as well as an exhibition, Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965 encompasses a wide

spectrum of international events, including conferences, seminars, and workshops with regional foci. The research and discussion it developed are now mirrored in the show, which is devoted to the dynamic relationships among artworks and artists in international, national, and local contexts, as well as to the complex aesthetic forms that blossomed all over the world after the turmoil of World War II. I wish visitors to the exhibition a stimulating and enjoyable aesthetic experience and many new insights as they immerse themselves in this presentation of the multifarious facets of the postwar period. I extend my sincere thanks to the organizers for their exemplary dedication and effort.

Dr. Ludwig Spaenle

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PREFACE Johannes Ebert · Secretary-General, Goethe-Institut

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ith its project of the three major thematic exhibitions Postwar, Postcolonialism, and Postcommunism, Haus der Kunst, under the direction of Okwui Enwezor, is taking a new, globally oriented look at the art of these periods from differing perspectives. The approach of interrelating these various vantage points—North and South, East and West, colonizers and colonized—in all their nuances corresponds to the dialogical principle of the work of the Goethe-Institut. It is our great concern—and our strength— to support and make perceptible viewpoints and discourses thatare part of our everyday business all over the world before they are known in Germany. Renowned both nationally and internationally, Haus der Kunst has proven an ideal partner in this effort. It has undertaken nothing less than to create, through an in-depth research phase of several years, a foundation for the writing of a new, globalized history of modern and contemporary art after 1945. The “Goethe-Institut Fellowship at Haus der Kunst” was launched in 2013 in support of the preliminary research for these exhibitions. Through this cooperation with the Goethe-Institut, Haus der Kunst seeks to establish research as a new mainstay within its spectrum of activities. International in scope, the program is directed toward emerging scholars who, in addition to their own research work, are

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integral members of the curatorial team for one year, making fundamental contributions to the preparation of the exhibition. In this context the collaboration with Okwui Enwezor, Ulrich Wilmes, and the entire team at Haus der Kunst has proven eminently productive. The program’s first fellows—Atreyee Gupta, Yan Geng, and Damian Lentini—came from India, China, and Australia. To the same extent that they gained from new experiences themselves, they also gave the project new impulses. The concern in this reflective setting is with the interplay between art, culture, politics, the economy, and society as understood in modern and contemporary art on the global level. That is a strong, future-oriented counter-position to the architecture and history of Haus der Kunst, which is now becoming a nexus for encounter and mutual exchange between fellowship recipients and artists, curators and scholars. Part I of the trilogy—Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965—is now open to the public. Thanks to the inclusion of artistic approaches from the most diverse corners of the world, it is now, for the first time, possible to read this world not solely from a Western perspective. Instead, with the aid of works little known in the West, the world presents itself here as a globally interlinked and mutually influencing whole.

Johannes Ebert

PREFACE Hortensia Völckers · Artistic Director, Kulturstiftung des Bundes Alexander Farenholtz · Administrative Director, Kulturstiftung des Bundes

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sked what he thought of Western civilization, Mahatma Gandhi replied, “I think it would be a good idea.” The same could be said of the postwar era: in retrospect, it might seem to have been a “good idea” had the war been succeeded by a period of peace. Instead, hardly had the defeated countries signed their surrenders than the Cold War broke out between the victorious powers. In the early postwar years, the war continued to make itself felt in many ways—including the politics of culture and exhibitions. Munich’s Haus der Kunst housed a military officers’ club, and the Allies used other parts of the premises for “reeducation” events such as an exhibition on international children’s and young people’s literature, or shows designed to rehabilitate art movements proscribed under National Socialism, from French Impressionism to the Blaue Reiter. From the time of this new beginning onward, the concern was not solely with ex-post-facto denazification in art and culture; the postwar affiliation with the West advanced to become the chief perspective of West German cultural politics. For decades, standardized collection histories, research foci, exhibition practices, and art-historical narratives made “modern art” and “Western art” look like one and the same thing. The Postwar project shows that it was a “good idea” to counter this transatlantic one-sidedness with globally expanded research projects.

Haus der Kunst had already committed itself to this goal some time ago in its guiding curatorial principles, which are informed by recognition of the fact that the “development lines of contemporary art follow a global and complex course, and defy constraint by geographic, conceptual and cultural boundaries.” In this spirit, the Kulturstiftung des Bundes is pleased to support a project in which researchers, curators, art historians, and students—from Germany and, significantly, from many other countries as well—pursue the endeavor of defining a global modernity that takes into account artistic approaches not only of Germany, France, England, and the United States but also of India, China, Japan, Egypt, Nigeria, Cuba, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and more. Haus der Kunst had already organized a research symposium on this subject in 2014. Now, two years later, it is opening an exhibition that offers a splendid abundance of works dating from the “postwar” period. What it teaches us is that multiple “modernisms” await discovery in places far remote from the Western centers. It is our hope that Postwar will meet with a positive response, draw a broad public, and trigger a discourse that will inspire many other exhibition venues to retell the stories of modern art under the conditions of globalization.

Hortensia Völckers and Alexander Farenholtz

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DIRECTOR’S FOREWORD Okwui Enwezor

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n his posthumously published Prison Notebooks, the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, writing in the 1930s, in the depths of his incarceration by the Fascist government of Benito Mussolini, made the following observation: “The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned. I am a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.” Gramsci’s reflection on modernity is all the more captivating for having anticipated so succinctly the wretched spirit engendered by the catastrophe of World War II across the world. For many who survived the war—especially those who witnessed the concentration camps or the destruction wrought by the atom bombs, saw the images of destroyed lives and cities that these disasters produced, and lived through the social conditions of the period—to refuse to become disillusioned required extraordinary vigilance. Even before the war ended, the prescient incisiveness with which Gramsci had confronted the positivist idealism of modernity had united many modern artists, thinkers, policy-makers, legal theorists, and ordinary people around a singular fact: the necessity of emerging from the unprecedented trauma and violence of World War II without illusions, particularly at a time when humanity faced the daunting task of refusing disillusionment while building an entirely new modern and humanistic global compact. In Europe and Japan, the postwar period inspired a profound reflection on how to assimilate the lessons of the war and the invidious

statecraft of colonialism, while also recognizing, without equivocation, the quest of the colonized for the end of colonial empires and imperial dominions. Both the victors and the vanquished of the war had to live up to new responsibilities, to which end they instituted new programs and policies to allow a smooth transition from a bellicose period to a more peaceful one. It is in this sense that within the remit of this project “postwar” should be seen not as purely an aftermath but as a horizon into which the ideals of global emancipation and decolonization could be projected as the new world order transitioned into a multilateral system of governance. In culture, similar ideals were pursued and questions were raised across the world around issues of art and heritage, scientific and educational exchange, cultural preservation and social interaction. These reflections were important contributors in the founding of UNESCO in Paris in 1945. From the defeat of Japan and Germany to the retreat of empire; from the creation of the Atlantic charter, the Pacific alliance, and the Warsaw pact to the building of a system of multilateral global institutions; from decolonization and the emergence of new nation states to the partition of others; from revolutions to dictatorships, Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965 probes the creative ferment in which artists attempted to come to terms with the dawn of a new contemporary era. Through the vital relationship between artworks and artists, produced and understood from the point of view of local and specific contexts, Postwar aims to project a broad global understanding of the

Okwui Enwezor

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historical forces that attended the shaping of art after 1945. Covering the years 1945 to 1965, the exhibition proposes, through exhaustive research and case studies organized across regions, to explore the global view of contemporary art in the wake of the radical geopolitical transformation and realignment after the defeats of Japan and Germany. It is thus positioned not only as a reflection on the defeat of the aggressive regimes located on the shores of two oceans—the Pacific and the Atlantic—but also as a tracing of the spaces of art across the sweeping lines of those two oceans on five continents. By mapping these oceanic lines and their continental contours, Postwar straddles nations, political structures, economic systems, institutional frameworks, and ideological positions. More important, it engages with the vividness of the artistic systems and cultural networks of the period. Postwar can also be understood as the site of making and unmaking, connecting the ceaseless points of movement of the cosmopolitans and the diasporic, the exiles and the displaced, the immigrants and the refugees. From this turning point in global history it is possible to see the strong shift in artistic identities fomented by the entangled histories of the postwar period: who made art? Where and why, with what and how? The exhibition is devoted precisely to the untangling of this question. Employing a dramaturgical and social lens, Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965 is centered in the interregnum between recovery from the devastation of the war and the creation of new artistic networks in the war’s aftermath. It responds to the multifarious conceptions of art among artists working with a vital awareness of a world created from conflict and within the experience of change. For these artists—who lived in different parts of the world, and many of whom were scarred by war and by imperialism, colonialism, racism, and segregation—the idea that art and artists had roles to play in such a period of instability, while constructing fresh insights into human culture and creativity, was fundamental to the shaping of a new artistic modernity. Artists were also deeply involved in the search for new subject matter, creating contemporary forms and harnessing materials in fresh ways that have since come to define modern and contemporary art. It should also be noted that the two decades covered here, from 1945 to 1965, marked a cultural turning point: the end of European dominance of contemporary around the world, the rise of the international prominence and hegemony of contemporary American art, popular culture, and mass media, and the incipient globalization of art. For even as the United States was consolidating its newly found cultural position, other nations, in South America, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and East and Central Europe, were busy as well, exploring and rethinking the artistic paradigms of their respective contexts. This changing of stakes in the language, material, and form of art led artists to develop new and alternative modernities to mirror the changed terms of geopolitical dialogue across the world. In Europe, as the Cold War divided the continent into two separate ideological spheres—the Warsaw Pact countries of Eastern and Central Europe, allied with the Soviet Union, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries of Western Europe, allied with the United

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States—the emerging global South of twenty-nine newly independent Asian and African countries convened in Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955 to lay the foundation for the principle of nonalignment, of supporting neither East nor West but instead “facing forward,” in the memorable phrase of Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah. In the arts, even while the ideological fissure created by the competition for cultural dominance between East and West, communism and capitalism, socialism and liberal democracy, created a crude binary in the way the terms “abstraction” and “socialist realism” were taken as moral equivalents, artists in newly independent countries were discovering the role that they could play in nation-building and the advancement of a de-Westernized national culture. Artists across the world grappled not only with aesthetic and formal issues of artistic creation but also with debates on the correct ideological and cultural position: conformity or individualism, subjectivity or collectivity, regionalism or internationalism, alignment or nonalignment. In recent years, scholarship around the world has begun to shed light on the many alternative histories of contemporary art from this period, and these inquiries have created opportunities to interrogate former conclusions and the general history of the postwar period. They have often ended up challenging and expanding previous discourses of modernity that were grounded in Western practices of exclusion. We in turn have gained critical insight into the art of the postwar era by broadening the borders of art history since 1945 while reflecting back on the debates and discourses that were crucial and fundamental to artists and their ideas in different regions of the world. At the same time, we have explored how different terrains of artistic practice and conditions of production that flourished in previously underrecognized and understudied art-historical canons can enrich our current understanding of postwar art history. The emergent scholarship on postwar art has made a deep impact on the curatorial arguments that frame this exhibition; in turn, it requires exhibitions such as this one to foreground them. What is crucial is that it is the art itself, and the systematic conceptual and aesthetic approaches undertaken by the artists of the period, that have been the real revelation. It is our hope that some of these issues will come to sharper relief in the course of the exhibition. Postwar has involved 218 artists from more than sixty countries and 150 lenders from 36 countries. A project of this complexity, scope, and ambition must be multipronged in its affiliations and networks. After nearly five years of research, it gives me great pleasure to thank my two colleagues and co-curators of the exhibition—Ulrich Wilmes, chief curator and deputy director of Haus der Kunst, and Katy Siegel, Eugene V. and Claire E. Thaw Endowed Chair in Modern American Art at Stony Brook University, New York—for the incredible privilege of developing and realizing such an important exhibition with them. Ulrich’s and Katy’s exemplary knowledge of the field, their commitment to research and their marshaling of every available intellectual resource at their disposal, and finally their insistence on building a more global account of postwar art has meant that together we could curate an exhibition worthy of the ambition we all invested in its making.

Director’s Foreword

A project of this globe-spanning dimension requires not only delicate diplomacy but also a shared common horizon among participants and collaborators. To this end we are pleased to acknowledge the generous support provided to us by so many artists, colleagues, lenders, archivists, foundations, museums, artists’ estates, galleries, and research institutes over the course and the process of its planning. Our immense gratitude goes to the patron of this exhibition, the honorable Dr. Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Federal Republic of Germany, whose support has been vital to the objectives of Haus der Kunst as an open, global institution. We wish to thank our principal collaborating institution, the Brooklyn Museum, New York, and especially Anne Pasternak, president and director; Nancy Spector, deputy director and chief curator; and Sharon Matt Atkins, vice director, exhibitions and collections management, for their enthusiastic endorsement of the exhibition and for making it possible to present it in New York, a city where an important body of postwar art was created and historicized. We are indebted to so many individuals and organizations who have played key roles in funding Postwar. We are particularly thankful to the shareholders and the major supporter of Haus der Kunst: The Free State of Bavaria, the Gesselschafft der Freunde Haus der Kunst, and the Alexander Tutsek-Stiftung for their annual funding support. As the planning of the exhibition began, we received two major grants from the Kulturstiftung des Bundes, Berlin, and the Goethe Institute, Munich, that underwrote the exhibition and research. These two grants were strengthened by two more from the Art Mentor Foundation, Lucerne, supporting the exhibition and our educational programs. We are very grateful to the boards and officers of these organizations, and especially to Hortensia Völckers, Artistic Director, and Alexander Farenholtz, Administrative Director, Kulturstiftung des Bundes, Berlin; Johannes Ebert, General Secretary, and Hans-Georg Knoop, former General Secretary, Goethe Institut, Munich; and Evelyn Kryst, Karin Ebling, and Miriam Lüthold Lindén, Art Mentor Foundation, Lucerne. Further thanks go to Darren Walker, President, and Elizabeth Alexander, Director, Creativity and Expression, at the Ford Foundation, New York; Wolfgang Heubisch, President, and Michael Barnick, Heinke Hagemann, Irmin Rodenstock-Beck, and Philippe Litzka, Members of the Board, of the Gessellschaft der Freunde Haus der Kunst; and Hans-Ewald Schneider and Ingrid Schuchlenz at Hassenkamp, Cologne, for the additional funding support they provided to us. Finally, the staff of Haus der Kunst and the core organizational team of this exhibition have played an impressive role in shaping its outcome on every level. It is with gratitude that I recognize their contributions and thank each of them for ably shepherding the entire process and bringing special professional care and sensitivity to the realization of this mammoth project.

Okwui Enwezor

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CURATORS’ ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Okwui Enwezor, Katy Siegel, Ulrich Wilmes

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ostwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965 has been in the making for five years. During that time we have accrued debts to so many individuals and institutions who have supported our work along the way. The generous support that artists, colleagues, scholars, archivists, foundations, museums, artists’ estates, and research institutes have provided to us over the course and process of planning the exhibition has enabled us to map a truly global view of the art of the postwar era. We are especially thankful to the lenders, who not only lent key and rare works to the exhibition but granted us permission to reproduce them in the catalogue. In 2013 and 2014, during several curatorial meetings at Tate Modern, London, and in Munich, we benefited from the knowledge and research of colleagues at Tate Modern who hosted us and participated in our deliberations on the meaning of “postwar.” We are especially thankful to Chris Dercon, former Director; Achim Borchardt-Hume, Director of Exhibitions; and, for their contributions during a two-day curatorial workshop, to Tate curators, fellows, and researchers including Tanya Barson, Juliet Bingham, Elena Crippa, Lena Fritsch, Matthew Gale, Mark Godfrey, Shoair Mavlian, Jennifer Mundy, Vassilis Oikonomopoulos, Nada Raza, Kasia Redzisz, Helen Sainsbury, Chris Stephens, Sandra Sykorova, Alex Taylor, Katy Wan, Andrew Wilson, and Zoe Whitley. We acknowledge the early support and interest of Catherine Grenier, former deputy director, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris.

In the best possible way this project has been structured by exchange. The exhibition has been enriched by the participation of the large group of scholars who participated in a four-day conference organized by Haus der Kunst in May 2014. Our gratitude goes to Atreyee Gupta, Haus der Kunst’s inaugural Goethe Institut Post-Doctoral Fellow, who helped to convene and coordinate the conference and the publication of its papers. For the insight they provided through their respective researches we thank the participants in the conference and the contributors to the forthcoming Postwar Reader: Sam Bardaouil, Nicholas Cullinan, Iftikhar Dadi, Federico Deambrosis, Alessandro Del Puppo, Burcu Dogramaci, Nikolas Drosos, Patrick Flores, Éva Forgács, Hal Foster, Alessio Fransoni, Jacopo Galimberti, Walter Grasskamp, Boris Groys, Serge Guilbaut, Hideki Kikkawa, Sohl Lee, Gregor H. Lersch, Paula Barreiro López, Tara McDowell, Abigail McEwen, Armin Medosch, Kobena Mercer, Gerardo Mosquera, Alexandra Munroe, Chika Okeke-Agulu, Mari Carmen Ramírez, Amanda Katherine Rath, Dorothea Schöne, Nada Shabout, Devika Singh, Terry Smith, Ming Tiampo, Reiko Tomii, and Isobel Whitelegg. In organizing the conference we also benefited from the support of two crucial partners in Munich, the Zentral Institute für Kunstgeschichte and the art history department of Ludwig Maximillian University, which hosted sessions of the conference in their respective institutions. We thank Iris Lauterbach, Events and Fellowships Manager at the Zentral Institute für Kunstgeschichte, and Burcu

Okwui Enwezor, Katy Siegel, Ulrich Wilmes

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Dogramaci, Professor of Art History at Ludwig Maximillian University, for their staunch solidarity. Thanks are due to Eugene V. and Clare E. Thaw for their generous support for Katy Siegel’s scholarly work and research. We further acknowledge the support of Joachim Bernauer, Head of Culture at the Goethe-Institut, and Johannes Hossfeld, Head of the Film, Television, and Radio Division at the Goethe-Institut. We are grateful to Uchenna Enwezor and Louise Neri for their unceasing support throughout the preparations for Postwar. We are delighted by the overwhelming response that our invitation to contribute to the project has received from so many esteemed colleagues. Our thanks go to Alejandro Anreus, Ariella Azoulay, Zainab Bahrani, Galia Bar Or, Homi K. Bhabha, Emily Braun, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Ekaterina Degot, Ješa Denegri, Nikolas Drosos, Pedro Erber, Gao Minglu, Romy Golan, Andrea Giunta, Walter Grasskamp, Catherine Grenier, Atreyee Gupta, Salah Hassan, Yule Heibel, Geeta Kapur, Pamela M. Lee, Anneka Lenssen, Damian Lentini, Courtney Martin, Anne Massey, Mark Mazower, Yasufumi Nakamori, Chika Okeke-Agulu, Stephen Petersen, Mari Carmen Ramírez, Richard Shiff, Terry Smith, Fred Turner, Sarah Wilson, and Tobias Wofford for their illuminating contributions to the catalogue. We acknowledge with gratitude the excellent contributions of the graphic designers at Double Standards, Berlin, especially Chris Rehberger, Annika Riethmüller, and Julia Egger, for the beautifully designed catalogue and the accompanying exhibition guide. We thank Thomas Byttebier, Jerome Coupé, Dimitri Jeurissen, Jacques Letteson, and Sander Vermeulen at Base Design, Brussels, for the engaging and stimulating design of our new website, the microsite for Postwar, film trailer, and the image campaign. We were fortunate to have the capable hands of David Frankel editing the texts in the catalogue; David’s consummate skill, precision, and sensitivity to elucidating the meaning of the writer’s core ideas shaped the book and transformed the essays immeasurably. Our thanks go to Sophie Reinhardt, the copy editor of the German catalogue and exhibition guide, for her incisive and patient work. It was a pleasure to work with Ann Henderson, Stacy Moore, Monica Rumsey, and Emily Salmon, the team of copy editors of the catalogue and exhibition guide in English, who provided the editorial overview with precision and reliability. Further thanks are due to other contributors to the copy-editing process, including Jonathan Fox (chronologies) and Wendy Vogel (artists’ biographies). Our thanks go to the contributing writers of the shortguide entries and artist biographies: Andrianna Campbell, Tiffany Floyd, Yan Geng, Megan Hines, Carina Kaminsky, Damian Lentini, Nicolas Linnert, Daniel Milnes, Alexandra Nicolaides, Ady Nugeraha, Amy Rahn, Tim Roerig, Tatjana Schäfer, Gemma Sharpe, Petronela Soltész, Joseph Underwood, Wendy Vogel, Caroline V. Wallace, and Rachel Wetzler. We further acknowledge the important work of translating the texts from Croatian, French, Hebrew, and German, a task rendered by Richard Flantz, Dorotea Fotivec, Judith Rosenthal, Rebecca van Dyck, and David Wharry. For the enormous task of translating the catalogue texts from English into German we thank Bernd Weiß,

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translation coordinator, David Drevs, Bettina Eschenhagen, Dörte Fuchs, Barbara Hess, Barbara Holle, Norma Keßler, Felix Mayer, Jutta Orth, Trude Stegmann, and Christine Wunnicke. We also thank Nikolaus Schneider, David Drevs, Barbara Holle, and Anne Pitz for their excellent translations of the exhibition guide texts. It has been great to rely on the unflappable dedication of our colleagues at Prestel Verlag, the publisher that has overseen the production of the catalogue and exhibition guide. We are especially thankful to Christian Rieker, publisher, Wolfram Friedrich, production director, Katharina Haderer, editor in chief, Constanze Holler, editorial direction, and Cilly Klotz, production management. Our immense thanks go to Nina Beitzen, Valeska Höchst, and Wilfried Kuehn at Kuehn Malvezzi, Berlin, who with vivid and meticulous clarity provided the beautiful exhibition design. We are indebted and grateful to colleagues and staff at Haus der Kunst for their dedicated work and or the attention they gave to every detail of the project. Marco Graf von Matuschka, Chief Financial Officer, and Moritz Peterson, Assistant, guided the financial, legal, and operational work necessary to achieve our goals. Thanks are due to Melissa Klein, Executive Assistant to the Director, and to Iris Ludwig, Teresa Lengl, and Sonja Teine, Assistants to the Director, for maintaining the smooth running of the Director’s office. We recognize with immense thanks the excellent and peerless work of a team of curators, fellows, researchers, and liaisons at Haus der Kunst who have enriched this exhibition. We especially thank Sabine Brantl, Curator of the Archive; Patrizia Dander, former Curator; Leon Krempel, former Senior Curator; Isabella Kredler, Assistant to the Chief Curator; Yan Geng, 2014 Goethe Institut Post-Doctoral Fellow; Luz Gyalui, Exhibition Liaison; Damian Lentini, 2015 Goethe-Institut Post-Doctoral Fellow and Assistant Curator; Julienne Lorz, Curator; Megan Hines, Curatorial and Research Assistant to Katy Siegel; Daniel Milnes, Assistant Curator; Markus Mueller, Music Program; Mark Nash, Film Program; Tim Roerig, Managing Editor and Curatorial Assistant; Andrea Saul, Coordinator of Public Programs; Anna Schneider, Assistant Curator; Sonja Teine, Curatorial and Research Assistant; Carina Kaminsky, Curatorial Intern; and Laura Lang, Curatorial Intern, for their impressive effort on every facet of the exhibition. The professional and meticulous work of Tina Köhler, Head of Exhibition Production and Coordination; Cassandra Schmid, Registrar; Sophia Sprick, Assistant, Exhibition Coordination; Lucas Hagin and Mareike Hetschold, Assistant Registrars; Chloé Coquilhat and Maxim Weirich, Interns; Johannes Baur, Marjen Schmidt, and Susanne von der Groeben, Conservators; Anton Bosnjak, Markus Brandenburg, Elena Carvajal Díaz, Tanja Eiler, Andrea Faciu, Vincent Faciu, Florian Falterer, Hans-Peter Frank, Moritz Friedrich, Adam Gandy, Ben Goossens, Martin Hast, Tommy Jackson, Marzieh Kermani, Christian Leitna, Ruth Münzner, Kaori Nakajima, Roland Roppelt, Tina Schultz, Andrea Snigula, Nikolaus Steglich, Magnus Thoren, Tim Wolff, and Laura Ziegler, exhibition preparation and installation; Anton Köttl, Head of Facilities; and Glenn Rossiter, Technical Assistant, has been

Curators’ Acknowledgments

indispensable in the logistical organization and coordination of such a complex project. Last but not least, we acknowledge the efforts of Tina Anjou, Marketing; Anna Schüller, Digital Communication; Jacqueline Falk, Digital Communication Assistant; Elena Heitsch, Press; Martina Fischer, Mediation and Visitor Relations; Chris Goennawein, (Jakob Jakob) graphic design; Christian Gries, Digital Communications Consultant; and all those both inside and outside Haus der Kunst whose contributions have been invaluable in the realization of this project.

Okwui Enwezor, Katy Siegel, Ulrich Wilmes

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THE JUDGMENT OF ART: POSTWAR AND ARTISTIC WORLDLINESS Okwui Enwezor

Introductory Essays

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PROLOGUE

n April 30, 1945, soldiers of the American Seventh Army entered the bombarded, nearly destroyed, and deserted streets of Munich.1 One day earlier, regiments of the army had liberated the Dachau concentration camp, just a few miles away on the outskirts of the city.2 Among the many events auguring the collapse of the Nazi regime, Munich’s capture was especially significant, as this was where the Nazi Party had been founded, in 1920, and it had served as the springboard for Adolf Hitler’s murderous political ambition. In the early days, the city, known as “Hauptstadt der Bewegung” (Capital of the movement), had been the center of the party’s ideological machinery and base to its many loyalists and brutal epigones.3 When American forces occupied the ruined city, the official capitulation of the German army was still over a week away. 4 And when the war’s end was celebrated all across Europe on May 8, 1945, World War II as such was far from over: as Europe began the process of reconstruction, the war in the Pacific was still raging. The surrender of the Japanese imperial military would demand another three months of intense

Fig. 2. Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, General Douglas MacArthur, looks on as Umezu Yoshijiro, Chief of the Imperial Japanese Army General Staff, signs the Japanese Instrument of Surrender aboard USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, September 2, 1945

earlier times important guests including Hitler, Benito Mussolini, the Aga Khan, and Edward, Duke of Windsor, had recorded their visits to the museum.6 The soldiers’ graffiti-like inscriptions marked the final chapter of the Haus der Deutschen Kunst before it hurtled, along with the rest of Germany, into the postwar era.

THE DISENCHANTMENT OF MODERN ART

Fig. 1. Aerial view of Munich's city center after Allied air raids, c. 1945

fighting—including the relentless fire-bombing of Tokyo and other Japanese cities—before their dramatic conclusion: the detonation of two atomic bombs, respectively christened “Little Boy” and “Fat Man,” in Hiroshima on August 6 and in Nagasaki on August 9.5 Meanwhile, in Munich, American forces had occupied the Haus der Deutschen Kunst, a miraculous survivor of the bombing that had leveled a great part of the city. The occupation of the building on May 5, 1945, was memorialized by the signatures of three American soldiers on the pages of the institution’s Goldenes Buch (visitors book; fig. 3), where in

It is a serendipitous bargain of history that the exhibition Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965 should be organized in Haus der Kunst, a building that in its former incarnation as the Haus der Deutschen Kunst completely abjured modern art and international exchange in the arts. While the exhibition is not commemorative, Postwar marks the seventieth anniversary of Haus der Kunst as a public institution under its current name (acquired within a year after the end of the war) and the revision of its critical perspective. Its past history of intolerance remains inextinguishable, though. Perhaps for this reason, Haus der Kunst exemplifies the deep contradictions of the postwar era.7 To reach a sense of why Postwar matters in this context, we must go beneath the building’s skin to review the institution’s earlier, antimodern understanding of art. In its former life as a Nazi cultural icon, the building was designed as a showcase, a triumphant work of architectural propaganda. For Hitler the Haus der Deutschen Kunst was not just any building: it was a “temple” of German art, conceived, designed, and constructed expressly for the purpose of exhibiting the timelessness and purity of Germany’s national aesthetic spirit. This point was adumbrated in a speech Hitler gave on July 18, 1937, to mark the opening of the building and inaugurate the first edition of the Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung (Great German Art Exhibition; fig. 4): “When, therefore, the cornerstone

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of this building was laid, it was with the intention of constructing a temple, not for a so-called modern art, but for a true and everlasting German art, that is, better still, a House for the art of the German people, and not for any international art of the year 1937, ’40, ’50 or ’60.” 8 Describing Impressionism, Futurism, Cubism, and Dadaism as “insane and inane monstrosities,” the speech underscored Hitler’s fervent aesthetic ethnocentrism and overall disenchantment with modern art.9 He denounced Jews in particular, accusing them of being the leading propagators of the fraud of modernism in museums and in the press:

were extinguished in Germany while museums were stripped of the works of modern art in their collections.12 In counterpoint to these condemnations of modern art and Jews, the resplendent white galleries of the new art “temple” provided the perfect backdrop for the grandiose type of work that Hitler and the Nazis saw as the true German art. It was in this building that eight editions of the Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung were staged between 1937 and 1944. Their remit was to show the types of mimetic art (mostly idealized figurative, landscape, and genre paintings and monumental heroic sculptures), by regime-favored artists such as the painter Adolf Ziegler and the sculptor Arno Breker, that glorified the Nazi aesthetic position.13 In this role the Haus der Deutschen Kunst not only signified the ideological strictures to which artists working in Nazi Germany had to conform, it also conveyed the corrosive ethos of identity discourse, thus putting in place the Führer’s purifying vision of art: Cubism, Dadaism, Futurism, Impressionism, etc., have nothing to do with our German people. For these concepts are neither old nor modern, but are only the artifactitious stammerings of men to whom God has denied the grace of a truly artistic talent, and in its place has awarded them the gift of jabbering or deception. I will therefore confess now, in this very hour, that I have come to the final inalterable decision to clean house, just as I have done in the domain of political confusion, and from now on rid the German art life of its phrase-mongering. “Works of art” which cannot be understood in themselves but, for the justification of their existence, need those bombastic instructions for their use, finally reaching that intimidated soul, who is patiently willing to accept such stupid or impertinent nonsense—these works of art from now on will no longer find their way to the German people.14 For eight years of its existence the Haus der Deutschen Kunst fulfilled Hitler’s vision of artistic purity in his “temple” of art. Despite the increasing battlefield losses of the German army and the near certainty of defeat, Hitler insisted that plans for the 1945 edition of the Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung should proceed. It was a delusional thought.

Fig. 3. Title page of the Goldenes Buch signed by Adolf Hitler and U.S. Army Sergeant Richard S. Radelet, 1945

On these cultural grounds, more than on any others, Judaism had taken possession of those means and institutions of communication which form, and thus finally rule over public opinion. Judaism was very clever indeed, especially in employing its position in the press with the help of so-called art criticism and succeeding not only in confusing the natural concepts about the nature and scope of art as well as its goals, but above all in undermining and destroying the general wholesome feeling in this domain.10 A day after the speech, its verbal excoriation of modern art was escalated into a merciless public denunciation in the form of the exhibition Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art; fig. 5), staged in the arcade galleries of a nearby building in the Hofgarten.11 With modernist art thus condemned as degenerate, the leading lights of experimental modernism

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Introductory Essays

Fig. 4. Visitors at the Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung, 1937

POSTWAR TRANSITIONS: FROM HAUS DER DEUTSCHEN KUNST TO HAUS DER KUNST The aftermath of the war midwifed an atmosphere of great indeterminacy, a state of change. Germany entered an extensive phase of denazification. It was under this policy that the Haus der Deutschen Kunst became Haus der Kunst, thus shedding its ignominious past, 15 but it is not clear today how the removal of “Deutschen” from the museum’s name took place or who gave the order. 16 The name change may have been made by the American military administration, which had control of the building; 17 that the initiative was German also seems plausible, given the ideology of the institution’s original patron. In any case the name change signaled a new direction, an embrace of what had once been excluded, deemed filthy or degenerate, and the rehabilitation of modern art in the reconstituted institution.

Fig. 6. Title page of the exhibition catalogue Ausstellung Bayerischer Gemälde des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts (Fifteenth and Sixteenth-Century Bavarian Paintings), 1946

Fig. 5. Installation view of Entarte Kunst at the Hofgarten Arcades, Munich, 1937

On January 17, 1946, after less than a year of closure, the building reopened to the public under its new name. The inaugural exhibition was Ausstellung Bayerischer Gemälde des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts (Fifteenthand Sixteenth-Century Bavarian Paintings).18 Presented in the vast galleries of the building’s west wing, this major exhibition was a veritable blockbuster of masterpieces, including Albrecht Dürer’s Self-Portrait in Fur Coat (1500) and Four Apostles (1526), Matthias Grünewald’s Saints Erasmus and Mauritius (1523), Albrecht Altdorfer’s Battle of Alexander at Issus (1529), and almost 200 more works.19 An unsigned review of the exhibition in The Bavarian, the English-language newspaper catering to the American military and civilian population, described this important moment of the return of classical European painting to public view as their return from exile.20 There followed a series of exhibitions of modern art, ranging from Moderne Französische Malerei (Modern French Painting, 1946) to Georges Braque (1948) to Die Maler am Bauhaus (Bauhaus Painters, 1950).21 In September 1949, five months after the partition of Germany into the

German Democratic Republic (East Germany) and the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany), Haus der Kunst staged the grand exhibition Der Blaue Reiter München und die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (The Blue Rider in Munich and the Art of the Twentieth Century), showcasing works by Georges Braque, Robert Delaunay, André Derain, Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, August Macke, Franz Marc, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Kees van Dongen, Maurice Vlaminck, Alexej von Jawlensky, and other artists who had been ostracized a dozen years earlier under the Nazi regime. In 1955 the museum staged a triumphant Picasso retrospective that brought together many major works of the artist’s career up to that point, including half a dozen from New York’s Museum of Modern Art and all fifteen paintings of the newly completed series “Women of Algiers”(1954–55).22 The exhibition also included Guernica (1937), Picasso’s great antiwar painting depicting the destruction of the Basque town by the German and Italian air forces on April 26, 1937—the first presentation of this work in Germany. Joining this most political of paintings was another antiwar work, Massacre in Korea (1951; plate 117), an addition to the rich trove of politically oriented works that Picasso pursued following Guernica, throughout and after the German Occupation. The capstone of this period of Haus der Kunst’s integration of modernism came with the twenty-fifth anniversary of Entartete Kunst. On October 25, 1962, the museum opened Entartete Kunst. Bildersturm vor

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25 Jahren (Degenerate Art: The Iconoclasm Twenty-Five Years Ago),23 an attempt to reconstruct the 1937 exhibition. That show had contained some 650 works of modern art, by 112 artists, that the Nazi regime had labeled degenerate and had seized from private and public collections. With the 1962 exhibition, which brought together works by such artists as Kandinsky, Max Beckmann, James Ensor, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Wilhelm Lehmbruck, August Marc, Emil Nolde, and many others, Haus der Kunst finally made a specific link between its past condemnation of these artists and their contemporary rehabilitation in the context of postwar Germany. In doing so it completed its journey into its own fractured history. Yet in all the intervening years, and indeed right up to the present day, not once did the museum organize any exhibition related to either the theme of the war or its aftermath.

South, the foundation of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and the independence of Laos. The process of recovery was not limited to the political and economic spheres. Moral insight into the atrocities and suffering of the war was just

A TIME OF RECKONING: REMAKING A SHATTERED WORLD The conflicts of World War II had barely ebbed before the process started of reconfiguring, suturing, and repairing what had been broken and shattered. What would the postwar peace look like? Who would be responsible for overseeing it? What institutions would ensure that its terms were respected? Whether successful or not, as an attempt to consider the totality of the world as a single entity, the postwar planning process was one of the most complex and unprecedented undertakings in history. On January 1, 1942, the United States, the Soviet Union, China, and Great Britain signed the Declaration of the United Nations, a declaration joined a day later by twenty allied nations fighting the Axis powers and brought to fruition on October 24, 1945, when the United Nations was formally established as a global institution.24 Around the same time as the Declaration of the United Nations, preparatory meetings were taking place for the Bretton Woods Conference of July 1944, which created the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The conference, which was planned in Washington, D.C., and held in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, was initiated at the invitation of the United States; forty-four allied nations from six continents— Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America—participated in shaping the final agreement, which reordered the international finance and banking systems that would be essential in financing the postwar reconstruction.25 Postwar planning, however, was not the province of the United States and the European powers alone. As the new great powers were reorganizing the affairs of the world, leaders in other regions were making their own plans for the end of the war. The League of Arab States (also known as the Arab League) was established in Cairo on March 22, 1945; in October of the same year, the Fifth Pan-African Congress, held in Manchester, England, gathered delegates from many African and West Indian countries to demand freedom and an end to colonial rule in Africa and the West Indies.26 This was also the year of Korea’s division into North and

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Fig. 7. Participants at the Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester, November 10, 1945

as pressing. As a consequence, an enormous space of thinking fell open to art. After all, artists and art institutions had been involved in processing, transmitting, and translating reflections on the war for the public in various parts of the world. In the United States, The Museum of Modern Art had strongly supported the war effort, producing nearly forty related exhibitions.27 It is important to note that the question of the means or approach by which art might address the urgent moral questions that arose from the harrowing experiences of the war pointed to the complex possibilities available to art and artists during this pivotal moment, beyond the conventional repertoire of recognizable imagery.

ANTHROPOLOGICAL MACHINES: BETWEEN HUMAN AND ANIMAL In order to understand the gripping hold of World War II on the cultural, ethical, and moral imagination, it is necessary to underscore the war’s scale and the toll it exacted. Any discussion of art and the postwar era must first come to terms with the effect of the war on the thinking of artists, intellectuals, and the general public alike. World War II was the most catastrophic and lethal conflict in human history. It was the ultimate killing field: in less than a decade, tens of millions of people were annihilated. Owing to technological advances

Introductory Essays

in weaponry and machinery, the sheer number of combatants, and the planetary scale of the conflict, the war produced casualties—wounded, maimed, and dead—in incalculable numbers beyond those of any other war.28 World War II was in fact several wars, fought across continents and among countries and territories, among ideological and political beliefs. The war stamped multiple enduring images on the global imagination. The extent of the horrors came into focus slowly, with photographs, films, and writings documenting the cities, towns, and countryside in ruin and desolation,29 the grotesque concentration camps,30 the industrial-scale annihilation of the Holocaust,31 and finally the cataclysmic devastation of the atom bombs that vaporized Hiroshima and Nagasaki.32 The growing awareness of what had happened introduced the sense of a new possibility: that humanity possessed the capability liter-

were already developed within the institutions of the colonial state, where early prototypes of concentration camps and mass killing were first conceived and tested.35 The acknowledgment of the dialectical relationship between colo­nialism and violence complicated any sense of the uniqueness of the Holocaust. In fact the logic of race and bureaucracy that the Nazis integrated in the planning of the Final Solution, and on which Arendt wrote so compellingly, operates through the blurring of the distinction between man and animal, whereby “it functions by excluding as not (yet) human an already human being from itself.” 36 Writing at the height of the global struggle against colonialism, Aimé Césaire observed how in the colonial state, “colonization works to decivilize the colonizer.” 37 In such a state, the colonizer is the victim of his own self-dehumanization;

Fig. 8. Yo�suke Yamahata. Nagasaki Journey. August 10, 1945. Silver gelatin print on glossy fiber paper, 9.5 × 14.5 cm. Courtesy Daniel Blau, Munich

ally to destroy itself. With tens of millions dead and many more millions left homeless, displaced, and stateless, the aftermath of World War II demonstrated the crisis of humankind in extremis.33 World War II established a radical threshold between life and death. It unleashed a debate about the nature of humanity and confronted the entire global sphere with the dramatic misalignment of means and ends: the sublation of power by dangerous ideological systems into fearful anthropological machines, to use a term coined by Giorgio Agamben.34 The Holocaust and the camps were natural consequences of the extensive development and deployment of the technologies of race, bureaucracy, and violence. As Hannah Arendt pointed out, these instruments

and colonization, Césaire insists, “dehumanizes even the most civilized man … the colonizer who in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal, accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal.” 38 Here, colonial violence is a vital extension of the anthropological machine. For Agamben, the condition in which the human is reduced to the nonhuman level is the state of “bare life,” a concept that enables the distinction between worthy and worthless lives to be posited and institutionally interpolated. He writes, “Nazism determines the bare life of homo sacer in a biological and eugenic key, making it into the site of an incessant decision on value and nonvalue.” 39

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THE ART OF WAR

THE ANOMALOUS ARCHIVE

ven before World War II ended, artists were dealing with its repercussions. Many were exploring the possibilities of the war as subject matter. With the stench of death everywhere, painting too carried the acrid fumes of decay and the stains of decomposition. Picasso’s Charnel House (1944–45; fig. 10), for example, its grisaille tonality suggesting black-and-white documentary images of the war and of the death camps, represented a coda to the artist’s Guernica, of 1937. It depicts the rigid and contorted forms of a slain family, their bound and stiff bodies crammed beneath a simple wooden table in their own home. Francis Bacon painted his breakthrough triptych Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944; fig. 11) in London, a city devastated by German bombing raids. The work provided the pictorial model for a subsequent series of paintings on the theme of crucifixion, including Fragment of a Crucifixion (1950; plate 2). Against an orange-ocher background, figures with elongated necks and distended bodies show snaggletoothed mouths bellowing out of their heads. The forms are pallid and gray, as if dusted with ash; posed on a studio table and a sculptor’s modeling plinth, they suggest monsters emanating from the abyss of torture and the agonies of death. Several years earlier in Paris, Jean Fautrier had explored the anatomy of executed prisoners: paintings such as Sarah (1943) and La Juive (The Jewess, 1943; plate 1) suggest the bodies of violated women and, through their titles, expose the entanglement of identity and race. 40 In the series Otages (Hostages, 1943–45), meanwhile, Fautrier used seriality to communicate a sense of the multiplicity of the Nazis’ victims. With their built-up surfaces of plaster troweled onto canvas and coated with slick smears of oil, the paintings have a relief effect that fuses the abstract with the anthropomorphic. Made in the bleak years of the German Occupation, they come close to an art of witnessing, depicting bodies frozen in their own congealed fat, severed, tree-stump-like limbs, and splayed, grisly heads marked with the punctures and lesions left by blunt instruments. With such images of the tortured and killed in circulation, and news from the concentration camps emerging in the press, the tense air was laden with grief-filled resonance. After the liberation of France on August 19, 1944, elation was mixed with revanchist passion, as if the veil of war had simultaneously dissolved and reappeared. The mood was both triumphant and anxious, laced with bitterness and vengefulness. Liberated France called for a thorough cleansing and demanded accounting from those who had betrayed the country. As Sarah Wilson writes, “The epuration, however, was far more bloody. … It was a period of denunciation, revenge killings, the settling of scores, and jealousies, and above all of public trials with hastily assembled judicial apparatus.” 41

The trials and cleansings in France presented a clear idea of what awaited all occupied countries as the war ended. As images and accounts of the war became increasingly common after the Soviet army’s liberation of Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, and the release of grisly scenes of Bergen-Belsen by the British Army Film and Photographic Unit, 42 it was no longer possible to deny the imperative of images to speak to what had initially been rendered obscure or invisible. 43 A growing debate in the immediate postwar years centered around the representation of the death camps and specifically on the notion of the Holocaust as “unrepresentable.” Theodor Adorno’s controversial statement from 1949 that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” opened up debates around whether eschewing such representations made the Holocaust even more susceptible to opacity, almost to the point of being an anomaly. 44 It was still impossible, however, to interpret the afterlives of the images as mere evidence of the state’s anaesthetized bureaucratic order—as the pictorial assembly of “the banality of evil,” to borrow an incisive phrase of Arendt’s. 45 The death camps had been reported on only sketchily during the war; now images of them appeared, conveying their horrendous scope and stupefying scale. Artists had to confront their anomalous status. 46 In Germany, it was difficult for such images to find their way into art for at least a decade. When they did, it was in the form of allegory. Joseph Beuys, who during the war had been conscripted into the Luftwaffe as a pilot, was one of the very few artists to draw directly from his wartime experiences in the shaping of his artistic persona. His sculptural installation Auschwitz Demonstration (1956–64), composed of symbolic objects in a series of wood-and-glass vitrines, was the rare exception capable of invoking Auschwitz by name; an earlier tableau, Hirschdenkmäler (Monuments to the Stag, 1958/85; plates 5, 6), could only suggest it. While the dissonance of the war and its anesthetized memory remained issues for the postwar generation of German artists, explicit references to the camps, as well as the use of wartime experiences and imagery as subject matter, were not entirely absent. In the three-part environment Das schwarze Zimmer (The Black Room) Wolf Vostell brought together parts of three individual assemblages— Deutscher Ausblick (German View, 1958–59; plate 7), Auschwitz Scheinwerfer (Auschwitz Floodlight, 1958–59) and Treblinka (1958–59; fig. 12)—into one overarching system to deal with the atrocities of the war. 47 Representations of the war and its devastation first appeared in Gerhard Richter’s work as part of the vast archival resource Atlas (1962–), an open-ended databank of images placed in reserve, a pictorial cauldron liable to singe all who touch it. The camps did not appear in Atlas until 1963: panel 11 contains a single such image, nestled among generic and unrelated nature and wildlife scenes (fig. 9). The image is unmistakably gruesome: it shows a cluster of blackened, emaciated, and rotting corpses scattered across a narrow lane between two low buildings. A flock of vultures perch in a row on the roof of the building to the left, like sentries

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watching over the macabre scene. Two years later, in 1967, Richter would add several more images of concentration camps in panels 16–20. No images of the camps have appeared since. Atlas is collated in numbered panels, organized mostly chronologically (there are sometimes jumps in sequence) and according to idiosyncratic categories. Each panel contains multiple images derived from a variety of sources—newspapers, magazines, photo albums, books, snapshots. This arbitrary combination of pictorial genres sometimes defies any sense of standard or systematic organization, yet the sudden appearance of the photograph in panel 11 seems calculated rather than afterthought. It leads one to question whether Richter’s delay in introducing pictures of the camps, as well as prewar images in which Jews are publicly shamed and humiliated, was a result of the traumatic violence contained within the fragile, yellowing paper of these newspaper cutouts and photographs. As some of his early work shows, his reticence in using war-related images to produce paintings was not categorical. 48

Whatever compelled Richter’s initial process of collocating and collectivizing images of calculated shock, in some senses Atlas responds to the very state of incommensurability into which photographs of Nazi atrocities were plunged after the war. As Benjamin H. D. Buchloh has observed, the first appearance of the concentration camps in the work ruptures “the overall banality of found photographs” that preceded that photograph in panel 11: “The puncturing suddenly positions the Atlas project within the dialectics of amnesia and memory.” 49 But it also represents the challenge to artists to confront and demystify what was, in the early postwar period, the then evolving idea of the unrepresentability of the Holocaust, one corresponding to Adorno’s remark about Auschwitz and poetry. In its relationship to the history of postwar Germany, Atlas represents an ongoing act of commentary on the anomalous status of the archive and on the traumatic relationship to contemporary German history provoked by images of the camps. As Buchloh notes,

Fig. 9. Gerhard Richter. Newspaper & Album Photos (Atlas Sheet 11). 1963. 14 b/w clippings, 2 b/w Photographs, 51.7 cm × 66.7 cm. Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau München, Munich

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Fig. 10. Pablo Picasso. Le charnier (The Charnel House). 1944–45. Oil and charcoal on canvas, 199.8 × 250.1 cm. New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Mrs. Sam A. Lewisohn Bequest (by exchange) and Mrs. Marya Bernard Fund in memory of her husband Dr. Bernard Bernard and anonymous funds. Acc. n.: 93.1971

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The first set of photographs of the victims of a concentration camp now functions as a sudden revelation, namely, that there is still one link that binds an image to its referent within the apparently empty barrage of photographic imagery and the universal production of sign exchange value: the trauma from which the compulsion to repress had originated. Paradoxically, it is at this very moment that the Atlas also yields its own secret as an image reservoir: a perpetual pendulum between the death of reality in the photograph and the reality of death in the mnemonic image.50

FIGURED AND DEFIGURED

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eanwhile, artists in Central and Eastern Europe found the concentration camps and the Holocaust far from unrepresentable: they drew openly from imagery of the destructions and killings perpetrated by German soldiers. Explicit references to these programmatic massacres appeared in the paintings of the young Andrzej Wróblewski, who, at barely twenty years old, painted some of the most startling narratives of the destruction of the Jews of Poland. The figure of the Gestapo executioner appears repeatedly in such works as Executed Man, Execution with a Gestapo Man (1949 ; plate 10). Beyond this sinister figure of terror, so indelibly sketched by Paul Celan in the searing poem “Todes Fugue” (Death Fugue, 1945),51 Wróblewski also refers to the Warsaw ghetto in the double-sided painting Liquidation of the Ghetto/ Blue Chauffeur (1949; plate 9). Another Polish artist, Alina Szapocznikow, explored the Holocaust in sculptures such as Hand—Monument to the Heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto II (1957; plate 8). In relation to Adorno’s phrase about poetry and Auschwitz, it is interesting that Wróblewski’s paintings are contemporary with Celan’s poem, and with Boris Taslitzsky’s depiction

of the concentration camp in The Small Camp, Buchenwald (1945; fig. 13). Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, written and performed by the composer in a Nazi prison camp in 1942, and Arnold Schoenberg’s jarring composition A Survivor from Warsaw (1947) also share in the ceaseless explorations of the themes of death and survival inspired by the Holocaust. At different turns in the first two decades after World War II, the war as subject matter or catalyst for artistic reflection was addressed through what could be called a “de-figured” representation. Mark Godfrey has written compellingly on the relationship of abstraction to represen­ tations of the Holocaust; his eloquent exploration considers whether abstract art, or a work without the figure, has the capacity to tackle genocide, which seems to call for an explicitly representational language rather than a symbolic one.52 Among the examples he envisions as able to overcome the seeming limitations of a symbolic, abstract language are Frank Stella and Morris Louis—Stella in his breakthrough black geo­ metric paintings Die Fahne Hoch and Arbeit Macht Frei (1958 ; plate 13), which explore the vision of the Nazi regime through the meaning of the paintings’ titles; Louis in using the gestural vocabulary of Abstract Expressionism as a form of coded writing in Untitled (Jewish Star) and the series “Charred Journal: Firewritten” (both 1951; plates 14, 15).

OTHER ARCHIVES Like many traumatic relics of the war, the archive, far from being an aide-memoire, addresses the implicit question, what is an image in relation to the event it references or depicts? The destruction caused by

Fig. 11. Francis Bacon. Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. c. 1944. Oil paint on 3 boards, 94 × 73.7 cm (each). TATE Collection, London. Presented by Eric Hall 1953

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the atom bomb, and the number of people killed, did not fall into the category of the unrepresentable or unspeakable. Rather, the images of the atomic blasts produced by Japanese photographers were soon subjected to active censorship by the occupying forces of the American army. At first, Japanese newspapers widely published images of the enigmatic mushroom clouds that emerge from the ground zeroes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, while the American media used such images to consolidate the U.S. status as the only superpower with a nuclear arsenal. However, as concern about the bombs and condemnation of their effects began to appear worldwide, photographs showing those effects, and the dead, were either restricted or outright suppressed. The Japanese military photographer Yōsuke Yamahata arrived in Nagasaki on August 10, 1945, a day after the bomb was dropped, and photographed the aftermath extensively (plate 28). He was one of the earliest photographers to document the destruction of the city, and some of his images appeared ten days later in the August 21 issue of the Japanese newspaper Mainichi Shinbun. Upon Japan’s surrender, on August 14, images of the aftermath were restricted by the occupying American military government until the restrictions were lifted in 1952.53 When the army successfully detonated a plutonium device in the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945—a device similar in design and makeup to Fat Man, the bomb soon detonated over Nagasaki—the United States effectively won a new arms race, becoming the first country to acquire nuclear capabilities for military purposes. In destructive force and power, the atom bomb was unlike any weapon previously developed, let alone deployed for warfare. The implications were immediately apparent: not only did the atom bomb come to symbolize U.S. military superiority, it became the central animating military weapon in the search for a balance of power that led to the Cold War. The bomb also instilled the fear that the ensuing nuclear arms race would lead to unintended consequences.54 Before long, however, the debates over radioactive nuclear fallout were counteracted by a growing interest in atomic power as a source of cheap, safe, clean energy. The dialectic of a dystopian and a utopian view of nuclear science was an important one in postwar public thought. Artists throughout the world were not merely attuned to these nuclear debates, they weighed in on the various attributes of the technology—its ethical dimension, the fate to which it exposed civilization and humanity.55 With the military doctrine of “Mutual Assured Destruction” (mad) between the United States and the Soviet Union, the Cold War exacerbated existential doubts regarding the survival of humankind. Artists such as Maruki Iri and Maruki Toshi in Hiroshima Panels (1950–82; fig. 14, plates 26, 27), Isamu Noguchi in Bell Tower for Hiroshima (1950; plate 17) and Atomic Man (1952; plate 22), Karel Appel in Hiroshima Child (1958; plate 25), and Yves Klein in Hiroshima (1961) employed different representational strategies to engage with the effects of the bomb on Japanese civilians. In these works, Hiroshima, much like Auschwitz, becomes an emblem of annihilation. For artists such as Salvador Dalí, in Atomic Idyll and Melancholic Uranium/Melancholic Atomic (1945); László Moholy-Nagy, in Nuclear I CH (1945; fig. 15) and Nuclear II (1946); Weaver Hawkins, in

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Atomic Power (1947; plate 29); Enrico Baj, in Manifesto Nucleare BUM (1951; plate 37); Henry Moore, in Atom Piece (1964–65; plate 39); Roy Lichtenstein, in Atom Burst (1965; plate 38); and Andy Warhol, in Atomic Bomb (1965), the iconography of the mushroom cloud served an allegorical function as a means by which to both address the actuality of a nuclear catastrophe and render its possibility unthinkable.56 The inquiry into the nature of the human had always been ambivalent, for the question is profoundly unanswerable and unknowable, under constant interrogation. It became all the more so after World War II, which produced devastating demonstrations of man as both victim and perpetrator of violence. Alberto Giacometti’s shrunken, cadaverous figures tottering on spindly legs attest to these issues, as do the skeletal, distended figures in Ibrahim El Salahi’s paintings. Both bodies of work respond to an ambivalence, and recall the photographs of the gaunt, emaciated inmates of the death camps staring out at the viewer with hollow, vacant eyes. The terrible images of violated bodies left to the postwar generations incessantly raised the question of what defines the human and sets it apart. Throughout Postwar, the figure is encountered in countless states of precarity: crushed, mutilated, flayed, dismembered, tortured, crucified, as in David Siqueiros’s Cain en los Estados Unidos (Cain in the United States, 1947; plate 164), Magda Cordell’s Figure 59 (1958; plate 136), Colette Omogbai’s Agony (1963; plate 171), and Jack Whitten’s Head IV (1964; plate 148). In this procession of tormented figures and maimed bodies, Siquieros and Whitten introduce a new resonance in their treatments of the black body as it was subjected to racist violence in the United States during the postwar era.

“ANTI-RACIST RACISM”: HUMANISM AND DECOLONIZATION

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s the preoccupation with the human form in states of privation, degradation, desolation, and worry took hold in Europe, African, Asian, and African American artists lifted the body from its beleaguered and anguished state onto the historical stage as a figure of social agency. It was almost as if prior representations of existence through a collective leitmotif of suffering had been cast into doubt. Yes, suffering remained, and mattered; it seemed a mistake, though, to read the human predicament purely through the lens of the abjection of the white body. Certainly, when the topography of postwar art is scanned, an absence emerges, namely that of the colonized body whose trauma had constantly been erased to the point of expungement from the historical record. As Homi Bhabha notes, “It is as if the question of desire that emerged from the traumatic tradition of the oppressed has to be denied … to make way for an existentialist humanism that is as banal as it is beatific.” 57 Because of this absence of the colonized body, a philosophical combat was shaping up on the poverty of the Western discourse on “humanism.”

Introductory Essays

Fig. 12. Wolf Vostell. Treblinka from the environment “Das schwarze Zimmer” (The Black Room). 1958–59. Dé-Collage: motorcycle part, wood, film, and transistor radio, 180 × 141 × 31 cm. Berlinische Galerie, Berlin

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Fig. 13. Boris Taslitzky. Le petit camp à Buchenwald (The Small Camp Buchenwald). 1945. Oil on canvas, 300 × 500 cm. Paris, Centre Pompidou - Musée national d'art moderne - Centre de création industrielle

The tools were those of postcolonial battle. For postcolonial critics the target in Western humanism was not just its internal contradictions but its hypocrisy and complicity in maintaining the colonial state. Césaire confronts this question head-on in the opening lines of his Discourse on Colonialism: “The fact is that the so-called European civilization—‘Western’ civilization—as it has been shaped by two centuries of bourgeois rule, is incapable of solving two major problems to which its existence has given rise: the problem of the proletariat and the colonial problem.” 58 In this context the absolution of colonial violence by philosophy and art was addressed with alacrity by many who knew otherwise. “I do not come with timeless truths,” 59 are the words Frantz Fanon used to set the stage of the combat. In his rhetorical query “What does a man want? What does the black man want?” Fanon asked that the question of man be considered, not in the language of universal abstraction, but in the concrete realm of a refigured blackness. Blackness can be both figural and metaphoric in the works of postcolonial artists, as in Maqbool Fida Husain’s Man (1951; plate 155), Gerard Sekoto’s Head of a Man (1963; plate 169), El Salahi’s Self-Portrait of Suffering (1961; plate 119), and Malangatana Valente Ngwenya's To The Clandestine Maternity Home (1961; fig. 16). On Kawara’s Thinking Man (1952; plate 157) may not literally depict someone black, but the mottled brown skin of the diseased figure, standing slightly off-center in the frame, discloses itself as other. Certain works suggest blackness as constituting a resistance to an idealized and blinding whiteness.60 This is made the more so by blackness’s need for intense acts of looking. In Francis Newton Souza’s Head of

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a Man Thinking (plate 153) and Two Saints (After El Greco) (plate 154), two of a series of dense black paintings that the artist produced in 1965, the figure melts into the background (fig. 17). Rather than one dominating the other, figure and ground hold the same pictorial valence, as if Souza were demanding of viewers that their gaze penetrate the materially compacted surface in order to make out the forms gouged deep into the caked crust. One looks, but can barely perceive the images in the thick, hatched impasto of black-on-black oil paint. Yet this makes the blackness still more luminous. Postwar Paris may have been consumed by existentialism61 but in cities like Algiers, Baghdad, Bombay, Cairo, Dakar, Jakarta, Lagos, Nairobi, New Delhi, Saigon, Tehran, and Tunis, the rights of the black and the brown, from the Sahara to the Himalayas and beyond, were dialectically jousting with the rights of the white/European, from New York to Paris and London. Decolonization and civil rights movements demanding independence, equal rights, and an end to oppression, racism, segregation, and exclusion had revealed the hollowness of the high-minded discourse of humanism. These ideas also played out in the domain of art, producing different strands of pictorial effects. In Africa, for example, there was the idea of cultural sovereignty and of the uniqueness of postcolonial African modernity, a theme derived from the Négritude movement. An exemplary work of this culturalist take is Ben Enwonwu’s painting Going (1962; plate 289), a festival of forms, objects, and figures in a pictorial pageant of post-independence Nigeria.62 Graceful female figures float through a raucous landscape packed with

Introductory Essays

classical African masks and sculptures, suggesting the daily interaction among precolonial and postcolonial African cultures. Uche Okeke meanwhile sought similar results through different iconographic means and a concept of “natural synthesis,” 63 an attempt to harness both African and Western-modernist pictorial forms. Here, cultural sovereignty does not supersede individual autonomy; they are held in dialogic tension. In Aba Revolt (Women’s War) (1965; plate 290) Okeke foregrounds the discursive relevance of the postcolonial experience against the expressionist exuberance that is a core trope of modernist painting. His imagery is drawn from a tradition of feminist militancy in Africa, where women may strip naked as a shaming tactic against an oppressor, their nudity thus becoming a sign of radical protest. Both Enwonwu and Okeke articulate the presentness of the battle for decolonization and independence, as well as foregrounding a discursive interplay among different cultural archives—among colonial and postcolonial memories, among African and European forms. The depiction of decolonization through the image of the nubile celebrant suggests the continuity of tradition within the changing space of postcolonial modernity, while independence is embodied by an engaged figure committed to defending the integrity of the African space from colonial injustice.

REFIGURING THE OTHER The humanism articulated by European intellectuals in the postwar period was met with radical postcolonial doubt. As Césaire made clear, “What is serious is that ‘Europe’ is morally, spiritually indefensible.” 64 The reasons for these repudiations of Europe—a term to be understood as including the United States—had to do with the fact that Western traditions of thought had constructed a civilizational scaffold that defined man through a hierarchical scheme, a “racial epidermal schema,” in Fanon’s phrase.65 This scaffold set the European (white) “man” at the apex, the negated, deracinated figure of the black/brown, non-European other at the base. In self-exile in Paris, James Baldwin wrote of this figure, “The black

man insists, by whatever means he finds at his disposal, that the white man cease to regard him as an exotic rarity and recognize him as a human being.” 66 Invited by Léopold Sédar Senghor to write an introduction to an anthology of black and Malagasy poetry, Jean-Paul Sartre drew on the dialectic of race and racism as a route into the tension between humanism and colonialism. 67 To tackle that tension he articulated a recognition, “what I shall call the moment of separation or negativity: this antiracist racism is the only road that will lead to the abolition of racial differences.” 68 The prescription, though troubling in its strange advocacy, is worth considering, especially in the context of the search on the part of the oppressed for an insurgent, radical, separatist, and militant subjectivity.69 Sartre’s “moment of separation and negativity” was based precisely on the agenda of decolonization and the self-determination of the oppressed. Although the European powers initially failed to accept or recognize it, the postwar period marked the start of the collapse of empire and imperial rule in the search for justice, freedom, and an alternative global order of equality and self-determination among nations and peoples. This was the world envisaged by the Bandung Conference, organized by Sukarno in Indonesia in April 1955. The conference brought together a coalition of twenty-nine independent Asian and African countries—plus Yugoslavia, the one European participant—to discuss the postwar global order from the perspective of the colonized in the midst of the Cold War. In his opening address Sukarno requested vigilance among the gathered countries: I beg of you, do not think of colonialism only in the classic form which we of Indonesia, and our brothers in different parts of Asia and Africa, knew. Colonialism has also its modern dress, in the form of economic control, intellectual control, actual physical control by a small but alien community within a nation. It is a skillful and determined enemy, and it appears in many guises. It does not give up its loot easily. Wherever, whenever and however it appears, colonialism is an evil thing, and one which must be eradicated from the earth.70

Fig. 14. Markui Iri and Toshi Maruki. Water (Panel III) from “Hiroshima Panels” (series of 15 panels), 1952. Indian ink on Japanese paper, 180 × 720 cm. Maruki Gallery for the Hiroshima Panels, Higashimatsuyama

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Fig. 15. László Moholy-Nagy. Nuclear I, CH. 1945. Oil and graphite on canvas, 96.5 × 76.2 cm. Gift of Mary and Leigh Block 1947.40. The Art Institute of Chicago

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Introductory Essays

The Bandung Conference was a landmark moment in the postwar period. It inspired a new international consciousness in the decolonization movements and laid the foundation for an incipient world picture. What would a world liberated from totalitarian tyranny and colonial rule and exploitation be? Who and what should oversee the control of human destiny? Because of the nebulous alliances around which the battles were fought, the postwar arrangements that emerged after the war had the effect of producing atomized geopolitical spaces that were soon reconfigured into new battle fronts, from liberation wars to the Cold War. Nevertheless, the postwar period brought the business of European colonial empires to a crashing halt. As Tony Judt writes, the period entailed “Europe’s reduction,” for the Continent and its constituent states “could no longer aspire, after 1945, to international or imperial status.” 71 In the aftermath of the war, decolonization and liberation struggles would fundamentally reshape the imperial mission of European colonialism. They would mark the attenuation of empire.72 Even while the embers of imperialism still glowed across vassal states in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, in the decades that followed the shrinking of Europe also witnessed, as Judt observes, “the withering away of the ‘master narratives’ of European history: the great nineteenth-century theories of history, with their models of progress and change, of revolution and transformation.” 73 The postwar period also accelerated the process of movement between the colonies and the colonial metropoles. Within a decade after the end of the war, as refugees and the displaced returned to their home countries or moved elsewhere to be resettled, former colonial subjects began a counter-movement to the European cities their countries had been affiliated with to study, seek opportunity, and live. These migrations and exilic movements, a flow of people that included many artists, expanded the cosmopolitan imaginary. The Europe of the immigrations, to paraphrase the subtitle of Sarat Maharaj’s essay “The Congo Is Flooding the Acropolis,” was being transformed into a scene of radical alterity. The Continent foregrounded what Maharaj describes as the “immigrant exile’s portmanteau.” 74 The narrator of V. S. Naipaul’s autobiographical novel The Enigma of Arrival (1987) captures this epochal moment in a telling passage: Because in 1950 in London I was at the beginning of that great movement of peoples that was to take place in the second half of the twentieth century—a movement and a cultural mixing greater than the peopling of the United States, which was essentially a movement of Europeans to the New World. This was a movement between all continents. … Cities like London were to change. They were to cease being more or less national cities; they were to become cities of the world, modern-day Romes, establishing the pattern of what great cities should be, in the eyes of islanders like myself and people even more remote in language and culture. They were to be cities visited for learning and elegant goods and manners and freedom by all the barbarian peoples of the globe, people of forest and desert, Arabs, Africans, Malays.75

This convergence of dark peoples in Europe’s modern-day Romes sign­ posts the colonial/postcolonial clash so succinctly captured in Maharaj’s twinning of the Congo and the Acropolis. In his civilizational metaphor, the Congo essays backwardness while the Acropolis carries the stamp of all that is excellent, good, and enduring. In this scene, as Maharaj writes, “If the Congo evokes the swelling tide of the ‘dark peoples,’ the Acropolis signals Europe’s domination which the colonised seek to shake off.” 76

BETWEEN THE PACIFIC AND THE ATLANTIC

Artworks never exist in time. They have entry points. — Redza Piyadasa77

Throughout this essay the term “postwar” is used to describe the historical period following the end of World War II. These years were marked on the one hand by reconstruction and rehabilitation and on the other by a fundamental program of taking stock, asking questions, and a flurry of institutional activities: the creation of new global bodies such as the United Nations, the first global courts of justice, tribunals for war crimes, the agencies arising out of Bretton Woods (the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization), unesco, the Commission on Human Rights, and other corporate devices for mediating relationships among nations, economies, and scientific projects. The building of the foundations of the postwar global order was accompanied by the drafting of key international documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the rise of global decolonization and nonaligned movements that would usher in and solidify postcolonial accounts of political and cultural sovereignty. In the field of art, the postwar period marks a historical and cultural turning point, for it brought about a waning of the dominance of the Western European art capitals and the rise of the international presence and hegemony of contemporary American art, popular culture, and mass media.78 If America liberated Western Europe from the scourge of Nazism, it also liberated itself from the artistic and cultural domination of Western Europe. This shift in fact mirrored the altered terms of geopolitical power, with defeated Europe acquiring and acquiescing to new patrons and protectors. As the Cold War divided the Continent into two spheres of influence, between the Warsaw Pact countries of Eastern and Central Europe, allied with the Soviet Union, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries of Western Europe, allied with the United States, the arts also created a distinct ideological relationship between communism and capitalism, socialism and liberal democracy. A crude binary for sure, but the ideological differences in the division of East and West posited abstraction and socialist realism into two moral equivalents: freedom and restriction.

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It would be a mistake, however—one often made in the narratives of postwar history—to place the entire focus on the North Atlantic world and its Pacific corollary, as if the rest of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America did not exist. Surveys of art history in the postwar period—“art since 1945”—are notorious for such exclusions and blind spots. Until recently, art-historical narratives have tended to stay on the safe ground of an exclusivist illusion in which all forms of artistic innovation

Fig. 16. Malangatana Valente Ngwenya. To the Clandestine Maternity Home. 1961. Oil on canvas, 84.5 × 97.8 cm. Iwalewahaus, Universität Bayreuth. Courtesy DEVA, Universität Bayreuth

begin and end in the dominant centers of North American and Western European spheres of influence. This geopolitical bias has often tilted to the advantage of the countries that emerged victorious in the war—in other words to the North Atlantic alliance, thus skewing the study of contemporary art. While it is not our task to rewrite this narrative, it is nevertheless our purpose in this exhibition to present a new understanding of the actors and to raise substantial questions about the trajectories and genealogies of postwar art and its histories. In recent decades, a new art history has come to the fore that is neither exclusivist in its interests nor exclusionary in scholarship. New spaces of research are opening up, just as reconceived maps and networks of the flow of art and the assessment of its meaning are being constituted.79 And the rise of interest in the construction of a new map of global art history coincides with the emergence of recent scholarship that understands the value of studying the uneven development of historical methodologies across art histories. With this transformation in the optics of analysis, a vivid picture of postwar art is taking shape. Inevitably, such changes are attended by disputes that are at once methodological and historical, cultural and political. Yet these disputes not only engage and complicate the modernist narratives of art history, they have also produced insightful studies focused on regions, continents, countries, as well as individual artists. New

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art-historical scholarship from across the world in Asia, Africa, South America, the Middle East, and the former Eastern Europe are expanding the study of postwar art. It is our hope that some of these issues will come into sharper relief through this exhibition. Rather than being a map, Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965 is about networks. The project is also about the conundrums that have shaped the uneven exchange between the West and the Rest. On one hand it is a meditation, despite all doubts, on the creative vitality and potential of art, the ways in which the artists of the period engaged and experimented with forms and materials. This includes the transformations that occurred within aesthetic systems and within the logic of artistic production as new ideas and movements, technologies and techniques, emerged to redefine the subjects, strategies, and languages of contemporary art. At the same time, the postwar years mark a critical juncture in global art: the decline of the power of European art to set the agenda of global art discourse and the rise of American artistic hegemony. At the same time, an artistic worldliness emerged in which diasporic, transnational, and decolonized subjectivities charted new paths of artistic discourse. With this in mind, this exhibition is premised on the construction of a global picture of artistic production in the two decades that the project covers. Following the arc of two oceans—the Pacific and the Atlantic— Postwar is a reflection and retracing of the spaces and conditions of artistic production. By navigating the broad sweep of these epic bodies of water, the exhibition straddles continents, nations, geopolitical structures, economic patterns, and institutional frameworks to map new cultural networks and aesthetic agendas. These include case studies on the emergence of new nation states, the partition of others (India and Pakistan, North and South Korea, China and Taiwan, Israel and Palestine, East and West Germany), and the remaking of old ones. The encounters and artistic dialogues among artists, their exchanges of ideas, lend insight into the development of postwar art. From the First World to the Second World and Third World, from liberation struggles and civil rights movements to decolonization and nonalignment, from revolutionary socialism to liberal democracy, from the atomic age to the space age, from mass communication to consumerism, this survey informs and frames the processes that attended the remaking and remodeling of the global order. But which stories of art can this exhibition tell of the momentous events that shaped the world seventy years ago? Inevitably, a project of this scope and ambition faces vexing questions on multiple fronts. These include questions of interpretation, such as social versus formal art-historical methodology; of diachronic in contrast to synchronic curatorial approaches; of the criteria governing the inclusion and exclusion of artists and artworks; and of the balance between Western and non-Western art. At the same time, an exhibition such as this emerges from a long lineage of exhibitions and academic writing on art and artists of the period that this project covers. Against this backdrop, we must inevitably confront the weight of “canonical” art history, whose immense shadow falls on

Introductory Essays

Fig. 17. Francis Newton Souza. Untitled (Head). 1965. Oil on board, 73.7 × 58.4 cm. Courtesy Aicon Gallery, New York

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the shoulder of historical accounts and aesthetic interpretations in the face of alternative narratives. To soldier forth with this endeavor, the weight of “canonical” art history must first be shrugged off, let fall, gracefully, by the wayside. This does not necessarily mean casting it aside in toto, nor abandoning some of its many important insights. But it is part of this exhibition’s mission to acknowledge and identify the persistent blind spots of that history, and the Eurocentric limits that it places on artistic activities outside Europe and North America. To whatever extent possible, Postwar seeks, even in abbreviated terms, to be global and expansive, so as to tell a different kind of story of postwar art since 1945. In many ways the exhibition is revisionist in the best possible sense: it aims to create a multivalent network of relationships and differences, affiliations and cultural solidarities, singularities and multiplicities. Most significantly, it seeks to bring into dialogue the work of artists from North and South, East and West, regional and metropolitan, national and transnational, cosmopolitan and diasporic. In doing so it reshapes unsustainable art-historical boundary-making, which for too long has sequestered artists (including Europeans) in ethnocentric corrals and has divided the art world into consolidated enclaves, while consigning many significant artists from outside Western Europe and North America to the margins of critical inquiry. Postwar is a story that can only make sense on a broad canvas. It is neither a chronological narrative nor an episodic account of art movements; instead, the privileged mode of narration of this complex and complicated topoi is heterotemporal80 and heterochronical. 81 In other words, there is neither a singular temporality nor one sole chronicle. One way to approach this task might be to “provincialize” 82 (to borrow Dipesh Chakrabarty’s illuminating term) the postwar art-history industry—“Art since 1945”—in order to project what Terry Smith has called “the world-picture” of modern and contemporary art. 83 This clearly calls for a recasting of art history—an examination on a global scale, bearing in mind the work of artists across the world, in every continent, and of every shade. 84 It is our hope that Postwar not only reconceives the very syntax of artistic modernity but enlivens the multiplicity of the accounts that have come to shape it.

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1 The first American forces to enter Munich were a small squad of soldiers under the command of twenty-seven-year-old, German-born Lieutenant Wolfgang F. Robinow. See Charles Hawley, “Remembering World War II: The US Soldier Who Liberated Munich Recalls Confronting the Nazi Enemy,” Spiegel Online, April 29, 2005, available online at www.spiegel.de/ international/remembering-world-war-ii-the-us-soldier-who-liberated-munich-recalls-confronting-the-nazi-enemy-a-354029.html (accessed June 2016). 2 Located just sixteen kilometers (ten miles) from Munich, Dachau was the Nazi regime’s first concentration camp. It opened in March 1933, initially to house political prisoners opposing the regime, and was the model for all later concentration camps and subcamps built in Germany and German-occupied countries. See the website of the Dachau memorial at www.kz-gedenkstaette-dachau.de/index-e.html (accessed June 2016). 3 See Winfried Nerdinger, ed., Munich and National Socialism, trans. Jefferson Chase (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2015), p. 9. 4 V-E Day, the official end of the war, is commemorated on May 8 in Europe and on May 9 in the Soviet Union. Germany’s capitulation had been announced two days earlier, on May 6, in Rheims, where General Dwight D. Eisenhower had accepted the German surrender. Celebrations were postponed until May 8, however, when the Allied and Soviet commands signed the document of surrender together in Berlin. See Ian Buruma, Year Zero: A History of 1945 (New York: The Penguin Press, 2011), pp. 15–18. 5 See Sadao Asada, “The Shock of the Atomic Bomb and Japan’s Decision to Surrender: A Reconsideration,” in The Pacific Historical Review 67, no. 4 (November 1998): 477–512. 6 Like trophy hunters, American army officers added their signatures to the Goldenes Buch next to the names of august earlier visitors to the building. On the main and title page of the book, Sgt. Richard S. Radelet signed his name between the printed name and the signature of Adolf Hitler; Sgt. Eugene Johnson signed on the top page, above where Benito Mussolini and the Aga Khan had signed on September 25 and October 22, 1937; and 1st Lt. Robert E. Bishoff left his name below the signature of Edward, Duke of Windsor, who had visited on October 23, 1937. The guest book lies in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich. 7 On the complexity of the new geopolitical arrangements that followed the end of the war see Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (London: Penguin Books, 2005). 8 Hitler, “Speech Inaugurating the ‘Great Exhibition of German Art,’ Munich,” in Herschel B. Chipp, ed., Theories of Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), p. 476. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., p. 475. 11 Entartete Kunst opened on July 19, 1937, one day after the inauguration of the new Haus der Deutschen Kunst. See Entartete Kunst Ausstellungsführer, exh. cat. (Berlin: Verlag für Kultur- und Wirtschaftswerbung, 1937). 12 On Entartete Kunst and its impact on artists and the avant-garde see Stephanie Barron, “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1991). 13 After 1936, besides being one of Hitler’s favorite painters, Adolf Ziegler also served as president of the Reichskulturkammer (Chamber of visual arts), a position that gave him the responsibility of coordinating the seizure of artworks deemed degenerate from museums throughout Germany. It was Ziegler who was responsible for the hasty organization of the Entartete Kunst exhibition, beginning in Munich and then touring the country’s cities. 14 Hitler, “Speech Inaugurating the ‘Great Exhibition of German Art,’ Munich,” p. 479. 15 The various testimonies presented in the course of the denazification of the Haus der Deutschen Kunst include a submission made by three Frenchmen who had been sent to work there during the war as forced labor. The letter, signed by a Mr. Armand, a Mr. Mesler, and a Mr. Petior Grolet, stated that during their time at the museum, Mr. H. Gräf, Mr. A. Kugler, Mr. Otto, Mr. K., and Mr. Koppauer had treated them correctly. The letter clearly implicates the museum in the use of forced labor. See M. Armand, M. Mesler, and M. Petior Grolet, denazification certification letter for Heinrich Gräf, May 1, 1945. Spk A K539 Gräf, Heinrich, Staatsarchiv München, Munich. 16 The earliest published document using the changed name is the title page of the book Ausstellung Bayerischer Gemälde des 15. und 16 Jahrhunderts (Munich: Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives, Office of the Military Government for Bavaria, 1946), the catalogue for an exhibition that opened on January 17, 1946. 17 The building seems to have remained identified as the Haus der Deutschen Kunst at least until late in 1945. A letter in the Haus der Kunst archives written on November 2, 1945, identifies the Officers’ Club as located in the Haus der Deutschen Kunst through both the printed letterhead and writing in the letter itself. It is signed by the civilian personnel chief of the Officers’ Mess and carries an identification stamp noting the same location. 18 See the exhibition catalogue Ausstellung Bayerischer Gemälde des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts. The exhibition was the first, other than the Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung, to be staged in

Okwui Enwezor

39

the building since 1944. It contained works from the Bayerische Staatsgemälde-Sammlungen,

that laid many German cities to waste see W. G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction,

the Bavarian state painting collection.

1999, Eng. trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Random House, 2003).

19 Because Munich’s Alte Pinakothek had been damaged during the war, the paintings were

30 After the end of the war, beyond the exhaustive reports of governmental and human-rights

exhibited at Haus der Kunst, where the collection remained until the 1950s.

organizations on the nature of the death camps, a range of memoirs by survivors began to

20 The Bavarian, January 24, 1946, p. 8.

appear. One of the earliest accounts published, originally in 1947, was that of the Jewish-­

21 A review of the museum’s rapid reorganization of its artistic program is available online

Italian chemist Primo Levi, who had survived internment in Auschwitz. See Levi, If This Is a

at www.hausderkunst.de/en/research/history/historical-documentation/after-the-war/ (ac-

Man, trans. Stuart Woolf (London: Orion Press, 1959). For a compelling elaboration of the

cessed June 2016).

meaning of Auschwitz and its moral and ethical implications see Giorgio Agamben, Remnants

22 The Pablo Picasso exhibition included 126 paintings, 34 sculptures, 25 drawings, 56

of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, 1998, Eng. trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York:

prints, and 13 ceramic works. It traveled to the Rheinisches Museum Köln-Deutz, Cologne, and

Zone Books, 1999). Even camp administrators, including some of the most notorious ones,

to the Kunstverein and the Kunsthalle-Altbau, Hamburg. See Picasso 1900–1955 (Munich:

wrote memoirs; see Rudolph Höss, Death Dealer: The Memoirs of the Kommandant at

Austellungleitung München, e.V. Haus der Kunst, 1955).

Auschwitz, 1946–47, Eng. trans. Andrew Pollinger (Boston: Da Capo Press, 1996).

23 See Jürgen Claus, Entartete Kunst. Bildersturm vor 25 Jahren, exh. cat. (Munich: Ausstel-

31 See Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 1961 (rev. ed. New York: Holmes

lungsleitung München e.V. Haus der Kunst, 1962).

and Meier, 1985).

24 See Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley, FDR and the Creation of the U.N. (New Haven

32 For many, World War II has come to signify and conjure two particular images of appalling

and London: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 45.

horror: the Holocaust—the extermination of millions of European Jews—and the dropping of

25 See Official Proceedings and Documents of United Nations Monetary and Financial Con-

atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

ference, vols. 1 and 2, available online at https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/docs/publications/

33 See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 1958 (reprint ed. Chicago: University of Chicago

books/1948_state_bwood_v1.pdf and https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/docs/publications/books/

Press, 1998).

1948_state_bwood_v2.pdf (accessed June 2016). See also Ben Steil, The Battle of Bretton

34 See Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, 2002, Eng. trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford:

Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order

Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 33–38.

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).

35 For Arendt, the convergence of the ideology of race and its management was “actually

26 The Pan-African Congress was organized by Kwame Nkrumah, who led Ghana (formerly the

made on the Dark Continent. Race was the emergency explanation of human beings whom

Gold Coast) to independence from Britain in 1957 and became its first prime minister, and the

no European or civilized man could understand and whose humanity so frightened and hu-

Trinidadian writer and trade unionist George Padmore. The congress, a postwar attempt to re-

miliated the immigrants that they no longer cared to belong to the same human species.” See

suscitate W. E. B. Dubois’s earlier Pan-African Congresses, brought together representatives of

Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951 (reprint ed. San Diego and New York: Harcourt,

African and West Indian political, labor, and civic organizations who declared, “The delegates of

1985), p. 185.

the Fifth Pan-African Congress believe in peace. How could it be otherwise when for centuries

36 Ibid, p. 37.

the African peoples have been victims of violence and slavery. Yet if the Western world is still

37 Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 1950, rev. 1955, Eng. trans. Joan Pinkham

determined to rule mankind by force, then Africans, as a last resort, may have to appeal to force

(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), p. 35.

in the effort to achieve Freedom, even if force destroys them and the world.” See Padmore, ed.,

38 Ibid., p. 41.

History of the Pan African Congress (London: The Hammersmith Bookshop, 1947), p. 5.

39 Agamben, Homer Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, 1995, Eng. trans. Daniel Heller-­

27 “During the war years the museum modified its program, working in support of the war

Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 153.

effort by preparing special programs, posters, films, and exhibitions for the government, the

40 See Rachel E. Perry, “Jean Fautrier’s Jolies Juive,” October 108 (Spring 2004): 51–72.

armed forces, and later on for veterans. The Museum executed thirty-eight contracts for various

41 Sarah Wilson, “Paris Post War: In Search of the Absolute,” in Frances Morris, Paris Post War:

governmental agencies, including Office of War Information, the Library of Congress, and the

Art and Existentialism 1945–55, exh. cat. (London: Tate Gallery, 1994), p. 27.

Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs. Nineteen exhibitions were sent abroad and

42 The British Army Film and Photographic Unit was a corps of trained photographers and

twenty-nine were shown on the premises, all related to the war and the problems and suffering it

cameramen established on October 24, 1941, to record military events in which the British

engendered.” Sam Hunter, “The Museum of Modern Art: Introduction,” in The Museum of Modern

Armed Forces were engaged. The No. 5 British Army Film and Photographic Unit entered the

Art, New York: The History and Collection (New York: Harry N. Abrams and The Museum of Mod-

Belsen-Bergen concentration camp on April 17, 1945, two days after the camp had been lib-

ern Art, 1984), pp. 20–21. In a bulletin from 1942, the Museum had this to say about its collec-

erated by British and Canadian Forces, although some of the unit’s photographers had already

tion: “Though it does not so obviously bear upon the War, the museum collection is a symbol of

entered the camp earlier. One year later, in 1946, the unit disbanded. See Mark Celinscak, 

one of the four freedoms for which we are fighting—the freedom of expression. It is art that Hitler

Distance from the Belsen Heap: Allied Forces and the Liberation of a Nazi Concentration Camp

hates because it is modern, progressive, challenging (Hitler insists upon magazine cover realism

(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), p. 38.

or prettiness); because it is international, leading to understanding and tolerance among nations

43 On the question of what images can show about the Holocaust see Georges Didi-­

(Hitler despises the culture of all countries but his own); because it is free, the free expression of

Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz, 2003, Eng. trans.

free men (Hitler insists upon the subjugation of art).” “The Museum and the War,” The Bulletin of

Shane B. Lillis, 2008 (repr ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

the Museum of Modern Art 10, no. 1 (October–November 1942): 19. Even in the postwar period,

44 At the end of the essay “Cultural Criticism and Society,” 1951, Theodor Adorno, who spent

no museum was more directly involved than MoMA as an arbiter of “progressive” modernism

the war years in Los Angeles, wrote that “cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final

and a promoter of American contemporary art. In 1952, the Museum’s second director, René

stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”

d’Harnoncourt, established its International Program (later succeed by its International Coun-

See Adorno, Prisms, Eng. trans. Shiery Weber Nicholsen and Samuel Weber (Cambridge, Mass.:

cil) to promote modern art and contemporary American art through a global lending program

The MIT Press, 1983), p. 34.

and through traveling exhibitions sometimes organized in collaboration with U.S. government

45 This dictum came as the subtitle of “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” an in-depth article on the

agencies. These collaborations were the subject of controversy, especially when they involved

trial of Adolf Eichmann that Arendt wrote on assignment for The New Yorker, which published

the CIA-financed Congress for Cultural Freedom. See Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the

it in February and March 1963. Arendt later revised and expanded the article into a book:

Piper?: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta Books, 1999), pp. 267–74.

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking, 1964).

28 Worldwide statistics remain incomplete, but it is calculated that over 40 million died across

46 Immediately after the war, with the onset of the Nuremberg trials and the denazification

the world. The Soviet Union alone incurred an estimated 20 million war dead. See Micheal

process, the German people were confronted with questions of their responsibility, or lack

Clodfelter, Warfare and Armed Conflicts: A Statistical Encyclopedia of Casualty and Other

thereof, for the crimes of National Socialism. One of the first thinkers to grapple with the

Figures, 1494–2007, 1992 (rev. ed. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2008), pp. 560–61.

issue of guilt was the philosopher Karl Jaspers, who had been expelled by the Nazis from the

29 Buruma recounts a chilling exchange during the German surrender to the Soviets. Field

University of Heidelberg in 1937 but had remained in Germany through the war, although he

Marshal Wilhelm Keitel of Germany, Buruma writes, “told the Russians that he was horrified

was strongly anti-Nazi. When he launched his inquiry into the idea of German guilt, then, in a

by the extent of the destruction wrought on the German capital. Whereupon a Russian officer

series of public lectures delivered in the fall of 1945, just a few months after Germany’s sur-

asked Keitel whether he had been equally horrified when on his orders, thousands of Soviet

render, he had the authority to engage the most important moral dilemma faced by Germans

villages and towns were obliterated, and millions of people, including many children, were bur-

of the postwar generation. See Jaspers, Die Schuldfrage, 1947, Eng. trans. as The Question of

ied under the ruins.” See Buruma, Year Zero, p. 18. For a riveting recollection of the bombings

German Guilt, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Doubleday Broadway, 1948). Arendt, Wolfgang

40

Introductory Essays

Borchert, Alfred Döblin, and Eugen Kogon were among the important voices dealing with the

Centre, Asele Institute, and Minneapolis: African American Cultural Center, 1982).

issue of guilt within Germany immediately after the war.

64 Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, p. 32.

47 See Claudia Mesch, Modern Art at the Berlin Wall: Demarcating Culture in the Cold War

65 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 112.

Germanys (London and New York: Tauris Academic Studies, 2008), p. 55.

66 James Baldwin, “Stranger in the Village,” Harper’s Magazine, October 1953, p. 45.

48 Some of Gerhard Richter’s early paintings, including Hitler (1962), Bombers (1963),

67 Born in 1906 in Senegal, Léopold Sédar Senghor cofounded the black-consciousness literary

Uncle Rudi (1965), Herr Heyde (1965), Family by the Seaside (1964), and others, address

movement Négritude, with Césaire and Léon Damas, in 1935, several years before the outbreak

images, events, and individuals related to Nazism and the war. He recently completed a

of World War II. A Paris-based coalition of intellectuals of the African diaspora, the founders used

cycle of four large-scale abstract paintings based on grainy black-and-white photographs of

their literary journal L’Étudiant noir as a platform for a dialogic, positivist black/African humanism

Birkenau. It is intriguing that he chose abstraction as a way to engage this obviously difficult

and a resistance to colonialism. Négritude—a neologism coined by Césaire—appropriated the

subject matter, after over fifty years without producing such a picture. See Helmut Friedl,

negativity of the pejorative racist terms “négre” and “nigger” and deployed W. E. B. Dubois’s dia-

Gerhard Richter: Birkenau (Cologne: Buchhandlung Walther König, 2015).

lectical idea of a diasporic black double consciousness to contest, challenge, and reject Western

49 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Gerhard Richter’s Atlas: The Anomic Archive,” October 88

cultural, racial, and moral domination. The movement’s influence went beyond the initial franco-

(Spring 1999): 143.

phone world of African and Caribbean writers to encompass much of the African and diasporic

50 Ibid., pp. 143–44.

worlds. See James A. Arnold, Modernism and Négritude: The Poetry and Poetics of Aimé Cesairé

51 For a careful translation and examination of Celan’s great poem, which thematizes the nec-

(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981); Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York:

essary voicing of the Shoah, see Paul Celan, “Death Fugue,” Eng. trans. John Felstiner, in

Bantam Books, 1989); and Cesairé, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, 1947, Eng. trans.

Felstiner, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 31–32.

Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2001).

52 Mark Godfrey, Abstraction and the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). 53 After their initial appearance in Mainichi Shinbun in August 1945, Yosuke Yamahata’s

68 Jean-Paul Sartre, “Black Orpheus,” 1948, Eng. trans. John MacCombie, The Massachusetts

photographs were proscribed and kept out of circulation. The ban was lifted in 1952, and the

as the introduction to Senghor, ed., Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie negre et malgache (Paris:

magazines Asahi Graph and Life soon published the photographs, respectively in the issues

Quadrigge/Presse Universitaire de France, 1948).

Review 6, no. 1 (Autumn 1964–Winter 1965): 18. The essay was originally published in French

of August 6 and September 29, 1952. In 1955, Edward Steichen, curator of photography at

69 See Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961, Eng. trans. Constance Farrington (New York:

New York’s Museum of Modern Art, included some of the photographs in the Museum’s influ-

Grove Press, 1963).

ential exhibition The Family of Man. Similar censorship of images of the bomb also occurred in

70 Sukarno, quoted in Partha Chatterjee, “Empire and Nation Revisited: 50 Years After

films. As Jerome F. Shapiro writes, “Recently, film historians have brought to light the extent

Bandung,” in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 6, no. 4 (August 2006): 487.

to which the Supreme Command of Allied Powers (scap) censored references to Hiroshima

71 Judt, Postwar, p. 7.

and Nagasaki in films made during the Occupation years of Japan, and the extent to which the

72 See Chatterjee, “Empire and Nation Revisited,” pp. 487–96.

Japanese government itself also suppressed, and even now continues to suppress, culturally

73 Judt, Postwar, p. 7.

and historically important films about the atomic bombings.” See Shapiro, Atomic Bomb Cinema:

74 Sarat Maharaj, “The Congo Is Flooding the Acropolis: Art in the Britain of Immigrations,”

The Apocalyptic Imagination in Film (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 6.

Third Text 15 (Summer 1991): 77–90.

54 Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein were among those alarmed about the consequences

75 V. S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), pp. 141–42.

of the introduction of atomic weapons of mass destruction. On July 9, 1955, they called a

76 Maharaj, “The Congo Is Flooding the Acropolis,” p. 81.

press conference at Claxton Hall, London, where they released the Russell-Einstein Mani-

77 The poignant and evocative text of this epigraph appears as an inscription on the surface

festo on nuclear disarmament. See Russell and Einstein, “The Russell-Einstein Manifesto,”

of a conceptual artwork, a painting titled Entry Points (1978), by the Malaysian artist Redza

in Joseph Rotblat, Scientists in the Quest for Peace: A History of the Pugwash Conferences

Piyadasa. In many ways it articulates with incisive brevity the task of mapping the global coor-

(Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1972), 137–140. The manifesto is also available online,

dinates of the artworks in this exhibition.

at https://pugwash.org/1955/07/09/statement-manifesto/; see also https://pugwash.org/

78 Serge Guilbaut has made the contentious claim that the waning of Paris as the center

1955/07/09/audio-bertand-russell-joseph-rotblat-manifesto-press-conference-9-july-­

of modernism and the rise of New York were consequences of the concerted assertion of

1955/ (both accessed June 2016). See also Jaspers, The Future of Mankind, 1958, Eng. trans.

American hegemony in global cultural politics. See Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of

E. B. Ashton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961). The book was also published under

Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, Eng. trans. Arthur Goldhammer

the title The Atom Bomb and the Future of Man.

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).

55 Along with Russell and Einstein, the philosophers, theologians, and scientists addressing

79 Several exhibitions since the late 1980s have presented new curatorial research that

these issues included Jaspers, Günther Anders, and Lewis Mumford.

has broadened the field of postwar scholarship. For a few examples see Rasheed Araeen,

56 In cinema there emerged a genre of filmmaking that Shapiro calls “atomic bomb cinema”:

The Other Story, exh. cat. (London: The Hayward Gallery, 1989); Jean-Paul Ameline, Face

films such as Children of Hiroshima (1952), by Kaneto Shindõ; The Bells of Nagasaki (1953),

à l’histoire, 1933–1996, exh. cat. (Paris: Flammarion and Centre Georges Pompidou, 1996);

by Hideo Ôba; Gojira (Godzilla, 1954), by Ishirõ Honda; Hiroshima mon amour (1959), by Alain

Luis Camnitzer, Jane Farver, and Rachel Weiss, eds., Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin,

Resnais; La Jeteé (1962), by Chris Marker; and Stanley Kubrick’s classic nuclear war spoof

1950s–1980s, exh. cat. (New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999); Okwui Enwezor, The Short

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). See Shapiro,

Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994, exh. cat. (Munich:

Atomic Bomb Cinema.

Prestel and Museum Villa Stuck, 2001); Mari Carmen Ramírez and Héctor Olea, Inverted

57 Homi Bhabha, “Foreword. Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche, and Colonial Condition,” in

Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America, exh. cat. (New Haven: Yale University Press, and

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 1952, Eng. trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London:

Houston: Museum of Fine Arts Houston, 2004).

Pluto Press, 1986), p. xx.

80 See Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Preface to the 2nd edition,” in Provincializing Europe: Postco-

58 Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, p. 31.

lonial Thought and Historical Difference, 2000, (rev. ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press,

59 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 9.

2007), p. xvii.

60 David Siqueiros’s Cain en los Estados Unidos shows a white mob—figures of the gro-

81 Nicolas Bourriaud uses this term to underline the multiplicity of accounts of contemporary

tesque—dragging a bloodied black man out of a prison cell for a lynching. In the blurry

art. See Bourriaud, statement from a brochure outline for the “Altermodern” program of the

forms of Jack Whitten’s series of heads (Head IV—Lynching, 1964, for example), whiteness

Tate Triennial (London: Tate Britain, April 2008).

assumes a ghostly presence.

82 The terminological turn made through Chakrabarty’s concept of provincialization is enor-

61 See Morris, Paris Post War. The intriguing aspect of Morris’s exhibition is not so much its

mously useful in grappling with how to break up historical master narratives. See his Provin-

exclusive focus on the work of white European artists as the absolute absence of any discus-

cializing Europe.

sion of French colonialism in Indochina and North Africa, regions that in the period in question

83 Terry Smith, “World Picturing in Contemporary Art: The Iconogeographic Turn,” Australian

were literally at war with the French state. The absence strikes one as part of a general his-

and New Zealand Journal of Art 7, no. 1 (2006): 24–46. See also Smith, What Is Contemporary

toricist fiction that pervades the art establishment and its institutions.

Art? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), pp. 5–6.

62 See Chika Okeke-Agulu, Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-­

84 For an important contribution toward an expansive methodological view of art history

Century Nigeria (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015).

studied on such a global scale, see David Summers, Real Spaces: World Art History and the

63 See Uche Okeke, Art in Development: A Nigerian Perspective (Nimo, Nigeria: Documentation

Rise of Western Modernism (London: Phaidon, 2003).

Okwui Enwezor

41

ART, WORLD, HISTORY Katy Siegel

Introductory Essays

L’histoire de la peinture est liée a celle de l’humanité (The history of painting is linked to the history of humanity). —Mohamed Khadda, 1964 1

P

ostwar is more than Aftermath and Triumph, the most obvious traces of World War II in the view from Europe or the United States. The destruction, ruin, and then reconstruction of Europe, alongside or in conflict with the rising tide of American affluence and influence, is only one part of the story, the part that focuses on the shifting fortunes of the West. The destroyed cities to be reconstructed and modernized included Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Tokyo, as well as the Arab cities—Cairo, Beirut, Damascus—bombarded by colonial violence before and after the war. 2 Yet the tragedies of European cities are often cast as singular in art-historical accounts, particularly those written for exhibitions that tell and retell the story of Europe and/or the United States, with increasing detail or polemic.3 In these accounts, even this story’s other, more proximate side—the tale of Communist Russia and Eastern Europe, the West’s competitors in the Cold War—was long in eclipse. 4 In recent decades, however, historians tout court have aggressively questioned and reconfigured received accounts of the postwar period.5 First came the revelations from Eastern European archives opened after 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Communist bloc, affording a much more detailed vision of Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the other Iron Curtain nations. A second wave of historical reconsideration looked at the so-called Third World; many political, social, and economic histories over the past two decades have discussed anticolonial struggles and new nationhood. 6 Still more recent accounts have traced the transnational ties of the pan-Arab and -African movements and the affiliations of the nonaligned nations. Many historians tackle the broader historical conundrum of the relation of these new accounts to the older ones that focused on the two superpowers and their Cold War, asking whether China, for example, or Asia broadly conceived, has a history incommensurate with that paradigm.7 Others have countered the East-West narrative altogether, reorienting to North-South and arguing that the American and Western European perception of the threat posed by masses of poor people of color was equal to that of the threat posed by Communism. 8 Debates have arisen around the subject matter of history as well, around whether to emphasize the paper trail of foreign policy or the more nebulous category of culture. 9 And some, particularly postcolonial theorists, have questioned the very idea of world history as a linear development in which the world’s cultures belong to a single master narrative. 10 Art historians have not been absent from these disciplinary shifts. Scholars and curators have done much—though certainly not all—of the primary research required to write accounts of the artistic

figures and institutions of new nations (although Western museums, particularly in the United States, have been slow to stage monographic exhibitions for postwar artists from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and the Middle East).11 The question of how such accounts might sit within, inform, or refigure a larger account of modern art, and of art history more broadly, remains far from resolved. Scholars studying the formerly colonized nations have produced penetrating critiques of the center/periphery account of modernism, with its implication of delayed or imitative versions in the non-West, and have developed subsequent debates about “alter” or hybrid modernities. 12 But no previous exhibition has attempted a global account of postwar art, staged from a perspective of interrelation. A worldwide perspective is often seen as properly relevant only after 1989, when the end of state Communism created the conditions for a global art world. This change has been categorized as a shift from the “modern” to the “contemporary.” 13 And in fact, contemporary art from the non-West seems an easier fit for the market than the work made earlier by “modern” artists in new nations, where stylistic choices were more obviously restricted by ideology (emphasized in many accounts of Chinese art) or seemed imitative to Western critics (as in many accounts of Middle Eastern art). Global art histories therefore rush to the post-1989 years, perhaps after a brief prelude, in order to leap over a moment—“the modern”—when much art is dismissed as being of questionable quality; as being marked by inadequate difference from other art sharing a seemingly belated style; or, conversely, as producing too much friction with globalism, thanks to a nationalist political orientation that now appears old-fashioned. A few scholars have sought to rewrite the history of world art as a whole, producing radically reconceived survey texts or theoretical reconsiderations of historical models, epitomized respectively by the work of David Summers and Hans Belting. 14 The global survey begins at a moment well before modernism and attempts to locate universal features of art from different cultures and periods, allowing an art history that doesn’t jump, as in the earlier survey model, from ancient Egypt to ancient Greece, as though art in Egypt simply stopped at a certain year. However well-intentioned, the approach can seem an art-historical analogue of the neoliberal “end of history,” while its attempt at global comprehension through the quest for universals—often found in formal similarities—occludes appreciation of the material specificities, politics, and conflicts in and among different artistic cultures. In other words, it occludes history itself—the relations and conflicts among nations and cultures that shaped the postwar world, with actors interacting intensely and in many directions on a global scale, well before 1989. (In fact, accepting 1989 as the crucial date presumes the centrality of the Cold War, a centrality that historians have recently sought to question.) It was in the postwar period that relations among artistic practices across the world became active and necessary, though not by any means equal. 15 After 1945, the world was united, not in the recurrent hope of a rational universalism in the

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Fig. 1. Mohammed Khadda. Alphabet libre (Free Alphabet). 1964. Oil on canvas, 100 × 81 cm. Musée national des beaux-arts d’Alger, Algiers

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interest of humanity as a whole, but by a new order based on continuous conflict among political and economic interests. This conflict both produced and was enforced by apocalyptic technology, mass production, endless war, new forms of economic empire and resistance, and global mass communication. Postwar seeks to explore—at least in a first draft—the artistic aspect of this situation, examining it in a way that is both global and historical, framed by the ambitious questions posed by historians and making use of the primary and critical work done by art historians in particular. No exhibition, of course, even one on the scale of Postwar, can fully measure up to this task. Not only did we have to make choices about what to include, but our choices were of course constrained by the availability of particular artworks, a condition itself reflecting a whole history of valuation (entailing economics and even international diplomatic relations). But within the practical limits curators always face, Postwar has taken its cues, above all, from reconsiderations of the nature of global history. The exhibition rests on the shoulders of those who have done the demanding work of recovering and studying individual artists from around the world, and also on those of recent art historians who have looked at transnational connections among artists, including those belonging to pan-Arab and -African, SouthSouth, and nonaligned networks.16 It reflects an attempt to see the Cold War as one aspect of a global struggle for power; to see Europe as only one terrain of that struggle, and as itself provincial in this sense; and to look at history not as the unfolding of a single story, or as a fractured plurality of stories, but as a knot of mutually inflecting histories. 17 This complexity was already sensed by the artist On Kawara in 1955, speaking at a roundtable, “Atarashii ningen zō ni mukatte” (Toward a New Human Image), in Tokyo:

the art-world battle between the United States, newly ascendant politically and economically, and the damaged nations of France, Germany, and to a lesser degree England. In fact, however, the makers (and even many supporters) of the apparently new artistic modes in New York and on the West Coast were initially tentative in their claims for their work, and exhibitions of these modes included European, Mexican, and Cuban artists along with Americans. The only insistent note was the assertion that American art, long seen as provincial, imitative, and

In our reality, we did not pass through an upwardly mobile time, or the best time, of modernity. Take, for example, capitalist production. We are already mired in late-stage ills of monopoly [without having gone through its earlier stages]. At the same time, feudal institutions and sentiments remain, permeating every aspect of our life. I suspect that these different historical stages are layered. When we try to transcend this, we cannot proactively change our reality, unless we shed a Westernized monolithic viewpoint and accept these contradictions as autonomous subjects in order to devise a method or plan for change based on the concrete reality.18

Fig. 2. Wols (Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze). Apatride. 1944. Photography. Private Collection

Kawara was speaking specifically about Japan, but his insistence that histories coexist, as historical strata, so to speak, has broad implications. Even though he uses the language of development—stages, modern­ ity—he undercuts its reality. As we begin to see the modern, including its dominant iterations in the United States and Europe, as both local and a matter of mutual exchange, the obdurate centrality of this category to our thinking about the art of the period may begin to dissolve. The starting point for most histories and exhibitions of the postwar period has historically been just that tale of Aftermath and Triumph—

primitive or even barbaric, might in fact be developing something of value. 19 Even within the United States, the art of Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock, Mark Tobey, and others that was later labeled “Abstract Expressionism” was only one mode among others; there were also realisms of all stripes, such as the identifiably American subjects of Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth and the popular leftist images of Ben Shahn (the last, famously, paired with de Kooning in the American Pavilion of the Venice Biennale of 1954), which, however, have come to be granted far less historical importance. 20

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Despite growing excitement about Abstract Expressionism, the market and general regard for it were weak both inside and outside the United States until the mid-to-late 1950s, and the attention it received was balanced by scornful dismissal of its outlandishness. Early “since 1945” accounts (such as Documenta II, in 1959, and various textbook surveys) placed the United States in a relatively minor role, and often reached back before the dark interlude of the war (and its attendant, questionable art) in an effort to cast postwar European artists as the heirs of earlier modernists such as Vasily Kandinsky—Hans

the most obvious artistic (rather than territorial) issue was the apparently purely stylistic conflict between abstraction and figuration. This pair of categories—which became a cliché largely without passing through the stage of analysis—was described bluntly by the painter Georg Baselitz: “There was abstraction in the West and realism in the East.” 24 At the level of official policy, prescription, and nationalist promotion of the arts, the line between the two was indeed drawn firmly, as in the United States famously advertising abstraction as democratic freedom and the Soviets mandating legible, uplifting images

Fig. 3. Wifredo Lam. La Réunion (The Reunion). 1945. Oil on paper, remount, white chalk, 152 × 212 cm. Paris, Centre Pompidou - Musée national d'art moderne - Centre de création industrielle

Hartung, for example, or the politically blameless artist Wols (featured in Documenta I and II and in the 1958 Venice Biennale), a German resident in France who was interned in a French camp during the war and died six years after its end (fig. 2).21 It was in this context that the exhibition The New American Painting, which circulated through Basel, Milan, Madrid, Berlin, Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris, and London in 1958–59, accompanied by a Pollock retrospective, announced the newly uppercase, newly official label. Reviews were mixed, but regardless of their verdict critics often saw a battle between former national allies—a moment, as Lawrence Alloway characterized the 1960 Venice Biennale, when “[Jean] Fautrier slapped Franz Kline or Kline socked Fautrier.” 22 American political and artistic ascendance would become much more truly joined in the 1960s, with Pop art, whose content seemed to anticipate this reception.23 By this time the territorial battles between New York and Paris had long taken their place in the context of the Cold War. From this optic

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of the labor and health made possible under Communism. This institutional history, of diplomatic papers and museum correspondence, has conditioned art-historical accounts. 25 But in the day-to-day lives of artists, the practices were rarely as fixed as the names for them were in the discourse. 26 Although critics could be didactic about the historical necessity and definition of abstraction, many artists were not interested in it as an explicit program or supposed telos of painting. Abstraction as an absolute dictate—as it was for Ad Reinhardt—was rare, and to some seemed ridiculous enough that Elaine de Kooning parodied it in her spoof article “Pure Paints a Picture.” 27 Her husband, Willem de Kooning, along with Wols, Tobey, Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Mark Rothko, and many others who were referred to as abstract painters rejected the term, linking it to the rationalism that in their eyes led to fascism.28 Nor did they prefer its opposite, which artists like Norman Lewis and Francis Bacon

Introductory Essays

Fig. 4. Taro Okamoto. My Reality. 1950. Digital scan from silver gelatin print. Taro Okamoto Museum of Art, Kawasaki

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Fig. 5. Mathias Goeritz. El animal del Pedregal. 1951. Reinforced concrete. Courtesy L.M. Daniel Goeritz & Galería La Caja Negra, Madrid

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identified as “illustration,” seeking instead an impure and active relation between the artist and his or her materials and in the specificities of the paint’s speed and viscosity and color on canvas, whether it made a face or a squiggle (but, for these particular artists, no squares). Furthermore, artists were ambivalent not only about abstraction, which they linked to a discredited theoretical and ideological modernism, but also about the United States. Many of them were immigrants, Jews, gay, socialists, and African Americans, with cosmopolitan identities and experiences that put them at odds with any conservative posturing about the nation (making them suspicious of the Whitney Museum of American Art, for example), even as some found things to love in American culture: its informality, its music, its movies. Representation too could be an engaged and personal practice rather than a socially dictated one. While the Communist regimes had mandates for political representations and acceptable subject matter, those mandates fluctuated through the thaw after the death of Joseph Stalin and during Mao Zedong’s Hundred Flowers campaign.29 Soviet painting had a range of styles, including “severe” and romantic, reaching back to nineteenth-century Russia, and Chinese traditional ink-painting techniques were sometimes forbidden and sometimes allowed, depending on the content and the artist. There was art in the “popular democracies” of Eastern Europe—by Vladimir Boudnik, Ivo Gattin, and Tadeusz Kantor, for example—that engaged gestural abstraction or that continued earlier geometric styles. Art by Communist artists varied throughout the world, as manifested in the work of the many socialist and Communist artists in the West, such as André Fougeron, Renato Guttuso, and Charles White, and in the widespread influence of the Mexican artist David Siqueiros (despite his own Stalinism) on the work of artists as varied as Kawara and Inji Efflatoun. In the United States, popular paintings and illustrations by Norman Rockwell were more than a match for Soviet art as realist propaganda. Nonetheless, the tension between abstraction and figuration was real, and it is fascinating to see how it played out not only in the conflict between East and West, or between Communism and capitalism, but also as a way of figuring other frictions—most notably those aroused by decolonization, arguably the most significant political fact of the period. In this context it provided an artistic register for the revival of an earlier understanding of East-West conflict, that between Asian and Middle Eastern cultures on the one hand and Western on the other.30 Here Western abstraction was often positioned against non-Western representational content, from rural scenes of indigenous life to political, ethnic, or religious imagery. Succinctly describing this conceptual structure as one that “divides art into form, which is learned and borrowed from the West, and content, whose raw material is abstracted from national cultures,” art historian Shiva Balaghi finds this dilemma at the root of a forty-year-old question in her field: “Is this art modern and is it Iranian?” 31 The fact that a parallel question had been asked of American art in the early and mid-twentieth century, and in fact in many locations outside Europe, helps us

to understand the divide as less between East and West than between modernism, as a provincial (and exceptional) European conceit, and the art of every other place in the world, especially the former colonies.32 Even after World War II, the form of the modern, despite the putative triumph of American art, still primarily meant the modernism of the former colonial powers, whether known through the work of an early-twentieth-century artist such as Paul Klee (a sympa­t hetic figure for many artists in Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East because of some common feeling for nature and/or Klee’s own reciprocal interest in arts of those regions) or through the academic, third-generation Cubism of colonial art education. What an art historian might understand as an (unanswerable) question about style was experienced by artists as an (impossible) demand that the artist choose between social and artistic identity, as when Iba N’Diaye spoke of the pressure on Senegalese artists to “be ‘Africans’ before being painters or sculptors.” 33 Referring to culture as broadly conceived, Aimé Césaire framed the dilemma neatly: “The problem is often summarized in the form of which option to take. A choice between autochthonous tradition and European civilization. Either to reject indigenous civilization as puerile, inadequate, bypassed by history, or else, in order to preserve the indigenous cultural heritage, to barricade oneself against European civilization and refuse it.” He put the poisoned choice thus: “In other terms, we are summoned: ‘Choose between fidelity and backwardness, or progress and rupture.’” 34 Looking at art through the lens of this opposition, “fidelity” could mean faith with the past, and with the legibility and familiarity of representation; “progress and rupture” would be the modern, and breaking with the familiar in favor of abstraction, the unknown. The polarity of this choice could be reversed so as to obviate the presumed hierarchy of social value. In terms of anticolonial politics, this could mean reversing the opposites of barbaric and civilized, as in León Ferrari’s 1965 condemnation of Western and Christian civilization: for Ferrari, the use of the atom bomb was not the necessary factor ending World War II but a prelude to the U.S. war in Vietnam, the latter event made still more malign by being broadcast to the world on television.35 Writers such as Césaire and Frantz Fanon pointed out how the promises of empire as a modernizing regime had been broken, and noted the truly democratic, educational developments achieved by colonized peoples in resistance to both their rulers and selected traditional practices. In some contexts abstraction could be found not as a rupture of local artistic practice but, in the guise of tradition, on its side. Contradicting the idea of abstraction as a fundamentally modern, Western phenomenon, spreading around the world like economic development, many Middle Eastern, South Asian, and North African artists, such as Mohammed Khadda, Anwar Jalal Shemza, and Jewad Selim, saw the historical arts of Islam as inherently nonrepresentational, abstract avant la lettre.36 (Some Western artists, such as Barnett Newman, promoted the idea of non-European indigenous or traditional art as abstract, but tended to cast the makers of this art as admirable but

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naive.) When the reference was to the graphic arts and Arabic calligraphy, a pointed dialectic could develop between the universal and the particular, as in the work of artists such as Sadequain, Charles Hossein Zenderoudi, and Shakir Hassan Al Sa’id.37 For these artists abstraction functioned as a historical return, rather than a rupture; as Sylvia Naef frames it, whereas in Europe the modern meant breaking with the past, “In the Arab world (as in other non-European countries), modernity was, from the beginning, a way of reconquering the past.” 38 (Some Japanese artists worked similarly with traditional Japanese calligraphy.)39 Gestural marks and shapes drawing on Arabic or Urdu script could both be read with particular knowledge and appreciated broadly for their formal qualities. While respecting the differences between art that played with Arabic script and the concrete poetry widespread through South America, Japan, and Europe, we can nonetheless see a common wish to speak at once to the particular and to the universal. 40

and content, abstraction and figuration, and other terms on a list of dichotomies in active conflict; this meant, in his own early painting, the unreconciled coexistence of “a classical, static structure, and a romantic, dynamic structure. … The result is a painting that generates an extremely intense dissonance,” a dissonance capturing a conflicted social reality. Okamoto expressed the conflict most intensely in a performance of 1950, in which he slashed a photograph of his face into fragments (fig. 4). 41 That same year, in a conference in Darmstadt (at which artist Willi Baumeister and art historian Hans Sedlmayr represented the ideological extremes of abstraction and representation), Theodor Adorno similarly insisted that “harmony in a modern work of art rests in its uncompromised expression of the irreconcilable.” 42 A decade later, Gerhard Richter (like Baselitz, an emigrant from East to West) developed a practice that alternated between or forced together the materiality of paint and representational imagery, so as to preserve the clash between them. 43

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Fig. 6. Lee Seung-taek. Hanging Oji. 1960s. Courtesy Gallery Hyundai, Seoul

Some artists of course did choose sides, whether owing to social pressure or to personal conviction, and hewed strictly to either programmatic abstraction or figuration. Others believed that highlighting the dichotomy would drive the conflict to a climax of contradiction. In a manifesto of 1949, Taro Okamoto explicitly sought to keep form

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any rejected the opposition of abstraction and realism, condemning the terrible choices between East and West, academic convention and soulless modernism, local and modern, particular and universal, and often the very categories of the distinction. Their art represented less a moderate compromise than a refusal of the alternatives, a third way. For Ernest Mancoba, the distinction was symptomatic of all of the problems of modernity: “Our history has brought about, little by little, this dichotomy between abstraction and figuration which provokes, more and more, a terrible atomization in the very essence of life. In no domain more than in the arts has this systematic dichotomy caused such destruction of the very foundation to the human identity.” 44 Mancoba’s complaint was echoed by many others through the idea of a missing center, with humanity as something pushed aside or explicitly denied by the two modernist extremes of ideology. Among the many events inspired by this question were the 1950 Darmstadt conference featuring Baumeister, Sedlmayr, and Adorno (Das Menschenbild in unserer Zeit, “The Image of Man in our Time”), the Tokyo roundtable at which Kawara spoke in 1955, art-critical debates in London and Paris, the publication of essays in such cultural journals as Présence Africaine and Al-Adab (Syria), an exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (New Images of Man), and the formation of an artists’ group in Buenos Aires (Otra Figuración). Some of this discourse was based on a humanism flowing from the influence of Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist writing on art, which saw the individual pitted against faceless social forces. 45 But what could sometimes seem like a generic humanism was often a claim to something more legitimate, because more specific, as in discussions that asserted a specifically Syrian humanism embodied in a cultural tradition stretching back to ancient Sumeria. 46 Much of this writing critiqued the West as the agent of World War II and of colonialism, as in Fanon’s indictment of “this Europe, which never stopped talking of man, which never stopped proclaiming its sole

Introductory Essays

Fig. 7. Gazbia Sirry. Hopscotch. 1959. Oil on canvas, 100 × 150 cm. Courtesy Zamalek Art Gallery, Cairo

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concern was man; we now know the price of suffering [that] humanity has paid for every one of its spiritual victories.” 47 Fanon might have been speaking for artists like Demas Nwoko, whose Colonial Officers (1960) condemns not humanity or “man” but European colonialism. In texts such as Fanon’s and the talks at the Tokyo roundtable, what was at stake was not a choice between humanist and antihumanist

Fig. 8. Theodoros Stamos. Sounds in the Rock. 1946. Oil on composition board, 122.2 × 72.1 cm. New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Gift of Edward W. Root. Acc. n.: 27.1947

positions (itself a dichotomy grounded in a Western perspective) but the recognition of a “new human,” as both Fanon and Kawara put it. 48 Artists grasping to visualize this figure, including Baselitz, Mancoba, Fateh Al-Moudarres, Karel Appel, Magda Cordell, Antonio Berni, Ben Enwonwu, Alfonso Ossorio, Francis Newton Souza, and Jack Whitten, aggressively pushed abstraction and representation into each other, interrupting human images with lumps of oil paint, metal objects, charcoal, sand, detritus, and gestural marks. Though often seen as more battered and belated than avatars of the new, these figures arguably embodied the historical present as the result of war, anticolonial struggles, and fusions between humans and technology.

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Artists weary of the fractures of modernity often looked back, whether to a moment before the disrupting of an earlier unity or to a space beyond the reach of culture, using a range of strategies art historians have commonly labeled “primitivism.” In 1945, Césaire pronounced Wifredo Lam’s totemic paintings free of the twin modern constraints—aesthetics and realism—and claimed that they called modern man back to the “first terror and passion” (fig. 3). 49 Many North American and European artists, including Baumeister, Jay DeFeo, Helen Frankenthaler, and Mathias Goeritz (one of a group of artists dubbed the “new prehistorics”), made pilgrimages to the prehistoric sites of Lascaux and Altamira and sought to emulate what they found there in their own work (fig. 5).50 While artists involved in such attempts were often trying to escape their own culture and history, they could also be trying to reclaim it. Amid China’s civil war of the 1940s, Dong Xiwen went to study the Buddhist murals in the caves of Dunhuang.51 In the early 1960s, Lee Seung-taek used stones and earthenware fermentation vessels to make sculpture, returning it to a time before the Japanese occupation of Korea, not to mention the Korean War (fig. 6).52 In the Zaria Art Society in Nigeria at the end of the 1950s, Uche Okeke and Demas Nwoko studied traditional practices such as Nok sculptures and Igbo drawing. For these artists, of course, primitivism is not the relevant category; the sources they sought were not outside history but explicitly inside their national history, even if the handmade aspect or spirituality of the works seemed to provide alternatives to faulty aspects of the modern.53 At the same time, paradoxically, the nationalist aspect of this work—the attempt to create a new Nigerian tradition—aligned it with modernity, once again overturning a dichotomy. The image of non-Western art as shaped by fixed and timeless traditions beyond historical change was a false one; as many artists, such as N’Diaye, pointed out, they and their peers largely hailed from cities, not from traditional agrarian settings. On the other hand, many cast the Western tradition—supposedly the progressive term of the contrast, having broken with the past and hurtled forward—as ironically itself suffering from rigor mortis. Both Mancoba and Newman decried the rigidity of rules put forth by the ancient Greeks: the canon of proportion, which rendered African art “ugly,” and the overrefined ideals of beauty and geometry.54 (Both also, like many other artists including Okamoto, complained about the Western philosophical tradition, with its tyranny of conceptual structures over experience.) Their complaints resonated with Fanon’s broad condemnation of Western civilization as inert, even dead: “All the Mediterranean values—the triumph of the individual, of enlightenment and Beauty—turn into pale, lifeless, trinkets.” 55 All tradition, in fact, had the potential to be dead weight. Fanon was ruthless, condemning Western traditional aesthetics and modern “nonrepresentational” modes alike as models for the colonized artist, and also decrying the postindependence turn of African nations to “a point by point representation of national reality which is flat, untroubled, motionless, reminiscent of death rather than life.” 56

Introductory Essays

Many artists, in “advanced” as well as “underdeveloped” nations, sought to create an active relation between tradition and the modern—to find a dynamism that kept both living. They also sought a profound engagement with the material world. The will to animate material fueled the postwar stress on touch and performance; in Japan, for example, it was central—more so than the influence of European or American gestural painting—to the Gutai artists and critics, who viewed matter through the lenses of nature, artistic experiment, and socialism.57 The widespread interest in chance and in the rule of natural physical laws downplayed human subjectivity (even among American painters, much criticized in later years for their supposed egotism). This desire for active involvement with the world also colored the seeming opposite of materialist, gestural art: realist, socialist painting; in Guttuso’s words, “This is the condition of the engagé artist. There is no other way for him to feel, to study, to imagine, to be affected than by seeing/finding himself permanently merged with life and engaged in the task of grasping the movement/vitality [before him].” 58 Gazbia Sirry wrote of her political and fantastic paintings, “I have had my own myths since my childhood. I feel I am fused into various elements of nature and life such as human beings, the desert, the sea, plants, and even manmade constructions. I strive to express the essence of humanity” (fig. 7).59 By treating human subjects as objects among other objects, such work cast humans as belonging to the natural world, rather than as knowing subjects observing and controlling from outside it. Sirry’s statement and work speak of an empathy with the material world, one that both dialed down her own subjecthood and recognized the value and perspective of things we normally think of as objects. As the artist Sadamasa Motonaga said, “There is limitless emotion in nature. [It is] in every object, every person, every creature, even in a blade of grass, but most people have difficulty seeing it.” 60 Everywhere, artists and writers—Wols in France, Theodoros Stamos in the United States, Léopold Sédar Senghor in Senegal—pointed to their connection to things like rocks or pebbles, mute, opaque, and ordinary (fig. 8). This active empathy could reflect an antimodernist return to nature, but did not by any means exclusively; as Sirry said, the connection could apply to manmade things as well. When Robert Rauschenberg told an interviewer, “I don’t like to take advantage of an object that can’t defend itself,” he was speaking of the man-made and often industrially produced objects in his “Combines”—a car door, a stuffed goat, a photograph, a commercial label. 61 This attitude of radical respect for things, a nonhierarchical attitude that could lend subjecthood to objects, verged on animism. Most common in materialist painting and sculpture, it appeared, surprisingly, in self-consciously transgressive art: David Medalla went so far as to call himself a hylozoist—a believer in the unity of life and matter—and the soapy forms of his “Cloud Canyons” visibly grow, bubbling over their frames and out into space. 62 Hans Haacke’s

early sculptures, while using a Minimalist/formalist vocabulary as containers, were also organic in the constantly changing condensation or growing grass contained within their Plexiglas cubes. What has been called vitalism (although that name ties it too firmly to Henri Bergson and specific philosophical traditions) could coexist with even the most apparently rationalist practice of the postwar period. Madí and Neoconcrete artists rendered geometry itself mobile and living, in paintings, books, and sculptures intended to be handled and activated by the spectator, who is in turn herself touched by them (fig. 9). 63 With their Bichos and Bólides respectively, Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica sought to enact a kind of healing, both psychological and social, by returning the participant to a holistic experience of body and soul. The aim of overcoming the subject/object divide becomes explicit: the subject must not just look at but work with the object to change it, and thus change her own experience.

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ooking globally at postwar art thus helps us to go beyond adding names and works to canonical lists (although that is certainly important) to rethinking the category of art itself and reconsidering the criteria for understanding and evaluating it. Modernist art theory, its vision centered on the West, made abstraction the goal toward which the history of art seemed to move. Attending to the multiplicity of postwar art asks us to put aside the idea of a will to abstraction in favor of a more complex understanding of artists’ practices, one that no longer separates their relation to their materials, emphasized by theory under the name of “form,” from their relation to physical, social, and political realities. A blanket category like “representation,” for instance, fixes an image and obscures the interactive aspects of the artist’s relation to the physical world, whether scientific, natural, or animistic. Again and again, the artists included in Postwar insist on the inseparability of supposedly purely formal qualities of their work from the subject matters with which they are concerned. It was possible to experiment with painting, and abstraction, without isolating the means as a value above all others. While waiting for a critique in a Washington, D.C., newspaper—anticipating Western judgments of quality and fetishization of form—Enwonwu remarked that his painting technique “may be disappointing to very good painters but technique in painting is not the criterion for knowing what is good, bad or indifferent in art.” 64 The alternative was not to hew to either representational content or the informe but to undo the dominance and isolation of formalism, to revalue the political, the spiritual, the personal, the traditional, the popular, and the everyday, as dynamically manifested in material form. Anticolonial writings, particularly by African and Caribbean authors, theorized this relation between art and world in varying registers. For Senghor, the dynamism was both aesthetic/epistemological and social, demanding a way of knowing that would acknowledge the division between subject and object and work to overcome

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it. The divide could be bridged with empathy, revealing the political potential in a commonplace artistic act. 65 Senghor’s criticism of the conventional Western individual subject—the European “first distinguishes the object from himself. … He destroys it by devouring it”— resonates strikingly with that of Adorno: “the subject swallows the object, forgetting how much it is an object itself.” 66 The hypersubject creates its counterpart, the pure object. This separation into extreme positions was something Césaire recognized in colonialism, calling it “chosification,” a kind of Midas touch that turned people into objects. 67 Undoing this separation, whether through theory, art, or politics,

participation and communion.70 Perhaps the most important thing was not the choice of strategy—communion or confrontation—but the fact of agency. Similarly, the most important facet of the animism that imbued certain artists’ work was not respect for objects, or even a connection to nature, but the perception that we are none of us either alone in or central to the universe. There is a negative aspect to dynamism, of course; despite the picture of stalemate and stasis implied by the idea of the Cold War, the social reality of the postwar period was one of constant intervention and change, as new political forces replaced the old empires.

Fig. 8. Lygia Pape. Book of Creation Walking (detail), 1959. Gouache on cardboard, 18 parts, 30 × 30 × 0.2 cm (each).

held the potential for the object to become a subject again, to be unfrozen. Taking this sense of agency and mobility still further, Fanon, an adamant advocate of national liberation, did not equate national identity with nationalism, seeing it not as an end in itself—a formal, fixed thing—but as liberating the living consciousness of a people. 68 Despite their differences, these thinkers all spoke against the split of subject and object and its attendant immobility. If claims for intuitive and embodied knowing have been criticized as clichéd, even as themselves the product of colonial binaries (and founded on opposition to Western rationalism), today, when the West seems moribund rather than rational, they appear prescient, desirable, radical. 69 Senghor’s endorsement of empathy was just one strategy for the subject’s engagement with its “other”; further possibilities included confrontation, related to the preservation of incommensurability and conflict so strongly advocated by Fanon (and Adorno), and also

54

If Césaire’s 1945 essay on Lam bemoaned the distance that money and machines had put between people, by 1965 a lack of distance was equally disturbing. Even the defenses once afforded by the Pacific and Atlantic oceans were disappearing. As Sukarno said, opening the Bandung Conference in 1955, [Man] has learned to consume distance. He has learned to project his voice and his picture across oceans and continents. … He has learned how to release the immense forces locked in the smallest particles of matter. … And do not think that the oceans and the seas will protect us. The food that we eat, the water that we drink, yes, even the very air that we breathe can be contaminated by poisons originating from thousands of miles away.71

Introductory Essays

We have seen these warnings—of the worldwide reach of atomic warfare, ideological broadcasting, and ecological disaster—all come true, even as the promise of nonalignment celebrated at Bandung has faded. But in trying to understand the art of a period that looked to the future at least as much as it reflected an experience of decline and aftermath, it is important to maintain its sense of possibility, to see the promise inherent in active engagement—in conflict as well as affinity. To look beyond the Cold War to the most pressing issues of the day: Kwame Nkrumah told the Council of Foreign Relations in New York City in 1958, “This attitude of nonalignment does not imply indifference to the great issues of our day. It does not imply isolationism. It is in no way anti-Western; nor is it anti-Eastern. The greatest issue of our day is surely to see that there is a tomorrow.” 72 For postwar artists too, the refusal to line up—with orthodoxies of abstraction or representation, with purely objective or subjective views of the world—could mean an attempt to see and shape a history no longer dominated by the ideological or material structures of the past.

Katy Siegel

55

I thank my assistant Megan Hines for her extensive and expert research for this essay, and

(London: Phaidon, 2003); Hans Belting, The End of Art History? (Chicago: University of

Hosam Aboul-Ela for his thoughts on broad theoretical readings.

Chicago Press, 1987).

1 Mohamed Khadda, “Élements pour un art nouveau,” Révolution Africaine no. 74 (June 27,

15 Even if we think of modernity as always having been a world system, as Mignolo and

1964): 22. To be repr. and trans. in Modern Art of the Modern World: Primary Documents, eds.

Immanuel Wallerstein claim, in the late twentieth century relations became directly, furiously

Anneka Lenssen, Sarah A. Rogers, and Nada Shabout (forthcoming from The Museum of

reciprocal, operating in all directions and all over the world. See Wallerstein, The Modern

Modern Art, New York). Thanks to Lenssen for so generously sharing this material and her

World-System (New York and London: Academic Press, 1974), and Mignolo, Local Histories/

own insights with me throughout the research for Postwar.

Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton: Princeton

2 Hassan Jabareen directly compares the Middle East and the Europe of 1945 as Tony Judt

University Press, 2000).

describes it in Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (London: Penguin Books, 2005).

16 To name only a few, Hassan, Iftikhar Dadi, Nancy Jachec, Saloni Mathur, Ming Tiampo, and

See Jabareen, “Palestinians and Hobbesian Citizenship: How the Palestinians Became a Mi-

Bojana Piskur.

nority in Israel,” in Will Kymlicka, ed., Multiculturalism and Minority Rights in the Arab World

17 These are, respectively, the powerful and perspective-shifting insights of Connelly,

(New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 198.

Chakrabarty, and Guha. See Connelly, “Taking Off the Cold War Lens”; Chakrabarty, Provin-

3 Many admirable and important exhibitions nonetheless attend solely to Europe as the

cializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton Univer-

locus of the postwar, sometimes including Russia or the United States as foils. See, e.g., Face

sity Press, 2000); and Guha, History at the Limit of World-History.

à l’histoire (1933–1996), Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1997, and Be-Bomb: The Transat-

18 On Kawara, in Hamada Chimei, Kawara, Yamanaka Haruo, Ikeda Tatsuo, Kiuchi Misaki,

lantic War of Images and All That Jazz, 1946–1956, MACBA, Barcelona, 2007).

Yoshinaka Taizo¯, and Haryu¯ Ichiro¯ (roundtable moderator), “Atarashii ningen zo¯ ni mukatte,”

4 In English, see the broadly read John Gaddis, Now We Know: Rethinking Cold War History

Bijutsu hihyo¯, July 1955, p. 47. Thanks to Tomii for translating this discussion and helping me

(New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), and Vladislav Zubok and Constantine

to engage its nuances.

Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996).

19 See, e.g., the 1945 exhibition A Problem for Critics, organized by Howard Putzel in his

5 Postwar is shaped by the work of scholars too numerous to reference here. I single out the

small New York City gallery, Gallery 67; reviewed, with a reprint of the press release, in

meta-historical writing of Dipesh Chakrabarty, Matthew Connelly, Paul Gilroy, Ranajit Guha,

Edward Allen Jewell, “Toward Abstract or Away,” New York Times, July 1, 1945, sec. 2, p. 2.

Heonik Kwon, Lydia Liu, Mark Mazower, Walter Mignolo, Vijay Prashad, Tuong Vu, and Odd

Many of these early shows and critical roundups were not exclusively American, including

Arne Westad.

Europeans such as André Masson and Mexican or Cuban artists such as Rufino Tamayo and

6 The term “Third World” was coined in 1952 by Alfred Sauvy, in “Trois mondes, une planeté,”

Wifredo Lam.

L’Observateur no. 118 (August 14, 1952): 5.

20 On U.S. art’s multiple postwar styles see Mary Caroline Simpson, “American Artists Paint

7 Even among those nations that did enter World War II as combatants, it was common to

the City: Katharine Kuh, the 1956 Biennale, and New York’s Place in the Cold War Art World,”

characterize the conflict primarily as a territorial/local war; see David Reynolds, “The Origins

American Studies 48, no. 4 (Winter 2007): 31–57.

of the Two ‘World Wars’: Historical Discourse and International Politics,” Journal of Contem-

21 The first textbook called Art since 1945 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1958) had one chap-

porary History 38, no. 1 (January 2003): 29–44. For an argument positing the imbrication of

ter on the United States and twelve on European nations; the 1959 Documenta II, subtitled

the Cold War and the Third World see Westad’s many publications, including The Global Cold

Kunst nach 1945, included only a few American artists and placed them at the exhibition’s end.

War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). For the argument that Asia has not

22 Lawrence Alloway, The Venice Biennale: 1895–1968 (Greenwich, Conn.: New York

only a different history but demands a different historical model see Kuan-Hsing Chen, Asia

Graphic Society, 1968), p. 144. Contemporary and subsequent accounts from both “sides”

as Method (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010). For the claim that “the vast epic” of

have emphasized the combative institutional and discursive aspects of the situation rather

Asia after 1945 is “ultimately the most significant of the postwar era” see Joyce and Gabriel

than the art and politics of the artists. See, e.g., Irving Sandler, The Triumph of American

Kolko, The Limits of Power: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1945–1954 (New

Painting (New York: Praeger, 1970); and Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of

York: Harper and Row, 1972), p. 246.

Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War (Chicago: University of

8 See Connelly, “Taking Off the Cold War Lens: Visions of North-South Conflict during the

Chicago Press, 1983).

Algerian War for Independence,” American Historical Review 105, no. 3 (June 2000): 739–

23 See Catherine Dossin, “To Drip or to Pop? The European Triumph of American Art,” Artl@s

69, and Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: New

Bulletin 3, no. 1 (2014): 80–103. It is interesting that recent global survey exhibitions have

Press, 2007).

focused on Pop art as an international phenomenon vigorously contesting the dominance of

9 For the former see Connelly, “Taking Off the Cold War Lens”; for the latter see Vu, “Cold War

American culture. See The World Goes Pop! at Tate Modern, London, and International Pop at

Studies and the Cultural Cold War in Asia,” in Vu and Wasana Wongsurat, eds., Dynamics of the

the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, both in 2015.

Cold War in Asia: Ideology, Identity, and Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 1–16.

24 Georg Baselitz, in “Outcomes, Prospects, Bounces: Georg Baselitz talks to Rainer Michael

10 See Guha, History at the Limit of World-History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).

Mason,” in Rainer Michael Mason, Georg Baselitz, exh. cat. (Lugano: Museo d’arte moderna,

11 Recent initiatives by Tate Modern and the Centre Pompidou are exceptions, with exhibitions

2007), p. 159. The East German/West German conflict is an exception and has been thor-

on artists such as Saloua Raouda Choucair (Tate Modern, 2013) and Wifredo Lam (Centre

oughly studied, recently, for example, in Eckhart Gillen, Feindliche Bruder? Der Kalte Frief und

Georges Pompidou, 2015). The museological history of Latin American art is quite different,

die deutsche Kund, 1945–1990 (Berlin: Nicolai, 2009), and Stephanie Barron and Sabine

with both The Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, undertaking major

Eckmann, eds., Art of Two Germanys: Cold War Cultures (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2009).

scholarly and monographic intiatives. Contemporary artists are also treated differently, with

25 For less doctrinaire accounts of the American promotion of art as politics see Jachec,

artists such as Walid Raad often featured in major monographic exhibitions.

“Transatlantic Cultural Politics in the Late 1950s: The Leaders and Specialists Grant

12 For particularly rounded discussions among the many possible examples, see Salah M.

Program,” Art History 26, no. 4 (September 2003): 533–55, and Dossin, The Rise and Fall

Hassan, “African Modernism: Beyond Alternative Modernities Discourse,” South Atlantic

of American Art, 1940s–1980s: A Geopolitics of Western Art Worlds (London: Ashgate,

Quarterly 109, no. 3 (Summer 2010): 451–74, and the rest of this special issue on “African

2015). On the mechanics of the Soviet blockade on artistic interaction with the West see

Modernism,” and Partha Mitter, “Interventions. Decentering Modernism: Art History and

Antoine Baudin, “‘Why Is Soviet Painting Hidden from Us?’: Zhdanov Art and Its Interna-

Avant-Garde Art from the Periphery,” Art Bulletin 90, no. 4 (2008): 531–74.

tional Relations and Fallout, 1947–53,” in Thomas Lahausen and Evgeny Dobrenko, eds.,

13 The most consistent writing here is Terry Smith’s, as in What Is Contemporary Art? (Chi-

Socialist Realism without Shores (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), pp. 227–56.

cago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). One can see this supposed shift as a historical

Discussion of this subject has a long, contested, and often misleading history. Hilton Kram-

event or, thinking of the modern in its usual definition as a local (or, per Chakrabarty, pro-

er, who was to become a notably conservative critic, was one of the first to remark on the

vincial) European phenomenon, as a geographic one; this is explicitly true in the case of

use of American artists by the government, which he pointed out was done without their

the United States and Japan, both of which posited the modern as European in the 1940s.

agreement: Kramer, “The Coming Political Breakthrough,” Arts 34, no. 4 (1960): 12. Later

For the historical approach see Katy Siegel, Since ’45: America and the Making of Con-

accounts often elided the politics of the artists with those of officials, as in Eva Cockcroft,

temporary Art (London: Reaktion, 2011), and Richard Meyer, What Was Contemporary Art

“Abstract Expressionism: Weapon of the Cold War,” Artforum 12, no. 10 (June 1974):

(Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2013); for the geographic see Reiko Tomii, Radicalism in

39–41. For some of the documents surrounding this circulation—including the 1956

the Wilderness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan (Cambridge, Mass.:

exhibition Modern Art in the U.S.A., the first show sent not only to Western but to Eastern

The MIT Press, 2016).

Europe (notably Belgrade)—see Porter McCray, “American Tutti Frutti,” The Sweet Sixties:

14 David Summers, Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism

Specters and Spirits of A Parallel Avant-Garde (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014), pp. 121–35.

56

Introductory Essays

26 As others have noted with respect to East and West Europe. See for example Siegfried

46 See the poet Adonis’s 1953 essay “The Meaning of Painting,” as discussed in Lenssen,

Gohr, "Art in the Post-War Period", in Christos M. Joachimides et al., eds., German Art in

“The Shape of the Support,” pp. 208–11.

the 20th Century: Painting and Sculpture, 1903–1983, exh. cat., London, Royal Academy

47 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove, 2004), p. 236.

of Arts (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1985), p. 466; and Giles Scott-Smith and Joes Segal,

48 I am indebted to Reiko Tomii for translating the roundtable and discussing its nuances

“Divided Dreamworlds? The Cultural Cold War in East and West,” in Peter Romjin, Scott-

with me.

Smith, and Segal, eds., Divided Dreamworlds: The Cultural Cold War in East and West

49 Césaire, “Wifredo Lam,” Cahiers d’art 20–21 (1945–46): 357. Author’s translation from

(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), pp. 1–9.

the French.

27 Elaine de Kooning, “Pure Paints a Picture,” ARTnews 56, no. 4 (Summer 1957): 57, 86–87.

50 On Mathias Goeritz see Jennifer Josten, “Mathias Goeritz and International Modernism in

28 Willem de Kooning, “What Abstract Art Means to Me,” The Bulletin of The Museum of

Mexico, 1949–1962,” PhD diss., Yale University, 2012, p. 33.

Modern Art 18, no. 3 (Spring 1951): 7.

51 Thanks to Neil Huang for drawing this to my attention.

29 See, e.g., Susan E. Reid and David Crowley’s anthologies Socialism without Shores and

52 Joan Kee, “Use on Vacation: The Non-Sculptures of Lee Seung-taek,” Archives of Asian

Style and Socialism: Modernity and Material Culture in Post-War Eastern Europe (both Oxford:

Art 63, no. 1 (2013): 103–29.

Berg, 2000). On Mao’s Hundred Flowers campaign see Lu Peng, A History of Art in 20th-Cen-

53 See Chika Okeke-Agulu, “The Art Society and the Making of Postcolonial Modernism in

tury China, 2006 (rev. ed. Milan: Charta, 2010), pp. 465–69.

Nigeria,” South Atlantic Quarterly 109, no. 3 (Summer 2010): 505–27. See also Okeke-Agu-

30 The older, Orientalist divide between East and West somewhat parallels the fear of

lu’s essay in the present volume.

the colonized and colored masses discussed in Connelly, “Taking Off the Cold War Lens,” and Prashad, The Darker Nations. The Indonesian President Sukarno called it “the conflict

54 Mancoba, in Obrist, “An Interview with Ernest Mancoba,” p. 382; Newman, “The New Sense of Fate,” 1948, in Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews , ed. John O’Neill

between black and white, East and West, colonizer and colonized.” Quoted in Westad, The

(New York: Alfred Knopf, 1990), pp. 164–70. Here Newman constitutes “the West” as Europe,

Global Cold War, p. 83.

situating the United States instead within the Americas and its histories.

31 Shiva Balaghi, “Iranian Visual Arts in ‘The Century of Machinery Speed, and the Atom’: Re-

55 Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, p. 11.

thinking Modernity,” in Balaghi and Lynn Gumpert, Picturing Iran: Art, Society and Revolution

56 Ibid., p. 161.

(London: I.B. Tauris, 2002), p. 24.

57 See Natsu Oyobe, “Human Subjectivity and Confrontation with Materials in Japanese Art:

32 This intersection of the history and form of European modernism with American social

Yoshihara Jiro and Early Years of the Gutai Art Association, 1947–1958,” PhD diss., University

history are the subject of my book Since ’45, which deals not with the exceptionalism of

of Michigan, 2005, and Erber, Breaching the Frame: The Rise of Contemporary Art in Brazil

the United States but rather with its specificity and, equally and conversely, to borrow from

and Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), p. 62.

Chakrabarty, with the provincialism of Europe.

58 Renato Guttuso, “Del realismo del presente e altro,” Paragone 85 (1957): 53–74, Eng. trans.

33 Iba N’Diaye, quoted in Elizabeth Harney, “Densities of Modernity,” South Atlantic Quarterly

as “On Realism, the Present, and Other Things,” trans. Nan Hill and Marco Lobascio, in Kristine

109, no. 3 (Summer 2010): 495. Similar conflicting pressures existed for African American

Stiles and Peter Selz, eds., Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Art-

artists, including Romare Bearden, Beauford Delaney, and Jack Whitten, and also for women

ists’ Writings (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1996), p. 179.

artists around the world.

59 Gazbia Sirry, quoted in Mursi Saad El-Din, ed., Gazbia Sirry: Lust for Color (Cairo: Ameri-

34 Aimé Césaire, “Culture and Colonization,” 1956, repr. in Social Text 28, no. 2 (Summer

can University in Cairo Press, 1998), p. xv.

2010): 140–41.

60 Sadamasa Motonaga, “The Unknown,” 1955, quoted in Joan Kee, “Early Gutai Painting,

35 León Ferrari, “La respuesta de la artista,” Propositos, October 7, 1965, n.p. Thanks to

1954–1957,” Oxford Art Journal 25, no. 2 (2003): 126.

Megan Hines for her translation of this text.

61 Robert Rauschenberg, quoted in G. R. Swenson, “Rauschenberg Paints a Picture,” Art

36 See Anneka Lenssen, “The Shape of the Support: Painting and Politics in Syria’s Twenti-

News 62, no. 2 (April 1963): 46.

eth Century,” PhD diss., MIT, 2014, pp. 289–90.

62 See Jack Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture: The Effects of Science and Technology on

37 See Shabout, “The Arabic Letter in Art,” in Shabout, Modern Arab Art: Formation of Arab

the Sculpture of This Century (New York: George Braziller, 1968), p. 345.

Aesthetics (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007), pp. 61–144.

63 See Mari Carmen Ramírez, “Vital Structures: The Constructive Nexus in South America,”

38 Sylvia Naef, “Reexploring Islamic Art: Modern and Contemporary Creation in the Arab World

in Ramírez and Héctor Olea, Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America, exh. cat. (New

and Its Relation to the Artistic Past,” RES: Anthroplogy and Aesthetics no. 43 (Spring 2003): 167.

Haven and London: Yale University Press, and Houston: MFA Houston, 2004), pp. 191–201.

39 See, e.g., Takiguchi Shuzo, “Calligraphy East and West,” 1957, repr. in Doryun Chong,

64 Ben Enwonwu, quoted in Sylvester Okwunodo Ogebechie, Ben Enwonwu: The Making of

Michio Hayashi, Kenji Kaiya, and Fumihiko Sumitomo, eds., From Postwar to Postmodern: Art

an African Modernist (Rochester, N.Y.: Rochester University Press, 2008), p. 107.

in Japan 1945–1989 (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2012), 74–77.

65 On Léopold Sédar Senghor’s philosophical interests, particularly with regard to Ger-

40 There is a large and growing body of writing, addressing both art and literature, around

man ethnographic traditions, see Bennetta Jules-Rosette, Black Paris: The African Writers’

these experiments with the Arabic alphabet and calligraphy. See Naef, “Reexploring Islamic

Landscape (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1998), pp. 33–38, and Gabriele Genge,

Art”; Shabout, “The Arabic Letter in Art”; Dadi, “Ibrahim El Salahi and Calligraphic Modernism

“Survival of Images?,” in Genge and Angela Stercken, eds., Art History and Fetishism Abroad:

in a Comparative Perspective,” South Atlantic Quarterly 109, no. 3 (Summer 2010): 555–76;

Global Shiftings in Media and Methods (Bielefeld: [transcript] Verlag, 2014 ), pp. 43–45.

Hassan in the present volume; and Robyn Creswell, “Tradition and Translation: Poetic Modern-

66 Senghor, “On African Homelands and Nation-States, Negritude, Assimilation, and African

ism in Beirut,” PhD diss., New York University, 2012. Thanks to Lenssen for discussing this with

Socialism,” 1996, summarizing a lifetime’s view. Quoted in Frederick Ochieng’-Odhiambo,

me. On concrete poetry in Brazil and Japan see Pedro Erber’s essay in the present volume.

“Negritude: The Basic Principles and Appraisal,” in Isabelle Constant and Kahiudi C. Ma-

41 Taro Okamoto, “Avant-Garde Manifesto: A View of Art,” 1949, in Chong, Hayashi, Kaiya, and

bana, eds., Negritude: Legacy and Present Relevance (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge

Sumitomo, eds., From Postwar to Postmodern, p. 38. On Okamoto’s early paintings see Bert

Scholars Publishing, 2009), p. 71; Adorno, “Subject and Object,” 1969, in Andrew Arato and

Winther-Tamaki, “Oil Painting in Postsurrender Japan: Reconstructing Subjectivity through

Eike Gebhardt, eds., The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (New York: Continuum, 1985),

Deformation of the Body,” Monumenta Nipponica 58, no. 3 (Autumn 2003): 347–96. I thank

p. 499. Both Senghor and Adorno summarized their long-running concern with the topic in

Rika Hiro for discussing her research with me; see her forthcoming “Walking out of Ground

these essays.

Zero: Art and the Aftereffects of the Atomic Bombs in Postwar Japan,” PhD diss., University

67 Césaire, Discours sur le colonialisme, 1950 (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1955), p. 22.

of Southern California.

68 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 144. Fanon saw nationhood as a necessary step on

42 Theodor Adorno, 1950, quoted in John Paul Stonard, Fault Lines: Art in Germany, 1945–

the route to developing a still more radical liberation.

1955 (London: Ridinghouse, 2007), p. 258. On the Darmstadt conference see Hans Ger-

69 For the critique of Senghor within African intellectual circles of the late 1960s and ’70s

hard Evers, ed., Darmstädter Gespräch. Das Menschenbild in unserer Zeit (Darmstadt: Neue

see Bennetta Jules-Rosette, “Jean-Paul Sartre and the Philosophy of Negritude: Race, Self,

Darmstädter Verlagsanstalt, 1950).

and Society,” Theory and Society 36, no. 3 (June 2007): 274–76.

43 See Gerhard Richter, The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings and Interviews, 1962–1993

70 Senghor, Liberté I. Négritude et humanisme (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1964), p. 9.

(Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1995), p. 37.

71 Sukarno’s welcoming speech at Bandung, 1955, repr. in Jussi M. Hanhimåki and Westad,

44 Ernest Mancoba, quoted in Hans Ulrich Obrist, “An Interview with Ernest Mancoba,” Third

eds., The Cold War: A History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts (Oxford: Oxford Univer-

Text 24, no. 3 (2010): 381.

sity Press, 2003), p. 351.

45 See Sarah Wilson’s essay in the present volume.

72 Kwame Nkrumah, quoted in ibid., p. 355.

Katy Siegel

57

POSTWAR: DENAZIFICATION AND REEDUCATION Ulrich Wilmes

Introductory Essays

T

he end of World War II and the collapse of the 1943 and of June 1943–February 1944—received nearly 850,000 and Third Reich left most of Germany’s large cities in 700,000 visitors respectively (846,674 and 694,680 to be exact) proves ruins. Given the numbing magnitude of the desthis point.1 Even so, in the end it was presumably pure chance that saved Haus der Kunst during the many airstrikes on the city. Aerial photogratruction, reconstruction within a foreseeable fuphs from the period show destruction in the immediate vicinity; nearly ture seemed inconceivable. The Allies had flown the entire row of buildings on the opposite side of Prinzregentenstrasse, more than seventy air attacks on Munich between for example, had been gutted (fig. 2). It was only thanks to good luck that 1940 and 1945, reducing large sections of the city exhibition activities could be resumed at Haus der Kunst quite promptly to rubble. The neighborhoods worst affected were after the war. the old districts of the city center. Altogether more than half of the buil The building ultimately owed its postwar preservation to a mixdings, including over 80,000 residential flats, had been damaged or desture of prudence and self-interest: the American commanders not only troyed. Before the war Munich had had a population of approximately saw a need to maintain it in its original function as an art space but also 830,000, making it the fourth-largest city of the Reich. By the end of the realized that its undamaged state made it an ideal setting for events and war that number had decreased to an estimated 550,000. activities of their own. In the entirely intact restaurant facilities and a Life in the urban stone desert made extreme demands on people’s number of the exhibition and adwill to survive, in comparison to ministration rooms, they set up which the restoration of cultural their Officers’ Club, the “Pee One,” life was secondary. Given the city’s the ancestor of the P1 Club that living conditions and more or less opened in Haus der Kunst in 1949 nonexistent infrastructure, the and still exists there today.2 And fact that cultural institutions of all shortly after the end of the war, the kinds resumed work right after the spacious halls of the eastern and war’s end seems quite remarkable. western wings were already being One of the few major buildings to used again for exhibitions. have survived the bombing intact The establishment of Nazi was Haus der Kunst, the “House rule and then the war had produced of Art,” formerly the Haus der a rupture between German culdeutschen Kunst, the “House of ture and the modern avant-gardes. German Art.” The city had baEfforts to reconnect with contemrely been liberated—by the U.S. porary developments had to be carSeventh Army, on April 30, 1945— ried out from an absolute zero point when the exhibition hall became a Fig. 1. US soldiers carrying a town sign that reads “München. Hauptstadt der Bewegung” (Munich. Capital of the [Nazi] Movement), April 30, 1945 on the economic and sociopolitical focus of the occupying power. The scales alike. Against the background initial intention was to demolish of this completely new beginning and the demands of large-scale reconthis ideologically contaminated building, which had stood since 1937 as struction, the declared aim and priority of the victorious powers was the a stronghold of “true German art,” a symbol of the prohibition on the elimination of every last trace of National Socialist ideology, a goal they international modern avant-gardes as “degenerate.” pursued through a strategy of denazification, reeducation, and social Haus der Kunst had taken elaborate measures to camouflage its restructuring. The requisites for this program were political differ­ facilities, and to some extent may have had these to thank for the fact entiation, cleansing, and the rehabilitation of persecuted groups.3 that it had withstood the war almost unscathed. Yet the concealment Five categories of guilt were established: major offenders, offenefforts are also a sign of the significance for the Nazis of the building ders (Activists, Militants, and Profiteers, or Incriminated Persons), leswhere eight editions of the Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung (Great ser offenders (placed on probation), followers, and exonerated persons German Art Exhibition) had taken place by 1944. The raison d’être of the (persons from the above groups who had succeeded in proving their exhibitions during the Nazi era was purely propagandistic: they served innocence before civilian tribunals). Although the occupying powers as the stage for an aesthetic ideology in keeping with the regime’s thefundamentally agreed on the general objectives of the denazification ories of race. Moreover, after the outbreak of the war, the art shown in measures, there were no standardized procedures for the practical imHaus der Kunst—landscapes, animal depictions, glorifications of the plementation of these aims in the occupation zones. 4 Cleansing opefamily, a corporeal ideal corresponding to Nazi race theory—served rations had already been carried out before the liberation by so-called as a distraction from reality. The fact that the most successful versions antifascist committees, mainly members of the labor movement, in the of the Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung—those of July 1942–February

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spring of 1945, but had not met a positive response from the Allies and were prohibited in the early summer of that year. It was not until January 1946 that the Allied Control Council (the governing body of the Allied Occupation Zones) issued a joint directive of the occupying powers,

Fig. 2. Aerial photograph of Haus der Kunst by the U.S. Air Force, June 6, 1945

followed in October of that year by guidelines for dealing with active Nazis and their beneficiaries. By this point, however, the trials were already in full swing, and widely differing procedures were used to carry them out. Whereas the Americans distinguished themselves with a radical moral stance, and were intent on cleansing the “movement” to its depths, administrators in the British and French zones took a largely pragmatic approach focused on removing National Socialist elites from politics and government. It took the directive of the Control Council of October 1946 to define a common orientation, at least formally. Denazification was implemented most rigorously and briskly in the Soviet-­ occupied zone, where a catalogue of measures was enacted providing for the removal of former members of the Nazi party (the National­ sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or National Socialist German Workers’ Party [NSDAP]) from public administration and their debarment from all public functions. This included the withdrawal of all political rights. The American military government’s most important instrument, meanwhile, was a questionnaire with 131 questions demanding information on the respondent’s relationship to the Nazi regime (fig. 3). The cases were heard before civilian tribunals, lay courts with the authority to pass judgment.5 In all of the occupied zones, the cleansing process faced the problem that certain experts whose services were crucial to the reconstruction of a functional infrastructure were also ideologically unacceptable in the context of denazification. Lack of transparency made the procedures seem despotic, and public criticism of them emerged early on. Even the liberal center-left Süddeutsche Zeitung, in its issue of April 24, 1946, amended its basic approval of the process because “activists,” who had actually incurred guilt, were being neglected at the expense of the

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less severely incriminated “followers.” This opinion was reinforced by the allowance of so-called “Persilscheine,” statements submitted by nonincriminated citizens confirming a person’s innocence in terms of the incrimination categories. The more this procedure took hold, the more it was seen as unjust. At the same time, however, it served as a pretext for the increasing repression of the guilt of the silent majority who had connived in or consented to the regime. The spread of the refusal to confront and reexamine the everyday reality of the Third Reich was mirrored in opinion polls conducted by the Americans: whereas in March 1946, 57 percent of the respondents expressed positive attitudes to the denazification process, by December the proportion had shrunk to 34 percent.6 Artists and culture workers were naturally subject to the same denazi­ fication procedures as the rest of the population. In this context it will hardly come as a surprise that they pursued the same strategies of casting a favorable light on their roles in the service of the regime. The famous cases of Leni Riefenstahl and Arno Breker, which have been comprehensively discussed in the literature, remain alarming today as examples of how cunningly people who had benefited from Hitler’s regime—even allowing for contrary evidence, still beyond all doubt—sought to clear themselves of the charge of having generated Nazi propaganda.7 Both artists used the same strategy and made the same arguments in their defense. To Riefenstahl, her film Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will), on the NSDAP convention in Nuremberg on September 5–10, 1934, was a neutrally descriptive documentary that merely recorded events: “That has nothing to do with politics. … The images had to be able to say what otherwise would be spoken. But that doesn’t make it propaganda.” 8 As for her two-part film Olympia: Fest der Völker/Fest der Schönheit (1938), Riefenstahl claimed it had been made on behalf of the International Olympic Committee—even though Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda ministry had financed the film’s production company, Olympia-Film GmbH, in which she herself was a shareholder. Breker for his part lamented what he termed an ideologically misconceived classification and assessment of his work that had served to diminish his artistic importance: I’m an inflicted phenomenon, a victim of the times. I was robbed of the entire impact of my artistic œuvre. If someone stands in front of my figures in fifty years and views them without bias because the political points of contact no longer apply—the points that are still relevant today, as your presence shows—then he will see only how I depicted arms and legs, and in general the human being, and then I will meet with understanding. 9 The self-description as “victims” that both Riefenstahl and Breker would claim for the rest of their lives included adjustments to their personal relationships with Hitler. Breker maintained that “Hitler and I were not friends. Nor was I his favorite sculptor, as is always claimed. [Josef] Thorak ranked foremost.” 10 Meanwhile Riefenstahl went so far as to say, “I regret 100 percent having made Hitler’s acquaintance. That he

Introductory Essays

Fig. 3. Personnel questionnaire of the Military Government of Germany, 1946

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interfered with my fate. Everything I suffered after the war came about only because of that.” 11 The claim of ignorance of Nazi atrocities became a collective attitude, presenting an obstacle to the critical reassessment of each individual’s own past. Instead, the demand for a so-called Schlussstrich—that is here, a “bottom line,” a line at the bottom of the only very recent past— began to spread, and by the time of the campaign for the first Bundestag elections, in 1949, was being vehemently propagated by the Free Democratic Party (FDP) (fig. 6). From 1933 onward there had been substantial disruptions to the managements of the major museums. As was the case with all public institutions, many directors had been dismissed, to be replaced by successors the Nazis considered reliable. Remarkably, despite the increased government influence on collection and exhibition policies, a number of influential posts remained in the hands of independent art historians—who, however, could not of course prevent the substantial losses to their institutions’ holdings brought about by what, following the closure of the modern-art department of the Nationalgalerie Berlin in October 1936, was in effect a prohibition on modern art in public collections. Under the direction of Adolf Ziegler, a painter who had risen to the position of president of the Reichskulturkammer (Reich Chamber of Visual Arts),

Fig. 4. Leni Riefenstahl looks on in horror as Wehrmacht soldiers massacre the Jewish population of Kon´skie, Poland, in the presence of Sonderfilmtrupp Riefenstahl (Special Film Troop Riefenstahl), September 12, 1939

over 20,000 artworks by about 1,400 artists were confiscated as part of a drive to purge museums of works classified as “degenerate.” As the director of Entartete Kunst, the “Degenerate Art” exhibition held in

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Munich in 1937 and subsequently traveling throughout Germany, Ziegler spoke at its opening in the Hofgartenarkadengebäude:

Fig. 5. Leni Riefenstahl (center) and her lawyer Dr. Alfred von Seefeld (right) at the start of her denazification trial, West Berlin, April 21, 1952

You see around us monstrosities of madness, of impudence, of inability and degeneration. What this show has to offer causes shock and disgust in all of us. … Here I lack the time to present to you, my national comrades, all of the crimes these fellows have ventured to commit in German art on behalf, and as pacemakers, of international Jewry.12 Ziegler carried out his duties with a fervor rooted in the deepest conviction—but that did not protect him from being suspended from his office by Goebbels after privately expressing already in 1943 anti-administration views on the cessation of the bombing war . It was Hitler’s protection alone that saved him from lengthy concentration camp custody and allowed him to keep receiving his salary. After the war, he was categorized as a “follower”; thus denazified, he withdrew entirely from public life. The bloodletting inflicted on the Museum Folkwang, Essen, through the confiscation of “degenerate art” was severe, encompassing more than 1,400 works in all—150 paintings and a larger stock of watercolors and prints. The museum’s internationally outstanding holdings of modern art were thus eliminated at a single blow. The operation was managed by Klaus Graf von Baudissin, appointed as the museum’s director by the Na­t ional Socialists in 1934, after the resignation of Ernst Gosebruch. The Museumsverein (museum society), which oversaw the museum’s operations along with the city of Essen, had resolutely resisted this decision, leading to Baudissin’s suspension in 1938 by Mayor Just Dillgardt. Heinz Köhn took his place and, during the war and postwar years, succeeded in controlling the museum’s fate in such a way as to prevent even greater damage from being done. “His career can be considered exemplary of the continuity in personnel that determined cultural life in the newly founded Federal Republic.” 13

Introductory Essays

In 1933, Otto H. Förster rose to the position of director of the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne, a post he held until 1945. In 1934 he joined the NSDAP. Under his directorship, some 500 works branded as “degenerate” were confiscated, and about 600 further works were sold to obtain funds for for new acquisitions, not only on the domestic market but in areas the Germans had occupied, the Netherlands and the northern part of France. After the war, Förster defended these proceedings as legally and morally sound. On the basis of that argument, he continued to protest his dismissal until 1957, when he once again re­ceived an appointment, now as director general of the museums of Cologne, an office he kept for three years. In their striving for “reeducation,” the occupying powers attached crucial importance to creating an entirely new and (even if initially subject to their control) independent press. After the American military government’s information control division granted the Frankfurter Rundschau an initial group license for the establishment of a daily newspaper, on August 1, 1945, Colonel Bernard B. McMahon, who ran that division in Bavaria, awarded license no. 1 to the Süddeutsche Zeitung, the first newspaper founded in Munich, Bavaria. The first issue, published on October 6, 1945, the same day the license was granted, contained an article by Alfred Dahlmann, “Moderne Kunst als Hoffnung” (Modern art as hope). The text is noteworthy in two respects. On the one hand, it emphasized the “key function” of modern art in the restoration of a liberal society. On the other, it demanded that art not limit itself merely to picking up where it had left off in 1933—when some modernist art had had a pessimistic undertone, a prophetic sense of the coming disaster—but should express “a positivism of the calamity overcome, a positivism that bestows the mercy of the chance to make a common fresh start.” In lofty language, Dahlmann called attention to the responsibility of the arts immediately after the war, but also to the accompanying opportunity: Modern art in Germany has thus indeed been given a new beginning. If we understand it, make practical use of it, and realize it—and let us call this to mind very fundamentally again and again—it will grant or deny us the opportunity to join in shaping the cultural future of the world as creatively mature members of a family of nations in the process of reuniting. German contemporary art faces its hour of destiny.14 After the war, the controversies over the direction art might take were increasingly eclipsed by the political confrontation between the power blocs. The international coalition against the Nazi regime had already begun to disintegrate before the end of World War II. The doctrine proclaimed by Harry S. Truman on March 12, 1947, and the failure of the foreign ministers’ conference of December of that year in London, where the break between the two United States and the Soviet Union became clearly evident, significantly aggravated the tension. The founding of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) on May 23, 1949, and of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) on October 7 of the same year,

on the territories of the former occupied zones, cemented Germany’s political division. From that time on, the boundary between the two German states was tantamount to a demarcation line between the Soviet Union, as one sphere of influence, and the United States of America, with its allies France and Britain, as the other. The division of Germany affected the biographies of many artists in West and East Germany alike, if in very different ways. The propa­ gandistic form of art that had been practiced by the National Socialists was rightly branded a reprehensible abuse. One of the main concerns of artists after the war, then, was to regain the liberties they had lost, and above all the freedom to develop without ideological constraints. At the same time, art was now instrumentalized yet again to buttress the respective social systems’ claims to ideological superiority. Whereas the idea of the autonomy of art illustrated the liberal orientation of the cap­ italist West, in the East the focus was on art’s political function in the construction of a socialist society.

Fig. 6. “Schlußstrich drunter!” (“Bottom line!”), election poster of the Free Democratic Party (FDP) for the first Bundestag elections on August 14, 1949

Under the influence of the United States, the development of European art of the postwar period was distinguished by a radicalized conception of the artwork. American artists in turn took their cue from a victors’ mentality that strove for complete dissociation from the European tradition of art history. At the same time, Central European art strove to pick up the thread of modernism where it had broken during the Nazi era. In 1958, an exhibition entitled The New American Painting had a four-week run at the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste (the present-day

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Universität der Künste) in Berlin. Organized by The Museum of Modern Art in New York, this propagandistic survey of the emerging dominant artistic movement, which also traveled to several other European cities, showed eighty-one works by seventeen painters, including all of the chief Abstract Expressionists. The driving force behind the project was the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which in turn was financed by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA, through foundations closely affiliated with that organization.15 For young German artists who had grown up under the Nazi regime, the exhibition was both a shock and a revelation. It confronted the young Georg Baselitz, for example, with the abrupt experience of an attitude wholly unfamiliar to him and based on a seemingly unbounded conception of freedom:

never really able to free himself of it. On the contrary, he consistently professed to it as a formative influence: I lived through seven years of war. After 1945, the part of Germany I grew up in was occupied by the Russians; then I was sent to the part that was occupied by the Americans. It was as though the children were being punished for the stupidities of the fathers.17 Gerhard Richter had a similar experience a year later when he visited Documenta II, which acquainted him with the same American painters. As had been the case with Baselitz, it was above all Jackson Pollock who made the most powerful impression on Richter:

Fig. 7. Adolf Hitler (center) with, to his right, Gerdy Troost, Adolf Ziegler, and Joseph Goebbels at the opening of the Haus der deutschen Kunst, Munich, May 5, 1937

I found those pictures so overwhelming, so totally unexpected, so different from the experience of my own world at the time that I felt totally desperate, because I thought I’d never stand a chance of doing well compared to those painters.16

The sheer brazenness of it! That really fascinated me and impressed me. I might almost say that those paintings were the real reason why I left the GDR. I realized that there was something wrong with my whole way of thinking.18

In Berlin, the show’s propagandistic function was manifest in the choice of an art school as the venue for its presentation. It participated in the confrontation between two social systems, based on contrary ideologies, that were contending with one another over which could lay claim to being the legitimate countermodel for overcoming the fascist past on German soil. The contest was fought in all areas of society: the economy, science, culture. Baselitz, who had been born in the Germany of the Nazi regime and had grown up in the socialist “workers’ and peasants’ state” (the GDR), was so put off by this ideological confrontation between the German past and his own postwar present that he was

Hardly had Germany been liberated, hardly had the hostilities ceased at the beginning of May 1945 and the country proclaimed its unconditional surrender on the 8th of that month, than cultural life was revived in all of the country’s major cities. Museums and art associations resumed their activities, orchestras performed concerts in what auditoriums were intact. The decade 1945–55 was a period of the recovery and citation of modernism. It began with the reconstruction of the infrastructure and the reeducation of the population, a task in which cultural institutions and programs played a key role. A very few examples will have to suffice here to illustrate the tremendous will that motivated these efforts.

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Introductory Essays

On June 18, 1945, the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Berlin reopened, and with it the school’s first postwar exhibition, with works by the German Expressionists as well as artists such as Hans Uhlmann, Renée Sintenis, Oskar Nerlinger, and others. This was followed by the first exhibition of the Kammer der Kunstschaffenden in Berlin, with works by artists such as Erich Heckel, Max Pechstein, Ney Gerhard Marcks, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff.19 In Dresden, the Erste Allgemeine Deutsche Kunstausstellung (First General German Art Exhibition) took place from August 25 to October 31, 1946. Such prominent figures as the artists Karl Hofer, Hans Grundig,

collection of Expressionist art to the city of Cologne, his native town, on May 2, 1946. Toward the end of that year the works were exhibited in the city’s Alte Universität, and subsequently also in Hamburg, Oldenburg, and Stuttgart. Haubrich had been collecting since the 1920s with a focus on German Expressionism and Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) work. In that context he had worked with Förster, director of the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum beginning on April 1, 1933. It was under Förster’s directorship that some 500 works had been eliminated from the museum’s holdings in 1937 and about the same number of purchases made, many of them in occupied territories. Haubrich had acquired

Fig. 8. Installation view of Adolf Ziegler's painting Die vier Elemente (The Four Elements, 1937) at the exhibition Histories in Conflict: Haus der Kunst and the Ideological Uses of Art, 1937-1955, Haus der Kunst, Munich, 2012

Max Pechstein, and Herbert Volwahsen, but also the art critic Will Grohmann, made up the jury and were moreover responsible for the exhibition concept, which provided for the presentation of 594 works by 250 artists. The project stood out not only in its magnitude but— more important still—because it was a genuinely pan-German exhibition, intended to give contemporary artists an international orientation and affiliation. At the same time, it was the only opportunity to unite two cultural spheres that were already beginning to drift apart: all subsequent Allgemeine Kunstausstellungen took place after the founding of the FRG and the GDR. One of the most remarkable gestures of these years was the endowment made by the lawyer Josef Haubrich, who gave his outstanding

a number of the “degenerate” works from the museum; after the war, his endowment returned them to the collection.20 A course was set in cultural politics when Josef Haubrich decided to donate his collection to the city of Cologne in 1946, after his house was confiscated by the British. … Haubrich’s collection became a symbol of resistance, but also of the so-called Wiedergutmachung [reparation]. It was to symbolize the credible will to democracy.21 In Munich, the former Haus der Deutschen Kunst had been closed for only a short phase of the denazification trials. The building resumed its activities in January 1946, now under the name “Haus der Kunst,”

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with a presentation of works from the collections of the Bavarian state, formerly housed in the Alte Pinakothek, which had been destroyed. The Bavarian state collections would remain in Haus der Kunst until 2001, when the modern department of the collections that were presented there since 1946 moved into the Pinakothek der Moderne in Barerstrasse. In July 1946, Haus der Kunst staged the Internationale Jugendbuchausstellung (International Children’s and Young Adult Book Exhibition), designed by Jella Lepman. Presenting more than 4,000 books from fourteen countries, it was the first international event to take place in postwar Germany. For Lepman, a journalist, Haus der Kunst was an ideal venue for her project—not despite its past but precisely because of it. In the memoirs she wrote nearly twenty years later, she recalled her thoughts and feelings: “I began critically inspecting the exhibition rooms and strode through the halls as if they already belonged to us. In my thoughts I swept away the boxes and crates; the international children’s books would move into this heathen temple and their good spirits would chase away the evil ones.”22 The program of Haus der Kunst in the first postwar decade was largely devoted to rehabilitating modernism in Germany. In September 1949, the exhibition Der Blaue Reiter. München und die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (The Blaue Reiter: Munich and the Art of the Twentieth Century), organized by Ludwig Grote, formed the prelude to a series of presentations on artists who had been banned from the museums and condemned as “degenerate” under the Nazi regime. In a speech at the opening, the responsible undersecretary of the Bayerischen Staatsministerium für Unterricht und Kultus (Bavarian State Ministry of Education and Culture), Dieter Sattler, remarked that Haus der Kunst had thus been “denazified.” 23 That show was followed by Maler am Bauhaus (Painters at the Bauhaus) and by monogra-

Fig. 9. Editorial staff of the Süddeutsche Zeitung in their war-damaged office, 1946

phic exhibitions on Frank Lloyd Wright and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner in 1952, Adolf Hölzel and Oskar Schlemmer in 1953, and Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Edvard Munch in 1954. The series culminated with a Pablo Picasso retrospective in 1955 (fig. 10), the founding year of the

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Documenta series of quinquennial exhibitions, whose future as the most important exhibition institution for contemporary art was not foreseeable at the time. The Picasso show featured over 250 paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures, and aroused as much curiosity as it did protest. Virtually casting its subject as the embodiment of the contemporary artist personality, and his work as a synonym for

Fig. 10. Visitors admire Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica (1937) at the exhibition Picasso 1900–1955, Haus der Kunst, Munich, 1955

avant-gardist thought, the exhibition was broadcast to the public from a vantage point removed from political retrospect. Even so, it brought one of art’s most famous and most gripping testimonies to the barbarity of war—Guernica (1937), which was shown alongside many other opera magna—into the former sanctuary of National Socialist aesthetic ideology. There was also a work referring to the continuing topicality of war, which had by no means disappeared from the face of the earth: Massacre in Korea of 1951 (plate 117). In December 1937, Picasso had expressed himself unambiguously on the stance he associated with Guernica: “It is my wish at this time to remind you that I have always believed, and still believe, that artists who live and work with spiritual values cannot and should not remain indifferent to a conflict in which the highest values of humanity are at stake.”24 In his discerning positive review of Haus der Kunst exhibition for Die Zeit, Carl Georg Heise pointed to the work’s political perspective by empha­ sizing the liberty with which Picasso had guided art from its rich past into the present and beyond, and came to the conclusion that society was obligated not only to acquaint itself with Picasso’s art, “but to ‘accept’ it as a decisive contribution to the shaping of our image of the world—and, what is more, to the recognition of the self.”25 In view of the webs of global, political, and cultural relationships that have their origins in the decades after World War II, Heise’s postulate is as relevant today as ever. Translated from German by Judith Rosenthal

Introductory Essays

and the German Democratic Republic in the east in 1949. Only the city of Berlin, the former capital of Nazi Germany, was jointly administered by the Allied powers and divided into four sectors. 5 “The discrepancy between expectation and reality that ensued in the American zone in the course of denazification was prodigious. Thirteen million persons of the age of eighteen and over had filled out their questionnaires; the liberation law applied to nearly one-third of the population. Some 10 percent were ultimately sentenced. And actual punishment or lasting disadvantages were suffered by fewer than 1 percent of those designated for denazification.” Wolfgang Benz, Demokratisierung durch Entnazifizierung und Erziehung. Quoted in Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, Bonn, Informationen zur politischen Bildung, Heft 259: Deutschland 1945–1949,. Quoted in http://www.bpb.de/izpb/10067/demokratisierung-durch-entnazifizierung-und-erziehung?p=all (accessed August 8, 2016). 6 See Paul Hoser, “Entnazifizierung, Reaktionen in der Gesellschaft,” available online at www.historisches-lexikon-bayerns.de/Lexikon/Entnazifizierung#Reaktionen_in_der_ Gesellschaft (accessed July 22, 2016). 7 See, e.g., Steven Bach, Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl (New York: Knopf, 2007); Jürgen Trimborn, Riefenstahl: Eine deutsche Karriere (Berlin: Aufbau, 2002); and André Müller, “Interview mit Arno Breker, 1979,” in Müller, Entblößungen (Munich: Goldmann, 1979). 8 Leni Riefenstahl, quoted in Spiegel Online, September 9, 2003: http://www.spiegel. de/kultur/kino/zitate-von-leni-riefenstahl-ich-bedaure-zu-100-prozent-hitler-kennengelernt-zu-haben-a-264954.html (accessed July 21, 2016). 9 Arno Breker, in Müller, “Interview mit Arno Breker, 1979.” Available online at http://andremuller.com-puter.com (accessed July 20, 2016). 10 Ibid. 11 Riefenstahl, quoted in Spiegel Online, September 9, 2003. 12 Adolf Ziegler, quoted in Klaus-Peter Schuster, Nationalsozialismus und “Entartete Kunst.” Die Kunststadt München 1937, 1988 (5th rev. ed. Munich: Prestel, 1998), p. 217. 13 Hans-Jürgen Lechtreck, “‘Ein stetiges, der Stadt Essen würdiges Ausstellungsleben’— Das Museum Folkwang 1945–1955,” in Julia Friedrich and Andreas Prinzing, eds., “So fing man einfach an, ohne viele Worte.” Ausstellungswesen und Sammlungspolitik in den ersten Jahren nach dem zweiten Weltkrieg (Berlin: Akademie, 2013), p. 64. 14 Alfred Dahlmann, “Moderne Kunst als Hoffnung,” Süddeutsche Zeitung (Munich) no. 1 (October 6, 1945): 4. 15 “When the Tate Gallery in London showed interest in the exhibition The New American Painting in 1958 (it was on view in Paris at the time) but couldn’t bear the transport costs, the American ‘millionaire and art lover’ Julius Fleischmann stepped up and brought the de Koonings and Pollocks to London. The money came from the Farfield Foundation, of which Fleischmann was president. The foundation was nothing other than a secret channel for CIA funds. Fleischmann was also a member of the board of directors of the International Program of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.” See Armin Wertz, “Kunst als Propaganda im Kalten Krieg,” Journal 21, July 25, 2014, available online at https://www.journal21.ch/ kunst-als-propaganda-im-kalten-krieg (accessed July 22, 2016). 16 Georg Baselitz, quoted in Farah Nayeri, “Georg Baselitz: Raw Views of a Painful Past,” 1 See Sabine Brantl, Haus der Kunst, München—Ein Ort und seine Geschichte im National-

New York Times, February 26, 2014, available online at www.nytimes.com/2014/02/27/

sozialismus (Munich: Allitera Verlag, 2007), p. 86.

arts/international/Georg-Baselitz-Raw-Views-of-a-Painful-Pastnt-to-the-end.html?_r=0

2 Since Haus der Kunst was the only major undamaged building in central Munich, in the

(accessed August 9, 2014).

early postwar years it was used to house American officers and their social events. The pre-

17 Baselitz, “A Conversation with Donald Kuspit at the Guggenheim Museum,” in David

sence of the Officers’ Club turned the building into an entertainment hotspot, but its exotic

Craven and Brian Winkenweder, eds., Dialectical Conversions: Donald Kuspit’s Art Criticism

address—Prinzregentenstrasse 1—was difficult for the Americans to pronounce, so they

(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011), p. 74.

called the club the “Pee One.” The birth of an institution! From then on, jazz concerts and

18 Gerhard Richter, in “Interview with Benjamin H. D. Buchloh,” in Richter, Gerhard Richter,

dances were the order of the day. As the rooms used for cultural purposes developed into a

Writings, 1961–2007 (New York: D.A.P., 2009), p. 163.

global contemporary-art center, one section of the building was reserved for gastronomical

19 See Kunst in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1945–1985, exh. cat. (Berlin: Nationalga-

and entertainment highlights. When the Greek Alecco took over the restaurant, in 1968, he

lerie, Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, 1985), p. 454.

impressed his guests with a motto that still characterizes the P1 Club today: “To be in is a pas-

20 See Friedrich and Dorothee Grafahrend-Gomert, “Josef Haubrich. Ein Sammler und seine

sing phenomenon; to be the best is an art.” See http://p1-club.de (accessed August 5, 2016)

Sammlung,” in Friedrich, ed., Meisterwerke der Moderne. Die Sammlung Haubrich im Museum

3 According to the Munich city records for 1946: “March 5, 1946: in a meeting chaired by

Ludwig (Cologne: Walther König, 2011), pp. 13–41.

Minister President Dr. Wilhelm Högner, the minister presidents of the three Länder of the Ame-

21 Grafahrend-Gohmert, “Die Sammlung Haubrich und der Wiedeaufbau des Wall-

rican zone signed the ‘Law on Liberation from National Socialism and Militarism’ in the council

raf-Richartz-Museums ab 1945,” in Friedrich and Prinzing, eds., “So fing man einfach an, ohne

chamber of the Munich city hall. ‘On behalf of General [Joseph] McNarney, General [Lucius]

viele Worte, p. 92 (see note 13).

Clay pronounces the consent of the American military government.’ On May 13, with the con-

22 Jella Lepman, quoted in Brantl, Haus der Kunst, München, p. 115.

sent of the American military government, the first civilian tribunals for the enforcement of the

23 Ibid.

cleansing law began their work.” Quoted in muenchen.de https://www.muenchen.de/rathaus/

24 Pablo Picasso, “Message to Artists’ Congress,” sent by telephone to the American Artists’

Stadtverwaltung/Direktorium/Stadtarchiv/Chronik/1946.html (accessed July 18, 2016).

Congress, New York, December 1937, in Dore Ashton, ed., Picasso on Art: A Selection of

4 At the Yalta Conference of February 4 to 11, 1945 the Allied Powers decided to separate

Views (New York: Da Capo, 1972), p. 145.

Germany into four occupation zones adminstered by the United States, the Soviet Union,

25 Carl Georg Heise, “Picasso und kein Ende,” in Die Zeit, December 1, 1955, available online

Great Britain, and France until the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany in the west

at http://www.zeit.de/1955/48/picasso-und-kein-ende (accessed August 5, 2016).

Ulrich Wilmes

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POSTWAR: THE MELANCHOLY HISTORY OF A TERM Mark Mazower

Introductory Essays

M

ore than any war before it or since, World War II was an exercise in world-making, an expansion of the imagination that ran in parallel with the struggle on the battlefield. Dominated by dreams of the future and human improvement, and by radically divergent views of what that might mean, it was a struggle in which virtually none of the participants thought or wished that things should go back to how they had been before the fighting began. “How New Will the Better World Be?” cautioned the American historian Carl Becker in 1944 in response, but amidst the war he went unheeded.1 The Germans had begun with their talk of a “Neuordnung” or New Order, but their opponents quickly realized that they had no choice but to follow and offer alternatives. When H. G. Wells penned his polemic The New World Order in early 1940, it was to excoriate those members of the British ruling class who thought, just as they had in 1914, that there was nothing much wrong with how things were, and that once the Germans had been taught how to behave like gentlemen, everyone could settle down again and things could go back to being run in the old way.2 That summer, as if to signal the death of liberal internationalism, Germany, Italy, and Japan signed a pact that proposed carving the world up into separate spheres of influence. The following year came the Allied response in the form of the Atlantic Charter and the detailed planning that eventually led to the formation of the United Nations. Wells was right that old blinkers were not so easily cast aside. The war was a global one—far more than its predecessor in 1914–18—and its effects were felt across continents: a huge civilian death toll in East Asia, devastating famine in India. It accelerated urbanization and economic development in Africa and the Middle East and fanned dreams of the end of colonialism everywhere. Yet in the minds of Europe’s leaders— and not only Europe’s but Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin as well, men educated in the old truths of the nineteenth century—peace and security were still primarily issues that revolved around the future of Europe. When Gilbert Murray, a prominent internationalist, wrote in 1946 about the shift from the League of Nations to the new United Nations, he noted that “some great movement for unity and constructive reconciliation in Europe is an absolute necessity for civilization.” Then he added, almost as an afterthought: “Of course Europe is not everything. There are other continents.” 3 “Europe is not everything.” That insight was a start but it was one acquired painfully and often reluctantly and its full implications took time to emerge. For the end of the war seemed to mark two quite distinct processes, and while one went deep into Europe’s heart, the other led far afield. The first was the effort to reconstruct a decimated continent, to stabilize the nation-state system that had emerged after 1918, and to restore democracy to peoples who had abandoned it. The second was to determine the fate of Europe’s overseas empires and to bring democracy and independence to those demanding it there. The disjuncture between

the two had been striking during the war, when many ardent anti-Nazis had seemed happy to defend the need for colonial rule indefinitely into the future. It was as though for them the war were about establishing the difference between good and bad ways of running empires, not about the evil of empire tout court. Putting these two stories together raises the question of Europe’s changing place in the world after 1945, in an era in which the long centuries of European global ascendancy suddenly and, to many people, unpredictably, came to an end. Postwar, the title of this sweeping exhibition, seems as good a word as any to encompass this period of rupture and reinvention. But it is a word that like all such terms has its own secret history and carries its own

Fig. 1. John Vachon. Wrocław 1946 (Marketplace at Grunwald Square). 1946. Photography

hidden and not-so-hidden implications. For to call these years the “postwar” years is not to lay bare something in nature. Time does not present itself in epochs; it is we who see it that way, and the way we carve periods out of time, fix their origins and endpoints, and label them is itself a revelation of perspective and its contingencies. For one thing, no previous war in history had ever been regarded by those who lived through it as leading in its aftermath to some postwar era. The term was not unknown before 1939 but it was extremely rare, and even after 1918 it was not used except by a few economists and technical experts. Deployed shortly after World War II erupted in 1939, the term has enjoyed its own fitful history. Once it entered common

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Fig. 2. A photographer in Warsaw uses his own backdrop to mask war-damaged buildings, November 1946.

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Introductory Essays

parlance, very rapidly, in the early 1940s, it was never abandoned, but its peak usage occurred in two distinct phases: one during the 1940s themselves, as a term to describe a wished-for future, and the other after the end of the Cold War, to take a new look at a now-distant past. “Postwar”: it is a crisp term, pragmatic yet imbued with hope. It posits the audacious possibility of a break with violence, the dawning of a new era in which war itself is finally banished from human affairs. Friedrich von Gentz, secretary to Klemens von Metternich, had hoped that the 1815 Congress of Vienna might win Europe a breathing space of one or two generations; neither he nor any other respectable statesman seriously believed that war could be eradicated for ever. That was, in the nineteenth century, the millennial dream of radical evangelical fanatics, not sober diplomats, not even the most mystically inclined. Yet this was the hope in and after World War II, a hope of course given extra urgency after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Over a century the dreams of nineteenth-century American and British peace activists had been passed on to those most practical of dreamers, the mid-twentieth-century planners. It was American planners who drove the thinking among the Allies about a new era of global peace and prosperity. They were men like State Department officials Sumner Welles and Leo Pasvolsky, the one, in the early years of the war, the most important figure in Washington driving thinking about international governance; the other a brilliant foreign-policy expert, a keen student of Soviet communism and a man aware of the importance of dreams in international politics and of the pitfalls that lay in wait for them. They wanted to avoid the mistakes of the past, and in particular the mistakes of their American predecessor Woodrow Wilson. The British followed reluctantly, fearful that “postwar” was a cover term for anti-imperialism or else, more cynically, for an American takeover of their possessions. But they too understood that you could not fight a modern war with a conscript army without a clear sense of what you were fighting for, and that an integral part of that sense was the capacity to “win the peace,” or at least to think during the war about how to prevail once the fighting had stopped. If the golden age of the postwar was the last two years of the war itself, the term remained useful long after 1945 because the world was now living in an atomic age. The millennial dream of universal peace acquired new meaning once war had suddenly become more terrifying than ever. Within days of the bombing of Nagasaki, Bertrand Russell warned that “the prospect for the human race is sombre beyond all precedent.” 4 Even before this, seventy scientists working on the Manhattan Project, led by physicist Leo Szilard, had petitioned President Harry S. Truman to think carefully before resorting to the military use of the bomb against the Japanese. Concerned scientists presented world peace as a goal above politics—but scientists, like businessmen, tend to imagine a world above politics as the place they live in. In fact, not only did political tensions get in the way of the dream of international control of atomic energy, they broke apart the alliance of the Big Three that had defeated the Nazis and the Japanese. One way or another, the alliance against Napoleon had held for generations; the alliance against Germany scarcely outlived

Adolf Hitler himself. Or, to be more precise, it held—just—but frayed badly in the 1940s to the point of invisibility. The Cold War—another new term that betrayed the preposterous ambition, the unfulfilled longing, embodied in the term “postwar”—was now underway, and the long shadow of the atom bomb, as this exhibition testifies, overhung it. Did the Cold War mean that the promise of a “postwar” time had been falsified? Certainly there were indications of this, as civil war in Greece erupted in a series of campaigns that swept the mountains of the mainland, left hundreds of thousands dead or displaced, and saw napalm used on the European continent for the first time before the 1940s were out. Yet Greece aside, war did not return to Europe: so much was gained. And arguably the principal goal of the postwar planning effort was attained: to keep the general peace in Europe once Nazism was defeated. From this perspective, “postwar” embodied the deeply Eurocentric view of what mattered that we started out highlighting, a view in which the war that counted was the war within Europe, or over Europe’s future. Other wars, in this way of looking at things, could be discounted as “small wars,” or better still omitted from the collective memory and conscience of the world. One could thus overlook, as much of the European and American media did, the stirrings of colonial revolt in Algeria beginning in May 1945; Damascus, where the war against Hitler morphed seamlessly into the war for Syrian independence against France; and insurgencies in Indochina, the Dutch East Indies, and Madagascar in 1945–47, bitter and bloody conflicts that marked, in retrospect, the endgame of empire. The trouble was that “postwar” was an argument not only about peace but about stability. What counted internationally, and counted more and more in the atomic age, were not the rights of colonial peoples, still less the universal march of democracy, but the stabilization of power around the world to prevent conflict between the Soviet Union and its enemies spilling out of control. This usually, especially early on, meant American support for at least some of the tottering European empires—French and British in particular—even if in the 1950s and early ’60s the United States in particular was often working quietly behind the scenes trying to get its allies in Europe to liberalize colonial rule. The odds were stacked against those fighting for liberation from the colonial regimes, and from their perspective the “postwar” era could only be regarded as one in which the legitimacy of their struggle was questioned and opposed. Europe mourned its dead, lamented its past, and simultaneously celebrated its continued role in civilizing the backward peoples of the world. So talk about the postwar was obviously a matter of perspective and for many outside Europe, the wars to think about were those to come, not those behind them. Other wars remained to be fought, other peaces to be challenged. One reason surely for the declining use of the term “postwar” in the 1960s was the growing awareness everywhere that the age of wars had not ceased, that national liberation—often attainable only through war—was the cause of the age, and, increasingly, that beyond the achievement of national self-determination and colonial independence, a new era of wars lay in wait: of civil wars, such as those in

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Pakistan and Nigeria, or of Third World powers, like that between China and India. The omnipresence of war stretched into the future. The postwar era, in short, was nothing if not an era of new wars. Which begs the question: why then the revival of interest in the postwar after 1989? There can be no question about this refocusing: in the 1990s, the number of books with the word in their title suddenly trebled compared with the previous decade; in the first fifteen years of this century, the number more than doubled again. books like Tony Judt’s

“Postwar” also signaled a specific psychological situation: coping with the past in all its dimensions, embarking on the work of mourning, the estimating of material and psychic losses, and above all—a theme that came naturally to our increasingly psychologizing era—the reckoning with trauma. How did we get over it? Did we? Can we put it behind us? And now, in 2016, the more Europe descends into infighting and the more the far right returns from the ashes, the more we are drawn back to those questions, and the more we talk about “we” and forget to ask

Fig. 3. Floris Jespers. The United States Saved Belgium from Starvation during the War and When Peace Came They Helped to Rebuild the Country and Its Scientific Institutions. 1939. Tapestry, 502.9 × 563.9 cm.

Postwar, conceived and written in the aftermath of Europe’s reunification, articulated a new concern, and help us understand the reasons for it too.5 This time round “postwar” was primarily not a policy matter but an academic one—the concern of historians, and of historians of Europe in particular, and beyond that, of all those seeking to understand the promise of the future of a newly unified continent by returning to the last moment before its division. In this context “postwar” mean everything that the term “Cold War” had denied: the autonomy of Europe in relation to the superpowers, the possibilities for continental and national revolutionary reconstruction, movement as opposed to stasis.

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who “we” really are. It is all too easy even for historians to forget that the postwar was also the last phase of the “scramble for Africa,” and that the imperial land grab that began in the Maghreb in the mid-nineteenth century ended in the desperate jockeying over the fate of the Italian colonies in north and east Africa, the same territories—Libya, Eritrea, Somalia—whose plight today reminds us how little was actually settled in that postwar moment. Can art encourage us to reflect on the limits and bounds of our perspective? Can the notion of “postwar” be expanded to include those only peripherally drawn into World War II and those whose real wars lay

Introductory Essays

years, sometimes decades in the future, and may be continuing at the time of this writing? The challenge of this exhibition is to target that older Eurocentric conception and to amplify its meaning. The art itself shows a commonality of visual languages that transcends the specificity of historical experiences and hopes. It also suggests an underlying commonality of hopes characteristic of that moment in world history—the emergence of rural populations everywhere into dignity, the appeal of formalism, the embrace of the technical as an engine of social transformation. If the threat of the bomb was one force bringing people together, these were others. Older, identifiably European languages of painting were quietly jettisoned: the pastoral—rarely encountered in the works shown here—and above all the neoclassicism that had offered the principal challenge to modernism across the ideological spectrum in the 1920s, and that survived after 1945 only momentarily in pockets of Socialist Realism. Into the vacuum came a diversity of aesthetics that mediated the violence of the war years and tried to find ways to contain it. There is an unprecedented sense of the fragility of the human body in a physical landscape now detonated by bombs or churned by rebuilding. The utopianism that survived into the postwar era, and indeed that underpinned a new era of ambitious social planning, coexisted with a deep sense of psychic unease. “Postwar” as a moment of hope, an era of achievement; “postwar” as a sense of promise that was not to be fulfilled because it could never have been. All of that and more is visible here.

1 Carl Becker, How New Will the Better World Be? (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1944). 2 H. G. Wells, The New World Order (London: Secker & Warburg, 1940, repr. ed. Minneapolis: Filiquarian Publishing, 2007). 3 Gilbert Murray, “Retrospect and Prospect,” From the League to the U.N. (London, New York, and Toronto: Geoffrey Cumberlege, Oxford University Press, 1946), pp. 191, 197. 4 Bertrand Russell, “The Bomb and Civilization,” Glasgow Forward, August 18, 1945. 5 Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin Press, 2005).

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LEGACIES OF BANDUNG: DECOLONIZATION AND THE POLITICS OF CULTURE Dipesh Chakrabarty

Introductory Essays

T

he urge to decolonize, to be rid of the colonizer in every possible way, was internal to all anticolonial criticism after the end of World War I. Postcolonial critics of our times, on the other hand, have emphasized how the colonial situation produced forms of hybridity or mimicry that necessarily escaped the Manichaean logic of the colonial encounter.1 It is not only this intellectual shift that separates anticolonial and postcolonial criticism. The two genres have also been separated by the political geographies and histories of their origins. After all, the demand for political and intellectual decolonization arose mainly in the colonized countries among the intellectuals of anticolonial movements. Postcolonial writing and criticism, on the other hand, was born in the West. They were influenced by anticolonial criticism but their audiences were at the beginning in the West itself, for these writings have been an essential part of the struggle to make the liberal-capitalist (and, initially, mainly Anglo-American) Western democracies more democratic with respect to their immigrant, minority, and indigenous—though there have been tensions between these—groups and populations. Race has thus figured as a category central to postcolonial criticism while its position in anticolonial discourse varies. The question of race is crucial to the formulations of Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, or C. L. R. James, for example, but it is not as central to how a Mahatma Gandhi or a Rabindranath Tagore thought about colonial domination. If historically, then, anticolonialism has been on the wane since the 1960s and displaced by postcolonial discourse in the closing decades of the twentieth century, it has been further pointed out by more recent critics of postcolonialism that even the postcolonial moment is now behind us, its critical clamor having been drowned in turn by the mighty tide of globalization.2 This seemingly easy periodization of the twentieth century—anticolonialism giving way to postcolonialism giving way to globalization— is unsettled if we look closely at the discussions about decolonization that marked the 1950s and ’60s of the last century. Ideas regarding decolonization were dominated by two concerns. One was development. The other I will call “dialogue.“ Many anticolonial thinkers thought of colonialism as something of a broken promise. European rule, it was said, promised modernization but did not deliver on it. As Césaire said in his Discourse on Colonialism: It is the indigenous peoples of Africa and Asia who are demanding schools, and colonialist Europe which refuses them; … it is the African who is asking for ports and roads, and colonialist Europe which is niggardly on this score; … it is the colonized man who wants to move forward, and the colonizer who holds things back. 3 This was the developmentalist side of decolonization whereby anticolonial thinkers came to accept different versions of modernization theory that in turn made the West into a model for everyone to follow.

This today may very well seem dated but it has not lost its relevance. What I will focus on here is a cultural style of politics that the talk about development fostered. I will call it the “pedagogical style of politics.” In the pedagogical mode, the very performance of politics reenacted civilizational or cultural hierarchies: between nations, between classes, or between the leaders and the masses. Those lower down in the hierarchy were meant to learn from those higher up. Leaders were like teachers. But there was also another side to decolonization that has received less scholarly attention. Anticolonial thinkers often devoted a great deal of time to the question of whether or how a global conversation of humanity could genuinely acknowledge cultural diversity without arranging them on a hierarchical scale of civilization—that is to say, an urge toward cross-cultural dialogue without the baggage of imperialism. Let me call it the dialogical side of decolonization. Here, unlike on the pedagogical side, there was no one model to follow. Different thinkers took different positions, and it is the richness of their contradictions that speaks directly to the fundamental concerns of both postcolonial criticism and globalization theory. That indeed may be where the global movement toward decolonization left us a heritage useful for the world even today. In what follows, I track these two aspects of the language of decolonization, starting with the historic conference in Bandung, Indonesia, where some 600 leaders and delegates of twenty-nine newly independent countries from Asia and Africa met on April 18–24, 1955, to exchange views of the world at a time when the Cold War and a new United Nations regime were already important factors in international relations.4 […]

DATELINE: BANDUNG, APRIL 1955 In 1955, when Richard Wright, the noted African American writer then resident in Paris, decided to attend the Bandung Conference, many of his European friends thought that this would be an occasion simply for criticizing the West. Even Gunnar Myrdal, in writing the foreword to the book that Wright wrote as a result of his experience at Bandung, ended up penning an indictment of what happened in Bandung: “[Wright’s] interest was focused on the two powerful urges far beyond Left and Right which he found at work there: Religion and Race. … Asia and Africa thus carry the irrationalism of both East and West.”5 Both Myrdal’s and Wright’s Parisian friends appear to have misjudged what decolonization was all about. It was not a simple project of cultivating a sense of disengagement with the West. There was no reverse racism at work in Bandung. If anything, the aspiration for political and economic freedom that the conference stood for entailed a long and troubled conversation with an imagined Europe or the West. “I was discovering,” wrote Wright, “that this Asian elite was, in many ways, more Western than the West, their Westernness consisting in their having been made to break with the

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past in a manner that but few Westerners could possibly do.”6 It was in fact the newsmen from his own country who attended the conference who, Wright felt, “had no philosophy of history with which to understand Bandung.” 7 I will shortly come to this question of the philosophy of history that marked the discourse of decolonization. For now let me simply note the historical moment when the conference met. The Bandung Conference was held at a time when currents of deep and widespread sympathy with the newly independent nations—or with those struggling to be independent (such as Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, central Africa, etc.)—met those of the Cold War. Treaties unsatisfactory to the United States had been signed in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. The French had lost in Dien Bien Phu and the Korean War had ended. Some of the Asian nations had joined defense pacts with the United States: Pakistan, Thailand, and the Philippines. Some others belonged to the Socialist bloc. Bandung was attempting to sustain a sense of Asian-African affinity in the face of such disagreements. This was not

Apart from the lack of mutual trust and respect, the conference, so opposed to imperialism, had no operative definition of the term. This was so mainly because there were deep and irreconcilable differences among the nations represented. The prime minister of Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Sir John Kotelawala, caused some tension in the political committee of the conference—and shocked Nehru—when on the afternoon of Thursday, April 21, 1955, he referred to the Eastern European countries and asked, “Are not these colonies as much as any of the colonial territories in Africa or Asia? … should it not be our duty openly to declare opposition to Soviet colonialism as much as Western imperialism?”9 The compromise prose drafted by the conference in trying to accommodate the spirit of Sir John’s question clearly reveals the shallow intellectual unity on which the conference was based. Rather than refer directly to “the form of the colonialism of the Soviet Union,” the founding committee eventually agreed on a statement that called for an end to “colonialism in all its manifestation[s].” 10 […]

PEDAGOGICAL STYLE OF DEVELOPMENTAL POLITICS

Fig. 1. Indonesian president Sukarno, Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, and other delegates at the Bandung Conference, 1955

easy, as there was pressure from the Western countries to influence the course of the conversation at Bandung by excluding China, for example. Jawaharlal Nehru’s correspondence with the United Nations makes it obvious that sometimes he had to stand his ground on the question of neutrality in the Cold War. A letter he wrote to the Secretary General of the United Nations dated December 18, 1954, on the subject of Bandung, reads: We have no desire to create a bad impression about anything in the US and the UK. But the world is somewhat larger than the US and the UK and we have to take into account what impressions we create in the rest of the world. … For us to be told, therefore, that the US and the UK will not like the inclusion of China in the Afro-Asian Conference is not very helpful. In fact, it is somewhat irritating. There are many things that the US and the UK have done which we do not like at all.8 […]

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The discourse and politics of decolonization in the nations that met in Bandung often displayed an uncritical emphasis on modernization. Sustaining this attitude was a clear and conscious desire to “catch up” with the West. As Nehru would often say in the 1950s, “What Europe did in a hundred or a hundred and fifty years, we must do in ten or fifteen years,” or as is reflected in the very title of a 1971 biography of the Tanzanian leader Julius Nyerere: We Must Run While They Walk.11 The accent on modernization made the figure of the engineer one of the most eroticized figures of the postcolonial developmentalist imagination. Even the cursory prose of a stray remark by Wright to a friend in Indonesia catches this precedence of the engineer over the poet or the prophet in the very imagination of decolonization. “Indonesia has taken power away from the Dutch,” Wright said, “but she does not know how to use it.” This, he thought, “need not be a Right or Left issue,” but he wondered, “Where is the engineer who can build a project out of eighty million human lives, a project that can nourish them, sustain them, and yet have their voluntary loyalty?”12 This emphasis on development as catching-up-with-the-West produced a particular split that marked both the relationship between elite nations and their subaltern counterparts and that between elites and subalterns within national boundaries. Just as the emergent nations demanded political equality with the Euro-American nations while wanting to catch up with them on the economic front, similarly their leaders thought of their peasants and workers simultaneously as people who were already full citizens—in that they had the associated rights—

Introductory Essays

but also as people who were not quite full citizens in that they needed to be educated in the habits and manners of citizens. This produced a

Fig. 2. President Gamal Abdel Nasser speaks in Damascus at ceremonies to mark the second anniversary of the United Arab Republic, 1960

style of politics on the part of the leaders that could only be called pedagogical. From Nasser and Julius Nyerere to Sukarno and Nehru, decolonization produced a crop of leaders who saw themselves, fundamentally, as teachers to their nations. […]

DIALOGICAL SIDE OF DECOLONIZATION It is our contemporary interest in the circulation of humans, objects, and practices across and beyond the boundaries of the nation state that makes the other side of decolonization—representing the thoughts of the colonized on conversation across differences—relevant to the concerns of both globalization and postcolonial theory. However, what was said by theorists of decolonization about “dialogue across difference” was often contradictory. But precisely because their debate was of necessity unfinished, it leaves us a rich body of ideas that speaks to the concept of cosmopolitanism without seeking any overall mastery over the untamable diversity of human culture. Long before academics began to talk about “global English,” Bandung brought Wright a premonition of the global future of this language that was once, as Gauri Viswanathan and others have shown, very much a part of the colonizing mission. “I felt while at Bandung,” wrote Wright, that the English language was about to undergo one of the most severe tests in its long and glorious history. Not only was English becoming

the common dominant tongue of the globe, but it was evident that soon there would be more people speaking English than there were people whose native tongue was English. … H. L. Mencken has traced the origins of many of our American words and phrases that went to modify English to an extent that we now regard our English tongue in America as the American language. What will happen when millions upon millions of new people in the tropics begin to speak English? Alien pressures and structures of thought and feeling will be brought to bear upon this mother tongue and we shall be hearing some strange and twisted expressions. … But this is all to the good; a language is useless unless it can be used for the vital purposes of life, and to use a language in new situations is, inevitably, to change it.13 Clearly ahead of his time, Wright glimpsed a future that would be visible much later only to the generations that would come after Salman Rushdie. Wright’s was a vision of anticolonial cosmopolitanism. English would cease to be the master’s language. Learning it would no longer be a matter of the colonized Caliban talking back to Prospero, the master. Instead, the vision was that as other languages gradually died into it, English would become plural from within so that it could become the new Babel of the world. The Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe would echo this vision ten years after Wright articulated it: Is it right that a man should abandon his mother tongue for someone else’s? It looks like a dreadful betrayal and produces a guilty feeling. But for me there is no other choice. I have been given the [English] language and I intend to use it. … I felt that the English language will be able to carry the weight of my African experience. But it will have to be a new English, still in full communication with its ancestral home but altered to suit new African surroundings.14 Yet, delivering the Robb lectures—later published as Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature—at the University of Auckland in New Zealand some twenty years after these words were spoken, Ngugi wa Thiongo, the Kenyan writer, adopted a position exactly the opposite of that spelt out by Wright and Achebe. An essay by the Nigerian writer Gabriel Okara in the Africanist journal Transition illustrated for Ngugi the “lengths to which we were prepared to go in our mission of enriching foreign languages by injecting Senghorian ‘black blood’ into their rusty joints.” Okara had written, In order to capture the vivid images of African speech, I had to eschew the habit of expressing my thoughts first in English. It was difficult at first, but I had to learn. I had to study each jaw expression I used and to discover the probable situation in which it was used in order to bring out their nearest meaning in English. I found it a fascinating exercise. Ngugi disagreed. “Why”, he asks, “should an African writer, or any writer, become so obsessed with taking from his mother-tongue to enrich

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other tongues? … What seemed to worry us more was this: after all this literary gymnastics of preying on our languages to add life and vigor to English and other foreign languages, would the result still be accepted as good English or good French?” 15 He for one experienced this as a “neo-colonial situation” and went on to describe the book resulting from his lectures as his “farewell to English as a vehicle for any of [his] writing”: “From now on it is Gikuyu and Kiswahili all the way.” 16 It is not my purpose to use the positions of Wright and Ngugi to cancel each other out. I think they anticipate two familiar and

It would be good in African secondary schools to make it compulsory to study a vernacular language along with French. We have heard for decades about the “modern humanities.” Why should there not be “African humanities”? Every language, which means every civilization, can provide material for the humanities, because every civilization is the expression, with its own peculiar emphasis, of certain characteristics of humanity. … This then is where the real aim of colonization lies. A moral and intellectual cross-fertilization, a spiritual graft.17 In other words, there is no cross-fertilization without an engagement with difference. Senghor’s thoughts received an even sharper focus when, writing in 1961 on the question of Marxism, he made a passionate plea against overlooking the always situated human being— man in his concrete affiliations to the past—in favor of the figure of the abstract human, so favorite of the modernizers—or some globalizers of today—from both the Left and the Right. “Man is not without a homeland,” wrote Senghor. He is not a man without color or history or country or civilization. He is West African man, our neighbor, precisely determined by his time and his place: the Malian, the Mauritian, the Ivory Coaster; the Wolof, the Tuareg, the Hausa, the Fon, the Mossi, a man of fish and bone and blood, who feeds on milk and millet and rice and yam, a man humiliated for centuries less perhaps in his hunger and nakedness than in his color and civilization, in his dignity as incarnate man.18

Fig. 3. Senegalese president Léopold Sédar Senghor and French president Charles de Gaulle at the Élysée Palace, Paris, July 1965

legitimate responses to possibilities inherent in global conversation: globalization as liberation and globalization as subjugation. Globalization is no one homogeneous thing. It could indeed be both. Léopold Senghor, on the other hand—of whose love of French Ngugi was no fan—points us in directions that remind us that the ambiguities and the richness of the moment of decolonization were never exhausted by the antinomies set up here by what we have excerpted from Wright and Ngugi. Senghor’s thoughts—even in what he wrote on the (somewhat unpopular) topic of “assimilation” to French culture in 1945—have much to say to us about what it might mean to inflect our global conversation by a genuine appreciation of human diversity. Clearly, Senghor was not for nativist isolation. He wrote, for instance, “mathematics and the exact sciences … by definition have no frontiers and appeal to a faculty of reason which is found in all peoples.” This, he thought, was true for even “history and geography,” which had “attained a universal value.” But what about languages like “Greek, Latin and French?” He wrote: “I know the advantages of these languages because I was brought up on them … ” but “the teaching of the classical languages is not an end in itself. It is a tool for discovering human truths in oneself and for expressing them under their various aspects.” And then followed Senghor’s argument for diversity in the humanities:

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“Incarnate man”—or man as always already incarnate—was how Senghor imagined the world’s heritage of historical and cultural diversity. It was not a diversity that got in the way of cross-cultural communication nor was it a diversity that did not matter. For Senghor, one way that diversity could be harnessed in the cause of development was by deliberately creating a plural and yet thriving tradition of humanities in the teaching institutions of the world. The vision was different from those of Wright or Ngugi. Neither “global” English (or French) nor a return to one’s native language was the option Senghor outlined. The way forward was a world of multilingual individuals who would appreciate language both as means of communication and as repositories of difference. A philologist’s utopia, perhaps, but how far from the vision of anticolonial modernizers who, in their single-minded pursuit of science and technology in order to catch up with the West, ended up leaving to the West itself the task of preserving the world’s humanities. The humanities have generally suffered in the newly emergent nations—my generation of Indians could testify to the cult of engineering and management that went hand-in-hand with discussions of development—while it at least survived in some of the elite universities of the West in the form of “area studies.” This is not an argument against “area studies” in the West. For it may very well be a sad fact today that it is only in the West that modern, non-Western humanities are pursued with some seriousness.19

Introductory Essays

But there is a risk here. As the late Edward Said demonstrated it for our generation, the West has seldom performed this task in a manner that transcends its own geopolitical interests. And that is where Senghor’s call for a plural tradition of the humanities remains a living legacy for all postcolonial intellectuals both inside and outside the West.

A longer version of this essay was published in Economic and Political Weekly 40, no. 46 (November 2005): 4812-4818. It was presented initially as a keynote lecture at a conference entitled “Bandung and Beyond: Rethinking Afro-Asian Connections in the Twentieth Century,” held at Stanford University on May 14–15, 2005. I am grateful to the participants at the conference and to Rochona Majumdar for comments. Thanks to Arvind Elangovan and Sunit Singh for assistance with research. 1 The classic statement of this is Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994). 2 See, for instance, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 143–59. 3 Aime Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), p. 25. 4 The countries that sponsored the conference were Burma, India, Ceylon, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. In addition, twenty-four other countries joined the conference. They were: Afghanistan, Cambodia, People’s Republic of China, Egypt, Ethiopia, Gold Coast, Iran, Iraq, Japan, Jordan, Laos, Lebanon, Liberia, Libya, Nepal, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Thailand, Turkey, Democratic Republic of [North] Vietnam, State of Vietnam, and Yemen. See Selected Documents of the Bandung Conference (New York: Institute of Pacific Relations, 1955), p. 29. It should be noted that Israel was invited to participate in the Asian Relations Conference of 1947 but the delegation was called the “Jewish Delegation from Palestine.” See Asian Relations: Report of the Proceedings and Documentation of the First Asian Relations Conference, New Delhi, March–April 1947, introduced by D. Gopal (Delhi: Authorspress, 2003). Bandung, however, excluded Israel, mainly because of “strong opposition” from Arab countries. See Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru (hereafter SWJN), second series, ed. Ravinder Kumar and H. Y. Sharada Prasad (Delhi: JN Memorial Fund, 2000), 27: 109, 566. 5 Gunnar Myrdal, “Foreword,” in Richard Wright, The Colour Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference (Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Company, 1956), p. 7. 6 Ibid., p. 71. This point is underlined in a review of the book by Merze Tate of Howard University in The Journal of Negro History 41, no. 3 (July 1956): 263–65. Tate quotes the following lines from Wright: “Bandung was the last call of Westernised Asians to the moral conscience of the West.” P. 265. 7 Wright, The Colour Curtain, p. 82. 8 SWJN, second series, 27: 106. 9 Sir John Kotelawala, quoted in Roeslan Abdulgani, The Bandung Connection: The Asia-Africa Connection in Bandung in 1955 (Jakarta: Gunung Agung, 1981), pp. 115, 117. See also Kotelawala, An Asian Prime Minister’s Story (London: George G. Harrap and Co., 1956). 10 Abdulgani, The Bandung Connection, p. 119. It should be noted that the Bandung conference was not to make any “majority” decisions or raise divisive, controversial issues. See SWJN, second series, 28: 97–98. 11 Nehru, “Speech inaugurating the new building of the Punjab High Court, Chandigarh, March 19, 1955,” SWJN, second series, 28: 30; William Edgett Smith, We Must Run While They Walk: A Portrait of Africa’s Julius Nyerere (New York: Random House, 1971). 12 Wright, The Colour Curtain, p. 132. Emphasis added. Christopher Lee tells me of a fictionalized film about Gamal Abdel Nasser, Nasser 56, in which Nasser, trying to gather support and expertise for nationalizing the Suez, exhorts two engineers who question his judgment, saying “You are engineers, not poets.” Personal communication from Lee, May 20, 2005. 13 Wright, The Colour Curtain, p. 200. 14 Chinua Achebe, “The African Writer and the English Language,” 1964, quoted in Ngugi wa Thiongo, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: James Curry, 1986), p. 7. 15 bid., pp. 7–8. 16 Ibid., pp. xii, xiv. 17 Léopold Sédar Senghor, Prose and Poetry, selected and trans. by John Reed and Clive Wake (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 53–55: 1945 essay on "assimilation" excerpted from Vues sur L’Afrique noire, ou Assimiler, non être assimilés. 18 Ibid., p. 59. 19 In saying this I exclude the field of postcolonial studies, for that field, as I have already said, had its origins in the West. Postcolonial writers from outside the West are absorbed in that global field, which still tilts toward the West. Nor do I mean to denigrate or deny the value of the work in modern, non-Western humanities that emanates from countries like India, for instance, for a wider audience. But voices from the world of non-Western scholarship in the humanities command much less global presence than voices from the social sciences in India and elsewhere. The humanities one comes across in global forums today are much more parochially Western than the social sciences: that is my point. And that, I think, was the gap Senghor also was pointing to.

Dipesh Chakrabarty

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VISUAL ESSAYS AND CHRONOLOGIES Compiled by Damian Lentini and Daniel Milnes

VISUAL ESSAY: SOCIAL AND POLITICAL EVENTS

2 Tank and troops of the Allied 5th Army pass cheering civilians by the Colosseum in Rome, June 3, 1944.

1 Winston Churchill and General Charles de Gaulle walk down the Avenue des Champs-Elysées during the French Armistice Day parade in Paris, November 11, 1944.

4 Japanese representatives including Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu and General Yoshijiro¯ Umezu on board the USS Missouri during the surrender ceremonies, Tokyo Bay, September 2, 1945. 3 Field Marshall Wilhelm Keitel signs the ratified surrender terms for the German Army at Russian Headquarters in Berlin, May 7, 1945.

6 Atomic cloud over Hiroshima, taken from the Enola Gay while flying over Matsuyama, Shikoku, August 6, 1945. 5 Little Boy, the bomb that was dropped in Hiroshima, on trailer cradle ready to be loaded, Tinian, August 1945.

8 Civilians and service personnel in Picadilly Circus celebrate the news of Allied victory over Japan, London, 1945.

7 Ruins of the Reichstag in Berlin after the allied bombing, Berlin, June 3, 1945.

10 The crew of the Enola Gay before the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Tinian, August 1945. 9 Starved prisoners after the liberation of the concentration camp at Ebensee, May 7, 1945.

12 Polar cap of the Fat Man weapon is prepared for the bombing of Nagasaki, Tinian, August 1945.

11 Remains of the Industry Promotional Hall amongst the ruins following the dropping of the atomic bomb, Hiroshima, August 1945. 83

13 Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin convene at the Yalta Conference, Yalta, February 1945.

15 German citizens read a special edition of the Süddeutsche Zeitung announcing the result of the Nuremberg trials, October 1, 1946.

14 American servicemen and women gather in front of “Rainbow Corner” Red Cross club to celebrate the unconditional surrender of Japan, Paris, August 15, 1945.

16 Corporal Irwin Goldstein sets the switches on one of the function tables of the ENIAC, the first electronic, general-purpose computer, Moore School of Electrical Engineering, Philadelphia, 1946.

17 Delegates of the Fifth Pan-African Congress, Manchester, October 1945. 18 U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt meets with King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia on board the USS Quincy in the Great Bitter Lake, Egypt, February 14, 1945.

19 Prime Minister Clement Attlee celebrates a Labour Party election victory over Winston Churchill, London, July 26, 1945. 20 Sukarno declares the independence of Indonesia, Jakarta, August 17, 1945.

21 Hundreds of Muslim refugees crowd atop a train leaving for Pakistan, New Delhi, September 1947. 22 Residents of Athens protest the fatal shooting of 28 unarmed civilians during a peaceful demonstration, a precursor to the Greek Civil War of 1946-1949, Athens, December 8, 1944.

23 The proclamation of the Italian Republic is announced in newspapers, Milan, June 1946.

24 The Exodus, a crowded ship carrying illegal Jewish refugees from Europe, arrives in Haifa, July 18, 1947.

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26 Hundreds of thousands of Koreans flee south after the North Korean army strikes across the border, 1950.

25 A so-called Raisin Bomber lands at Tempelhof Airport to deliver supplies to Berlin after the Soviets cut off access to the city from the west, Berlin, June 1948.

27 Three hundred portraits of Dutch governors are removed from the Governor’s residence, later known as the Palace of Freedom, after the official recognition of Indonesian independence, Jakarta, December 1949.

28 Founder of the state of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, reads the proclamation that establishes the country as an independent nation, Tel Aviv, May 14, 1948.

29 Mao Zedong declares the founding of the People’s Republic of China at Tiananmen Square, Beijing, October 1, 1949.

30 President Truman signs the document implementing the North Atlantic Treaty at his desk in the Oval Office, as a number of foreign dignitaries look on, Washington, DC, August 24, 1949.

32 Ten people are crushed to death in the rush to receive the 40 grams of gold allotted to each citizen after the value of paper money drastically sinks in China, Shanghai, December 1948.

31 Posters for the London Peace Congress on display on the wall of the Military School, Paris, 1950.

33 Refugees board boats headed for Lebanon and Egypt during the Palestinian Exodus, Al-Shati Camp, 1949.

34 The Free German Youth organizes a parade to mark the election of State President Wilhelm Pieck and the founding of the German Democratic Republic, Berlin, October 1949.

35 The Olympic Torch is presented at the Summer Olympic Games at Wembley Stadium, July 1948, London. 87

37 Demonstrators with flags march through the Brandenburg Gate during the People’s Uprising in East Germany, Berlin, June 17, 1953.

36 Viewers in 3-D glasses enjoy the screening of the Bwana Devil, the first full-length, color 3-D motion picture at the Paramount Theater, Hollywood, November 26, 1952.

38 Revelers party on the street during the carnival in Rio de Janeiro, February 1953.

39 Thousands of Vietnamese refugees move from a French landing ship to the USS Montague as part of the Operation “Passage to Freedom” that helped citizens flee to the south of the country, Haiphong, August 1954.

40 Delegates arrive for the Asian-African Conference in Indonesia, Bandung, April 1955. 41 The Russell–Einstein Manifesto issued by Bertrand Russell at Caxton Hall, London, July 9, 1955.

42 Prime Minister Gamal Abdel Nasser is welcomed by cheering crowds after the signing of the British withdrawal order and one day after a failed attempt to assassinate him, Alexandria, October 27, 1954.

43 Original model for the double helix structure of DNA as discovered by James Watson and Francis Crick, 1953.

44 A resident washes graffiti from a wall during the clean-up after a coup d’etat which restored power to the Shah of Iran, Tehran, August 1953.

46 Citizens storm the Soviet Cultural shop and set fire to Communist propaganda during the Hungarian Revolution, Budapest, October 1956.

45 Roger Bannister runs the first sub-four minute mile, Oxford, May 6, 1954.

47 Crowds gather at Drill Hall during the Treason Trial, Johannesburg, December 1956. 89

48 Leaders convene at the Palazzo dei Conservatori to sign the Treaty of Rome, Rome, March 1957.

49 A replica of an atomic mushroom cloud is carried through the streets in protest against the upcoming British nuclear tests at Christmas Islands, Tokyo, May 1, 1957.

51 Ravi Shankar and members of his group practise in New York, 1957.

50 Elizabeth Eckford, one of nine students of color whose integration into Little Rock’s Central High School was ordered by Federal Court, is heckled by a mob on her first day, Little Rock, September 1957.

52 Fidel Castro delivers a speech after ousting President Fulgencio Batista, Santa Clara, January 1959. 53 Soviet citizens look at television sets and radios at the USSR Exhibition in Sokolniki Park, which took place parallel to the American National Exhibition, Moscow, August 1959.

54 Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier of Monaco descend the steps of Saint Nicholas Cathedral on their wedding day, Monaco, April 19, 1956.

55 The Soviet Union launches the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, into orbit, Baikonur, October 4, 1957.

56 More than two dozen indigenous Australian men come to Perth to fight a defamation case against Stanley Guide Middleton, Commisioner for Native Affairs, and the Australian Broadcasting Commission, Perth, 1958.

57 A public demonstration of the new Fiat Nuova 500 takes place at the Piazza San Carlo, Turin, July 4, 1957

58 The Explorer VI Earth satellite takes the first photograph of the Earth from space, South Point, Hawaii, August 14, 1959.

59 Crowds cheer and rejoice after the formation of the United Arab Republic between Egypt and Syria, Arbin, February 1958.

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61 An aerial photograph shows the site of the first French nuclear test, entitled “Gerboise Bleue,” in the Tanezrouft area of the Sahara Desert, south-west of Reggane, February 1960.

60 The Enovid birth control pill becomes widely available in the USA, June 1960.

62 Anti-nuclear weapons protests take place in Ghana after proposals for further French nuclear testing in the Sahara, Accra, September 1960. 63 A family explores the planned city of Brasilia after its inauguration as the country’s new capital, Brasilia, April 1960.

64 French security forces try to stop young demonstrators in the Rue Michelet opposing the peace plan with France, Algiers, December 1960.

65 Workers at the Tryokhgornaya Manafaktura textile factory perform early-morning exercises, Moscow, 1960.

67 Sony begins mass production of its new all-transistor, portable television set, Tokyo, January 1960.

66 Residents of West Berlin look over toward the eastern part of the city at Bernauer Street as construction work begins on the Berlin Wall, West-Berlin, August 13, 1961.

68 Soviet women view a poster celebrating cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin after he became the first man to travel into space aboard Vostok on April 12, Moscow, May 1961.

69 After being captured in Buenos Aires fugitive Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann is taken to Israel where he stands trial, Jerusalem, April 1961.

70 Former Congolese Premier Patrice Lumumba is brought back to Leopoldville under armed guard after his capture and is secretly executed one month later, Leopoldville, December 1960.

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72 Martin Luther King, Jr. waves to supporters during the March on Washington, the occasion on which he delivered his famous ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, Washington, DC, August 28, 1963.

71 Protesters from the group Women Strike for Peace hold placards urging for caution in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis, New York, October 1962.

73 Citizens react to the assassination of John F. Kennedy, New York, November 22, 1963.

74 Students at the Al Aqida High School, Baghdad, 1961.

75 On the day after French National Police attack a demonstration of around 30,000 pro-FLN Algerians in Paris, a graffiti inscription on the left bank of the Seine reads 'We drown Algerians here', Paris, October 18, 1961.

77 President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the 1964 Civil Rights Act as Martin Luther King, Jr. and others look on, Washington, DC, July 2, 1964. 76 Demonstrators at Tiananmen Square protest America’s military intervention in Vietnam, Beijing, February 1965.

78 Muhammad Ali stands over Sonny Liston during their controversial title fight after knocking out his opponent after just one minute of the first round, Lewiston, May 25, 1965. 79 A group of Beatlemaniacs wave and scream across from the Plaza Hotel where the Beatles are staying, New York, August 28, 1964.

80 A group of civil rights demonstrators march from Selma to Montgomery to fight for voting rights for racial minorities, Alabama, March 1965. 81 U.S. helicopters pour machine gun fire into the tree line to cover the advance of South Vietnamese troops in an attack on a Viet Cong camp near the Cambodian border, Tây Ninh, March 1965.

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CHRONOLOGY OF SOCIAL AND POLITICAL EVENTS

1944 June 4 Rome is liberated from Fascist rule by Allied forces. Mussolini flees June 6 D-Day landings by Allied forces on the beaches of Normandy June 15 US Army Air Forces begin bombing the Imperial Iron and Steel Works at Yawata, in northern Japan, the first direct attack on the Japanese home islands July 1 – July 22 The Bretton Woods Conference takes place in New Hampshire, paving the way for the creation of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund July 3 Japanese forces are defeated at the battles of Imphal and Kohima. August 1 The Warsaw Uprising, orchestrated by the Polish Home Army, is crushed by Nazi forces August 21 – October 7 The Washington Conversations on International Peace and Security Organization (also known as the Dumbarton Oaks Conference) takes place in Washington, D.C., paving the way for the establishment of the United Nations August 25 Paris is liberated from Nazi rule by the Free French Forces. Charles de Gaulle is declared chairman of the Provisional Government of the French Republic the following day

1945 January 27 The Auschwitz/Birkenau concentration camps are liberated by the Soviet Red Army February 4 – February 11 Following the Tehran Conference in 1943, US president Roosevelt, British prime minister Churchill, and Soviet premier Stalin meet again at the Yalta Conference to discuss Europe’s postwar reorganization March 22 The Arab League is founded in Cairo April 4 – April 29 The Ohrdruf, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Sachsenhausen, and Dachau concentration camps are liberated by Allied forces April 12 US president Roosevelt dies. He is succeeded by Vice president Harry S. Truman April 28 Benito Mussolini and his mistress Claretta Petacci are executed by Italian partisans and hung upside down in the Piazzale Loreto in Milan April 30 Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun commit suicide in the Führerbunker in Berlin April 30 Munich, once called the “Capital of the [Nazi] Movement,” is liberated by the US Army May 7 The first German Instrument of Surrender is signed in Reims in the presence of representatives of the Free French Forces and the US Army May 8 VE Day. The German Supreme Command of the Armed Forces, the Allied Expeditionary Force, and the Supreme High Command

June 26 The United Nations Charter is signed in San Francisco by fifty member states July 16 The United States successfully detonates the first nuclear bomb near Alamogordo, New Mexico July 17 – August 2 The Potsdam Conference on the eventual denazification of Germany takes place July 26 In British elections Labour leader Clement Attlee defeats Winston Churchill, resulting in the implementation of socialist reforms throughout the United Kingdom August 6 The nuclear bomb “Little Boy” is dropped on Hiroshima by the US B-29 bomber Enola Gay. Three days later, the plutonium bomb “Fat Man” is dropped on Nagasaki by the Boeing B-29 Superfortress Bockscar August 15 Japanese Emperor Hirohito announces the unconditional surrender of the Japanese military in a radio broadcast to the Japanese people August 17 Indonesian nationalists Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta declare the independence of Indonesia, igniting a revolution against the Dutch Empire September 2 The Japanese foreign minister Mamoru Shigemitsu signs the Japanese Instrument of Surrender on board the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay

September 9 Japanese forces surrender to the chairman of the Nationalist Government of China, Chiang Kai-shek, in Nanking, officially ending World War II in the Pacific

September 4 Brussels is liberated by the Second Canadian Division and the Welsh Guards

October 7 Concentration camp inmates forced to aid with the disposal of gas chamber victims revolt at Auschwitz

June 21 200,000 public servants participate in the Nigerian General Strike, the largest anticolonial workers’ strike in Africa

September 6 – September 8 The Soviet Red Army occupies the northern part of Korea along the 38th parallel to dismantle Japanese forces after their capitulation, while the southern part of the peninsula is occupied by the US Army

August 26 The National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons, an anticolonial political party, is formed by Nigerian nationalists Nnamdi Azikiwe and Herbert Macaulay in Lagos

September 19 The Moscow Armistice marks the end of the Continuation War between Finland and the Soviet Union

the United Kingdom, France, and the Soviet Union

1 French civilians celebrate the Liberation of Paris, August 1944. of the Soviet Red Army sign the second Instrument of Surrender in Berlin, marking the end of World War II in Europe May 8 103 Algerian demonstrators are killed by French police forces in the Sétif and Guelma massacre June 5 Germany is divided into four occupation zones, administered by the United States,

2 Defendants, including Hermann Goering, Rudolf Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and Wilhelm Keitel, sit in the dock at the Nuremberg Trials, Nuremberg, c. 1945-46. October 20 A Mongolian independence referendum takes place, with officials reporting 100 percent of the electorate voting for independence October 24 Syria gains independence after the joint UN/French Mandate ends November 1 – November 16 UNESCO is founded November 20 The Nuremberg trials against former leaders of the Nazi regime begin November 29 The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia is founded, with Marshall Tito as president December 27 Following the Bretton Woods conference, twenty-eight nations meet in New York and agree to establish the World Bank and International Monetary Fund

1946 January 4 The Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry meets in Washington, D.C., to discuss Jewish immigration and settlement in Mandatory Palestine. Subsequent meetings eventually result in the UN Partition Plan. January 10 Project Diana bounces radar waves off the moon and proves that communication is possible between Earth and outer space, thereby initiating the Space Age

September 20 – October 20 Tallinn, Riga, and Belgrade annexed by the Soviet Red Army

February 15 The creation of Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer, the first electronic general-purpose computer, is officially announced

October 6 The first issue of the Süddeutsche Zeitung is published in Munich; it is the first newspaper in southern Germany to receive a license from the US military administration

February 24 Juan Perón wins the Argentinian presidential elections, initiating the age of Peronism

October 15 – October 21 The Fifth Pan-African Congress takes place in Manchester, resulting in a unanimous demand for an independent Africa

March 22 The Treaty of London is signed by the government of the United Kingdom and the Emir of Transjordan. Three days later, Transjordan becomes the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan

March 31 The Greek Civil War breaks out between the Greek government army and the Communist Democratic Army of Greece March 31 The Chinese Civil War breaks out between the Kuomintang-led government of the Republic of China and the Communist Party of China, headed by Mao Zedong April 17 The last French troops stationed in Syria during the Vichy regime leave, handing control of the country to the republican government of Shukri al-Quwatli June 2 After a second constitutional referendum, Italy votes to abolish the House of Savoy and become a republic

March 23 – April 2 The Asian Relations Conference in New Delhi lays the groundwork for cooperation among Third World nations and the formation of the Non-Aligned Movement June 5 The European Recovery Program (also known as the Marshall Plan) is launched by the United States, contributing $13 billion to the economic reconstruction of Western Europe June 17 – August 15 The end of the British Raj leads to the partition of the British Indian Empire into the new nations of Pakistan and India. The resulting mass migration of Hindus and Muslims results in up to 400,000 deaths July 11 The ship Exodus 1947 leaves the port of Sète in France carrying 4,515 Jewish pas-

June 30 US Presidential Executive Order 9102, which ordered the forced relocation and internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, officially expires

July 4 The Philippines attain independence from the United States

July 29 The Paris Peace Conference results in numerous peace treaties between the former Allied and Axis powers August 16 The Direct Action Day (also known as the Great Calcutta Killings) takes place amid widespread rioting and killing between Hindus and Muslims in Calcutta, resulting in between 200 and 300 deaths October 7 The new Constitution of Japan is ratified by the Japanese House of Representatives, marking the country’s transition from a monarchy to a democracy, based on the British model of parliamentary government December 19 First Indochina War breaks out between the French Army and the Viêt Minh, extending into the neighboring protectorates of Laos and Cambodia

1947 March 12 President Truman urges the US Congress and the public to support the “endangered” peoples of communist Europe, thereby announcing the United States’ claim of being the leader of the Western world

February 4 Ceylon is granted its independence from Great Britain February 21 The Communist Party of Czechoslovakia stages a coup d’état, assuming control of the government and marking the start of four decades of Communist rule April 1 The publication of the “Alpher–Bethe–Gamow paper” (or “αβγ paper”) in the journal Physical Review leads to the development of the Big Bang theory May 14 The State of Israel is officially declared on the day that the British Mandate of Palestine expires. 700,000 Palestinian Arabs flee or are expelled from the Israeli territories May 26 D. F. Malan is elected prime minister as the Afrikaner National Party wins South Africa’s general elections, ushering in Apartheid as official state policy

July 1 The United States begins the controversial testing of atomic bombs on Bikini Atoll

July 4 An outbreak of violence against a gathering of Jewish refugees in the Polish city of Kielce results in a pogrom that leaves forty-two Jews dead

sulting in the amalgamation of the Malayan Union, Penang, and Malacca

3 Citizens queue to vote on Mongolian independence, Mongolia, October 20, 1945.

sengers on their way to Palestine. After being intercepted in Haifa, the passengers are returned to Europe, being forcefully removed by British forces in Hamburg September 2 The Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (also known as the Rio Pact) is signed in Rio de Janeiro. The treaty’s principle claim is that an attack against one signatory is to be considered an attack against all signatories October 22 The Indo-Pakistani War of 1947 breaks out over India and Pakistan’s joint claim to the princely states of Kashmir and Jammu November 30 The Civil War in Mandatory Palestine breaks out between Jewish and Arab communities, resulting in the Palestinian exodus from Mandatory Palestine and the concurrent Jewish exodus from Muslim states

1948 January 4 The Union of Burma is founded after the country breaks away from British rule January 30 Mahatma Gandhi is assassinated by a Hindu fanatic in New Delhi February 1 The Federation of Malaya is proclaimed, re-

June 22 The ship MV Empire Windrush arrives in England with 492 Jamaican immigrants on board, signaling the beginning of the migration of almost 172,000 workers from the Caribbean and Asia to the United Kingdom June 24 The Berlin Blockade commences after the Soviet Union blocks rail, road, and canal access to the Allied sectors of the city, marking the first concrete confrontation of the Cold War. Western Allies respond by delivering goods via an airlift, which lasts for almost a year

December 16 The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is ratified by the United Nations General Assembly

1949 January 8 The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon) is founded in Moscow as a response to the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC) January 26 The Nationality and Citizenship Act 1948, which grants citizenship to all Australians (including Aboriginal people), comes into effect. February 24 The Israel-Egypt Armistice Agreement is signed on the island of Rhodes, signaling the beginning of the end of the 1948 Arab– Israeli War April 4 The signing of the North Atlantic Treaty in Washington, D.C., paves the way for the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) on August 24, 1949 April 20 – April 23 The first International Peace Conference is held in Paris, with Picasso designing its dove emblem

June 28 Yugoslavia is expelled from the Communist Information Bureau, leading the country to develop its own method of socialism July 29 – August 14 The first Olympics since World War II take place in London. Germany and Japan are not allowed to participate August 15 Korea is officially partitioned after the establishment of the First Republic of South Korea followed by the declaration of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in the north on September 9, 1948 September 9 The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is formally established in the northern half of the Korean Peninsula, with Kim Il-sung as prime minister October 29 A military coup in Peru sees General Manuel Apolinario Odriá declared president October 30 The Nationalist Army of Chiang Kai-Shek is defeated at Mukden in Manchuria November 26 Edwin Herbert Land invents instant photography

4 Visit of Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia on board the USS Quincy at the Great Bitter Lake, Egypt, February 13, 1945.

May 11 Siam officially changes its French name to Thaïlande (Thailand), in accordance with the change of its Thai name to Prated Thai (“the Thai nation”) in 1939 May 23 The Federal Republic of Germany is declared, with Bonn as its capital July 1 The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act No. 55 is passed in South Africa August 12 The Fourth Geneva Convention, which defines humanitarian protections for civilians in a war zone, is agreed upon

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1953

October 1 The People’s Republic of China is declared by Mao Zedong in Tiananmen Square, Beijing October 7 The German Democratic Republic (East Germany) is established, resulting in the official partitioning of Germany December 7 The government of the Republic of China under Chiang Kai-Shek finishes its evacuation to Taiwan, declaring Taipei its temporary capital December 27 The Republic of the United States of Indonesia is declared, with Sukarno as president

1950 May 9 French foreign minister Schuman presents his proposal for the creation of a pan-European organization, signaling the beginnings of the creation of the European Economic Community June 24 – July 16 The 1950 FIFA World Cup takes place in Brazil, the first to be contested after World War II June 25 The Korean War begins when the North Korean Army crosses the 38th parallel and attacks South Korea July 15 – July 17 The first Darmstadt Talks, dedicated to the theme of “The Image of Man in Our Time,” take place in West Germany October 6 At the Battle of Chamdo, the People’s Liberation Army troops enter Tibet, which ends with the signing of the 17 Point Agreement in Lhasa in May the following year November 28 The Colombo Plan for Co-operative Economic Development in South and SouthEast Asia is launched with the aim of strengthening the economic and social development of member states

1951 April Iranian prime minister Mossadegh nationalizes the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company April 11 President Truman relieves General Douglas MacArthur of duties in Korea April 18 Foreign ministers of the Benelux States, France, Italy, and West Germany sign the treaty that founds the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), a precursor to the European Union

January 13 Pravda, the state newspaper of the USSR, publishes an article falsely accusing a number of prestigious Jewish physicians of plotting to poison the country's senior political leaders, the so-called “Doctor’s Plot” 5 Juan Perón wins the Argentinian presidential elections, Buenos Aires, February 27, 1946.

February 28 James Watson and Francis Crick publish their theory of the double-helix model of DNA

October 14 The Organization of Central American States is formed, a precursor to the creation of the Central American Common Market

March 5 Joseph Stalin dies of a stroke at his Kuntsevo residence near Moscow. He is succeeded by Nikita Khrushchev

December 20, 1951 The Breeder Reactor, which begins operation in Arco, Idaho, is the first to success­ fully produce energy from nuclear fusion

May 29 Edmund Hilary and Tenzing Norgay are the first to reach the summit of Mount Everest

December 24 The United Kingdom of Libya officially comes into being, with King Idris I as chief of state

1952 April 9 The Bolivian National Revolution results in the overthrowing of Hugo Ballivián’s government and the beginning of a period of agrarian reform, universal suffrage, and the nationalization of tin mines June 27 The Native Laws Amendment Act No. 54 is passed in South Africa, ordering all black people over the age of sixteen to carry pass books, as well as prohibiting them from remaining in urban areas longer than seventy-two hours without permission July 23 The Egyptian Revolution breaks out when an attempt to overthrow King Farouk escalates, resulting in the establishment of an Egyptian republic August 12 The “Night of the Murdered Poets,” the execution of thirteen imprisoned Soviet Jewish poets, takes place in a Moscow jail October 20 The Land and Freedom Army (also known as Mau Mau) begins an insurgency against British rule in Kenya. Jomo Kenyatta is taken into custody November 1 The United States successfully detonates a hydrogen bomb, the world’s first thermonuclear weapon, on Eniwetok Atoll in the Pacific November 4 In the US presidential elections the former Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe, Dwight D. Eisenhower, defeats Adlai Stevenson in a landslide

July 27 An armistice between North and South Korea brings an end to the Korean War July 28 The Republic of Egypt is declared, with General Muhammad Naguib the first president August 12 In response to the United States’ successful detonation a year earlier, the Soviet Union announces the first successful detonation of a hydrogen bomb August 19 A group of Iranian military leaders successfully overthrows Prime Minister Mossadegh and replace him with General Fazlollah Zahedi, who is loyal to the Shah

September 8 The Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO) is founded in Manila, comprising Thailand, the Philippines, Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, France, the United States, and Pakistan November 14 Egyptian president Muhammad Naguib is deposed by Gamal Abdel Nasser

1955 February 24 The Bagdad Pact, a pro-Western defense alliance that aims to restrict the spread of Communism in the Middle East, is signed between Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, and the United Kingdom April 18 – April 24 The Asian-African or Afro-Asian Conference (also known as the Bandung Conference) takes place in Indonesia. Organized by representatives from Indonesia, Burma, Pakistan, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), and India, the conference is a forerunner to the creation of the Non-Aligned Movement May 14 The Warsaw Pact is formed between Eastern European states keen to restore the balance of power between East and West June 26 The Congress of the People in Kliptown, Soweto, adopts the Freedom Charter, the

September 7 Ilya Ehrenburg publishes The Thaw. The novel’s title would later be used to describe the period of relaxation of official cultural politics in the Soviet Union under the rule of Nikita Khrushchev November 9 The Laotian Civil War breaks out between communists and royalists

1954 March 13 – May 7 The Battle of Điên Biên Phu signals the end of French colonial rule in Indochina May 14 The Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict is adopted May 17 In the Brown v. Board of Education case, the US Supreme Court rules that the segregation of schools along racial lines is “inherently unequal” and therefore illegal June 27 The world’s first nuclear power station opens at Obninsk, near Moscow

6 Shukri al-Quwatli, the first President of Syria after the country gained independence from France in 1946.

manifesto of the African National Congress and the South African liberation struggle against Apartheid September 16 Argentinian generals overthrow President Juan Perón, bringing an end to the age of Peronism November 1 The Vietnam War officially begins when the US Military Assistance Advisory Group recognizes the conflict in Vietnam as a civil war December 1 The Montgomery bus boycott begins after Rosa Parks is arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger

December 22 Cytogeneticist Joe Hin Tjio discovers the correct number of human chromosomes, forty-six

1956 January 1 The Republic of Sudan is declared after a referendum calls for a split from Egyptian and British control January 15 Oil is first discovered at the Oloibiri Oilfield in Nigeria February 25 Khrushchev delivers his report “On the Cult

December 19 The five-year Treason Trial commences in Johannesburg, South Africa, in which Nelson Mandela and 156 other defendants are accused of treason. The trial concludes in 1961 with the acquittal of all the accused

1957 January 5 US president Eisenhower delivers his “Special Message to the Congress on the Situation in the Middle East” (also known as the “Eisenhower Doctrine”), which states that a Middle Eastern country can request American economic or military assistance if it is being threatened by armed aggression from another state March 6 Gold Coast and British Togoland merge to form the State of Ghana after attaining independence from the United Kingdom March 25 The Treaty of Rome results in the creation of the European Common Market and the founding of the European Economic Community

7 Mourners at Birla House sit beside the body of Mahatma Gandhi who was assassinated the day before, January 31, 1948. of Personality and its Consequences” to the 20th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in which he formally denounces the glorification of one person (Stalin) April 28 Mao Zedong, Chairman of the Communist Party of China, launches his guiding principle: “Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend,” encouraging citizens to openly express their opinions of the Communist regime May 22 French minister of state Pierre Mendès resigns due to his government’s policy on Algeria July 26 The Suez Crisis erupts after President Nasser of Egypt nationalizes the Suez Canal, which leads to an unsuccessful invasion of the country by the armies of the United Kingdom, France, and Israel September 25 The first transatlantic telephone cable begins operating. In the first twenty-four hours of public service, there are 588 calls from London to the United States and 119 from London to Canada October 23 The Hungarian Revolution breaks out when a student protest in Budapest develops into a nationwide revolt against the government and its Soviet-imposed politics

July 25 Tunisia becomes a republic, with Habib Bourguiba its first president July 29 The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is established in Vienna August 31 Malaysia gains independence from the United Kingdom October 4 The Soviet Union launches Sputnik 1 into orbit, further integrating the Space Race into the Cold War October 22 François “Papa Doc” Duvalier seizes control of Haiti, declaring himself “president for life”

1958 January 1958 – 1961 The Great Leap Forward, an attempt to instigate the rapid development of China’s agricultural and industrial sectors, entails the mobilization of the country’s enormous labor forces and the abolition of private plots. The results are dramatic: the endeavors lead to economic regression and contribute to the Great Famine, which claims between 15 and 45 million lives January 1 The Treaty of Rome comes into effect, with the aim of bringing about economic integration among its members January 3 The West Indies Federation is formed in the

Caribbean by various former colonies of the United Kingdom February 1 Egypt and Syria merge to form the United Arab Republic, which is intended as a first step to a larger united Arab state. Gamal Abdel Nasser is nominated as the first president April 4 Several thousand people march for four days from Trafalgar Square in London to the Atomic Weapons Establishment in Aldermaston to demonstrate their opposition to nuclear weapons May 25 The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament is launched in London by Bertrand Russell. On this occasion Gerald Holtom designs the peace symbol July 14 The Arab Federation of Iraq and Jordan, which was formed on February 14, 1958, is abruptly disbanded by the July 14 Revolution in Iraq. The Republic of Iraq is formed August 30 – September 5 West Indian residents of the London suburb of Notting Hill are the victims of racially motivated violence during race riots September 28 The constitution of the Fifth French Republic, initiated by Charles de Gaulle, is ac­ cepted in a referendum December 5 – December 13 The First All-African Peoples’ Conference in Accra is attended by more than 300 delegates from twenty-eight African states

August 15 Cyprus attains independence after Cypriot community leaders reach an agreement with representatives of Turkey, Greece, and the United Kingdom September 26 Ceylon’s prime minister S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike is assassinated in Colombo. He is succeeded the following year by his wife, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, who becomes the world’s first elected female head of state October 30 Anti-colonial riots in Stanleyville (today Kisangani) in the Belgian Congo, result in the death of thirty protesters October 31 The Western Nigerian Government Broadcasting Corporation transmits the first television broadcast in Africa

1960 January 1 Cameroon is the first of seventeen African nations to gain independence in 1960, the others being Nigeria, Senegal, Mali, Belgian Congo, French Congo, Ivory Coast, Upper Volta (Burkina Faso), Somalia, Dahomey (Benin), Mauritania, Madagascar, Niger, Chad, Togo, Gabon, and the Central African Republic. The United Nations declares 1960 as the Year of Africa

December 18 The United States launches SCORE, the world’s first communications satellite, which broadcasts a Christmas message from US president Eisenhower via an onboard tape recorder December 31 Rebel troops under the command of Ernesto “Che” Guevara force the resignation of the Cuban dictator Batista. Fidel Castro is installed as the new Cuban prime minister on February 16, 1959

1959 March 10 An uprising in Tibet results in the People’s Liberation Army taking control of the entire country and the Dalai Lama permanently fleeing July 24 The “Kitchen Debate” between US vicepresident Nixon and Soviet premier Khrushchev takes place at the opening of the American National Exhibition in Moscow August 14 The US Explorer 6 satellite transmits the first pictures of Earth from orbit. Almost two months later, on October 7, 1959, the Soviet probe Luna 3 takes the first photographs of the dark side of the moon

8 News of the overwhelming majority vote in favor of independence spreads throughout Algeria, Algiers, July 5, 1962.

February 3 British prime minister Macmillan delivers his “Wind of Change” speech to the South African parliament, in which he announces that the British Government intends to grant independence to its African colonies March 21 South African police kill sixty-seven demonstrators of the Pan-African Congress during the Sharpeville Massacre April 21 Brasília is inaugurated as the new federal capital of Brazil May 11 Fugitive Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann is abducted by Mossad agents in Buenos Aires and taken to Israel to stand trial. On December 15, 1961, he is sentenced to death by the Jerusalem District Court

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August 19 The satellite Sputnik 5 is launched, with the dogs Belka and Strelka (Russian for “Squirrel” and “Little Arrow,” respectively), forty mice, two rats, and a variety of plants on board September 14 The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is formed in Baghdad October 12 Inejir�o Asanuma, chairman of the Japan Socialist Party, is assassinated during a taped political debate in Tokyo by Otoya Yamaguchi wielding a wakizashi (samurai sword) October 30 The first successful kidney transplant is performed by Dr. Michael Woodruff at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary December 9 A state visit by French president Charles de Gaulle to the city of Aïn Témouchent in Algeria results in rioting, resulting in the death of 127 people

9 Members of the Delegation of Cameroon in the United Nations Assembly Hall, New York.

1961 January 17 During his final State of the Union address, US president Eisenhower warns of a “military-industrial complex” in which the vested interests of the defense industry could come to influence US public policy

May 1 The Freedom Riders begin their interstate bus rides in the American South to protest against the non-enforcement of US Supreme Court decisions ruling that segregated public buses are unconstitutional

June 16, 1961 Soviet ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev defects to France while on tour in Paris with the Kirov Ballet August 13 The German Democratic Republic begins the construction of the Berlin Wall

10 National Guard soldiers escort Freedom Riders on their journey from Montgomery, Alabama to Jackson, Mississippi, Montgomery, May 1961.

October 11 The Second Vatican Council is opened by Pope John XXIII. The council results in increased efforts by the Vatican toward dialogue with other religions

November 1 The “Hungry Generation” movement is launched in Calcutta. Comprising a range of avant-garde writers, many of the movement’s leaders would lose their jobs or be imprisoned by the incumbent government

October 16 – October 28 The Cuban Missile Crisis breaks out after the Soviet Union stations nuclear missiles in Cuba. The conflict is eventually resolved with both countries agreeing to remove missiles from bases close to the other’s territory

December 11 US involvement in the Vietnam War officially begins when 400 US Army Special Forces personnel arrive in Saigon to train South Vietnamese soldiers

December 9 Tanganyika (part of modern-day Tanzania) becomes a republic

1962 January 1 Western Samoa gains independence from New Zealand January 24 The Organisation de l’armée secrète (Organisation of the Secret Army)—a far-right nationalist group opposed to Algerian independence—bombs the French Foreign Ministry in Paris

April 12 The Vostok spacecraft, piloted by Yuro Gargarian, completes a full orbit of Earth, making the Soviet cosmonaut the first human to journey into outer space

February 7 The US embargo against Cuba begins, prohibiting all US-related Cuban imports and exports

April 27 Sierra Leone gains independence from the United Kingdom

August 27 W. E. B. Du Bois dies in Accra, Ghana

September 1 The Conference of Heads of State in Belgrade results in the formation of the NonAligned Movement, which advocates a more prominent role for small and newly independent nations in the United Nations

December 19 An armed action by the Indian Armed Forces ends 451 years of Portuguese occupation in Goa

March 18 France and Algeria sign the Évian Accords in Évian-les-Bains, ending the Algerian War and paving the way for Algeria’s independence on July 3, 1962 July 1 Rwanda gains independence from Belgium July 23 The world’s first transatlantic television signal is transmitted between New York and Brussels

June 26 US president Kennedy delivers his “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech to an estimated audience of 450,000 in West Berlin August 27 Thousands of Americans converge upon Washington, D.C., for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. On August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his “I Have A Dream” speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial, calling for an end to racism

May 16 A military coup in South Korea renders the democratically elected government of President Yun powerless and brings about the end of the country’s Second Republic

January 17 The former prime minister of the Republic of Congo, Patrice Lumumba, is secretly executed. The announcement of his death sparks off protests across Europe and Africa

April 17 – April 19 Counter-revolutionary forces, with support from the US Central Intelligence Agency, unsuccessfully invade the Bay of Pigs in Cuba

October 20 The Sino-Indian War breaks out over the Himalayan border dispute

1963 January 26 Iranian Shah Pahlavi introduces a series of reforms known as the White Revolution, which include major land reform, granting suffrage to women, the creation of a national literacy program, and the privatization of nationalized manufacturing industries April 7 Yugoslavia is proclaimed a socialist republic, with Tito named “President for Life” April 20 Members of the terrorist group Front de libération du Québec bomb the city’s Canadian Army Recruitment Centre June 11 Vietnamese monk Thích Quång Đúc burns himself to death on the streets of Saigon to protest the persecution of Buddhists by South Vietnam’s Ngô Đình Diê.m administration. June 20 The Washington-Moscow Direct Communications Link (also known in popular culture as the “red telephone”), a Moscow-Washington hotline that was to facilitate quick diplomatic contact, is established as a direct result of the Cuban Missile Crisis

November 22 US president Kennedy is assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas December 12 The formation of the Republic of Kenya marks the end of over seventy years of colonial rule

1964 January Mao Zedong publishes Máo Zhuˇxí Yuˇlù (Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, to also known as “The Little Red Book”) February 25 Cassius Clay (later Muhammad Ali) beats Sonny Liston in Miami Beach, Florida, and is crowned the heavyweight champion of the world March 20 Cosmic background radiation caused by the Big Bang is discovered by astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson April 26 Tanganyika and Zanzibar merge to form Tanzania after the Arab dynasty in Zanzibar is overthrown May 27 Indian prime minister Nehru dies. He is succeeded by Lal Bahadur Shastri May 28 The Palestinian National Council adopts the Palestinian National Covenant, which results in the founding of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) June 12 Nelson Mandela and seven other members of the African National Congress are sentenced to life imprisonment for incitement to rebellion at the Rivonia Trial July 2 The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is signed into law by US president Johnson. It outlaws discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in facilities that serve the general public and at the workplaces August 1 Barbados, Bermuda, Guyana, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago, Turks and Caicos Islands, and Jamaica all

celebrate of the end of slavery in these former and continuing British colonies September 25 The Mozambican War of Independence commences between the guerrilla forces of the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (Mozambique Liberation Front) and Portugal October 14 Soviet premier Khrushchev is forced into

August 5 The Indo-Pakistani War of 1965 breaks out after escalating tensions between the two countries over the disputed provinces of Jammu and Kashmir August 6 US president Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act into law, which prohibits racial discrimination in voting August 9 Singapore is expelled from the Federation of Malaysia and becomes an independent city-state October 18 The Communist Party of Indonesia, the largest non-ruling communist party in the world, is officially banned on March 12, 1966

11 South Vietnamese government troops sleep in a U.S. Navy troop carrier on their way back to the Ca Mau, August 1962.

November 6 Cuba and the United States formally agree to start “Freedom Flights,” an airlift for Cubans who want to go to the United States

“voluntary” retirement by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He is succeeded by Leonid Brezhnev October 16 China successfully detonates its first nuclear bomb, becoming the world’s fifth nuclear power October 24 Northern Rhodesia attains independence and becomes the Republic of Zambia

1965 January 4 During his State of the Union address, US president Johnson proclaims his “Great Society,” a set of domestic programs that seek to eliminate poverty and racial injustice in the United States January 24 Former British prime minister Winston Churchill dies February 12 A group of students from the University of Sydney commence a “Freedom Ride” from Sydney to various segregated New South Wales towns. Inspired by the US Freedom Riders, the group protested, picketed, and advocated for civil rights for aboriginal Australians February 21 Malcolm X is assassinated by two Nation of Islam members in New York March 18 Soviet cosmonaut Alexey Leonov becomes the first person to walk in space July 14 US spacecraft Mariner 4 takes the first close-up photographs of Mars

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VISUAL ESSAY: ARTS AND CULTURE

2 The Mona Lisa returns to The Louvre after the war, Paris, 1945.

1 Josef Albers and students of his photography class in the cabbage patch near the Studies Building of Black Mountain College, 1944.

3 Two school children view Sidney Noland's painting Ned Kelly at Stringy Bark Creek at the South Melbourne Arts Festival, Melbourne, 1946.

4 Willem de Kooning sitting next to one of his Woman paintings in his studio, New York, 1946. Photograph: Harry Bowden.

5 Group photograph of the participants of the Høst exhibition of Dutch artists, Copenhagen, 1948. Back row f.l.t.r: Sixten Wiklund, Ernest Mancoba, Carl-Henning Pedersen, Erik Ortvad, Ejler Bille, Knud Nielsen, Tage Mellerup, Aage Vogel-Jørgensen and Erik Thommesen. Middle row: Karel Appel, Tony Appel, Christian Dotremont, Sonja Ferlov with her son Wonga, and Else Alfelt. Front row: Asger Jorn, Corneille, Constant and Henry Heerup.

6 Members of the artists' group Gelanggang Seniman Merdeka including Mochtar Apin, Baharudin en Asrul Sani and Chairil Anwar, Jakarta, 1948.

7 A Piet Mondrian's studio at 15 East 59th Street after his death, with Victory Boogie Woogie (unfinished; 1942-4), February 1944, Photograph: Harry Holtzman

8 Israeli sculptor Zeev Ben Zvi working on the Holocaust memorial at Mishmar HaEmek, 1945.

9 The All-Union Exhibition takes place at the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, 1946.

10 Lucio Fontana visits the ruins of his studio which was destroyed by bombs during the Second World War, Milan, 1946. 11 Participants from Israel and Palestine at the 24th edition of the Venice Biennale, Venice, 1948. 103

12 The Third General Exhibition of Plastic Arts takes place at the Sociedade Nacional de Belas Artes, Lisbon, 1948.

13 All six founding members of the Progressive Artists’ Group photographed during their exhibition, Bombay, 1949. f.l.t.r. (back row): M. F. Husain, S. K. Bakre, S. H. Raza. (Front row): F. N. Souza, K. H. Ara, H. A. Gade.

14 Whilst visiting from Paris, Shafic Abboud and a companion named Jacqueline partake in a field trip organized by the Académie libanaise des Beaux-Arts, Choueifat, 1950.

15 Aldo Turchario, Raffaele Leonporri, Antonello Trombadori and Renato Guttuso pose in front of the painting La Battaglia di Ponte dell'Ammiraglio in Guttuso's studio at the Villa Massimo, Rome, 1951.

16 Isamu Noguchi visits buildings, ruins and construction works in Hiroshima, 1951 [f.l.t.r.: Isamu Noguchi, Kenzo Tange, Tsutomu Hiroi, Michio Noguchi.]

17 The members of the Brazilian Grupo Ruptura, 1952. [f.l.t.r: Lothar Charoux, Anatol Wladislaw, Kasmir Fejer and Waldemar Cordeiro.]

18 An exhibition of works by Rafael Soriano opens at the Caseta del Parque Central, Havana, October 1950 [Group photograph with Loló Soldevilla (fourth from left), Rafael Soriano (sixth from left), Wifredo Lam (fourth from right), and others.]

19 Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner in the studio, 1950 [Long Island, New York, 1950]. Photograph by Hans Namuth.

20 A view of the studio of Seniman Indonesia Muda (SIM) during a visit by President Sukarno, Yogyakarta, 1955.

21 Group photograph of participants of an exhibition of the Movimento per l'Arte Concreta at the Libreria Salto, Milan, 1951 [F.l.t.r: Giulia Mazzon Sala, Regina Bracchi, Salto Jr., Gianni Bertini, Luigi Veronesi, Bruno Munari, Giuseppe Salto, Nino di Salvatore, Galliano Mazzon, Gillo Dorfles, and Gianni Monnet.]

22 Installation of works by Alexander Calder at the second edition of the São Paulo Biennial, 1953.

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24 Artist Dong Xiwen and Mao Zedong view works together with academy administrators during a visit to the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, 1953. 23 Reg Butler in his studio, sculpting Working Model for the Monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner, Berkhamsted, c.1955.

25 Mahmoud Hammad, Adham Ismail, Fathi Muhammad and other students from the Middle East pose for a photograph with the Director at the Scuola dell'arte della medaglia, Rome, 1954.

26 The Surrealist Group including Man Ray, André Breton, Alberto Giacometti and Wifredo Lam reconvene at the Café de la Place Blanche three decades after their first activities together, Paris, 1953

27 Installation view of Sandú Darié and Luis Martínez Pedro’s two-person exhibition at the Pavilion of Social Sciences, University of Havana, Havana, 1955. 28 Anwar Jalal Shemza and Safdar Ali (right) attend the opening of an exhibition of the Lahore Arts Group, Murree, 1954

30 Pablo Picasso’s Massacre in Korea is displayed on the streets of Warsaw, 1956.

29 Alberto Giacometti in his studio, Paris, 1954.

31 The Fifth Exhibition of the New Horizons Group opens at the Tel Aviv Museum, 1953.

32 Ben Enwonwu works on a sculpture in the studio he shared with William Reid Dick, London, mid 1950s.

33 The Jikken Ko�bo� group perform the ballet Eve Future in collaboration with the Matsuo –za Theater, Tokyo, 1955. Akemi Ballet Company at the Haiyu 107

35 Pinot Gallizio, Asger Jorn, Piero Simondo, and friends at work at the Experimental Laboratory, Alba, September 1956. 34 Vladimír Boudník during one of his actions on the streets of Prague, 1959.

36 Members of the Seniman Indonesia Muda (SIM) group work on the relief Flora and Fauna of Indonesia at the Kemayoran International Airport, Jakarta, 1957.

37 The Group 2 show, created by Richard Hamilton, John McHale and John Voelcker, is installed at the exhibition This is Tomorrow at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1956.

39 Teachers and students work on a mural at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, 1958. 38 Rauschenberg in his Front Street Studio with Interview (1955), Untitled (c. 1954), the second state of Monogram (1955–59; second state 1956–58), Bed (1955), and Odalisk (1955/1958), New York, 1958.

40 Gutai members at the Outdoor Gutai Art Exhibition, Ashiya Park, Ashiya, 1956. [Top row: Tanaka Atsuko, Murakami Saburo¯ , Yamazaki Tsuruko; middle row: Mizuguchi Kyo¯ ichi, Kanayama Akira, Shimamoto Sho¯ zo¯ ; bottom row, f.l.t.r.: Yoshihara Jiro¯ , Sadamasa Motonaga and Horii Nichiei.] 41 David Smith and Helen Frankenthaler embrace in Frankenthaler's studio, New York, 1957.

42 K.O. Götz uses a rake to create one of his paintings at his studio, Düsseldorf, 1959.

44 Kazuo Shiraga painting with his feet at the 2nd Gutai Art Exhibition, Tokyo, 1956.

43 Yayoi Kusama in her New York studio, 1958-59. 109

46 Gustav Metzger publicly displays his auto-destructive art by spraying hydrochloric acid on colored nylon sheets at his South Bank Demonstration, London, 1961.

45 Victor Musgrave, Anwar Jalal Shemza and the art critic George Butcher at Gallery One, London, 1960.

47 Willem de Kooning speaks at a symposium held at the Judson Center, New York, alongside Isamu Noguchi (seated second right) and Clement Greenberg (seated right), New York, 1961.

48 Malangatana (seated on the right on the shelf in the background) relaxes with Pancho Guedes and his family and colleagues at Guedes’ studio in Lourenço Marques, 1960. .

50 Niki de Saint Phalle creating one of her shooting (Tir) paintings at Galerie Impasse Ronsin, Paris, 1961

49 A group of young artists stage The Wall Exhibition of informel painting as a protest against the more conservative art on display at the Kukjeon (National Art Exhibition) inside the Duksoogung Palace, Seoul, 1960.

52 Patty Mucha and Claes Oldenburg performing in Snapshots for the City at Judson Memorial Church, New York, 1960.

51 Installation view of the Second Neoconcrete Exhibition at MEC, Rio de Janeiro, 1960.

53 The members of the Gorgona group at the first New Tendencies exhibition, Zagreb, 1961. [f.l.t.r.: unidentified friend, Josip Vaništa, Radoslav Putar, Ivo Štajner, Matko Meštrovic´, Slobodan Vulicˇevic´, Julije Knifer, Đuro Seder.]

54 Jacques Villeglé tears posters from a wall in Montparnasse, Paris, 1961.

55 Jeram Patel at work in his studio in the Department of Painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda, c. 1961. 111

57 Allan Kaprow creates his environment Stockroom for the exhibition Art in Motion at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 1961.

56 The American delegation including Nina Simone (third from left) and Hale Woodruff (second from right) arrive for the cultural festival in Lagos, 1961.

58 Marta Minujin destroys all of the works she has created during her time in Paris in La Destruccion (The Destruction) at Impasse Ronsin, Paris, 1961.

59 K.G. Subramanyan working on his large-scale mural, the King of the Dark Chamber, later installed at the cultural centre Rabindralaya in Lucknow, 1963.

60 Gulammohammed Sheikh, Himmat Shah and F.N. Souza converse at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda, c. 1962.

61 Testumi Kudo performs Happenings: Philosophy of Impotence at the Cinéma-Studio de Boulogne, Paris, 1963.

62 George Maciunas, Dick Higgins, Wolf Vostell, Benjamin Patterson and Emmet Williams perform Philip Corner’s Piano Activities during the FLUXUS: Internationale Festspiele Neuester Musik at the Städtisches Museum, Wiesbaden, 1962.

63 The exhibition Entartete Kunst. Bildersturm vor 25 Jahren (Degenerate Art: The Iconoclasm 25 Years Ago) takes place at Haus der Kunst, Munich, 1962.

64 Nam June Paik’s Exposition of Music – Electronic Television opens at the Galerie Parnass, Wuppertal, 1963.

65 Dr. Saburi Oladeni Biobaku holds his opening speech at the inauguration of the First International Congress of African Culture held at the National Gallery, Salisbury, 1962.

66 A meeting of the “Nouvelle Tendance” group at the GRAV [Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel] studio at rue Beautreillis, Paris, 1962. [From left to right: Dieter Hacker; Angel Duarte (Equipo 57); Uli Pohl; François Morellet (GRAV); Carlos Cruz-Diez; Ivan Picelj; Bernard Aubertin; Luis Tomasello; Henk Peeters; Horacio García- Rossi (GRAV); Julio Le Parc (GRAV); Gregorio Vardanega; Jesús Soto; Michelle Yvaral; Martha Le Parc; Jean-Pierre Yvaral (GRAV); Dada Maino; Martha Boto; Mme. Morellet; Francisco Sobrino (GRAV); Joël Stein (GRAV).] 113

67 The Third Annual Festival of the Mbari Mbayo club takes place, Osogbo, 1965. 68 David Siqueiros delivers a lecture to fine art students in front of his mural Del Porfirismo a la Revolución three days after being released from Lecumberri prison, Mexico City, July, 1964.

69 Artists and tutors including Elias Zaiat, Mahmoud Hammad, Nassir Chora and Fateh Moudarres judge students works at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Damascus, 1965.

70 Ernst Wilhelm Nay’s installation of three Augenbilder (Eye paintings) suspended from the ceiling garners attention at the third edition of the Documenta, Kassel, 1964. 71 Hi Red Center’s Cleaning Event (officially known as Be Clean! and Campaign to Promote Cleanliness and Order in the Metropolitan Area) takes place in Tokyo, 1964

73 Shigeko Kubota performs Vagina Painting as part of the Perpetual Fluxfest event held at the Cinematheque in New York, July 1965.

72 Celebrated passista Miro with Hélio Oiticica’s Parangolé P02 Flag 01 at the exhibition Opinião 65, Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro, 1965.

74 Marta Minujin performs Leyendo las noticias en el Río de la Plata (Reading the News in the Río de la Plata), Buenos Aires, 1965

76 Revellers enjoy a party at Andy Warhol’s studio, the Factory at 231 East 47th Street, New York, August 1965. 75 Tadeusz Kantor’s Cricotage takes place at the TPSP cafe, Warsaw, 1965 [F.l.t.r.: Zbigniew Gostomski, Wiesław Borowski, Edward Krasin�ski.] 115

CHRONOLOGY OF ARTS AND CULTURE

1944 February Piet Mondrian dies in New York, leaving his painting Victory Boogie Woogie (1942–43) unfinished March Max Bill organizes the exhibition Konkrete Kunst (Concrete Art), the first international exhibition of concrete art, at the Kunsthalle Basel. The show subsequently travels around Europe, inspiring the founding of art groups May Eugene W. Smith exhibits photographs of the Pacific war zones at the Museum of Modern Art in New York Halim el-Dabh premiers his experimental manipulated recording Ta’abir al Zaar (The Expression of Zaar) at the Expositions de l’art indépendant (Exhibition of the Art and

1 Works by Pablo Picasso installed at the Salon d’Automne, 1944, the artist’s first exhibition in Paris after the end of German occupation

Liberty Group) held at the Lycée Français in Cairo, constituting one of the earliest examples of electronic music June The first and only issue of the journal Arturo: Revista de artes abstractas is published in Buenos Aires, and includes Gyula Kósice’s essay “La aclimatación artística gratuita a las llamadas escuelas” (The Free Acclimatization to the So-Called Schools) and Rhod Rothfuss’s “El Marco: Un Problema de la plástica actual” (The Frame: A Problem in Contemporary Art) September The exhibition La prima mostra d’arte Italia libera (The First Art Exhibition of a Free Italy) takes place in Rome October The Salon d’automne (Salon of Independents), also known as the Salon de la Libération (Salon of Liberty) takes place in the Grand Palais in Paris, with a focus exhibition of Pablo Picasso’s work Jacob Lawrence exhibits his “Migration of the Negro” series at the Museum of Modern Art, New York

Jean Dubuffet holds his first solo exhibition at Galerie René Drouin in Paris

Kirchner, Paul Klee, and other Brücke artists

Charlie Parker records his landmark bebop album Ko-Ko at WOR studios in New York City

December Wassily Kandinsky dies in Neuilly-sur-Seine

Georges Henein publishes the pamphlet “Prestige de la terreur” (The Prestige of Terror) a couple of days after the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima

December Francis Newton Souza’s exhibition opens at the Bombay Art Society

1945 January Richard Wright publishes his memoir Black Boy Chester Himes publishes If He Hollers Let Him Go, detailing the life of an African American shipyard worker in Los Angeles during World War II The exhibition The Negro Artist Comes of Age: A National Survey of Contemporary American Artists takes place at the Albany Institute of History and Art in New York, featuring the work of artists such as Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, Norman Lewis, and Charles White

Albert Camus publishes his reaction to the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in the French Resistance newspaper, Combat George Orwell publishes his dystopian novel Animal Farm September Jorge Luis Borges publishes his short story “El Aleph” in the Argentinian literary magazine Sur Roberto Rossellini releases his film Roma città aperta (Rome, Open City) Karl Jaspers delivers a series of lectures exploring the collective guilt of the German people at Heidelberg University, which are subsequently published as Die Schuldfrage (The Question of German Guilt)

April Francis Bacon exhibits his Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion at the Lefevre Gallery in London to much controversy

October The Commemorative Exhibition of the Liberation takes places at the National Museum of Contemporary Art at Deoksugung Palace in Seoul

May Howard Putzel organizes the exhibition A Problem for Critics at 67 Gallery in New York as a challenge for someone to come up with a name to define recent tendencies in US painting

The first issue of the Süddeutsche Zeitung is published in Munich, the first newspaper to receive a license from the US military administration of Bavaria The inaugural exhibition of Arte Concreto-­ Invención opens at the house of Dr. Enrique Pichon Rivière in Buenos Aires. Featuring the works of Ramón Melgar, Juan Carlos Paz, Rhod Rothfuss, Estéban Eitler, Gyula Kosice, Valdo Wellington, and Carmelo Arden Quin, the exhibition is considered the first example of concrete art shown in South America

The Expositions de l’art indépendant (Exhibition of Independent Art), the first postwar exhibition of Egypt’s surrealist Art and Liberty Group, takes place at the Lycée Français in Cairo, including the work of Ramsès Younan June The first postwar exhibition of modern art in Germany takes place at a private house belonging to the artist Hans Uhlmann. Exhibited are classical expressionist works by Jeanne Mammen, Oskar Nerlinger, Hans Uhlmann, Renée Sintenis, and Georg Tappert Crimes hitlériens (Hitler's Crimes) opens at the Grand Palais in Paris, an exhibition exploring the crimes perpetrated by the Nazis during the war Germany’s first postwar art school, the Hochschule für bildende Künste, re-opens in Berlin July The first exhibition of the Kammer der Kunstschaffenden takes place in Berlin, featuring works by Erich Heckel, Karl Hofer, Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Max Pechstein, Karl Schmitt-Rottluff, Gerhard Marcks, and other formerly “degenerate” artists August The first postwar commercial art gallery, the Galerie Gerd Rosen, opens in a former textile and military supplies shop in Berlin, exhibiting works by Ernst Barlach, Marc Chagall, Lyonel Feininger, Ernst Ludwig

1946 January The exhibition Bayerischer Gemälde des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts (Bavarian Paintings of the 15th and 16th Centuries) opens at Munich’s former Haus der deutschen Kunst, which has been now officially renamed “Haus der Kunst” The All-Union Exhibition takes place at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, showing 1,459 works by 555 artists February John Cage begins composing his Sixteen Sonatas and Four Preludes for Prepared Piano Picasso unveils The Charnel House (1944– 45) at the Art et Résistance (Art and Resistance) exhibition in Paris. May The first edition of the magazine Plastic Arts is published in Seoul The first Salon des réalités nouvelles (Salon of New Realities) takes place at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Paris June Boris Taslitzky exhibits his “Buchenwald”

Jean Fautrier exhibits for the first time the series “Otages” (Hostages) he created during the Paris occupation at the Galerie René Drouin Jean-Paul Sartre delivers his lecture “L’Existentialisme est-il un humanisme?” (“Existentialism is a Humanism”) at Club Maintenant in Paris, which would be published the following year. Alfred Hitchcock releases the film Spellbound, which contains a dream sequence designed by Salvador Dalí November Tomás Maldonado and others found the Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención (Concrete-Invention Art Association) in Buenos Aires The first postwar German art group, Der Ruf, is exhibited for the first time at the Grünen Haus in Dresden Léopold Sédar Senghor publishes his collection of poems Chants d’Ombre (Shadow Songs) in Paris. Predominantly written prior to the outbreak of the War, many of the poems reflect upon the conflict between French and African culture.

2 Visitors admire Albrecht Dürer's self-portrait at the exhibition Bavarian Paintings of the 15th and 16th Centuries at Haus der Kunst, Munich, 1946. series of paintings at the Galerie La Gentilhommière in Paris Ad Reinhardt publishes his visual essay “How to Look at Modern Art in America” in PM magazine

July The Salon des Réalités Nouvelles is founded in Paris by art lover Fredo Sidès. August Tomás Maldonado and other artists publish the “Manifesto invencionista” (Inventionist Manifesto) in the magazine Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención. The first Madí exhibition takes place at Galería van Riel in the French Institute for

Gallery in New York and includes works by himself, Pietro Lazzari, Boris Margo, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, Theodoros Stamos, and Clyfford Still February Lee Kwae-dae writes a detailed report on the North Korean art scene in the journal New Paradise Alberto Burri is repatriated to Italy from the United States after spending almost four years in a prisoner-of-war camp in Hereford, Texas The Group of Seven exhibit for the first time at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art Primo Levi publishes Se questo è un uomo (If This Is A Man, also known as Survival in Auschwitz), describing his incarceration in the Auschwitz concentration camp

3 The First Exhibition of the Asociación Arte concreto-invención (AACI) opens at the Salón Peuser, Buenos Aires, March 1946

Superior Studies in Buenos Aires, officially launching the movement. Gyula Kosice concurrently publishes the “Madí Manifesto” The first Ferienkurse für internationale Neue Musik (International Summer School for New Music) is held in Darmstadt The Erste Allgemeine Deutsche Kunstausstellung (First General German Art Exhibition) opens in Dresden, exhibiting many works by artists previously declared “degenerate” November Romare Bearden publishes his essay “The Negro Artist’s Dilemma” in the journal Critique: A Review of Contemporary Art Lucio Fontana and his students at the Altamira academy publish “Manifesto Blanco” (White Manifesto) pamphlet in Buenos Aires, announcing his aim for a “Spatialist” art László Moholy-Nagy dies of leukemia at the age of fifty-one in Chicago December Dylan Thomas publishes his collection of poems Deaths and Entrances, many of which deal with the effects of World War II

1947 January Robert Antelme publishes L’Espèce humaine (The Human Race) concerning his experiences in the concentration camps The group Pelukis Rakyat (People’s Painters) is founded in Jogjakarta by the artists Affandi and Hendra Gunawan Barnett Newman organizes the exhibition The Ideographic Picture at Betty Parsons

March Samuel Kootz organizes the first exhibition of US abstract expressionist art in Europe at the Galerie Maeght in Paris June Otto Frank publishes his daughter Anne’s diary as Het Achterhuis (The Diary of a Young Girl) May Willi Baumeister publishes his book Das Unbekannte in der Kunst (The Unknown in Art), championing an art that is universally relevant and an artistic freedom that embodies a responsibility toward humanity Albert Camus publishes La Peste (The Plague) June The first exhibition of the group Fronte Nuovo delle Arti takes place at the Galleria della Spiga in Milan, featuring work by Renato Guttuso, Renato Birolli, Emilio Vedova, and others The Musée National d’Art Moderne opens in Paris

December Kwame Nkrumah publishes Towards Colonial Freedom, a manifesto that called for the introduction of a Marxist-Leninist ideology in African politics The New Realists exhibition takes place at the Hwa-shin Gallery in Seoul

1948 January Léopold Sédar Senghor publishes Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française (Anthology of New Negro and Malagasy Poetry in the French Language), which contains the introduction “Orphée Noir” (“Black Orpheus”) by JeanPaul Sartre Working under the pseudonym André Tamm, K. O. Götz publishes the first edition of the journal Metamorphose, dedicated to “experimental contemporary art and poetry” Jackson Pollock holds his first solo exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York, where he exhibits his famous “drip” paintings Fei Mu releases the film Spring in a Small Town Alberto Giacometti exhibits new works at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York; Jean-Paul Sartre writes the preface for the catalogue February The definitive version of Yasunari Kawabata’s Yukiguni (Snow Country) is published. An integration of nine separately published works, the book is a classic of modern Japanese literature March New York’s Museum of Non-Objective Painting organizes the exhibition Gegenstandslose Malerei in Amerika (Abstract Art

September Henri Matisse publishes his artist book Jazz

Ben Enwonwu holds his first solo exhibition at London’s Berkeley Galleries November The first issue of the quarterly journal Présence Africaine is published by Alioune Diop in Paris Lucio Fontana publishes his “Primo Manifesto dello Spazialismo” (First Manifesto of Spatialism) in Buenos Aires

Vladimír Boudník conducts his first “Events in the Street” in Prague at the end of April as part of the “Art-Explosionalism” manifesto­­ that he had just published May Alberto Burri holds his first solo exhibition at the Galleria La Margherita in Rome The 24th Venice Biennale opens, the first to be staged after World War II Norman Mailer’s first novel The Naked and the Dead is published, based on his experiences during the Philippines Campaign in World War II June The First International Congress of Art Critics is held at UNESCO headquarters in Paris July Ezra Pound publishes The Pisan Cantos August Paul Celan publishes “Todesfuge” (“Death Fugue”), which addresses the horrors of the concentration camps September Constant publishes “CoBrA Manifesto” in the journal Reflex #1 Harold Rosenberg publishes his famous essay “The Herd of Independent Minds: Has the Avant-Garde Its Own Mass Culture?” in the journal Commentary Luchino Visconti releases the film La Terra Trema (The Earth Trembles) The survey show Overseas Exhibition of South African Art opens at the Tate Gallery in London. It includes the work of fifty-three white South Africans, as well as that of Gerard Sekoto, which garners widespread praise October The first performance of Pierre Schaeffer’s Cinq études de bruits (Five Studies of Noises) takes place on French National Radio, one of the first public broadcasts of concrete music

August Arnold Schoenberg completes his composition A Survivor from Warsaw Op. 46, paying tribute to Holocaust victims.

October Cai Chusheng and  Zheng Junli release the film The Spring River Flows East. Now considered a classic of Hong Kong cinema, the film details the trials and tribulations of a family during the Second Sino-Japanese War

Willem de Kooning has his first solo exhibition at the Charles Egan Gallery in New York, where he exhibits his black-and-white abstract paintings

November The Korean Ministry of Education launches the first Kukjeon (National Art Exhibition) as a platform for Korean culture

4 Madí Exhibition at the 3éme Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, Paris, 1948. in America), which opens at the Staatliche Kunsthalle in Karlsruhe, before later traveling to Düsseldorf, Mannheim, Munich, and Stuttgart Ismael Rodríguez releases the film Nosotros los pobres (We the Poor) Sidney Nolan first exhibits his famous “Kelly” series of paintings at the Velasquez Gallery in Melbourne

The first exhibition of the Ofakim Hadashim (New Horizons) group takes place at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art Alexander Dymschitz, head of the Cultural Division of the Soviet Military Government in Berlin, publishes his two-part essay “Über die formalistische Richtung in der deutschen Malerei” (On Formalist Tendencies Within German Painting) in the newspaper Tägliche Rundschau, providing the first high-profile Soviet assessment of German art and condemning the domination of formalist tendencies within painting Vittorio De Sica releases the film Ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Thief)

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December The first exhibition of Movimento per l’arte concreta (Concrete Art Movement) is held

May Heinrich Böll publishes his first novella Der Zug war pünktlich (The Train Was on Time), focusing on the experience of German soldiers fighting on the Eastern Front The Ausstellung sowjetischer Malerei (Exhibition of Soviet Painting), a major exhibition of socialist realist painting, takes place at the Haus der Kultur der Sowjetunion in East Berlin

Adolph Gottlieb, Morris Graves, Hans Hofmann, Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, Mark Tobey, and Bradley Walker Tomlin

May Eugène Ionesco’s first play La Cantatrice chauve (The Bald Soprano) premieres at the Théâtre des Noctambules in Paris

October Curzio Malaparte publishes his book La Pelle (The Skin), detailing the myriad social

June Aimé Césaire’s essay Discours sur le colonialisme (Discourse on Colonialism) is published in Paris Alejandro Otero, Jesús Rafael Soto, Rafael Zapata, Bernardo Chataing, Régulo Pérez, Genaro Moreno, Omar Carreño, and others found the group Los Disidentes (The Dissenters) in Paris, concurrently publishing their “Manifesto No”

June Simone de Beauvoir publishes Le Deuxième sexe (The Second Sex) George Orwell publishes 1984 5 Participants of the 1st Exhibition of Modern Art, Krakow, 1948 at the Libreria Salto in Milan. The group is comprised of Bruno Munari, Gillo Dorfles, Gianni Monnet, and Atanasio Soldati Alan Paton publishes Cry, The Beloved Country Roberto Rossellini releases the film Germania anno zero (Germany, Year Zero) Barnett Newman publishes his essay “The Sublime is Now” in the journal Tiger’s Eye Tadeusz Kantor organizes the First Exhibition of Modern Art at the Pałac Sztuki w Krakowie, featuring works by a young Andrzej Wróblewski, as well as Henryk Staz˙ewski and Alfred Lenica The nascent Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) holds its second major exhibition, 40,000 Years of Modern Art, at the Academy Cinema in London

1949

July Yukio Mishima publishes his autobiographical novel Kamen no Kokuhaku (Confessions of a Mask) The All-China Art Workers Association organize the First National Art Exhibition at the Beijing School of Arts; it is the first major exhibition to take place after the end of the war with Japan and the only one held prior to the establishment of the People’s Republic of China The first Exhibition of the Progressive Artists’ Group at the Bombay Art Society represents the first major showing of the group’s work August Claude Lévi-Strauss publishes Structures élémentaires de la parenté (The Elementary Structures of Kinship) The influential Uruguayan artist and teacher Joaquín Torres García dies September The exhibition Der Blaue Reiter München und die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (The Blue Rider Munich and the Art of the 20th

January Max Bill publishes his influential essay “Die mathematische Denkweise in der Kunst unserer Zeit” (The Mathematical Approach in Contemporary Art) in the Swiss journal Werk, in which he argues for an art free from any reference to the existing world March Isamu Noguchi holds his first postwar solo exhibition at the Charles Egan Gallery in New York Vladimír Boudník publishes his program of “explosionalism” at the State School of Graphic Art summer school at Nový Falkenburk. He expands upon this program a couple of weeks later, producing the “Explosionalism Manifesto No. 2” April The first volume of Louis Aragon’s Les Communistes (The Communists) is published Hkielmar Lers releases the film Adamah, which was shot in Palestine just prior to the establishment of the State of Israel

July The exhibition Das Menschenbild in unserer Zeit (The Image of Man in our Time) takes place at the Mathildenhöhe in Darmstadt concurrent with the Darmstadt Talks at the Kunsthalle 7 Artists Sessions take place at Studio 35, April 1950, New York [Left to right: James Brooks, Ad Reinhardt, Richard Pousette-Dart, Louise Bourgeois, Herbert Ferber, Bradley Walker Tomlin, Janice Biala, Robert Goodnough, Hedda Sterne, David Hare, Barnett Newman, Seymour Lipton, Norman Lewis, Jimmy Ernst.] Photograph by Max Yavno. transformations that took place in Italy immediately following the Armitace

November CoBrA artists first show together as a group at the Exposition Internationale d’Art Expérimental (International Exhibition of Experimental Art), which is held at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam

January Maruki Iri and Maruki Toshi tour five of the “Hiroshima Panels” to fifty Japanese cities

Century) at Munich’s Haus der Kunst represents the first time that artists labeled as “degenerate” before the war are exhibited in the city The Mexican mural painter José Clemente Orozco dies in Mexico City Harold Rosenberg and Samuel Kootz organize the influential exhibition The Intra­ subjectives at the Kootz Gallery in New York, where they show work by William Baziotes, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky,

August Billy Wilder releases the film Sunset Boulevard The social and literary group Lembaga Kebudajaan Rakjat (LEKRA) is founded in Jakarta, issuing its first declaration on culture (“Mukadimah”) and establishing close links to Indonesia’s Communist Party Akira Kurosawa releases the film Rasho¯mon

Raúl Lozza organizes the Primera Exposición de Pintura Perceptista (First Exhibition of Perceptivist Painting) at the Van Riel Galería de Arte in Buenos Aires; he also publishes the manifesto “Ante la decadencia y espíritu negativo ...” (Faced with the decline and negative spirit ...) in the catalogue

1950 6 CoBrA members bring their works to First International Exhibition of Experimental Artists at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, November 1949.

UNESCO publishes The Race Question

March Alina Szapocznikow exhibits her sculptures for the first time at the VI Exposition des Artistes Juifs (Fourth Exhibition of Jewish Artists) in Paris April The so-called “Artist's Sessions” take place at Studio 35 in New York, attended by two dozen artists who later came to be known as the Abstract Expressionists Pablo Neruda publishes his collection of 340 poems Canto General (General Song) in Mexico City The group Zen 49 hold their premiere exhibition at Munich’s Galerie des Central Collecting Point

October Nemai Ghosh releases Chinnamul, the first Indian film to confront the partition of India. Sandú Darié holds his exhibition Estructuras Pictóricas (Pictorial Structures) at the Havana Lyceum in Cuba A group of writers and artists publish the “Surat Kepertjajaan Gelanggang” (The Gelanggang testimonial of beliefs) in postindependence Jakarta, beginning with the words “We are the legitimate heirs to world culture, and we are furthering this culture in our own way.” December Luis Buñuel releases his social realist film Los Olvidados (the forgotten ones)

1951 January Kofi Abrefa Busia publishes Self-Government for the Gold Coast February The work of Jackson Pollock is first exhibited in Japan as part of the First International Art Exhibition that takes place at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum. The exhibition will prove to be highly influential to artists such as Takamatsu Jiro¯ Hannah Arendt publishes Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft (The Origins of Totalitarianism) The exhibition Arte astratta e concreta in Italia, 1951: Opere di artisti di Roma, Milano,

Torino, Napoli, La Spezia, Livorno, Firenze, Venezia (Abstract and Concrete Art in Italy, 1951: Works by Artists of Rome, Milan, Turin, Naples, La Spezia, Livorno, Florence, Venice) is held at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome, featuring the work of Alberto Burri, Piero Dorazio, Mimmo Rotella, Emilio Vedova, and others A conference on abstract art takes place at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and includes contributions from Alexander Calder, Fritz Glarner, Robert Motherwell, Stuart

June Saloua Raouda Choucair publishes her essay  “Kayfa Fahima al-‘Arabi Fanna at-Tasweer” (How the Arab Understood Visual Art) in the journal al-Abhaath September Helen Frankenthaler’s first solo exhibition takes place at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York October Ben Enwonwu holds his first US exhibition at Howard University in Washington, D.C. The Studio für elektronische Musik begins broadcasting on Cologne’s Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk. Over the years, it would attract to the city the likes of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Nam June Paik, Cornelius Cardew, David Tudor, Mauricio Kagel, and John Cage The first São Paulo Biennial takes place at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo

8 Installation view of the exhibition by Max Bill at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, 1951

Davis, George L. K. Morris, and Willem de Kooning, who reads his famous essay “What Abstract Art Means to Me” Le Corbusier commences work on his master plan for the Indian city of Chandigarh March Theodor W. Adorno publishes Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft (Cultural Criticism and Society), in which he famously notes that “Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch” (“To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”)

November Michel Tapié organizes the exhibition Signifiants de l’informel (Signifiers of “Informel”) at the Studio Paul Facchetti in Paris. Showing the work of Jean Dubuffet, Jean Fautrier, Georges Mathieu, Henri Michaux, Jean-Paul Riopelle, and Jaroslav Serpan, he coins the term “informel” to group all of these works together Jikken Ko¯bo¯ (Experimental Workshop) present their first collective work, a ballet entitled The Joy of Life, created to mark the first Pablo Picasso retrospective in Tokyo. The work functions as a performative manifesto of the group’s ideas and provides an

Georges Mathieu and Michel Tapié organize the exhibition Véhémences confrontées (Opposing Forces) at the Galerie Nina Dausset in Paris, where they juxtapose the work of US and European abstract artists April Gholam Hossein Gharib, Hassan Shirvani, and Hooshang Irani publish “The Nightingale’s Butcher Manifesto” on the back cover of the magazine Fighting Cock. The newly formed Baghdad Group for Modern Art exhibit for the first time at the Museum of Ancient Costumes in Baghdad May Leo Castelli organizes the iconic 9th Street Show exhibition in an empty store at 60 East 9th Street, introducing the work of sixty-one, mainly young New York artists and propagating the idea of a “New York School” of painting

January The Lahore Art Circle is founded by Ahmed Parvez, S. Safdar, Anwar Jelal Shemza, Moyene Najmi, and Ali Imam in Pakistan Frantz Fanon publishes his book Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks) The Independent Group is founded in London as a collection of young artists circulating around the ICA. At the group’s first meeting, Eduardo Paolozzi passes around his “Bunk!” collages Isidore Isou’s experimental film Traité de bave et d’éternité  (Treatise on Venom And Eternity) is released February Gil J Wolman’s lettrist film L’Anticoncept (The Anticoncept) opens in Paris March Ralph Ellison publishes Invisible Man, about an African-American man whose color renders him invisible

9 The first Sao Paulo Biennial takes place at the Museu de Arte Moderna de Sao Paulo, October 1951 early indication of postwar Japanese interest in multimedia and performance art December The German artist Wols (Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze) dies of food poisoning in Paris The group EXAT 51 (an abbreviation of “Eksperimentalni atelje” / “Experimental atelier”) officially form at a plenary meeting of the Association of Applied Artists of Croatia and publish their manifesto in protest against the dominance of officially sanctioned socialist realist art and the condemnation of all forms of abstraction and unacceptable motifs

September Yo�suke Yamahata publishes Kiroku-shashin: Genbaku no Nagasaki (Atomized Nagasaki: The Bombing of Nagasaki: A Photographic Record) Sandú Darié, Luis Martínez Pedro, and Mario Carreño launch the magazine Noticias de Arte (Art News) in Havana December The Grupo Ruptura exhibition at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, along with the “Manifesto Ruptura,” which was also signed in 1952, represented a debut for the group, which comprised Waldemar Cordeiro, Geraldo de Barros, Lothar Charoux, Leopold Haar, Kazimir Fejer, Anatol Wladyslaw, and Luis Sacilotto Harold Rosenberg publishes his essay “American Action Painters” in ARTnews Michel Tapié organizes the exhibition Un art autre (An Other Art) at Studio Paul Facchetti in Paris, suggesting a new terminology that encompasses both the abstract and figurative works of the likes of Jean Dubuffet, Jean Fautrier, Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze, Alfonso Ossorio, Jackson Pollock,

The Soviet Fine Arts Exhibition opens in New Delhi before touring to Calcutta and Bombay April The Prima esposizione del Movimento Nucleare (First Exhibition of Nuclear Art) at the spaces of the Amici della Francia in Milan signals the formation of the group, who publish their first manifesto as part of the exhibition May Lucio Fontana and a group of sixteen other artists publish the “Manifesto del Movimento Spaziale per la televisione” (Television Manifesto of the Spatial Movement), which was simultaneously distributed during a television broadcast by Fontana

Max Bill’s first exhibition in Brazil, at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, inspires numerous Brazilian concrete artists The Exhibition of the National New Nianhua takes place at the Reading Room of the Russian Foreign Affairs Association in Beijing. Organized by the Chinese Artists Association, the exhibition demonstrates the government’s support for artists working in print media

1952

June Amos Tutuola publishes The Palm-Wine Drinkard The Peace Bridge, designed by Isamu Noguchi, opens in Hiroshima The exhibition Mensch und Form unserer Zeit (Man and Form of Our Time) takes place at the Städtische Kunsthalle in Recklinghausen July Karlheinz Stockhausen premieres his first composition, Kreuzspiel, at the International Summer School for New Music in Darmstadt August As part of his exhibition Antonio Berni expone 22 obras (Antonio Berni Exhibits 22 Works) at the Galería Viau in Buenos Aires, the artist publishes an essay about “Nuevo Realismo” David Tudor first performs John Cage’s 4’33’’ at the Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock, New York

10 Walter Nicks’ experimental dance group perform in front of Mathias Goeritz’s The Serpent in the courtyard of the Museo Experimental El Eco, Mexico City, 1953. Mark Tobey, Sam Francis, Pierre Soulages, Georges Mathieu, Graham Sutherland, Karel Appel, Germaine Richier, Eduardo Paolozzi, and others The Ruptura exhibition opens at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, widely considered to mark the official beginning of concrete art in Brazil

1953 January The controversial International Sculpture Competition: The Unknown Political Prisoner is held at the ICA in London, later traveling to the Museum of Modern Art, New York Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot premieres in Paris

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February The first Exposição Nacional de Arte Abstrata (National Exhibition of Abstract Art) takes place at the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, featuring work by Lygia Pape, Lygia Clark, and Ivan Serpa March In New York, Willem de Kooning first exhibits his “Woman” series at the Sidney Janis Gallery, while Robert Rauschenberg shows the “White Paintings” that he created in 1951 at the Stable Gallery April Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, and Ghislain

Ray Bradbury publishes Fahrenheit 451 Ray Ashley’s (also known as Raymond Abrashkin) Little Fugitive premieres in New York. The film’s naturalistic style and use of nonprofessional actors would prove to be profoundly influential to the subsequent New Wave cinema November William Burroughs publishes Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict and Queer under the pseudonym William Lee

Yale University, laying the foundations to his theory of formalism within modern art June The first Grupo Frente exhibition takes place at the Galeria Ibeu in Rio de Janeiro, exhibiting the work of Lygia Clark along with that of Hélio Oiticica, Aluísio Carvão, and Lygia Pape July Frida Kahlo dies at her home in Mexico City.

Yasujiro� Ozu’s film To¯kyo¯ Monogatari (Tokyo Story) is released

August The Lalit Kala Akademi (the National Academy of Art) inaugurated in New Delhi

December The Aula Magna building opens at La Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas, with acoustic clouds designed by Alexander Calder

Luigi Nono's cantata La victoire de Guernica (The Victory of Guernica) premieres at the International Summer School for New Music in Darmstadt

The influential Chinese painter Xu Beihong dies of a stroke. As a mark of respect, the Chinese Communist Party orders the creation of the Xu Beihong Museum at his home in Beijing

September Federico Fellini’s film La Strada (The Street) premieres at the Venice International Film Festival William Golding publishes Lord of the Flies

1954 11 Following its inauguration in December 1953, Alexander Calder's Acoustic Ceiling decorates the Aula Magna of the Universidad Central de Venezuela, Caracas, 1954. Cloquet’s film Les statues meurent aussi (Statues Also Die) premieres at the Cannes Film Festival. The anti-colonial message of the film was so confrontational, that it was promptly censored by the French state and was not screened again until 1968 Roland Barthes publishes Le Degré zéro de l’écriture (Writing Degree Zero) Luis García Berlanga’s comedy film ¡Bienvenido, Mister Marshall! (Welcome Mr. Marshall!) is released in cinemas in Spain June Camara Laye publishes his autobiographical novel L’Enfant noir (The African Child) August Mulk Raj Anand publishes The Private Life of an Indian Prince, detailing the social and political reform that was brought about by the abolition of the princely states system in India The Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm (Ulm School of Design) begins operations, under the supervision of Max Bill September Dong Xiwen’s monumental painting The Founding of the Nation is first exhibited to great acclaim in Beijing The exhibition Parallel of Life and Art takes place at the ICA in London October James Baldwin publishes his semi-autobiographical novel Go Tell It On the Mountain

January The China Artists Association publishes the essay “New Chinese Painting Movement” in the first edition of the relaunched journal Meishu, outlining the precepts for the sort of socialist realist art that was to be promoted in the country February Cyprian Ekwensi publishes People of the City March Renato Guttuso is given a solo exhibition at the Central Office of Art Exhibitions Zache�ta in Warsaw. The exhibition would then tour other Central and Eastern European countries and would be profoundly influential on realist artists The National Gallery of Modern Art opens in New Delhi April Jorge Romero Brest publishes his essay “Diálogo sobre el arte abstracto y el arte concreto” (Dialogue on Abstract and Concrete Art) in the Argentinian journal Saber vivir The Salon 54: Exhibition of Contemporary Yugoslav Painting and Sculpture is held in Rijeka. Dubbed a key exhibition for “the reconstruction of modernism” in Yugoslavia, the show featured the work of EXAT 51 members such as Ivan Picelj, Vlado Kristl, Božidar Rašica, and Aleksandar Srnec Akira Kurosawa releases his epic historical drama Shichinin no Samurai (Seven Samurai) May Bill Haley & His Comets release the album Rock Around the Clock Clement Greenberg delivers the lecture “Abstract Representational, and so forth” at

October The influential Exhibition of Economic and Cultural Achievements of the Soviet Union takes place at the Soviet Exhibition Hall in Beijing. Featuring works such as Fyodor Shurpin’s The Morning of Our Motherland (1948), the exhibition would provide the template for Chinese socialist realism for decades November Jean Rouch screens his first “ethnofiction” short film Les maîtres fous (The Mad Masters) to a small, select audience at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris Ishiro� Honda releases the film Gojira (Godzilla) December Ulli Beier publishes his essay “Wandmalereien  der  Yoruba” (Yoruba Wall Painting) in the journal Das Kunstwerk

1955 January Edward Steichen’s acclaimed Family of Man exhibition is held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, later traveling under the auspices of the US Information Agency throughout the United States and Europe Pokolenie (A Generation), the opening film of Andrzej Wajda’s “Three War Films” trilogy, is released Arnold Rüdlinger organizes the exhibition Tendances Actuelles III (Current Tendencies III) at the Kunsthalle in Bern, where he groups all of the exhibited abstract work under the term “tachisme” February Francis Newton Souza publishes his autobiographical essay “The Nirvana of a Maggot” in the journal Encounter

March Clement Greenberg publishes his polemical essay “American-Type Painting” in the spring edition of Partisan Review Famed jazz pioneer Charlie Parker dies in New York Wifredo Lam exhibits a series of his paintings at the Universidad de La Habana, Pabellon de Ciencias Sociales, in support for students’ protests against the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista

12 The first Documenta exhibition opens at the Fridericianum, Kassel, 1955.

April Victor Vasarely and Pontus Hultén publish their “Yellow Manifesto” as part of the exhibition Le Mouvement (Movement) at the Galerie Denise René in Paris, thereby introducing the idea of kinetic art The exhibition Indonesian Art is held as part of the Asian-African Conference in Ban­ dung, exhibiting the works of key Indonesian modern artists Sandú Darié and Luis Martínez Pedro stage the Primera Exposición Concreta (First Exhibition of Concrete Art) at the Pabellón de Ciencias Sociales of the Universidad de La Habana, Cuba May The exhibition Man, Machine and Motion: An Iconography of Speed and Space is held at the Hatton Gallery in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne The exhibition The New Decade: 22 European Painters and Sculptors opens at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Alberto Burri uses the occasion to print his famous “Words Are No Help” statement June Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s book Le Phénomène humain (The Phenomenon of Man) is posthumously published in Paris Herbert Bayer creates his Earth Mound at the Aspen Institute’s Aspen Meadows campus in Colorado, possibly the first “earthwork” done within the context of contemporary art July The Ogólnopolska wystawa młodej plastyki (National Exhibition of Young Art)—subtitled “Against War, Against Fascism”—takes place in the recently restored Armory building in Warsaw. More popularly known as the “Arsenal” exhibition, the show is considered to be the beginning of the cultural “thaw” in Poland, leading to a significant revision in Socialist Realism

The I. mednarodna graficˇna razstava (1st International Exhibition of Graphic Arts) is held at Ljubljana’s Moderna Galerija. The exhibition would subsequently become the Bienale Grafike (Biennial of Graphic Arts) Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein launch “The Russell-Einstein Manifesto” at a press conference at Caxton Hall, London The first Documenta exhibition opens in Kassel The exhibition Outdoor Exhibition of Modern Art to Challenge the Midsummer Sun represents the unofficial launch of the Gutai group (in that twenty-three of the forty participants were members) The Premiére biennale de la Méditerranée (First Biennial for the Arts of Mediterranean Countries) takes place at the Alexandria Museum of Fine Arts August Vladimir Nabokov publishes Lolita. Following its publication in Paris, the British Home Office orders all copies entering the United Kingdom to be seized. The French and US governments also subsequently ban the book for several years. The newly formed Grupa 55 hold their first exhibition at the “Desa” salon in Warsaw. Billed as an “anti-Arsenal” exhibition, the group rebelled against the domination of Socialist Realism

14 Saburo� Murakami performs Destruction of paper (Tsu�ka) at the 2nd Gutai Art Exhibition, Tokyo, 1956. Pablo Picasso’s monumental Guernica is exhibited as part of the exhibition Picasso 1900–1955 at Munich’s Haus der Kunst November The Wystawa obrazów (Exhibition of Pictures) is held at the “House of Artists” in Krakow, presenting works by Tadeusz Kantor, Jerzy Nowosielski, and others who combined Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism. The exhibition resulted in the creation of numerous artists’ groups, clubs, and galleries

1956 January Frank Auerbach is given his first solo exhibition at the Beaux Arts Gallery in London February Lennie Tristano releases his album Lennie Tristano, in which he overdubs piano and manipulates tape speed for effect on some tracks Toru Takemitsu premieres his work Relief Statique in Tokyo, one of the first compositions to employ electronic tape-recording techniques

13 Participants at the First World Congress of Black Writers and Artists at the Sorbonne, Paris, 1956. Fernand Léger dies at his home in Gif-surYvette Satyajit Ray releases the Bengali-language drama film Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road), the first film of The Apu Trilogy The Hiroshima Peace Center and Memorial Park, designed by Kenzo Tange, opens October Iannis Xenakis orchestral work Metastaseis premieres at the Donaueschinger Musiktage (Donaueschingen Festival) The First Gutai Art Exhibition opens at the Ohara Kaikan in Tokyo, with Saburo Murakami performing Work (Six Holes) and Kazuo Shiraga staging his work Challenging Mud Nicholas Ray’s film Rebel Without a Cause is released, portraying the moral decay of American youth

July Ousmane Sembène publishes his first novel Le Docker noir (Black Docker)

The first Exposição Nacional de Arte Concreta (National Exhibition of Concrete Art) opens at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, the first national meeting of concrete visual art and poetry

João Guimarães Rosa publishes his “monologue” book Grande Sertão: Veredas (The Devil to Pay in the Backlands) to great controversy

The exhibition Jackson Pollock opens at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the first major exhibition of the artist’s work after his death

works of Fernand Léger, a year after his death

March Fred M. Wilcox’s pioneering science fiction film Forbidden Planet premieres in the United States Loló Soldevilla organizes the influential exhibition Pintura de hoy. Vanguardia de la Escuela de París (Painting Today: Avant-Garde of the School of Paris) at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Havana Elvis Presley releases his debut solo album Elvis Presley April Alain Resnais’s documentary Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog) is shown “out of competition” at the Cannes Film Festival May Elie Wiesel’s 245-page manuscript of his experiences at the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps, Un di Velt Hot Geshvign (And the World Remained Silent), is published in Argentina. A shortened version of this book is published two years later in Paris as La Nuit (Night) June The Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris stages a large-scale retrospective of the

August Mongo Beti publishes his novel Le pauvre Christ de Bomba (The Poor Christ of Bomba) in Paris The landmark exhibition This is Tomorrow opens at the Whitechapel Gallery in London Sandú Darié first exhibits his “Estructura transformables” (Transformable Structures) at the Pabellón de Ciencias Sociales of the Universidad de La Habana, Cuba Jackson Pollock dies in a car accident September The First World Congress of Free Artists takes place in Alba, Italy. Organized by Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio and Asger Jorn, the conference concludes with an accord and signed resolution declaring the “inevitable outmodedness of any renovation of an art within its traditional limits” The First Congress of Black Writers and Artists is held at the Sorbonne in Paris. Leading black intellectuals address issues of colonialism, slavery, and Négritude October The 2nd Gutai Art Exhibition takes place at the Ohara Kaikan in Tokyo. It features Tanaka’s Electric Dress, a painting performance by Shimamoto Sho� zo� , Kazuo Shiraga’s Challenging Mud, and Saburo� Murakami’s At One Moment Opening Six Holes Satyajit Ray releases the Indian Bengali drama Aparajito (The Unvanquished), the follow-up to Pather Panchali November Bayn al-Qasrayn (Between the Two Palaces), the first book of Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy is published in Cairo Allen Ginsberg publishes Howl and Other Poems, one of the principal works of the Beat Generation Roger Vadim releases the film Et Dieu… créa la femme (And God Created Woman), launching Brigitte Bardot into the public spotlight December Yoshihara Jiro publishes the “Gutai bijutsu sengen” (Gutai Art Manifesto) in the journal Geijutsu Shincho¯

15 For Yves Klein’s Sculpture aérostatique 1001 blue balloons are released into the sky over Paris on the occasion of the exhibition “Yves Klein : Propositions monochromes” at Galerie Iris Clert, Paris, May, 1957

1957 January Renato Guttuso publishes his essay “Del realismo del presente e altro” (On Realism, the Present, and Other Things) in the journal Paragone, arguing for a form of socially engaged realism outside of the socialist realism proscribed by the Soviet Union Roland Barthes publishes his collection of essays from Les Lettres nouvelles as Mythologies February Miles Davis releases the influential album Birth of the Cool The Baghdad Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture is held at the Al-Mansur Club and shows the work of forty-five modern artists Ingmar Bergman iconic film Det sjunde inseglet (The Seventh Seal) is released March Paulin Soumanou Vieyra and Mamadou Sarr’s short documentary film Afrique sur Seine (Africa on the Seine) premieres in Paris Alina Szapocznikow publishes “Plastycy o plastyce” (Visual Artists on Visual Art) in the journal Przegla˛d Kulturalny

Uche Okeke’s first solo exhibition, Life in Northern Nigeria: An Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings (1954–1956), takes place at the Community Centre in Kaduna, Nigeria

Miles Davis releases his hard bop album Round About Midnight

Direction 1 opens at the Macquarie Galleries in Sydney, a landmark exhibition of abstract art in Australia

Andrzej Wróblewski dies in a mountaineering accident in Tatry, Czechoslovakia, at the age of twenty-nine

The Modern Fine Art exhibition opens at the Dong-hwa Gallery in Seoul

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April The First one-night exhibition of the ZERO Group—“an evening vernissage without a subsequent exhibition”—takes place at the “Ruinenatelier” in Düsseldorf The First Southeast Asia Art Conference and Competition takes place in Manila, which includes an small exhibition sent over by New York’s Museum of Modern Art May The first Annual Fifth Moon Group Exhibition is held at Zhongshan Hall in Taipei, officially launching the group. These annual exhibitions would continue until 1970 Yves Klein releases his Sculpture aérostatique (Aerostatic Sculpture) into the sky as part of his exhibition Propositions monochromes at Galerie Iris Clert in Paris June Elaine de Kooning publishes the article “Pure Paints a Picture” in the summer edition of ARTnews; it is widely considered to be one of the best articles on “pure painting” July Nevil Shute’s post-apocalyptic novel On the Beach is published The founding conference of the Situationist International takes place at Cosio d’Arroscia in Italy. Participants include Michèle Bernstein, Guy Debord, Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio, Asger Jorn, Walter Olmo, Piero Simondo, Elena Verrone, and Ralph Rumney August The landmark installation/exhibition An Exhibit opens at the Hatton Gallery in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, before traveling to the ICA in London September The first issue of Black Orpheus, “a journal of African and Afro-American literature,” is published in Ibadan, Nigeria

Diego Rivera dies at his San Ángel studio in Mexico

Sensibility, The Void) takes place at Galerie Iris Clert in Paris

Chinua Achebe’s postcolonial novel Things Fall Apart is published

December Yayoi Kusama holds her first exhibition in the United States at the Dusanne Gallery in Seattle

The first Tehran Biennial takes place at the Abyaz Palace building within the Golestan Palace complex. Organized by Marcos Grigorian and featuring the work of almost fifty artists, the Biennial acts as a “feeder” exhi-

July Wojciech Fangor and the architect Stanisław Zamecznik organize the exhibition The Study in Space at the “New Culture” Salon in Warsaw; it is the first “spatial painting” (i.e., installation art) exhibition in Central Europe

1958 January Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel Il Gattopardo (The Leopard) is posthumously published

Jasper Johns exhibits his “Flags” for the first time at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York February Lawrence Alloway publishes his essay “The Arts and the Mass Media” in the journal Architectural Design, coining the term “Pop art” March Robert Rauschenberg first exhibits his combines at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York Chuck Berry releases his classic rock-androll single Johnny B. Goode April The exhibition Das rote Bild (The Red Picture) takes place in the studio of Otto Piene in Düsseldorf, exhibiting monochrome works by forty artists. The catalogue accompanying the show is also the first issue of the group’s magazine, ZERO, which ceases publication after three issues Michel Tapié and Yoshihara Jiro� jointly organize the exhibition International Art of a New Era: Informel and Gutai at the Takashi-

Commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the October Revolution, the All-Union Art Exhibition is held at the Manege Exhibition Hall in Moscow; it is one of the largest exhibitions in Soviet history, with over eight thousand works displayed

September Mikhail Kalatozov releases the film Letyat bition for the country’s participation in the Venice Biennale An event simply called Untitled (Happening) takes place at Douglass College in New Brunswick, New Jersey, most likely the first happening in the United States Brussels World’s Fair (also known as Expo 58) opens at the  Heysel  Plateau, and includes the Atomium and Le Corbusier’s Philips Pavilion Pablo Picasso unveils his mural The Fall of Icarus on the wall of the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris May John Kenneth Galbraith publishes The Affluent Society, which introduces the controversial term “conventional wisdom”

Karl Jaspers publishes Die Atombombe und die Zukunft des Menschen (The Atomic Bomb and the Future of Man)

November The collective Equipo 57 publish their manifesto “The Interactivity of Plastic Space” to accompany their inaugural exhibition at the Sala Negra in Madrid

The exhibition Korean Contemporary Artists opens at the National Museum of Contemporary Art at Deoksugung Palace in Seoul

17 Yves Klein’s performance Anthropométrie de l'Époque bleue takes place at the Galerie internationale d'art contemporain, 253, rue Saint Honoré, Paris, 9 March 1960.

August Yashpal publishes Vatan Aur Desh (Homeland and Country), the first of his twovolume novel Jhutha Sach (This Is Not That Dawn) which is based on the events surrounding Partition. The second volume Desh Ka Bhavishya (The Future of the Country) is published two years later.

Elizeth Moreira Cardoso releases the album Canção do Amor Demais, widely considered to be the world’s first bossa nova record

The Chinese painter Qi Baishi dies at his home in Beijing at the age of ninety-three

Ben Enwonwu completes his sculpture of Queen Elizabeth II

Youssef Chahine releases the film Ba¯b al-H.adı¯d (Cairo Station)

Bimal Roy releases the Hindu drama Madhumati

Jack Kerouac publishes On the Road, a defining work of the postwar Beat and Counterculture generations

Boris Pasternak’s book Doctor Zhivago is first published in Italy after the author smuggles it out of the Soviet Union

The exhibition Seven Indian Painters in Europe at Gallery One in London attracts significant media attention to the work of Avinash Chandra and Francis Newton Souza

Ritwik Ghatak releases the Indian Bengali film Ajantrik (The Pathetic Fallacy)

16 Frank Stella in front of one of his “Black Paintings”, New York, between 1958 and 1962, Photograph: Hollis Frampton

June The exhibition Transferences at the Zwemmer Gallery constitutes the first London group show of “Commonwealth artists,” including Sidney Nolan, Francis Newton Souza, Denis Bowen, and a number of New Vision Centre artists

maya Department Store in Osaka, bringing together informel artists from Japan, Europe, and the United States

The Primera Bienal Interamericana de Pintura y Grabado (First Inter-American Biennial of Painting and Engraving) takes place at the Museo Nacional de Artes Plásticas in Mexico City

Yves Klein’s exhibition La spécialisation de la sensibilité à l’état matière première en sensibilité picturale stabilisée, Le Vide (The Specialization of Sensibility in the Raw Material State into Stabilized Pictorial

Luciano Berio’s pioneering electroacoustic composition Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) is broadcast for the first time in Naples

18 Pablo Picasso attends the inauguration of his mural at the UNESCO building, Paris, 1958.

zhuravli (The Cranes Are Flying), depicting the damage suffered to the Soviet psyche as a result of World War II Dorothy Miller organizes the exhibition The New American Painting at the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Berlin, which subsequently travels to Basel, Milan, Madrid, Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris, and London October The Zaria Art Society is formed by a group of art students at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science, and Technology. Comprising Demas Nwoko, Bruce Onobrakpeya, S. Irein Wangboje, Yusuf Grillo, William Olaosebikan, Simon Okeke, and Uche Okeke, the group aimed to “decolonize” the visual arts as taught by expatriate Europeans

Amílcar de Castro, Ferreira Gullar, Franz Weissmann, Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, Reynaldo Jardim, and Theon Spanudis publish “Manifesto Neoconcreto” (Neo-Concrete Manifesto) in the Brazilian journal Jornal do Brasil / Suplemento Dominical. In the same issue, Lygia Pape publishes her essay “Ballet: A Visual Experience” The Second Conference of Negro Writers and Artists, organized by the Société africaine de culture takes place in Rome, with Gerard Sekoto delivering his “I Am an African” speech May Satyajit Ray releases Apur Sansar (The World of Apu), the final part of The Apu Triolgy of films 19 Antonio Porta, Angela Verga, Farfa, Nanni Balestrini and Enrico Baj pose with Baj and Verga's Interplanetary Sculpture, Milan, 1959. December The exhibition Art of Socialist Countries opens at the Manege Exhibition Hall in Moscow. Framed as a socialist response to the commercial biennials held in Western Europe, the exhibition was best remembered for the inclusion of several contrasting approaches to socialist realism as well as, in the case of the Polish contribution, elements of abstraction

1959 January Günter Grass publishes Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum) February Musicians  Buddy Holly,  Ritchie Valens, and J. P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson are killed in a plane crash near  Clear Lake, Iowa, along with their pilot, Roger Peterson. The event is later dubbed “The Day the Music Died” The Extraordinary Congress of Art Critics takes place in Brasília, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo with the aim of discussing the construction of Brasília as part of the “Integration of the Arts” project March Jean Tinguely publishes his manifesto “Für Statik” (For Static), which he then scatters from an airplane over Düsseldorf. Jean Fautrier publishes his essay “Parallèles sur l’informel” (as “Parallelen zur neuen Malerei” [Parallels to the New Painting]) in the Viennese journal Blätter + Bilder, in which he famously states “painting is something that can only destroy itself, which must destroy itself in order to be reinvented” The first Exposição Nacional de Arte Neoconcreta (National Exhibition of NeoConcrete Art) opens at the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, the first largescale exhibition of neo-concrete works

François Truffaut releases his debut film Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows) The exhibition Gego: Sculptures and Gouaches takes place at the Liberia Cruz del Sur in Caracas; it is her first solo show June Alain Resnais’s film Hiroshima mon amour premieres in Paris Marcel Camus’ film Orfeu Negro (Black Orpheus) premieres in Paris. Featuring music by Antônio Carlos Jobim and Luiz Bonfá, the film is also noteworthy for popularizing bossa nova music outside of Brazil July The American National Exhibition opens in a pavilion in Sokolniki Park, Moscow, and is best remembered for the impromptu “Kitchen Debate” during the opening between then US vice president Richard Nixon and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev Documenta 2 opens in Kassel. Subtitled “Art After 1945,” the exhibition focuses solely on postwar art, particularly a contingent of ninety-seven predominantly abstract expressionist works sent by New York’s Museum of Modern Art August Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio publishes his “Manifesto della Pittura Industriale” (Manifesto of Industrial Painting: For a Unitary Applied Art) in the journal Internationale Situationniste Qurratulain Hyder publishes his novel Aag ka Darya (River of Fire), considered to be the most important novel of twentieth-century Urdu fictio The Antipodeans exhibition takes place at the Victorian Artists Society in Melbourne. Accompanied by the publication of “The Antipodean Manifesto,” the exhibition argues for the importance of figurative art and protests against the pervasiveness of US-style Abstract Expressionism Miles Davis releases the influential album Kind of Blue Eugène Ionesco’s absurdist play Rhinocéros is presented for the first time on BBC Radio

September William S. Burroughs publishes Naked Lunch

Raja Rao publishes his best-known work, The Serpent and the Rope Federico Fellini releases La Dolce Vita

Charles Mingus releases the song “Fables of Faubus” as a protest against Arkansas governor Orval E. Faubus’s actions to prevent integration at Little Rock Central High School in 1957

The exhibition Ray Gun takes place at the Judson Memorial Church in New York, featuring Claes Oldenburg’s The Street and Jim Dine’s The House

Peter Selz organizes the exhibition New Images of Man at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, examining new approaches to figuration in Europe and the United States

February The exhibition Œuvres d’Art transformable (Transformable Art) opens at Gallery One in London

October Ornette Coleman releases the album The Shape of Jazz to Come

The First National Art Exhibition “Soviet Russia” takes place in Moscow, featuring over 2,400 works of socialist realist art The Modern Literature and Art Association organize the Hong Kong International Salon of Paintings at St. John’s Cathedral Hall, the first major exhibition of modern art from both Hong Kong and Taiwan

The first Paris Biennale opens at the Musée d'art moderne de la ville de Paris, exhibiting mostly the work of younger artists The exhibition Zehn Jahre bildende Kunst in der DDR (Ten Years of Fine Art in the GDR) takes place as part of the 10. Jahrestag DDR-Gründung (The Tenth Anniversary Exhibition of the Founding of the GDR) at the Pavillon der Kunst in East Berlin Allan Kaprow stages his ground-breaking 18 Happenings in 6 Parts at the Reuben Gallery in New York

Yu Hyun-mok releases the film Obaltan (A Stray Bullet), commonly regarded as one of the best Korean films ever made The International Sky Festival takes place on the roof of the Takashimaya Department Store in Osaka, in which the work of thirty

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum opens in New York, ten years after the death of its founder and six months after its architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, died. November Gustav Metzger publishes his first mani­ festo of “Auto Destructive Art”, which exhibits at the Cardboards exhibition, held at Brian Robins' Coffee House in London Nam June Paik performs Hommage à John Cage: Music for Tape Recorder and Piano at Düsseldorf’s Galerie 22, his first action in which he performs outside the boundaries of conventional music The exhibition 10 Pintores concretos exponen pinturas y dibujos at the Galería de Arte Color‑Luz in Havana represents the first major showing of the recently-formed group Diez Pintores Concretos (Ten Concrete Painters); comprising Pedro Álvarez, Wifredo Arcay, Salvador Corratgé, Sandú Darié, Luis Martínez Pedro, Alberto Menocal, José Mijares, Pedro de Oráa, Loló Soldevilla, and Rafael Soriano Fateh Moudarres is given his first solo exhibition at the Galleria Cichi in Rome December Frank Stella exhibits the first of his “Black Paintings” at the exhibition Sixteen Americans at the Museum of Modern Art, New York

1960 April Parviz Tanavoli opens the Atelier Kaboud in Tehran, an important meeting spot for the Contemporary Artists’ Group

20 Raymond Hains, Pierre Restany, Jacques Villeglé, François Dufrene and Arman meet at the studio of Yves Klein to sign the “Constitutive Declaration of New Realism”, Paris, 1960. Japanese, US, and European artists are attached to helium balloons and launched into the sky May Guy Debord publishes the “Situationist International Manifesto” in Paris June Nagisa Oshima releases the film Seishun Zankoku Monogatari (Cruel Story of Youth) Gustav Metzger stages the First Public Demonstration of Auto-Destructive Art at the Temple Gallery in London Michelangelo Antonioni releases the film L’Avventura July Jean-Luc Godard releases his first fulllength film, À bout de soufflé (Breathless)

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September Lionel Rogosin’s semi-documentary film Come Back Africa premieres at the Venice International Film Festival Ben Enwonwu publishes his letter “African Art In Danger” in the Times newspaper, in which he speaks of his fear about the unhealthy situation affecting Nigerian modern art due to the influx of Western, particularly British, ideas and the ascension of the commercial market Gillo Pontecorvo releases the film Kapò October Arman’s exhibition Le Plein (Full-Up) opens at Galerie Iris Clert in Paris Wole Soyinka’s A Dance of the Forests is first performed as part of Nigeria’s independence celebrations in Lagos The Independence Exhibition takes place on Victoria Island in Lagos, and includes an Exhibition of Contemporary Nigerian Art Lygia Clark first exhibits her Bichos at the Galeria Bonino in Rio de Janeiro The “Nouveau Réalisme Manifesto” is signed at Yves Klein’s apartment in Paris

Wole Soyinka, Christopher Okigbo, JP Clark, and Ezekiel Mphahlele The first proto-Fluxus events are held in New York to coincide with the opening of George Maciunas and Almus Salcius’s AG Gallery. Music and events are staged by Maciunas and Salcius himself, along with Toshi Ichiyanagi, Jackson Mac Low, and Dick Higgins The exhibition Bewogen Beweging (Moved Movement) takes place at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam; it is an exhibition of kinetic art introducing the work of an emerging generation of artists such as Daniel Spoerri, Jean Tinguely, Robert Müller, Jesús Rafael Soto, and Dieter Roth April The Gorgona group publish the first of their “anti-magazines,” Gorgona 1, with each issue prepared as an original artwork by a single artist, beginning with Josip Vaništa Malangatana Ngwenya has his first solo exhibition, Malangatana Goenha Valente, at the Associação dos Organismos Económicos in Lourenço Marques May The I. Trijenale likovnih umetnosti (First Yugoslav Triennial of Fine Arts) takes place at the Muzej savremene umetnosti (Museum of Contemporary Art) in Belgrade The exhibition Environments, Situations, Spaces opens at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York. Allan Kaprow installs his seminal work, The Yard, in the “sculpture garden,” while Claes Oldenburg publishes his text “I Am for An Art”

21 Frank McEwen with founding members of the Workshop School in Salisbury. November A group of artists stages an alternative exhibition of works on the exterior walls of the Duksoogung Palace in Seoul, which is hosting the annual Kukjeon (National Art Exhibition). Comprising informel-style works, the exhibition contrasts with the predominantly conservative works on exhibit inside the building

June Karl Otto Götz publishes his essay “Elektronische Malerei und ihre Programmierung” (Electronic Painting and its Programming) in the journal Das Kunstwerk V. S. Naipaul publishes his much-acclaimed novel A House for Mr Biswas Kwame Nkrumah publishes his book I Speak of Freedom: A Statement of African Ideology

March The Mbari Artists’ and Writers’ Club is founded in Ibadan by Ulli Beier and the writers

The survey Recent Australian Painting opens at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, representing the first major exhibition of modern Australian art outside of the country Raymond Hains and Jacques (Mahé de la) Villeglé first exhibit their affiches lacérées referencing the Algerian War as part of the exhibition La France déchirée (Torn France), which is held at Galerie J in Paris July The exhibition Sydney Nine opens at the David Jones Art Gallery in Sydney, before showing at Gallery A in Melbourne in September. A direct response to the recent Antipodeans exhibition, the participating artists make a dramatic entrance, arriving at the opening of the Melbourne show in helicopter and brandishing abstract paintings. A young Robert Hughes writes the catalogue

The United States Information Agency organizes the traveling exhibition Vanguard American Painting, which opens in Vienna before traveling to Belgrade, Skopje, Zagreb, Maribor, Ljubljana, Rijeka, London,

György Ligeti’s “micropolyphonic” orchestral work Atmosphères premieres at the Donaueschingen Festival November Ibrahim El-Salahi is given a solo exhibition at the Mbari Gallery in Ibadan, Nigeria Georg Baselitz and Eugen Schönebeck publish the first edition of their “Pandämonisches Manifest” (Pandemonic Manifesto) as a poster during their joint exhibition at Fasanenplatz in Berlin. A second version of the manifesto would later be published as a limited edition in February 1962 Frantz Fanon’s book Les Damnés de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth) is published in Paris The exhibition Arte Destructivo (Destructuve Art) takes place at the Galería Lirolay in Buenos Aires. The exhibition comprises

Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, und Günther Uecker organize the event ZERO. Edition, Exposition, Demonstration at Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf, which coincides with the publication of the third and final issue of ZERO magazine August The first Nove tendencije (New Tendencies) exhibition opens at the Galerija suvremene umjetnosti (Gallery for Contemporary Art) in Zagreb The exhibition Otra Figuración (Other Figuration) takes place at the Galería Peuser in Buenos Aires, featuring the work of Luis Felipe Noé, Jorge de la Vega, Rómulo Macció, and Ernesto Deira September Arnold Belkin publishes his essay “Interiorism, Neo-Humanism, New Expressionism” in the journal Nueva Presencia

Athol Fugard’s play The Blood Knot premieres at the Rehearsal Room of Dorkay House in Johannesburg 22 Demas Nwoko and Uche Okeke at the opening of the inaugural art exhibition at the Mbari Artists’ and Writers’ Club, Ibadan, 1961.

Joseph Heller’s satirical novel Catch-22 is published

The Museum of the Chinese Revolution opens in Tiananmen Square in Beijing

Members of the Gorgona group hold the first Studio G exhibition at the Šira “picture framing shop” in Zagreb. Participants include Eugen Feller, Ivan Kožaric� , Maeda, François Morellet, Ivan Rabuzin, Matija Skurjeni, Marko Šuštaršic� , and Victor Vasarely

1961 February Niki de Saint Phalle stages the first of her “Shooting” actions in a vacant lot behind the artist’s studio at 11 Impasse Ronsin in Paris, the first of a dozen such events

Rattana Pestonji’s film Prae Dum (Black Silk) premieres at the Berlin International Film festival, becoming the first Thai film to be chosen for a major festival

Ornette Coleman releases the landmark album Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation

Hermann Nitsch stages his First Painting Action at the Technical Museum in Vienna

January Jewad Selim dies in Baghdad, just prior to the completion of his monumental Nasb al-Hurriyah (Monument of Freedom) in AlTahrir Square

Darmstadt, and Salzburg

October Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin release their experimental documentary film Chronique d’un été (Chronicle of a Summer) William Seitz organizes The Art of the Assemblage at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, a monumental survey exhibition of 130 artists’ works, ranging from cubism to the present day; the exhibition subsequently travels to Dallas and San Francisco

23 Participants of the Arte Destructivo (Destructive Art) exhibition pose for a group photo at the Galeria Lirolay, Buenos Aires, 1961 [Seated: Kenneth Kemble, standing f.l.t.r.: Jorge Lopez Anaya, Silvia Torras, Jorge Roiger and Luis Wells.] found objects subsequently distorted or destroyed to the sound of a lecture by Jorge Romero Brest, a reading of Aristotle’s Poetics, and the script to a play by Picasso, along with the artists’ own musical compositions Yoko Ono performs A Grapefruit in the World of Park, A Piece for Strawberries and Violin, and AOS—to David Tudor at Carnegie Hall in New York December Claes Oldenburg installs The Store in a disused property at 107 East 2nd Street in New York

1962 January Glauber Rocha releases the Barravento (The Turning Wind), one of the key films within the Brazilian Cinema Novo movement

February Chris Marker’s post-apocalyptic science fiction film La Jetée (The Pier) is released in Paris March Otto Piene organizes the first Zero-Fest at the Rheinwiesen in Düsseldorf, during which he releases balloons into the air, illuminating them with spotlights Marcos Grigorian exhibits part of his monumental Gate of Auschwitz for the first time at the Misaquieh Film Studio in Tehran The exhibition Nul is staged at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum. Featuring the work of Arman, Pol Bury, Enrico Castellani, Dadamaino, Piero Dorazio, Lucio Fontana, Francesco Lo Savio, Heinz Mack, Piero Manzoni, Otto Piene, and Günther Uecker, the exhibition constitutes the first major survey of the ZERO group The Mbari Mbayo Club is founded in Osogbo. For its inauguration Duro Ladipo premieres his first opera, Oba Moro (Ghost-Catcher King) April A display of paintings by Charles Hossein

Christo installs his Wall of Oil Barrels: The Iron Curtain in Rue Visconti in Paris July The inaugural concert of the Judson Dance Theater takes place at the Judson Memorial Hall in New York Andy Warhol first exhibits his Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962) at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles The Premier salon de l’indépendance (The First Salon of Independence) takes place at the Salle Ibn Khaldoun in Algiers, the nation’s first major post-independence art exhibition August Frank McEwen founds the “Workshop School” in the basement of the Rhodes National Gallery in Salisbury, Rhodesia The first Actuel exhibition opens at the National Central Information Center in Seoul The First International Congress of African Culture is held at the National Gallery in Salisbury, Rhodesia The kinetic art exhibition Dylaby: Dynamisch Labyrint (Dylaby: Dynamic Labyrinth) takes place at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam September Joseph Beuys helps organize FLUXUS: Internationale Festspiele Neuester Musik (FLUXUS: International Festival of Newest Music) at the Städtisches Museum in Wiesbaden, Europe’s first major Fluxus festival Rachel Carson publishes her book Silent Spring, documenting the grave environmental effects caused by the indiscriminate use of pesticides

24 Emmet Williams demonstrates his participative Universal Poem at The Festival of Misfits at the ICA, London, 1961. Zenderoudi at the Third Tehran Biennial at Abayz Palace marks the official beginning of the Saqqa�-k�a�na School movement Andrei Tarkovsky’s Soviet war drama Ivanovo detstvo (Ivan’s Childhood) is released in Moscow May Vladimir Nabokov publishes his 999-line poem Pale Fire Umberto Eco publishes Opera aperta (The Open Work) Benjamin Britten premieres his work War Requiem, Op. 66 to mark the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral June Doris Lessing’s novel The Golden Notebook is published Yves Klein dies of a heart attack in Paris

October The exhibition Entartete Kunst—Bildersturm vor 25 Jahren (Degenerate Art—Iconoclasm 25 Years Ago) takes place in Munich’s Haus der Kunst; it is the first critical survey of the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition that the National Socialists staged in the city in 1937

November The 1st Exhibition of the New Image Association takes place at Gyeongbokgung Palace Museum, Seoul An important solo exhibition of Jacob Lawrence’s work opens at the Mbari Club in Ibadan, Nigeria. It then travels to Lagos and Oshogbo Yasujiro� Ozu releases the film Sanma no aji (An Autumn Afternoon) December Anthony Burgess publishes his dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange

The First International Exhibition of Fine Arts of Saigon takes place at the Round-Pavilion in the Tao-Dàn Garden. Intended as a biennial, nomadic exhibition, the outbreak of the Vietnam War ensures that this is the only iteration of this event The International Exhibition of the New Realists at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York introduces the work of artists who would later be grouped under the banner of Pop art: Jim Dine, Robert Indiana, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, George Segal, Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann, Tano Festa, Mimmo Rotella, and Mario Schifano

April Pierre Boulle publishes his science fiction novel La Planète des singes (Planet of the Apes) May Josiah Kariuki publishes Mau Mau De­ tainee, recounting his experiences of the detention camps in Kenya during the Mau Mau Uprising June Ben Enwonwu publishes “Into the Abstract

1963 January The exhibition Two Painters from Africa: Malangatana and Salahi opens at the ICA in London Ousmane Sembène's debut short film Borom Sarret (The Wagoner) premieres at the Festival de Tours in Paris Sylvia Plath publishes The Bell Jar February Tetsumi Kudo performs Happening: Philosophy of Impotence at the Cinéma-Studio de Boulogne in Paris George Maciunas publishes the first “Fluxus Manifesto” comprising selected dictionary definitions of the word “flux” Joseph Beuys performs Sibirische Symphonie, 1. Satz (Siberian Symphony, First Movement) as part of the festival FESTUM FLUXORUM. FLUXUS. Musik und Antimusik. Das Instrumentale Theater held at the Staatlichen Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf Piero Manzoni dies of a heart attack in his studio in Milan Federico Fellini's film 8½ premieres in Italy to universal acclaim

Dr. No, the first James Bond film, is released The Festival of Misfits takes place at London’s ICA and Gallery One, featuring Fluxus concerts and events organized by Robert Filliou, Dick Higgins, Gustav Metzger, Robin Page, Nam June Paik, Daniel Spoerri, and others

contains a copy of their manifesto

Jean-Marie Straub releases his short film Machorka-Muff in New York March Dennis Brutus’s collection of poems Sirens, Knuckles, Boots: Poems is published by the Mbari Artists’ and Writers’ Club in Ibadan while he is in prison in South Africa Daniel Spoerri stages Restaurant de la Galerie J in Paris, which consists of a working restaurant, the remnants of which are then exhibited Nam June Paik stages Exposition of Music —Electronic Television at the Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal The Beatles release their debut studio album Please Please Me

25 The members of the Otra Figuración group, Rómulo Macció, Ernesto Deira, Luis Felipe Noé, and Jorge de la Vega, in Buenos Aires, 1963. Jungle: A Criticism of the New Trend in Nigerian Art” in the South African journal Drum Marta Minujín, along with a group of other artists, stages La Destrucción (The Destruction) at Impasse Ronsin in Paris, in which she destroys all of the works that she had created during her scholarship in the city by burning them and then smearing the remains with paint July Alexander “Skunder” Boghossian is given a solo exhibition of his works at the Mbari Gallery in Ibadan LeRoi Jones publishes his landmark study of Afro-American music and culture Blues People: Negro Music in White America August The Nove tendencije 2 exhibition takes place at the Galerija suvremene umjetnosti (Gallery of Contemporary Art) in Zagreb. Matko Meštrovic� uses the occasion to publish his untitled manifesto, which would be subsequently distributed as “ldeologija Novih tendencija” (The Ideology of New Tendencies) The “Manifes Kebudayaan” (Cultural Manifesto) is published in the News Republic newspaper. Signed by a number of Jakarta-based artists, the manifesto called for a rejection of Sukarno’s authoritarian cultural policies in favor of a universal humanism Charlotte Moorman stages the first Avant-Garde Festival of New York at the Judson Memorial Church in New York; it combines Fluxus and happenings with performance, kinetic, and video art

The Zero Group stage their exhibition ZERO — Der neue Idealismus at the Galerie Diogenes in Berlin, the leaflet of which

125

September The Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (Visual Arts Research Group) stage their first collective work, Labyrinthe, as part of the third Paris Biennale at the Musée d'art moderne de la ville de Paris Forough Farrokhzad’s acclaimed documentary short film Kh¯a˙neh sya˙h a˙st (The House Is Black) is released Wolf Vostell’s large-scale happening Nein – 9 Decollagen (organized by Galerie Parnass) takes place at various locations throughout Wuppertal. The audience is ferried by bus from location to location, including a cinema that screened Sun in Your Head as people lay on the floor Colette Oluwabamise Omogbai holds her first solo exhibition at the Exhibition Centre in Marina, Lagos The First Commonwealth Biennial of Abstract Art takes place at London’s Commonwealth Institute, before traveling around the United Kingdom The XII Convegno Internazionale Artisti, Critici e Studiosi d’Arte (12th International Convention of Artists, Critics, and Art Stu-

Demonstration for Capitalist Realism) at the Möbelhaus Berges in Düsseldorf Group 1890 have their inaugural (and only) exhibition at the LKA Gallery in New Delhi November Tadeusz Kantor’s exhibition Wystawa popularna (Popular Exhibition, also known as the Anti-Exhibition) at the Galeria Krzysztofory in Krakow, filling the space’s dark brick basement with almost a thousand objects that include drawings, sketches, theatrical costumes, boxes, and photographs December Shigeko Kubota’s first solo exhibition, 1st Love, 2nd Love ..., takes place at the Naiqua Gallery in Tokyo

October The first exhibition of the newly formed Amadlozi Group opens at the Egon Guenther Gallery in Johannesburg, featuring work by Cecil Skotnes, Sydney Kumalo, Ezrom Legae and Edoardo Villa Georg Baselitz holds a solo exhibition at the Galerie Werner & Katz in Berlin; in which he exhibits Die große Nacht im Eimer (The Big Night Down the Drain, 1962–63) for the first time. The work proves so controversial that it, along with the work Nackter Mann (Naked Man, 1962), are confiscated by the police The exhibition By or of Marcel Duchamp or Rrose Sélavy opens at the Pasadena Museum of Art. Curated by Walter Hopps, the show is Duchamp’s first ever retrospective Gerhard Richter and Konrad Fischer stage the exhibition/demonstration Leben mit Pop – Eine Demonstration für den kapitalistischen Realismus (Living with Pop – A

June Mohammed  Khadda publishes his essay “Éléments pour un art nouveau” (Components for a New Art) in the Algerian journal Révolution africaine Roland Barthes publishes Éléments de sémiologie (Elements of Semiology) in the French journal Communications Documenta 3 opens in Kassel. Now nicknamed the “Museum of 100 Days,” Docu-

November Herbie Hancock releases the album Empyrean Isles Wolf Vostell organizes In Ulm, um Ulm und um Ulm herum, featuring 200 participants across twenty-four locations

1965 January John Coltrane releases the album A Love Supreme A censored version of Marlen Khutsiev’s film Mne dvadtsat let (I Am Twenty) is released in Moscow. The original three-hour film would not be screened until 1989 March Dušan Makavejev’s art film Cˇovek nije tica (Man Is Not A Bird) is released in Yugoslavia

1964 January The Society of Nigerian Artists hold their inaugural exhibition at the Exhibition Centre in Lagos

March Marshall McLuhan publishes Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, coining the term “global village”

dents) takes place in Rimini and San Marino, concurrent with the IV Biennale di San Marino

Carolee Schneemann first performs her work Meat Joy at the American Center in Paris as part of the First Festival of Free Expression

The first Original Form Association exhibition takes place at the National Central Information Center in Seoul

Stanley Kubrick’s satirical black comedy Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is released in the United States

26 Gerhard Richter and Konrad Lueg stage the exhibition Leben mit Pop: Eine Demonstration für den kapitalistischen Realismus (Living with Pop: A Demonstration for Capitalist Realism) at the Möbelhaus Berges, Düsseldorf, 1963.

of the Western art world

Duro Ladipo’s Three Yoruba Plays (Oba Koso / The King Did Not Hang; Oba Moro / The King of Ghosts; and Oba Waja / The King Is Dead) are published together for the first time

Twins Seven Seven has his first exhibition as part of the Third Anniversary Celebration of Mbari Mbayo at the Mbari Mbayo Club in Oshogbo 27 Paul Keeler, Sergio de Camargo, Guy Brett, Christopher Walker, David Medalla and Gustav Metzger mailing Signals Newsbulletin from Cornwall Gardens, London, 1964. menta’s focus on painting, sculpture, and graphic art—as well as its emphasis on abstraction—resulted in it appearing to be somewhat behind the times, especially when considering the ascendancy of Pop, Nouveau Réalisme, Fluxus, and Capitalist Realism in Europe and the United States

 

April Milan Knížák organizes the První manifestace Aktuálního ume˘ní (First Manifestation of Aktual Art) in the streets around Prague, simultaneously publishing his magazine Aktuální ume˘ni (Aktual Art), both of which constitute Central Europe’s first happenings The Rolling Stones release their first, self-titles album

July Millie Small releases a cover version of the song “My Boy Lollipop,” the first successful hit that was recorded in the bluebeat style and a forerunner to reggae Yoko Ono first performs Cut Piece at the Yamaichi Concert Hall in Kyoto, with further performances taking place in Tokyo, London, and New York August The first edition of the Signals Newsbulletin is published in London

Clement Greenberg organizes the exhibition Post-Painterly Abstraction at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, representing a comprehensive survey of color field painters and subsequently leading to their work being grouped under this heading

Mikhail Kalatozov’s film Soy Cuba (I Am Cuba) is released in Moscow

May The 32nd Venice Biennale signals the European arrival of Pop art, with the work of Jasper Johns, Jim Dine, and Claes Oldenburg exhibited in the American pavilion, while a collateral exhibition of pop artists is staged by Leo Castelli and Ileana Sonnabend in the ex-American Consulate in San Gregorio. Most controversial of all is the awarding of the prize for foreign artists to Robert Rauschenberg, further signifying the United States’ ascension as the center

October The inauguration of the Signals Gallery takes place in London. Founded by David Medalla and Paul Keeler, the gallery opens with a solo exhibition of Takis’s kinetic sculptures

September Uzo Egonu holds his first solo exhibition at the Woodstock Gallery in London

Hi Red Center perform their famous Ochanomizu Drop and Let’s Participate in the HRC Campaign to Promote the Cleanup and Orderliness of the Metropolitan Area! in various venues around Tokyo during the city’s hosting of the Olympic Games

May The Spiral Group (Romare Bearden, Charles Alston, Norman Lewis, and Hale Woodruff) hold their first—and only—exhibition, First Group Showing (Works in Black and White), in a storefront space at 147 Christopher Street in New York. Bearden exhibits his work Conjur Woman (1964) for the first time Stano Filko and Alex Mlynárcˇ ik stage the legendary HAPPSOC I events throughout the streets of Bratislava David Smith dies in a car crash in South Shaftsbury, Vermont Marta Minujín and Rubén Santantonín organize the installation exhibition La Menesunda (Mayhem) at the Instituto di Tella in Buenos Aires, featuring sixteen rooms of participatory environments The exhibition Lygia Clark: First London Exhibition of Abstract Reliefs and Articulated Sculpture takes place at the Signals Gallery in London, her first major solo exhibition outside of America June David Medalla publishes his “MMMMMMM … Manifesto” in the Signals Newsbulletin Nina Simone releases her influential album I Put a Spell on You Fateh Al-Moudarres, Abdel Aziz Alloun, and Mahmoud Daadouch publish their letter “Inta Harr fi Ra‘ika” (You Are Free to Your Opinion) in the journal Sawt al-‘Arab; the letter would be later known as the “Syrian Artists’ Manifesto” July The first Biennale der Ostseeländer (Biennial of the Baltic Sea Countries) takes place at the Museum der Stadt Rostock as part of the city’s larger Ostseewoche Festival

Shigeko Kubota performs Vagina Painting as part of the Perpetual Fluxfest event held at the Cinematheque in New York

However, the director of the institute, Jorge Romero Brest, orders its removal just prior to the opening

Günter Brus stages his Wiener Spaziergang (Vienna Walk) through the streets of Vienna’s old city

October The Muzej savremene umetnosti (Museum of Contemporary Art) in Belgrade officially opens

The first Biennial of Spatial Forms takes place in Elbla˛g, Poland. Organized and sponsored by the Zamech Mechanical Works and the artist Jürgen Blum (Gerard Kwiatkowski), the biennial served as a national survey of large-scale sculpture August Hélio Oiticica presents the first public performance of his Parangolés during the exhibition Opinião 65 at the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro; concurrent

The exhibition Between Poetry and Painting takes place at the London ICA November On the evening before the opening at the Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf, Joseph Beuys stages the action Wie man dem toten Hasen die Bilder erklärt (How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare). With the doors locked, Beuys sits in the window of the gallery explaining the surrounding paintings to a dead hare he cradles in his arms, his face covered in gold leaf and honey December Tadeusz Kantor’s stages his first happening, Cricotage, at Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Sztuk Pie˛knych (Kraków Society of Friends of Fine Arts) on Chmielna Street in Warsaw

28 Günter Brus during his Vienna Walk, 1965. with his publication of “Paragolé: uma nova fundação objetiva arte” (Paragolé: A New Objective Foundation for Art) in the Brazilian journal Opinião Archie Shepp releases the album Fire Music, which included a requiem for Malcolm X Swiss architect Le Corbusier dies after drowning in the Mediterranean Sea at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin in France September Ye Yushan and a team of sculptors from the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts exhibit The Rent Collection Courtyard at the former Manor House of Liu Wencai (the original “rent collector”). The 114 sculptures prove to be so popular that replicas are quickly made and exhibited at the Museum of the Chinese Revolution in Beijing The Commonwealth Art Festival takes place in various locations throughout London. Although predominantly focused on historical art, the exhibition of “New Rhodesian Sculpture” at the Royal Albert Hall features works by a group of African artists who emerged from the school run by Frank McEwen at the National Gallery in Harare (then Salisbury) León Ferrari first attempts to exhibit his sculpture La civilización occidental y cristiana (Western Christian Civilisation, 1965) as part of the Premio Nacional e Internacional Instituto Torcuato Di Tella (National Award and the International Institute Torcuato Di Tella) exhibition in Buenos Aires.

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Section Introduction Yasufumi Nakamori Stephen Petersen Ariella Azoulay Plates

1

AFTERMATH: ZERO HOUR AND THE ATOMIC ERA

AFTERMATH: ZERO HOUR AND THE ATOMIC ERA

T

he opening image of the postwar era is that of the atomic bomb—a new technology that ushered in an era of intertwined beginnings and endings. The bomb was first a Japanese story, told through photography (much of it suppressed, only to be released later) and by artists describing the suffering they saw. Photographs and films of ruined cities and of concentration camp survivors also appeared in the immediate postwar period, and the full realization of the horror of the camps sparked ambitious work in Germany. As these accounts put an end to European moral authority, the war’s conclusion also signaled the end of Europe’s political power and the opening of an era of American military and commercial dominance. American artists were excited by the wondrous natural and scientific revelations of the nuclear age and were awed by the bomb’s biblically scaled power, even as they were skeptical of the U.S. government’s justification for its use. In the wake of Futurism’s worship of technology, Italian artists were also keenly focused on the bomb. A new kind of war began: the Cold War and the arms race, driven by the United States and Russia but encompassing all nations. The iconography of the mushroom cloud helped to create a new awareness of the globe as a single, interconnected entity, a sense of scale emphasized by the programs of space exploration that would emerge from military technology, affording views of the Earth that led to an awareness of global interconnectedness.

Introduction

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IMAGINING A CITY THROUGH PHOTOGRAPHY: JAPAN FROM 1945 TO 1968 Yasufumi Nakamori

1. Aftermath

B

y ruminating on the images of Japanese cities bombarded in 1945, I believe I might be able to construct a point of view with which to confront world history. It was only from the springboard stance of a return to that point where all human constructs were nullified that future construction would again be possible, I thought. Ruins to me were a source of imagination, and in the 1960s, it turned out that the image of the future city was itself ruins. Professing faith in ruins was equal to planning the future, so much were the times deranged and out of sync. —Arata Isozaki, 2006  1

on August 10, 1945, reveal a raw, direct dimension of the carnage, unfiltered by artistic subjectivity.3 When the second atom bomb was dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, Yamahata was immediately dispatched from his post in Fukuoka to go there with four other soldiers, including a writer and a painter. Despite the relatively short distance between the two cities—about 105 kilometers, or 65 miles—in the chaos of the moment the reporters’ trip took them twelve hours by train. They arrived on the outskirts of Nagasaki around 3 a.m. on August 10. In the cold night air and under a beautiful starry sky, Yamahata’s first sight there was of “numerous small fires, like elf fires, smoldering at a distance.” 4 He soon sensed that the city was in complete ruins. One of his companions described it as “a desert of death, as if hit by the largest storm in an era, unfolding under a crescent moon.” 5 The epigraph above, by the architect Arata Isozaki, represents a senti Yamahata was in Nagasaki for the next twelve hours. As day broke ment shared in the 1960s by many of the so-called yakeato-ha, the popand the light grew, he began to photograph, walking about six kilometers ulation that had grown up in the fire-devastated areas of post–World War from south to north and passing near ground zero. His images show II Japan. Born in the 1930s, as adolescents they saw their cities in ashes. charred bodies, bomb victims near death (fig. 1), architectural debris, Working from their memoa burning landscape, and a ries in the immediate postfew seemingly healthy surviwar years, they envisioned an vors, all seen under the direct archetypal city, a future city. rays of a cloudless August sky Isozaki’s statement thus (plate 28). A photograph of a speaks of the power of visually young boy standing with his and viscerally experiencing mother, each holding a rice the city in ruins. For many of ball and gazing absently at them, the image of the the photographer, is among bombed city, memorialized the best-known pictures through photographs, served Yamahata shot that day; it as an allegory for the death of was later included in the 1953 the old city and its ideological exhibition The Family of Man system—that is, Japan’s imat The Museum of Modern perial fascism of the war Art, New York, a version of years—as well as for the city’s which traveled to Tokyo in 2 new life. 1955, where four more of It is against this backYamahata’s Nagasaki photoground that this short essay graphs were added. 6 Fig. 1. Yo�suke Yamahata. Nagasaki Journey. August 10, 1945. Silver gelatin print Yamahata’s photographs traces the ruins of the war, as on glossy fiber paper, 10.4 × 13.6 cm. Courtesy Daniel Blau, Munich from that day, later called they were photographed and the “‘ground zero’ of atomic rebuilt, between 1945 and photography” by the critic Masafumi Suzuki,7 were dramatically dif1968, a significant period in the postwar era when Japan’s political, ecoferent from his earlier documentary photographs of people and sites nomic, ideological, and architectural environments shifted dramatically. in China and Southeast Asia. Those photos had emphasized the triumAt first those ruins served as mere documents, but as they were built over phant aspects of Japan’s colonial expansion in the region and were and the collective memory of them began to evaporate, they began to released in propagandistic publications supporting the fascist governfunction not only as reminders of the past but—in Isozaki’s sense—as ment. In Nagasaki, finding his consciousness of “expression” blown imaginative sources in the search for the future. They were crucial in away, Yamahata just kept looking at the transfiguration of the world constructing alternate times and spaces to revive fading memories. brought about by the A-bomb. 8 He would later remember that he was Among the photographs bearing witness to the atrocity of the atom “completely calm and composed … it was just too much, too enormous bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, at least 119 shots of to absorb.”9 Nagasaki taken by the Japanese-army photographer Yōsuke Yamahata

Yasufumi Nakamori

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The Japanese military never used Yamahata’s Nagasaki photographs for propaganda, since Japan soon surrendered. Some appeared in newspapers before General Douglas MacArthur banned publishing any information relating to the A-bombs. But Yamahata managed to keep his negatives during the Allied Occupation—they were not confiscated—and on August 15, 1952, after the ban was lifted, he published them as a book called Kiroku shashin: genbaku no Nagasaki (Documentary Photography: A-Bombed Nagasaki). The publication closely followed the issue of the magazine Asahi Graph for August 6, 1952, which for the first time widely distributed photographs of the full extent of the atrocities visited upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Fig. 2. Unidentified Photographer, United States Government. Blast- Fire-Damaged Ruins of Takeya Grammar School, Hiroshima. October 1945. Silver gelatin print, 10 × 12.7 cm. International Center of Photography, New York. Purchase, with funds provided by the ICP Acquisitions Committee, 2006

Yamahata’s pictures contrast sharply with a group of photographs taken in Hiroshima by photographers assigned to the Physical Damage Division of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey. Those photographs, shot to investigate and record the effects of the bombs on buildings, infrastructure, and industrial complexes, focus on structural damages absent human presence. Between October 14 and November 26, 1945, the photographers took over a thousand photographs.10 These images are clinical, scientific, and typological; they categorize their subjects by building type and by location and elevation in relation to ground zero (fig. 2). They appear alongside written analyses in a classified three-volume report, The Effect of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima, Japan (1947). The lives of the bomb victims soon began to be forgotten as the nation and its cities rebuilt at full speed. (By 1956, a Japanese white paper had stated that Japan’s postwar recovery efforts were complete.) Among the photographers who began to document the lives of A-bomb survivors in the 1950s was Ken Domon, who had earlier contributed to such journals as Nippon and Life. Having advocated realism in photography, Domon spent

136

the year of 1957 photographing survivors of the A-bomb at a hospital, an orphanage, and in various communities in Hiroshima. The following year, these photographs became a book, Ken Domon—Hiroshima, which begins with photographs of a young girl’s skin-graft surgery. While Domon focused on humanistic efforts to portray the lives of those affected by the bomb, the younger photographer Shōmei Tōmatsu took a more conceptual approach, creating a narrative flow of photographs presented as expressive rather than “objective” documents.11 In 1961, commissioned to produce images of bomb victims in Nagasaki by the Japan Council against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs, Tōmatsu instead photographed fragments of objects stored at the Nagasaki International Culture Hall (predecessor of the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum), such as a melted beer-bottle and a stopped wristwatch (fig. 3), shooting them simply against a plain backdrop. He also visited local villages with a social worker, photographing the keloid scars, burnt skin, and blinded eyes of their inhabitants. From then until 1999, he would take a series of photographs of the Urakawa family—a mother directly injured by the bomb and her three daughters born later, one of whom had only one functioning eye because of secondary exposure to radiation in utero, through her mother. When Tōmatsu published these images in the book Nagasaki, in 1966, twenty years had passed since the end of the war. A kind of collective amnesia had erased much of the direct memory of the consequences of the A-bombs, but Japan’s sovereignty remained in question through the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan (also known as Anpo), which allowed for the massive presence of U.S. military forces on Japanese soil. First signed in 1952, the treaty had been renewed in 1960. Around the same time, the photographer Kikuji Kawada became intrigued by cracks and stains on the surviving walls and ceiling of the dim, damp basement of the Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Dome, the ruin now a memorial in the city. He created dark, high-contrast, abstract photographs of these shapes, then published them in 1965 in a book called Chizu (Map). The book was elaborately designed, with intricate foldouts of some of the photographs, which included images of portraits, letters, and personal items left behind by fallen kamikaze pilots. Tōmatsu’s and Kawada’s rather different books represented each photographer’s attempt to argue that the period of the A-bomb damage was not confined to August 1945—it had just begun ticking then, and continued into the present. In 1968, Yamahata’s Nagasaki photographs resurfaced in a different context. Not only was that year the centennial of the Meiji Restoration, which launched Japan’s modern era, but politically, socially, and culturally it was one of the most turbulent years since the end of World War II, in Japan and around the globe. The nation was caught in a dichotomy, on the one hand anticipating the opening of Asia’s first world exposition, the techno-utopian and futuristic Expo ’70, in Osaka in two years’ time, and on the other the second renewal of the security treaty, also scheduled for 1970. Japanese cities were flooded with protesters who considered Expo a mere distraction from the treaty renewal for Japanese citizens;

1. Aftermath

Fig. 3. Sh�omei T�omatsu. Atomic Bomb Damage: Wristwatch Stopped at 11:02, August 9, 1945, Nagasaki. 1961 (printed 1980). Gelatin silver print, 21.4 × 20 cm. Minneapolis Institute of Art. The Alfred and Ingrid Lenz Harrison Purchase Fund. Acc. n.: 2013.22.1

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universities were barricaded, and some shut down, by agitating students. This specific historical context saw a number of photographic examinations of the formation of Japan as a modern nation, for example a massive traveling show of over 1,600 photographs, Photography 100 Years: A History of Photographic Expression by the Japanese.12 The exhibition traced the modern nation’s history through twenty thematic sections. Four of those sections—“Document,” “War Period,” “National Propaganda,” and “Graph[ic] Journalism”—included photographs directly related to World War II, among them five of Yamahata’s photographs of Nagasaki, which were enlarged to almost one-to-one scale and exhibited as photographic panels. With their large size and vivid depictions of corporeal damage, these images renewed and even magnified their earlier impact, and in the minds of many viewers the post-apocalyptic city streets of Nagasaki in 1945 became linked with Tokyo streets in 1968, shattered and filled with protestors.

the work was made, and of the present in which the work is being viewed—when the city may once again become a ruin. A closer look reveals ambiguities over whether two steel building frameworks that survived the war (images Isozaki found and superimposed onto the ruined cityscape), disproportionately large, are collapsing or under construction. The architect’s own drawing of a utopian and futuristic megastructure, seen as vertical shafts beneath one of the frameworks, suggests the incubation of a new city. Thus multiple moments collide within Re-ruined Hiroshima, in a constellation of past and present. The title suggests that the city is for a second time dead, but fragments within the collage provoke a hope to restore the city with, in Isozaki’s words, “the operation of imagination.”13 The time sequence here is disordered; Isozaki deliberately disregarded the linearity of time, an integral aspect of modernity.

Fig. 4. Arata Isozaki. Re-ruined Hiroshima, project, Hiroshima, Japan (Perspective). 1968. Ink and gouache with cut-and-pasted gelatin silver print on gelatin silver print, 35.2 × 93.7 cm. New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Gift of The Howard Gilman Foundation. Acc. n.: 1205.2000

Also in 1968, the architect Isozaki created Re-ruined Hiroshima, a complex collage of found photographs and his own drawings (fig. 4). Remembering the bombing and burning of his hometown of Ōita by U.S. air raids in July 1945, and seeing streets and campuses in Tokyo vandalized over Anpo again—Isozaki himself had been one of the protesters who clashed with police over the first renewal of the treaty, in 1960—he made the work as part of a larger sonic, visual, architectural, and cybernetic installation, Electric Labyrinth, which he produced for the Milan design triennial that same year. Electric Labyrinth visualized an intermingling of past, present, and future, interwoven and saturated with tensions and contradictions. Re-ruined Hiroshima itself is based on a found photograph of the apocalyptic landscape of Hiroshima soon after the A-bomb was dropped. While the work refers to the city’s nuclear death on August 6, 1945, its title refers to a future moment—in terms both of 1968, when

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As these examples indicate, photographs of A-bombed cities and their residents were shown and interpreted between 1945 and 1968 according to different strategies, in different formats and contexts, and for different purposes. As memories of the war began to slip away, though, photographers and artists gave the images a different life as an act of protest, reviving them, for example as a collage, in a context that unfolded as Japan’s growing role in the Cold War increased the recovering nation’s importance—problematically in relation to U.S. involvement in Asia. In this process, photographs of the ruins, whether they showed buildings or human bodies, transformed from mere documents to catalytic agents that complicated the linear sense of time and challenged the modernity Japan had achieved and the seeming progress it had made through its miraculous accomplishments in the economic, technological, and industrial arenas.

1. Aftermath

1 Arata Isozaki, Japan-ness in Architecture, trans. Sabu Kohso (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2006), pp. 99–100. Emphasis added by author. 2 See Yasufumi Nakamori, “Imagining Cities: Visions of Avant-Garde Artists and Architects from 1953 to 1970 Japan,” PhD dissertation, Cornell University, 2011. 3 See Rupert Jenkins, “Introduction,” in Jenkins, ed., Nagasaki Journey: The Photographs of Yosuke Yamahata, August 10, 1945 (San Francisco: Pomegranate Artbooks, 1995), pp. 13–22. 4 Yosuke Yamahata, “Genbaku satsuei memo,” in Munehito Kitajima, ed., Genbaku no Nagasaki: kiroku shashin (Tokyo: Daiichi shuppan-sha, 1952), p. 23. Author’s translation. - in ibid., p. 16. 5 Jun Higashi, “Reportage: genbaku Nagasaki no sanj o,” 6 The additional photographs in the Tokyo exhibition were removed when Emperor Hirohito visited it, leaving only a cropped and enlarged photograph of the boy with the rice ball. The exhibition was designed by the architect Kenz -o- Tange, who at the time was completing the Hiroshima Peace Center (1949–56). Tange had played an important role in the life of Isamu Noguchi during the artist’s early years in Japan. Inspired by Tange’s Hiroshima project, Noguchi created Model for Bell Tower for Hiroshima (1950; plate 17) and proposed Memorial to the Dead of Hiroshima (1952). 7 Masafumi Suzuki, “The Atomized City and the Photograph,” in Jenkins, ed., Nagasaki Journey, p. 35. 8 Nakamori, “Experiments with the Camera: Art and Photography in 1970s Japan,” in Nakamori, Allison Pappas, and Yuko Fujii, For a New World to Come: Experiments in Japanese Art and Photography, 1968–1979, exh. cat. (Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, 2015), p. 16. - “Meet Yosuke 9 Yamahata, quoted in Hidezoh Kondo, Yamahata—Nagasaki Photographer the Day after the Atomic Bombing,” Yomiuri Weekly, August 20, 1962, quoted here from Jenkins, ed., Nagasaki Journey, p. 103. 10 Erin Barnett and Philomena Mariani, “Introduction,” in Hiroshima Ground Zero 1945, exh. cat. (New York: International Center of Photography, in association with Steidl, 2011), p. 5. 11 Shomei Tomatsu argued for this approach in his debate with the documentary photographer Yonosuke Natori in 1960. In the issue of Asahi Camera for November of that year, Tomatsu published the letter “A Young Photographer’s Statement: I Refute Mr. Natori,” a response to Natori’s essay “The Birth of New Photography,” which had appeared in the magazine the previous month. Active since the prewar years, Natori complained that new, socially oriented photography often took on the style of Dada-influenced European commercial or fashion photography of the 1930s. Tomatsu in turn challenged the realist documentary photography practiced by Natori and his contemporaries and argued for the portrayal of social issues as personal documents. 12 See Nakamori, “Experiments with the Camera,” pp. 15–16. 13 Isozaki, quoted in Nakamori, “Imagining Cities.”

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“FORMS DISINTEGRATE”: PAINTING IN THE SHADOW OF THE BOMB Stephen Petersen

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n May of 1952, Time magazine reviewed an exhibition of paintings at the Galleria del Cavallino, Venice, “inspired by the atomic bomb.” “How,” the review began, “should a modern artist react to the atomic age?” The works in the show, including a pierced canvas by Lucio Fontana, shown illuminated from behind, and an enamel drip painting by Gianni Dova, described as a “churning blue and green fantasy,” were self-conscious attempts to translate atomic energy into pure gesture (fig. 1). Time described the works as being “almost as explosive as the bomb itself: furious fireballs of bright colors and bold contrasts.” The exhibit, the brainchild of Milanese dealer Carlo Cardazzo, was a spectacular success. During its first week alone, said Time, “4,000 crushed in for a look at the atomic fireballs and glowing pinholes.”1 The question of how modern artists should react to a world forever altered by the use of atomic weapons had arisen as early as 1946, when artist Ad Reinhardt rejected Ralston Crawford’s hard-edged abstract renderings of the Bikini Atoll nuclear tests, asking, “Do crooked shapes and twisted lines represent painting’s adjustment to the atomic age? (NO).”2 In a much-quoted interview of 1950, Jackson Pollock linked his innovative drip-painting technique of the late 1940s to the need to respond to recent technological developments, among them the atom bomb:

nuclear fusion attacks their profiles and prevents them from remaining intact. As if a hammer had crushed them or as if a charge of dynamite placed inside them had exploded, leaving the traces of combustion.”6 The idea of “traces of combustion” recalls the scorched landscapes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well as firebombing and other wartime atrocities. Viewed in this way, Wols’s nonfigurative works, like those of Pollock and de Kooning, remain haunted by the absent (exploded, disintegrated) figure. In postwar Milan, influenced by both Pollock and Wols, painters explored dripped enamels and other automatic techniques as a way both to depict and to express the consequences of the atomic bomb. Both the Arte Spaziale (Spatial Art) group, launched by Fontana with Dova and

My opinion is that new needs need new techniques … It seems to me that the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture. Each age finds its own technique. 3 Pollock saw, or at least intuited, a connection between his own stylistic breakthrough and the newly unleashed force of the atom, as did the many critics who reflexively described his work as “explosive.” Italian aesthetician Renato Barilli has more pointedly argued that postwar artists “had to confront the Holocaust of the Second World War, and, as if that were not enough, that of the atomic deflagration”: It might be said that the Other dramatically irrupted and not only in the marginal domain of stylistic research, but so as to reach all of humanity. This irruption changed the terms of the problem. Artists, with their intuition, understood it very well, and the informel, accompanied by other tendencies, was the response they proposed. 4 Barilli vividly likens the dissolution of the figure in the work of Pollock and Willem de Kooning in the late 1940s to the bursting atom: “In the same way, in the free transcription of Pollock and de Kooning the anthropomorphic figures of Picassian post-cubism explode … and are fused into the background of the picture.”5 Whereas modern art had been characterized by formal mastery, the informel brought about a disintegration of form and a fusing of figure and ground. Likewise, Barilli described the informel paintings of Wols (Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze) as starting from the whimsical figures of Paul Klee, but “the fire of

Fig. 1. Members Roberto Crippa, Lucio Fontana, and Gianni Dova of the Arte Spaziale group holding their paintings inspired by the atomic bomb, Milan, 1952. Courtesy Galleria del Naviglio Milano

Roberto Crippa under the sponsorship of Cardazzo’s Galleria del Naviglio, and the contemporaneous Arte Nucleare (Nuclear Art) group, founded by Enrico Baj, Sergio Dangelo, and Joe Cesare Colombo, saw themselves responding to the atomic age with painterly experimentalism. Dova for his part had abandoned geometric abstraction in 1950 and had begun to work with the Surrealist technique of flottage, producing aqueous abstractions with titles such as Atomic Marine—a “seascape” of roiling paint—and Composizione nucleare (Nuclear Composition). Meanwhile, Baj was dripping enamel paints so as to suggest liquidated landscapes and figures, giving his works such unmistakably atomic titles as Esplosione (Explosion) and Due figure atomizzate (Two Atomized Figures).

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Fig. 2. Enzo Preda. Per dimenticare Hiroshima (In Order to Forget Hiroshima). 1951. Enamel on canvas, 100 × 80 cm. Private Collection

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In November of 1951, Baj joined with Dangelo, who was exploring similar themes, in a dual show dubbed Pittura Nucleare (Nuclear Painting) at the Galleria San Fedele in Milan. Writing at length about the exhibit in Corriere della Sera, critic Leonardo Borgese summed up the artists’ belief that the atomic age required a new artistic vocabulary, distinct from the 1946 rendering of the atomic theme by Salvador Dalí: Let us therefore make an art that is modern, that is to say, atomic. Well, Salvador Dalí represented the atomic explosion with his fine mushroom cloud; but that is not enough, since a nineteenth-century painter would have rendered it in more or less the same fashion. We want, rather, a more intelligent, more alive, and, in a certain sense, more truthful representation, and even a more objective one.

Baj’s recurring image of the “atomic” man was a crude, graphic, at times whimsical conflation of a mushroom cloud and the skull and vertebrae of an eviscerated figure formed from freely poured enamel paint. On a certain level, these damaged and mutated forms resonated with written accounts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at a time when photographs of the bomb casualties were still being censored by the occupying authority and genetic mutations were only gradually being discussed in the international press. As the artist later explained, “We had a tragic conception of man. Representing pictorially the nuclear peril, the nuclear theme after all—nothing but exposing it—was already to show all its consequences.”8 The theme of contaminated birth and mutation appears in Baj’s ironically titled Concezione Immacolata (The Immaculate Conception) of 1950, its monstrous figure emerging from streams and pools of enamel,

Fig. 3. Unidentified Photographer, United States Government. Flash Burns on Steps of Sumitomo Bank Company, Hiroshima Branch. November 1945. Silver gelatin print, 10 × 12.7 cm. International Center of Photography, New York. Purchase, with funds provided by the ICP Acquisitions Committee, 2006

We want to remake, to interpret artistically and poetically … the physical and spiritual—and indeed psychic—explosions of the new man in the new world.7

and again in his 1953 Piccolo bambino (Little Boy), whose white blobs of paint suggest both the mushroom cloud and a small skeletal figure, conflating the name of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima with its consequences. Baj’s and Dangelo’s works, said Arturo Schwarz, “have as their motif the human condition as it would be after an atomic explosion.”9

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In preparation for a 1952 exhibit in Brussels, Baj and Dangelo issued a Manifeste de la peinture nucléaire (Manifesto of nuclear painting), in which they pronounced their “desire to demolish all the ‘isms’” of painting and to “reinvent” painting altogether. “Forms disintegrate,” the manifesto said; “man’s new forms are those of the atomic universe.” 10 They and Colombo collaborated to produce Nuclear Composition (1951; plate 36), an inventory of drips, blots, and splatters focused on a central “explosion” of pain. Baj has described the influence of Pollock on the three at this time, specifically the “idea of running colors, of colors thrown and emulsified … we were interested in investigating the material, by its disintegration.” 11 Colombo also collaborated with Baj to produce nuclear sculptures, assemblages made with bones (femurs, pelvic bones); further developing the atomic-anatomic theme, he exhibited a series of spray paintings outlining skeletal forms. This technique, visually conjuring the x-ray, used literal vaporization and atomization to suggest the effect of atomic radiation on the body. As Enrico Brenna wrote of Baj and the Nuclear artists in 1953, “They have wished to disintegrate painting and have found themselves in a nightmare world.”12 Baj’s 1951 word-painting Manifesto Nucleare BUM (Boom Nuclear Manifesto) featured a black mushroom-cloud-shaped head against an acid-lemon background overlaid with nuclear slogans and formulas, declaring “The heads of men are charged with explosives/every atom is exploding.” That same year, the Nuclear artist Enzo Preda exhibited Per dimenticare Hiroshima (In Order to Forget Hiroshima; fig. 2), a mushroom cloud made of drizzled enamel and punc­t uated by a bright orange spill emanating from its center. As the painter was clearly aware, Hiroshima could not be consigned to oblivion. In 1957, an expanded, international group of participants in Arte Nucleare included Yves Klein, the young French painter whose notorious Epoca blu exhibit—eleven nearly identical monochrome panels coated in artificial ultramarine pigment—had been held at the Galleria Apollinaire, Milan, in January. In September, Klein signed Baj’s manifesto Contro lo stile (Against Style), which denounced convention and style in art as empty repetition, and in October a monochrome painting by Klein was included in an important exhibit devoted to Arte Nucleare at the Galleria San Fedele. Only a few months later, Klein would exhibit his infamous Le Vide (The Void) at the Galerie Iris Clert in Paris, presenting the small gallery empty and painted a brilliant white, a provocative gesture that he contextualized at the time explicitly in terms of the atomic age and the threat of nuclear annihilation: I am happy to be dealing with a problem that is so much of our time. One must—and this is not an exaggeration—keep in mind that we are living in the atomic age, where everything material and physical could disappear from one day to another, to be replaced by nothing but the ultimate abstraction imaginable.13

and H bombs,” so that the explosions and their fallout would have a telltale color, detectable by all interested parties.14 The connection between Klein’s International Klein Blue (IKB) pigment and radioactive fallout suggests one possible meaning for his “Cosmogony” works of 1960, where the artist blew IKB pigment into falling rain and captured the blue-­infused drops on a sheet of paper, reminiscent of the “black rain” that poured radio­active particles on the atom-bomb survivors. Klein had lived in Japan for a year and a half in the early 1950s, studying judo. According to a friend he met there, the author Shinichi Segi, Klein was deeply impressed by a film by Fumio Kamei, Itike ite yokata (It’s good to live), which documented the scarred survivors of Hiroshima. The film included footage of the “shadow” of a vaporized figure burnt onto a Hiroshima doorstep by the atomic blast (fig. 3). Segi described its impact on Klein: In the great cataclysm, on the stairs, a man was disintegrated in a second, maybe less, and his shadow, from the brightest of all possible lights, remains etched—a disappearance, for eternity. ... Yves’s emotion was at its height. ... “This is close to a monochrome [he said].” Death, life and absence of life ... A stone colored by the shadow of a man: the stone and the body melted into one another by the extreme heat. The colored body—absence of the act of painting, and painting.15 The nuclear “shadows,” according to Segi, “influenced and incited” Klein to make the series of body imprints and silhouettes that he called “Anthropometries.” Klein, who only occasionally gave specific titles to his works, called one of the body prints, a unique example from c. 1961 featuring ghostly silhouettes, Hiroshima. Here his signature color IKB, applied with an atomizer, intimates the radiation blast itself, leaving faint shadows around absent figures. (The Hiroshima victims were literally vaporized by the blast, their shadows forming negative stains as the cement around them was blanched). It was, as Klein reportedly said about the atomic shadows, “close to a monochrome.” In 1961 Klein made a series of “Fire Paintings” using a flame thrower, among which some examples, the size of large Abstract Expressionist works, register imprints and silhouettes of figures along with scorch marks and drips made from water. In the days after the Hiroshima bombing, lacking onsite documentation, a Picture Post story on man’s entry into the “Atom Age” had in fact used the visual example of a flame thrower scorching a Japanese soldier to illustrate the action of the atom bomb, while pointing to the far greater force and speed of the bomb, which “literally seared to death all living things.”16 Harking back to an informel aesthetic while visibly suggesting flames and explosions, Klein’s “Fire Paintings” explored the ambiguous aesthetic territory—but also the terrifying reality—where the body disintegrates, fusing with the background.

Soon thereafter Klein drafted a letter to the International Conference on the Detection of Atomic Explosions proposing “to paint in blue the A

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1 “Outside Is Everything,” Time 59, no. 21 (May 26, 1952): 73. 2 Ad Reinhardt, “How to Look at Three Current Shows,” PM, December 15, 1946, p. 12. 3 Jackson Pollock, interview with William Wright, 1950, in Jackson Pollock: Interviews, Articles, and Reviews, ed. Pepe Karmel (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1999), p. 22. 4 Renato Barilli, “Tachisme, informel, abstraction lyrique,” In Les Années 50 (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, 1988), p. 80. All translations mine unless otherwise noted. 5 Ibid., p. 81. 6 Ibid. 7 Leonardo Borgese, “Arte Nucleare,” Corriere della Sera (Milan), November 24, 1951, repr. in Enrico Baj: Opere dal 1951 al 2001, exh. cat. (Rome: Palazzo delle Esposizioni, in association with Skira, Milan, 2001), p. 238. 8 Enrico Baj, “Attenzione alla Pittura: Baj par Baj,” in Enrico Baj (Paris: Filipacchi, 1980), p. 19. 9 Tristan Sauvage [a pseudonym for Arturo Schwarz], Art Nucléaire, trans. John A. Stevens (Paris: Editions Vilo, 1962), p. 52. 10 Baj and Sergio Dangelo, Manifeste de la peinture nucléaire (Brussels: Galerie Apollo, 1952), n.p. 11 Baj, interview with Freddy De Vree, in Enrico Baj Modifications, trans. Pia Nkoduga, exh. cat. (Antwerp: Ronny van de Velde, 1998), n.p. 12 Enrico Brenna, “Pretion,” in Sauvage, Art Nucléaire, p. 204. 13 Yves Klein, “My Position in the Battle between Line and Color,” 1958, repr. in Otto Piene and Heinz Mack, eds., Zero, trans. Howard Beckman (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1973), p. 10. 14 Klein, quoted in Sidra Stich, Yves Klein (Stuttgart: Cantz, 1994), p. 147. 15 Shinichi Segi, “Le réaliste de l’immatériel,” in Yves Klein (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, 1983), p. 84. 16 Picture Post (London), August 25, 1945, quoted in Christoph Laucht, “‘An Imagined Cataclysm Becomes Fact’: British Photojournalism and Real and Imagined Nuclear War in Picture Post,” in Catherine Jolivette, ed., British Art in the Nuclear Age (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), p. 83.

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THE NATURAL HISTORY OF RAPE Ariella Azoulay

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y the end of World War II in 1945, many German cities had been systematically destroyed by bombing from the air. The people who survived, and particularly the women, then went through another type of violence, this time from the land. A popular axiom of the Allied New World Order held that Germans had to pay for the Nazis’ crimes, and women, German in particular, had to relearn the lesson of rule by men, regardless of those men’s nationalities. The possibility that in the political vacuum created by the end of the war and the destruction of social fabrics, women would establish another polity amid the ruins, had to be eradicated. Starting on April 27, and over the course of several weeks, anywhere between a few hundred thousand and two million German women were raped.1 In the urban spaces where many of these rapes took place, cameras were not absent, to say the least; the destruction of living spaces and of the buildings of German cities is recorded in countless trophy photographs. These places were quickly crowded with photographers. The presence of rape, including both the preface to and the aftermath of physical violence, required no special effort to detect—the crime was ubiquitous. Yet it did not appear as a prime subject for these photographers in the way that the large-scale destruction of the cities did. A picture (fig. 1) showing two photographers together manifests an interest in the photographer in zones of war and violence as a figure always ready with his camera in his hand. That interest is reinforced by the invisible presence of yet a third photographer, the one who took the photograph we are looking at. In the context of the alleged absence of

Fig. 1. “Photographers at the Brandenburg Gate” (untaken photographs of rape), May 1945

photographs of rape, though, we can look at this photograph and ask, where are the photographs of rape that these photographers could have been taking in a city plagued with it? Did they not witness these rapes firsthand, or if women were raped in front of their eyes did they choose to avert their cameras? Using the diary A Woman in Berlin as a guide in my exploration of photography to capture rape, I focus mainly on Berlin, where thousands of photographs were taken during this time.2 In a city

where cameras abounded, though, I propose to use this photograph as a placeholder in a photographic archive in formation and to relate to it as a stand-in for a particular species: the untaken photograph of rape. Depending on the circumstances under which photographs were—or were not—taken or disseminated, and on the spectator position we nego-

Fig. 2. “The Capital of the Third Reich after the Storm,” April 1945

tiate, other placeholders can be named inaccessible photograph of rape, or as yet unacknowledged photograph of rape. These rapes were discussed, though not in depth or at length, in quite a few historical accounts.3 There is no disagreement among researchers about the widespread occurrence of rape—only about the precise number of women who were violated. To ask where the photographs of these rapes are, then, is not to search for evidence that women were systematically raped. Such evidence abounds. Instead, this is an ontopolitical question forced on the photographic archive, defying the priority given to photographs as the primary outcome of the event of photography, and the sanctity accorded to the frame as the boundary that determines what photographic narratives can be written. These priorities and presumptions limit what we can learn from photographs to discrete units of information known as facts, which are often used for summary accounts (as if the most important issue were whether “only” 700,000 or 800,000 women were raped in Berlin) or are dismissed as having any­thing to do with rape. When so many oral accounts from victims of rape describe the destroyed streets full of armed soldiers as the arena of their rape, we cannot refrain from asking, how is it that none of these photographs of destruction became associated with rape? What expectations are implied by the dismissal of these photos—that only a photograph in which a rapist or a group of rapists are captured in the same frame with an attacked woman could be recognized as a photograph of rape? Rather than reproducing common assumptions about the scarcity of images or the archival silence and expecting that after seventy years during which photographs of this systemic rape did not circulate, the archive will suddenly provide us with a few rare, previously unseen images

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of torn bodies, and rather than inhabiting the imperial role of the discoverer of a large-scale and known catastrophe, I limit my study to available images. After all, the aim is not to ratify the number of women known to have been raped through photographs of their wounded bodies. When we speak about conditions of systemic violence, we should not look for photographs of or about systemic violence, but should explore photographs taken in zones of systemic violence. The places recorded in them are exactly the same places where rapes took place. Maybe not on the third floor, but on the second; maybe not in the apartment on the right, but in this one on the left; maybe only three soldiers rather than four; and so

Fig. 4. “Battered Berlin,” July 11, 1945 (recto) Fig. 5. “Battered Berlin,” July 11, 1945 (verso)

Fig. 3. “Berlin, 1945”

on (fig. 2). The impossibility of stabilizing this kind of information, even though it may be crucial in individual cases, is counterbalanced by the possibility of using photographs to explore the conditions of systematic rape as foundational to post–World War II democratic political regimes: ruined urban spaces, military rule, and artificially produced food shortages. Photographs should not be approached as raw archival material—as if “what was there” is equal to what made it into the frame—or as positive facts whose intrinsic meaning as primary sources is to be pulled out through research. They should be read with and against other material, often considered “secondary,” and they deserve special

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Fig. 6. “Berlin, 1945”

Fig. 7. “Pumping for Water in Berlin,” July 20, 1945 (recto)

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Fig. 8. “Pumping for Water in Berlin,” July 20, 1945 (verso)

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attention since what they encapsulate is always more than what those who produced them intended to record. Hence my rejection of the axiom according to which there are no images of rape, which relies on the reduction of photography to photographs and ignores the co-presence of cameras and rape in the same unit of time and space. In zones of omnipresent violence of which there are no photos at all, all photographs should be explored as photographs of that very same violence. As with the rabbit-duck test, I propose to ask in which kinds of images this systemic rape is located, even if it remains elusive, and to attempt to bring rape to the surface of the photograph, side by side with more visible phenomena. Photographs showing the massive destruction of built environments are my first sources in this effort (fig. 3): I started to read these perforated houses, heaps of torn walls, empty door and window frames, uprooted doors, piles of rubble—all those elements that used to be pieces of homes—as the necessary spatial conditions under which a huge number of women could be transformed into an unprotected population prone to violation.

Fig. 10. “Berlin, 1945”

Fig. 9. “The Capital of the Third Reich after the Storming of the City,” April 1945

NO MARKS LEFT ON THE HISTORICAL TIMELINE Already in July 1945, the absence of rape was carefully constructed through tropes of substitution and displacement. The chaotic environment that had formed the arena of systemic rape had already been remodeled and replaced by discrete destroyed objects on relatively cleansed sidewalks. “This is one of the scenes presented to the eyes of Allied soldiers who entered war-shattered Berlin,” states the news agency that distributed these photographs (figs. 4, 5), replacing attention to the ruins with their appearance to the eyes of Allied soldiers. The

caption assumes the right of those who have destroyed the city to continue to seize it, administer it, and view it, and to act as if they were not the destroyers but those who had come to explore, assist, and restore order. This is the familiar imperial protocol: the plight one perpetrates becomes one’s trophy, the object of one’s gaze. Even if most of the rapes were perpetrated by Red Army soldiers and in the Soviet occupation zone, the tight daily cooperation among Allied forces made them more than just spectators—a position they inhabited without remorse—and certainly responsible for the naturalization and decriminalization of this systemic violence. Rather than standing against that violence and using the term “rape” to name a crime, the occupying powers deliberately conflated violence with sex and love—a private matter with public violence—by using “fraternization” as an umbrella term through which to regulate relations between men and women. Thus a photograph taken three months after the Allies entered the city, in which women are seen walking casually in the street, showing no sign that they have recently seen their first daylight after being forced to live for weeks as “cave dwellers,” can be distributed as a representation of the scene the Allies first saw when they entered the city on foot. The plight of certain segments of the body politic, or of entire populations, is not etched in historical time. Weeks of terror simply do not exist in the timeline of imperial powers’ news desks. Only some weeks later, and no earlier than that, were women actually back on the streets (fig. 6). To each

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other these women still seemed “unbelievably different,” “unfamiliar, older, distraught,” even when some of the main arteries of the city were cleared of rubble and differentiations between roads and sidewalks, private space and commons, locked indoors and open outdoors, made the street safe for them again (figs. 7, 8). 4 Reconstructing women’s timeline is a first step in reassociating photographs with rape. When photographs record the presence of welldressed girls and women in open spaces, as in the “Battered Berlin” image, we are reminded that these women were in a very early moment of re-experiencing the meaning of walking in their city without the threat of being violently captured and raped, or forced into the cruel deal

disappeared, so that the degree of their presence in photographs can be used in the reconstruction of the photographic timeline of the rapes taking place in this decor. When an anonymous Russian soldier took the photo in fig. 9, for example, women’s screams were probably audible. Instead of complying with factual classifications such as “bombed city,” provided by those who had the power both to destroy a fabric of life and to promote a discursive matrix in which such violence could be justified, I seek to render them unavailable, unreiterable. When photos of catastrophe are made into tokens of destruction, details like the density of the smoke, the height of the rubble, the position of the rubble in the entrance to a building, women’s grimaces, features, and clothes—all

Fig. 11. “Berlin Struggles up out of Rubble” (recto)

of being provided with enough food to survive in exchange for their bodies and work. This is, though, a photograph of a city from which omnipresent rape has been wiped out in order to clear the way for its survivors to be shaped as consumers by the Marshall Plan devised for them. When the Allies walked into Berlin after heavily bombarding it, smoke was still hanging in the air and the streets were carpeted with rubble and the corpses of people and animals. A few refugees on the run, carrying small bundles, could be seen. These elements gradually

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these are neglected, and appear as more of the same. When imperial violence is made into ether, these details can be helpful in making it palpable again. After all, innumerable photographs were taken in imperial arenas of violence. Careful attention to smell, color, sound, and other tactile aspects is necessary to endow this etheric violence with material presence in photographic archives. Visual documents of violence perpetrated in the open are not missing; they are located within available images falsely declared not to

1. Aftermath

Fig. 12. “Berlin Struggles up out of Rubble” (verso)

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Fig. 13. “Hunger – The Price of Defeat,” October 23, 1945 (recto)

Fig. 14. “Hunger – The Price of Defeat,” October 23, 1945 (verso)

be images of rape, even though they were taken in the same places and at the same time as the rapes. Inserted in such a reconstructed timeline, I propose to read fig. 9 not as another photo of destruction but rather as a photo of an arena of rape. In these perforated and porous dwellings, women lived with no windows, no doors, no water, no gas, no electricity, and very little food. The women moved from the upper floors to the basement and back, depending on the data they could gather on the behavior of their rapists. Some of the rapists, they learned, were too lazy to climb to the upper floors, especially when drunk; others felt less comfort­ able raping women in crowded places like basements, where, after the aerial bombing, people stayed since their apartments were made uninhabitable. Young girls in particular hid in closets and other less accessible parts of what was left of their or others’ homes. Some of the women managed to reduce the number of men who raped them by making deals with individual soldiers who would protect them from the others and, in exchange for access to their bodies, provide them with food. The rubble that blocked buildings’ entrances didn’t stand in the way of those who came to rape women. On the contrary, the chase after women was part of the adventure. Although the buildings were not secure, women preferred staying in them to going outside and walking to their predators. The deserted street in fig. 9 indicates this clearly: the road is already relatively cleansed of rubble, but only one or two soldiers are seen on it. On May 9, Anonymous wrote in her diary that she was “alone between her sheets for the first time since April 27” (fig. 10).5 The day before,

with the help of some of their “protectors,” she and other women had been able to block the entrance of the building they were living in with a kind of door, which restored, even if in a very vulnerable way, some semblance of privacy, threshold, choice, and order. Rapes didn’t cease at this point, but with some sign of order and organization, their number and frequency diminished. After some of the apartments’ doors were restored, it came time to clear buildings’ street entrances (figs. 11, 12). Writing on the same morning, Anonymous continued, “Some people equipped with heavy scoops called us down to the street, where we shoveled the pile of refuse on the corner.”6 When the photo in fig. 9 was taken, some time after April 27 and not much after the first week of May, rapes were still numerous.

Fig. 15. “Black Market Arrests,” 1945

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1. Aftermath

What exactly is fig. 9? Who took it, and why? The dead corpse of a horse, still attached to a damaged carriage, doesn’t seem to be what attracted the photographer; nor was it the scale of the destruction, as is clearly the case in “Battered Berlin,” whose focus is a collapsed building. In this image the photographer’s gaze is closer and more intimate. The photo was not taken in order to show the house or the street. It seems more like an idiosyncratic souvenir the photographer wanted to carry

their exchange: “‘How many times were you raped, Ilse?’ ‘Four, and you?’ ‘No idea, I had to work up the ranks from supply train to major.’” 10 Under these conditions, four times could not have been enough for survival. Not much could be found in a nearby dumping lot either. Anonymous noted “the people going hungry” in mid-May, after another friend of hers biked a two-hour distance to ask for some food (fig. 16). “She herself looks pitiful; a piece of bacon. Her legs are sticks and her knees jut out like gnarled bumps.” 11 There are no statistics, but many women preferred to shelter themselves from multiple gang rapes in these types of relationships. These men became friends of sorts, welcomed insofar as they could prevent foreigners from intruding and raping the women more brutally. Even if fig. 10 was not taken by Petka, Anatol, the Major, Vanya, it was taken by another soldier in a threatening proximity to women who, at the very moment when the photo was taken, hid in houses that were violated.

Fig. 16. “Refugees Get Hot Soup from Red Cross,” 1945

with him. He would have been familiar with this particular building; he probably knew how to get in and out of each of its holes, and wanted to keep some memories of the many evenings and nights he spent there with one woman or maybe many, first having to “grab her wrists,” “jerk her around the corridor,” and “pull her, hand on her throat, so she can no longer scream,” 7 and later providing some vodka, herring, candles, and cigarettes after he had raped her. At this point food rations were either nonexistent or minimal enough to push women to choose a sort of rape-under-control in the form of a food-for-sex exchange in place of other forms of rape. As Anonymous writes, “Physically I feel a little better, though, now that I am doing something, planning something, determined to be more than mere mute booty, a spoil of war.” 8 The photographer might be this guy, described by Anonymous: “out of all the male beasts I’ve seen these past few days he’s the most bearable, the best of the lot.”9 Those who succeeded in avoiding rape, or its recurrence, found themselves outside any of these providential economies. City dumps were rare places where they could find food (figs. 13, 14). The black-market economy was manipulated to authorize certain people to provide women with food, and to ensure that they were not creating their own markets with their own rules (fig. 15). They were constantly arrested since they never stopped trying to find and install their own trade networks. When Anonymous met with a friend, this was

This is a short version of a longer text shown as a visual essay at Pembroke Hall, Brown University, April 2016, and at the f/stop Festival for Photography, Leipzig, June 2016. 1 On the approximation of the number of rapes in Germany see Atina Grossmann, Jews, Germans and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Berlin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. 48–49; Antony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945 (New York: Viking, 2002); and Helke Sander’s film Liberators Take Liberties (1992). 2 Anonymous, A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City. A Diary, trans. Philip Boehm (New York: Picador, 2000), p. 13. 3 In 9,558 pages of books I have looked at that focus on 1945, only 161 address the mass rape of German women. In the thousands of photographs taken in 1945 and printed in albums there is no mention of rape at all. A few pages on rape can be read in each of these books: Douglas Botting, From the Ruins of the Reich: Germany 1945–1949 (New York: Crown, 1985); Ian Buruma, Year Zero: A History of 1945 (New York: The Penguin Press, 2013); Richard Bessel, Germany 1945: From War to Peace (New York: Harper Collins, 2009); David Stafford, Endgame 1945: The Missing Chapter of World War II (New York: Back Bay Books, 2007); and Giles MacDonogh, After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation (New York: Basic Books, 2007). 4 Anonymous, A Woman in Berlin, p. 84. 5 Ibid., p. 155. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid., p. 53. These descriptions in the diary use first-person pronouns where I have used the third person. 8 Ibid., p. 64. 9 Ibid., p. 116. 10 Ibid., p. 204. 11 Ibid., p. 140.

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AFTERMATH: ZERO HOUR AND THE ATOMIC ERA Plates

Kim Kulim Karel Appel Norman Lewis Francis Bacon Roy Lichtenstein Enrico Baj Morris Louis Mieczysław Berman Maruki Iri and Maruki Toshi Joseph Beuys Henry Moore Jean Fautrier Movimento Arte Nucleare Weaver Hawkins Barnett Newman Jess (Burgess Franklin Collins)

Isamu Noguchi Eduardo Paolozzi Robert Rauschenberg Gerhard Richter Mira Schendel David Smith Frank Stella Alina Szapocznikow

Igael Tumarkin Wolf Vostell Andrzej Wróblewski Yosuke Yamahata Yuri Zlotnikov

1

Jean Fautrier La Juive (The Jewess) 1943 oil on paper mounted on canvas Musée d'art moderne de la ville de Paris

2 Francis Bacon Fragment of a Crucifixion 1950 oil and cotton wool on canvas Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven

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3

David Smith Perfidious Albion 1945 bronze and cast iron Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas

4 David Smith The Maiden's Dream 1949 bronze The Estate of David Smith, New York

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Joseph Beuys Hirschdenkmäler (Monuments to the Stag) 1958/82 mixed media Private Collection

5

Joseph Beuys Hirschdenkmäler (Monuments to the Stag) 1958/82 mixed media Private Collection

6

7

Wolf Vostell Deutscher Ausblick aus dem Environment “Das schwarze Zimmer” (German View from the environment “The Black Room”) 1958–59 décollage, wood, barbed wire, tin, newspaper, bone, television with cover Berlinische Galerie – Landesmuseum für Moderne Kunst, Fotografie und Architektur, Berlin

8

Alina Szapocznikow Hand. Monument to the Heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto II 1957 patinated plaster and iron filings The Estate of Alina Szapocznikow, Paris

167

9

Andrzej Wróblewski Liquidation of the Ghetto/Blue Chauffeur 1949 oil on canvas Private Collection

10

Andrzej Wróblewski Executed Man, Execution with a Gestapo Man 1949 oil on canvas Private Collection

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11

Gerhard Richter Bomber (Bombers) 1963 oil on canvas Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg

12

Gerhard Richter Sargträger (Coffin Bearers) 1962 oil on canvas Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen – Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich

171

Frank Stella Arbeit Macht Frei 1958 enamel on canvas Private Collection

13

173

14 Morris Louis Untitled (Jewish Star) c. 1951 acrylic on canvas The Jewish Museum, New York

15

Morris Louis Charred Journal: Firewritten II 1951 acrylic (Magna) on canvas Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk

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16

17 < Isamu Noguchi

Isamu Noguchi

Humpty Dumpty 1946 ribbon slate Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Bell Tower for Hiroshima 1950 (1986) terra-cotta, wood The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York

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18

19

Isamu Noguchi

Isamu Noguchi

Memorial to the Atomic Dead 1952-82 graphite on tracing paper The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York

Sculpture Study c. 1950 ink wash on paper The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York

20

21

Isamu Noguchi Study for “Bell Tower for Hiroshima,” “Little Bomb,” and “Monument to Heroes” c. 1950 pencil on paper The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York

Isamu Noguchi Sculpture Study 1952 pencil on paper The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York

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Isamu Noguchi Atomic Man 1952 kasama stoneware Maxine and Stuart Frankel Foundation for Art, Bloomfield Hills

22

23 Isamu Noguchi Memorial to Man 1947 wallpaper The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York

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24

Karel Appel Exodus n0 1 1951 gouache and colored paper on brown kraft pieces of paper applied on paper Fondation Gandur pour l’Art, Geneva

25 Karel Appel Hiroshima Child 1958 oil on canvas Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo

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26

Maruki Iri and Maruki Toshi Fire (Panel II) from “Hiroshima Panels” (series of 15 panels) 1950 Maruki Gallery for the Hiroshima Panels, Higashi-Matsuyama

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27

Maruki Iri and Maruki Toshi Atomic Desert (Panel VI) from “Hiroshima Panels” (series of 15 panels) 1952 Indian ink and Japanese paper Maruki Gallery for the Hiroshima Panels, Higashi-Matsuyama

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Yosuke Yamahata Nagasaki Journey 1945 gelatine silver prints Daniel Blau, Munich

28

189

29

Weaver Hawkins Atomic Power 1947 oil on hardboard Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

30

Jess (Burgess Franklin Collins) If All The World Were Paper And All The Water Sink 1962 oil on canvas Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

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31 Eduardo Paolozzi Shattered Head 1956 bronze on stone base Private Collection, London

32

Joseph Beuys Verstrahlter Hangar (Radiated Hangar) 1962 polystyrene, wood, animal hair, and oil Museum Schloß Moyland, Bedburg-Hau

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33

Barnett Newman The Beginning 1946 oil on canvas The Art Institute of Chicago

34 Norman Lewis Every Atom Glows: Electrons in Luminous Vibration 1951 oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

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Robert Rauschenberg The White Painting (two panel) 1951 oil on canvas Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, New York

35

36

Movimento Arte Nucleare Nuclear Composition 1951 oil and enamel on paper glued on canvas Private Collection

37

Enrico Baj Manifesto Nucleare BUM 1951 varnish and acrylic on canvas Private Collection

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38

Roy Lichtenstein Atom Burst 1965 acrylic on board Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth

39

Henry Moore Atom Piece 1964–65 bronze Didrichsen Art Museum, Helsinki

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40

41

Mieczysław Berman

Mieczysław Berman

Wojna (War) 1944 collage Muzeum Narodowe we Wrocławiu, Wrocław

Apoteoza (Apotheosis) 1947 photomontage Muzeum Narodowe we Wrocławiu, Wrocław

Igael Tumarkin Aggressiveness 1964-65 iron Tel Aviv Museum of Art

42

43

Andrzej Wróblewski Słońce i inne gwiazdy (Sun and Other Stars) 1948 oil on canvas Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź

Yuri Zlotnikov Geiger Counter 1955-56 oil on canvas The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

44 205

45

Kim Kulim Death of Sun II 1964 oil and object on wood panel National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Gwacheon

46 Kim Kulim Three Circles 1964 steel, oil on wood panel Collection of the Artist, Seoul

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47

Mira Schendel Untitled 1963 tempera and plaster on canvas Hecilda & Sergio Fadel Collection, Rio de Janeiro

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Section Introduction Emily Braun Salah Hassan Geeta Kapur Richard Shiff Terry Smith Plates

2

FORM MATTERS

FORM MATTERS

M

aterialist abstraction is accounted for in the exhibition with works that were grouped under such labels as “art informel,” “Abstract Expressionism,” and “Gutai,” as well as with works by artists who responded to the visual appearance of this art but found different and local meanings in materials and how they handled them. Contemporary critics emphasized stylistic competitions that in historical accounts since then have often devolved into a kind of nationalist boosting. Today it is easier to see the transnational character of many of these strategies. Postwar emphasizes affinities of ideas and materials among American artists and artists who emigrated to the United States from Europe; it also documents the encounters of artists from around the world who gathered in such metropolitan centers as Paris, London, and Mexico City, and reviews the proximity and circulation of artworks in international exhibitions and small-press publications. This materialist art is typical of the postwar period in its difference from earlier European versions of modernism, often rejecting geometric approaches, for example, in a critique of rationality and science, which were seen as having dead-ended in the war and the atom bomb. Instead, artists favored gesture, raw materials and the laws of their behavior, and chance, producing surfaces that are often tactile, rough, and uneven. Many artists went farther still, invoking the entropy of matter and, more specifically, the outright destruction related to the traumatic events and lingering ruins of the postwar landscape. More hopefully, this materialism also embraced organicist, even vitalist thinking, as well as full-body performative experiments.

Introduction

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THE DIRT PARADIGM Emily Braun

2. Form Matters

To lay bare with a brutal brush all the tortures, all the filth, that lies at the base of our society. —Gabriel Désiré Laverdant, “De la mission de l’art et du rôle des artistes” (On the mission of art and the role of artists), La Phalange, 1845 All you need is mud, nothing but a single monochrome mud, if you really want to paint. … The painter has to know how to smear. —Jean Dubuffet, “Notes pour les fins lettrés” (Notes for the well read), 1945

T

he history of Western painting since the Renaissance has been framed by two dominant paradigms. The first, which held sway for centuries, was that of the window. Artists and viewers perceived the painted canvas as a transparent plane, a threshold into virtual depth, be it shallow dimensions within arm’s reach or an infinite expanse beyond the limits of the eye. Pictorial illusionism embodied the humanist tradition that saw man as “the measure of all things.” By the late nineteenth century, the “carpet paradigm” of formalist modernism had displaced the window paradigm.1 Inspired by theories in the decorative and applied arts, painting subordinated spatial illusionism to the demands of a new realism: the inherent planarity of the canvas. “A picture—before being a war horse, a nude woman, or telling some other story—” explained Maurice Denis, “is essentially a plane surface covered with colors arranged in a particular pattern.” 2 This new concept of pictorial autonomy accompanied the deterministic logic of the industrial revolution. Geometric abstraction aligned on the grid emulated the rationale of technological systems; bursting color fields and flat biomorphic shapes signaled a reaction against the same standardizing forces, a retreat into the interior realm of the pure aestheticism, the spiritual, the dream. The carpet paradigm accentuated a purely optical, highly subjective viewing experience through the shallow and shifting spaces of figure-ground reversals. It produced beautiful objects based on pleasing arrangements of color and form, even when disrupted by pictorial assassins such as Joan Miró. A different concept emerged around 1945, when two French artists began to heap and smear gritty oils onto the canvas or to obliterate the surface with coagulated pools of tar. Painting hit bottom, reveling in dirt, organic decay, and the ooze of geological substrata. Jean Fautrier’s “Otages” (Hostages) series, exhibited at the René Drouin gallery, Paris, that year, inaugurated this view on and in the ground, and were followed in 1946 by a show of Jean Dubuffet’s canvases paved with asphalt and the gravelly detritus usually employed for surfacing roads.3 After seeing their work at the end of the decade, Italian artist Alberto Burri created his “Catrami” (Tars), “Muffe” (Molds), and defiled “Bianchi” (Whites), and by 1950 was making “Sacci” (Sacks), pictures made out of soiled burlap gunnysacks (which had often been used as sandbags during the war). The dirt of soil and sweat impregnated the painterly support, now reduced to threadbare rags. This new form of artistic

expression could not be as enduring or pervasive as the previous two paradigms, nor did it aim to be. Its action was swift, the results decisive: to level the Western pictorial tradition. The works of Fautrier, Dubuffet, Burri, and others who followed in their tracks (Antoni Tàpies, Manolo Millares, Adolf Frohner, Otto Muehl) attacked the privileged vertical orientation of easel and mural painting and with it the view into space, no matter how shallow, above and around things. They annihilated the “fine” in “fine art,” seized the metaphoric higher ground that painting had aspired to represent, and reduced it to

Fig. 1. Jean Fautrier. Sarah. 1943. Impastos made of oil, white lead, pastel powder, ink, and varnish on paper mounted on canvas, 116 × 80.7 cm. Fondation Gandur pour l'Art, Geneva, Switzerland. Inv. n. FGA-BA-FAUTR-1

an indeterminate mass of sand, pumice, bitumen, and other crushed organic and mineral substances. At times, the weighty mounds of earthy matter warped or compromised the planar support. Critics referred to the style as matiériste (matter painting), hautes pâtes (thick pastes) art brut (raw art or outsider art), or informe (formless),but these descriptive monikers did not capture the cause of this historical shift. The dirt paradigm expressed the conditions of its specific historical moment: pulverized self-confidence, psychological disintegration. World War II had reduced city and country to rubble and muck. Millions of bodies were buried beneath. So was European culture: from ashes to ashes, dust to dust, pigments to ground matter. The battle metaphors used here to describe this ground operation are intentional: the term “avant-garde” took its name and purpose from the military “advance guard.” In 1845, writing in the socialist

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journal La Phalange (or “the phalanx,” a body of troops in close formation), Gabriel-Désiré Laverdant defined this new cadre of intellectuals and artists and stressed the importance of its front-line position if one was “to know where Humanity is headed, know the destiny of the human race.” Rooted in radical left-wing ideology, its heroic mission was to depict the plight of the downtrodden, in all their destitution and despair. 4 Exactly one hundred years later, Dubuffet scratched out some “Notes for the Well-Read” that articulated a last-ditch effort for painting. The French artist represented the low in literal terms by covering the canvas with filth, primal pastes, and “outlines drawn in the earth by heels.” 5 Some have interpreted Dubuffet’s elevation of the unworthy as a Marxist contestation of museum high culture—a proposal for a “lumpen art” for the common man. 6 He indeed preferred the techniques of the proletarian housepainter to those of the artistically trained one. But in the immediate aftermath of the war, when Dubuffet advocated returning painting to “the primal soils of origins,” class warfare had temporarily ceased as the nation united under the myth of the Resistance and the need for rehabilitation.7 The dirt paradigm expresses not the culture of the left but the culture of the defeated. The “destiny of the human race” had reversed course: all of humanity was brought down to the ground. The plunge into grime and putrescent matter around 1945 was sudden and drastic, nothing like the lyrical scattering of sand and animal glue (another product of organic decomposition) in earlier Cubist and Surrealist painting. Nor did it merely entail working horizontally with a canvas on the ground or table top, temporarily rotating the axis of a painting before mounting it on a wall.8 In imagery, medium specificity (a focus on the materiality of painterly grounds rather than on the material support), and address to the viewer, the dirt paradigm emphasized being one with the earth. It refused grandiose sight lines that projected skyward or over and above the terrain. Height in every culture, writes Wolfgang Schivelbusch, stands for power and control. “These qualities are symbolically elevated, just as homo sapiens, the only creature that walks erect, rises above the rest of the animal world. Conversely those who lack power are put down, subjugated, subordinated. … The winner rises up in the world while the loser falls.”9 At the end, Italy and France were technically on the winning side against Nazi Germany, but were morally compromised by fascism and the Vichy collaborationist regime. They had sunk low, even if collective guilt was mitigated by the sense of collective victimhood at the hands of the Nazi occupiers and by the heroic instances of resistance. Dirty painting, dirty hands—one day someone will write an essay on guilt as a motivating factor in aesthetics. For now we can observe that the dirt paradigm was tilled by avant-garde artists in certain nations whose governments and people had shamed themselves by supporting fascism, genocide, wars of empire, and brutal colonial rule. Fautrier’s involvement with the Resistance remains murky; Dubuffet, a professed anti-Semite (and admirer of the famously anti-Semitic Louis-Ferdinand Céline), profited selling wine to the Germans during the Occupation; Burri served in fascist Italy’s armed forces, including during the conquest of Ethiopia. The Japanese Gutai artists Uemae Chiyū, Saburo Murakami,

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Shōzō Shimamoto, and Michio Yoshihara sullied—even violently attacked—their canvases with charred bits, pulverized rubble, and the iridescent stains of spreading oil. Kazuo Shiraga slopped and slid paint with his feet. Many members of the group, including their leader, Jirō Yoshihara, had participated in the war.10 As to the German defeated, amnesia forestalled the representation of trauma until the next generation. Among those artists, Anselm Kiefer was a grand master of the dirt paradigm, first seen in his series of catastrophic battlefields, large-scale blackand-white photographs of scorched terrain overlaid with paint, sand, and straw.11 They emerged in the early 1980s, just as painting had been declared dead. Issues of personal culpability, equivocation, or helplessness aside, these artists acknowledged the toppling of European culture from its preeminent position. The utopian aims of the avant-garde had been compromised by instances of collaboration with totalitarian regimes of the left and right. To the winner go the spoils: America had secured the victory and therefore “stole” (or earned) the idea of modern art. The “strengths and capabilities” of the vanquished, observes Schivelbusch, “are symbolically transferred to the conqueror … a fate that befalls all losing elites in collapsing cultures as they are replaced by the homines novi.”12 Abstract Expressionism, however, did not stoop when it conquered: it embraced luminous and stormy hues, the colors of skies, verdant groves and watery depths. Awe, not disgust, prevailed. American postwar painters applied their medium freely with broad, energized stokes in “a new kind of flatness,” wrote Clement Greenberg, “one that breathes and pulsates.”13 They conjured deep space, the vertical figure, and transcendent atmospheric fields, by contrast to the compacted or excrescent layers of the European pictures under consideration here. Jackson Pollock’s occasional additions of strings, coins, and cigarette butts, while gritty, do not smother his labyrinthine skeins. Even his atomized compositions, with intimations of nuclear catastrophe, evoke inundation in the air, with sight lines through the autumn mists. Only after trips to Paris (in 1948) and Rome (1952–53) did an American, Robert Rauschenberg, start to paint and compile with asphaltum and gravel, soil and mold.14 Nor did the dirt paradigm apply to all postwar European gestural abstractionists, who preferred the American way in the postwar years of rehabilitation. Art informel practitioners Georges Mathieu, Hans Hartung, and Pierre Soulages choreographed free-floating strokes of color that hover in a distinct foreground plane (and, in their own time, metaphorically rose above the surrounding devastation). Working in Paris after the war, French-­ Canadian artists (on the winning side) invigorated their thick handling of paint with luscious white folds (Paul-Emile Borduas) or brilliant colors in a kaleidoscopic array (Jean-Paul Riopelle). By contrast, expressions of and with dirt resulted in drab hues or the acrid colors of rot. Accumulated particles and pancaked layers accentuated the perception of obdurate mass and refuted the three-dimensional extension of volume and space. Whereas the motions of Abstract Expressionism and art informel were sweeping, scattering, and elliptical, those of matter painting involved

2. Form Matters

digging, scratching, pressing, squeezing, and gouging, immersing oneself in the mire. Jean Paulhan observed that in Fautrier’s strangely shimmering and vaporous pastes, “crushed pastel is mixed with oil and ink with gasoline. Everything is made into a putty, pounded, rubbed down by hand.”15 Painting with sedimentary admixtures, these artists preferred tools that pushed, dragged, scraped, and troweled, or else they turned to the more basic appendages of palms and fingers. “A painter’s basic action is to besmear,” proclaimed Dubuffet, “not to spread tinted liquids with a tiny pen or a lock of hair but to plunge his hands into brimming buckets or basins. … He has to putty it

civilians, equated fleshy pastes with atrocities, being all “tumescent faces, crushed profiles, bodies stiffened by gunfire, dismembered, truncated, eaten by flies,” as Francis Ponge described them in 1946.18 In his macadam paintings Dubuffet went below the earth’s crust to fashion his urban troglodytes out of tar, then turned them “into griddle cakes, ironed flat.” 19 He often gave them the same colors as the ground into which they were impressed: fossil figures made from the same petroleum extracts as fossil fuel. The surfaces of the paintings actually open up physically but in one direction only, down, through cracks and fissures. Figure/ ground relationships in the dirt do not follow the spatial projections

Fig. 2. Paul-Émile Borduas. The Black Star. 1957. Oil on canvas, 162.5 × 129.5 cm. The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Gérard Lortie. Acq. n. 1960.1238

with his soils and thick paints, grapple with it, knead it, impress upon it.”16 As a result, he continued, the viewer would not scan the painting “passively” with an “instantaneous glance” but would dig deep into it as if through touch, becoming one with the matter and reenacting the feeling of being crushed, furrowed, plowed, and dragged down by gravity: “Wherever the surface has puckered when drying, he also dried, contracts, puckers.”17 Indeed, these artists privileged tactile sensations over the disembodied optical experience in tandem with their reorientation of the gaze. The wide visual scope commanded by the upright viewing figure was narrowed and directed downward to contemplate a new kind of landscape, not vertical motifs standing near or far but bodies in the ground. Fautrier’s “Otages,” begun in late 1942 in response to Nazi executions of French

and shifts of the carpet paradigm, as Hubert Damisch explained: “It is this illusion of the ‘behind-worlds’ that Dubuffet tirelessly denounces. And his work … eventually boils down to the stubborn assertion that behind things and under figures there is nothing but the ground.” 20 The same damning reversal of wall to pavement, vertical to horizontal, holds true even when Dubuffet paints urban walls marred by graffiti—or dirty words. As with Burri’s “Catrami,” “Muffe,” and “Bianchi,” layers of bitumen, pumice, and grime signal the reality of earthy biological growth and decay. We may view all of these pictures vertically on the wall but regard-“less,” what we see is the world beneath our feet; we press up against these images, they rub dirt in our faces. Faces, feces: Ponge noted the resemblance in Fautrier’s “pasty adhesive mortars,” and in his telling mania for covering up “small

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or fat mounds,” masking their traces with “quick lines of cinder or dust,” like cats who claw over their excrement.21 Like others after him, Ponge likened the globs, humps, and hollows of this postwar expression to Georges Bataille’s concept of the informe, or formlessness.22 For Bataille, matter that refused to take form in a coherent and centered composition represented the ascent of the foot and the demise of the head. This reversal of bodily hierarchy incarnated a loss of faith in reason and in the traditional cultural values of the West. Devised in response not to this postwar work but to Surrealism, however, Bataille’s analysis missed the embedded self-reflexivity of these artists’ ground maneuvers. The earthbound reality of the painterly medium, comprising powdered minerals, decomposing vegetative matter, and

Plants and leaves fall, minerals are crushed, but only to be taken up again and revivified by the artist’s palette. The culture of defeat inevitably leads to a culture of renewal. The dirt paradigm, as noted earlier, was necessarily short-lived: it provided a temporary buffer zone for psychic recovery. The function of such zones, writes Schivelbusch, “can be compared to the coagulation of blood and formation of scabs necessary for wounds to heal.” 25 One is reminded of Burri’s burlap skins with mucus membranes of polyacetate resin forming in and around the cavities. Wallowing in the mud is an age-old form of catharsis and cleansing before the cycle of death and rebirth, defeat and victory, begins again. In France, painting filth would not be tolerated for long in a new postwar society of modernization and decolonialization, obsessed with hygiene and smooth, clean surfaces.26

Fig. 3. Alberto Burri. Bianco nero (White Black). 1952. Oil, enamel, pumice, and PVA on canvas, 65 × 100 cm. Private Collection.

plant secretions, or what Dubuffet called the artist’s “forgotten native soil”: these base materials stood for themselves.23 Fautrier, Dubuffet, and Burri favored blending their own colored matter—black anthracite, blood-red mercuric sulphide, dark-blue cobalt oxide, and the whites of zinc, limestone, and gypsum. Their mucking about with artisanal craft debunked any notion of deskilling; to the contrary, they opposed the assembly production of paint in tubes. “We must bear in mind,” wrote Dubuffet respectfully on the language of materials, that the colors we handle are not abstract ciphers, they are highly concrete pigments or dilutions made of more or less finely ground minerals and blended with equally concrete substances like linseed oil, turpentine (distilled pine resin) and all kinds of other gums, glues and glazes. 24

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As befits its origins, the cycles of avant-garde fortune mimic those of the military. One might argue that these artists of base materialism buried the Western pictorial tradition, which had reached a saturation point, for good. Historical events hastened its demise. Nonetheless, the firsthand, highly physical encounter with soil and viscous matter proved fertile in the postwar decade and the one to follow. Dirt came off the wall and onto actual grounds and bodies with new, creative force. Notably, the Japanese exponents of the dirt paradigm inaugurated a new genre of performance art epitomized by Shiraga, who, while dressed only in his underwear, kicked, rolled, and dug through earthen wall plaster, rocks, sand, and gravel (Challenging Mud, 1955). 27 In 1909, midway between Laverdant and Dubuffet, F. T. Marinetti had already scripted this narrative of regeneration when he recounted how he drove his car into a ditch and emerged from the dank sludge reborn

2. Form Matters

as a Futurist. Avant-garde renewal was a messy business, but someone had to do it.

3 See Mirobolus Macadam e Cie. Hautespates de J Dubuffet, text by Michel Tapié (Paris: Galerie René Drouin, 1946). 4 Gabriel-Désiré Laverdant, “De la mission de l’art et du rôle des artistes,” La Phalange. Revue Mensuelle de la Science Sociale, tome 2, vol. 1, pp. 254, 271. Available online at http:// gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k95711m/f305.image (accessed April 2016). On the history of the terminology of the two avant-gardes, political and aesthetic, see Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1968), pp. 8–9. 5 Jean Dubuffet, “Notes pour les fins lettrés,” 1945, Eng. trans. as “Notes for the WellRead,” trans. Joachim Neugroschel, in Jean Dubuffet and Mildred Glimcher, Towards an Alternative Reality (New York: Pace Publications and Abbeville Press, 1987), p. 67. 6 Hubert Damisch, “Dubuffet ou la lecture du monde,” 1962, Eng. trans. as “Dubuffet or the Reading of the World,” trans. Kent Minturn and Priya Wadhera with revisions by Richard G. Elliott, Art in Translation 6, no. 3 (2014): 302. First published in Art de France 2 (1962): 337–46. 7 Dubuffet, “Notes for the Well-Read,” p. 67. See Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin Press, 2005), pp. 41, 63–71. 8 Influenced by Georges Bataille’s notion of formlessness (see note 22 below), Rosalind Krauss makes the argument that Jackson Pollock’s “importance was lodged in an axial rotation of painting out of the vertical domain of the visual field and onto the horizontal vector.” See “The Crisis of the Easel Picture,” in Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel, eds., Jackson Pollock: New Approaches (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1999), p. 161. But while Pollock dripped and scattered paint onto a canvas laid on the floor, he aimed at a new kind of mural painting, which, as Krauss admits (pp. 164–65) via an excursus into the criticism of Clement Greenberg, reasserted the optical, vertical orientation of the viewing subject and the opening up of the flat picture plane. Important for the “horizontal vector” argued for here is the self-reflexive subject matter (grounds literal and/ or depicted) and materiality of the medium employed, regardless of “axial orientation.” 9 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery (New York: Picador, 2004), p. 292. 10 Ming Tiampo, “please draw freely,” in Tiampo and Alexandra Munroe, eds., Gutai: Splendid Playground, exh. cat. (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 2013), pp. 46–47. Jiro¯ Yoshihara had been familiar with the French avant-garde and its periodicals from before the war. 11 See Andreas Huyssen, “Anselm Kiefer: The Terror of History, the Temptation of Myth,” October 48 (Spring 1989), esp. pp. 43–45. 12 Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat, p. 19. 13 Greenberg, “‘American-Type’ Painting,” 1955, in Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), p. 226. 14 On the influence of Alberto Burri on Robert Rauschenberg see Emily Braun, Alberto Burri: The Trauma of Painting, exh. cat. (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2015), pp. 74–76. On Burri’s matter painting under discussion in this essay see Braun and Carol Stringari, “Materials, Process, Color,” in ibid., pp. 116–19, 130–33, 136–39. 15 Jean Paulhan, “Fautrier l’enragé,” 1943, 1945–46, Eng. trans. as “Fautrier, the Enraged,” trans. Carol J. Murphy, in Curtis L. Carter and Karen K. Butler, eds., Jean Fautrier: 1898–1964 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 181. First published in Fautrier. Oeuvres, 1915–1943 (Paris: Galerie René Drouin, 1943), rev. and republished in 1945–46. 16 Dubuffet, “Notes for the Well-Read,” p. 77. 17 Ibid., pp. 77–78. 18 Francis Ponge, Note sur les Otages, peintures de Fautrier, 1946, Eng. trans. as “Note on the Otages, Paintings by Fautrier,” trans. Vivian Rehberg, in Carter and Butler, eds., Jean Fautrier: 1898–1964, p. 175. First published Paris: Editions Seghers, 1946. For the chronology of Fautrier’s “Otages” see Rachel Perry, “Jean Fautrier’s Jolies Juives,” October 108 (Spring 2004): 53–55; as Perry establishes, he started on these images in Paris well before he took refuge in the sanatorium at Vallée-aux-Loups, Châtenay-Malabry, in April 1944, where he supposedly overheard hostage shootings. 19 Dubuffet, “Notes for the Well-Read,” p. 79. 20 Damisch, “Dubuffet or the Reading of the World,” p. 11. 21 Ponge, “Notes on the Otages,” p. 176. 22 Ibid., and see Yve-Alain Bois and Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997). 23 Dubuffet, “Notes for the Well-Read,” p. 67. 24 Ibid., p. 71.

1 Joseph Masheck coined and defined the term in his landmark article “The Carpet Par-

25 Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat, p. 26.

adigm: Critical Prolegomena to a Theory of Flatness,” Arts Magazine 51, no. 1 (September

26 See Kristen Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French

1976): 82–109.

Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1995).

2 Maurice Denis, “Definition of Neo-Traditionalism,” 1890, Eng. trans. in Charles Harrison,

27 Tiampo, “please draw freely,” p. 51. On the French/Japanese network in the early 1950s

Paul Wood, and Jason Gaiger, eds., Art in Theory 1815–1900: An Anthology of Changing Ideas

and the influence of Gutai on Allan Kaprow’s Happenings see Munroe, “all the landscapes:

(Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1998), p. 863.

gutai’s world,” in Tiampo and Munroe, eds., Gutai: Splendid Playground, pp. 27–36.

Emily Braun

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WHEN IDENTITY BECOMES “FORM”: CALLIGRAPHIC ABSTRACTION AND SUDANESE MODERNISM Salah M. Hassan

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T

he late Osman Waqialla’s pioneering experimenexperimentation he revealed the abstracted rhythmic shapes of calligtation with classical Arabic calligraphy led to the raphy, finding in them the presence of objects, figures, and a fantastic rise of a distinct style within postwar Sudanese world of imagery. The Last Sound (1964; fig. 3), Allah and the Wall of Con1 art. Based on a mastery of this calligraphy’s frontation (1968) and Untitled (early 1960s), three representative works diverse styles, and an extensive knowledge of its from this period, clearly evidence Arabic script and Arabic-like characaesthetic balancing of masses of light and dark, ters, in addition to the Islam-inspired crescent motif and West African Waqialla’s contribution lay not only in his creative masklike figures. These works reference events in the artist’s life—The treatment of the sacred text of the Qur’an—clearly Last Sound, for example, was made on the death of his father—but canevidenced in his calligraphic variations on Qur’anic themes, as in his not be interpreted as narrative or realist depictions. Both demonstrate El “Al-Anbiyya’” (Prophets) series (1952–2002)—but in liberating Arabic calSalahi’s pursuit of a new, modernist visual vocabulary and mark a transligraphy from its association formation in his practice, a with the Qur’an through a pishedding of his Western aconeering treatment of secular ademic training, first at the Arabic texts, exemplified in College of Fine and Applied his series on Sudanese modArt (formerly known as the ern poetry and starting with School of Design in Gordon his earliest surviving work, Al Memorial College in KharSufi al Mu’azab (The Tormenttoum), beginning in the late ed Mystic, 1952; fig. 1).2 This 1940s, then at London’s interest in revolutionary exSlade School of Fine Art in perimentation was shared the 1950s. These concerns by his relatively younger had parallels among artcolleagues Ibrahim El Salahi ists in other metropolitan and Ahmed Shibrain, promcenters of the Arab world. inent figures in what by the The well-known Fuearly 1960s had evolved into neral and the Crescent (1963; the influential Khartoum plate 118) refers to the killFig. 1. Osman Waqialla. Al Sufi al Mu’azab (The Tormented Mystic) (title page). 1952. School. ing of Patrice Lumumba, Ink and color on hand made paper, 46 × 36 cm. In his early works the democratically elected Shibrain further developed leader of Congo, executed the potential of the Arabic letter as abstracted form, seeing it as a figural in a coup in 1961. Lumumba’s assassination had been a turning point in element with an “inspiring plastic aesthetic value” that he applied to an the era of decolonization, creating an outcry against imperialism and 3 Africanized Sudanese framework. In his innovative pen-and-ink paintneocolonialism not only in Africa but in the rest of the Third World. The ings of c. 1960, such as Untitled (fig. 2), Arabic-like characters are arcrescent moon, seen in other works of El Salahi’s from the early 1960s, ranged in a Kufic style on a plain white background. Individual characters recurs here with a procession of mourners, their facial expressions are barely decipherable, being shortened or elongated, compressed or masklike, carrying a corpse. Abstracted, elongated, and emaciated figexpanded, to become part of a larger abstracted composition. Shibrain’s ures cover the painting’s surface. Points of articulation such as knees and oil painting Message 40 (1966) includes both calligraphy and traditional elbows are delineated with spiral forms, and the male sexual organ is deIslamic decorative motifs, such as rosettes, crescents, and semifloral liberately exaggerated, in a style recalling certain West African sculptur4 arabesques. The paintings from this period, such as Untitled (1965), al forms and styles. deploy earthy colors recalling the references to landscape in the work of The real breakthrough in Sudanese visual modernism came in the other other Khartoum School artists, including El Salahi. Shibrain envilate 1950s and early ’60s in the pioneering work of Waqialla, Shibrain, sions colors such as blue and bluish green as referring symbolically to the and El Salahi. Iftihkar Dadi’s argument that El Salahi’s work should Nile river—a major life presence in Sudan—and red, yellow, and brown as be situated between “[Arabic] textuality, African plastic forms, and the hues of the earth and of northern Sudanese traditional architecture. transnational modernism” holds for the other two as well, and they also Concerns with calligraphic forms and abstracted figurations also shared a distinctive role in “developing an aesthetic of decolonization for appear in the work of El Salahi, who began to break down Arabic letthe Sudan and much of Africa.”6 The uniqueness of the dialectics and intertextualities in the work of these three artists becomes evident when ters and abstract their shapes in the early 1960s, focusing on their for5 analyzed in the context of artistic developments in the postwar period, mal properties rather than on their meanings. Through this process of

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which saw the rise of a distinct postcolonial modernism that was imbricated with Western metropolitan modernism. Calligraphic abstraction, which originated in different metropolitan centers of the Arab and Islamic worlds, was one form of this expression. It has continued to inform modernist experimentation, particularly in Sudan, where the early generation of the Khartoum School embraced it in the mid-to-late 1950s.

Fig. 2. Ahmed Shibrain. Untitled. N.d. Ink on paper, 76.3 × 45.8 cm. Iwalewahaus, Universität Bayreuth. Courtesy DEVA, Universität Bayreuth

Rooted in Islamic discursive traditions, it must be understood within the modernist quest for a new formalist visual language that emerged in the context of decolonization in the Middle Eastern Arab world. The end of World War II signaled not only the defeat of fascism in Europe but the beginning of decolonization in Africa, Asia, and the Arab world. The impact of decolonization on art and culture is still insufficiently well studied. It advanced through several landmark events that shifted world politics and created a new international order—the

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Bandung Conference in 1955, the Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris in 1956 and in Rome in 1959, the Pan-African Festival in Algiers in 1969.7 The postwar era both engendered and intensified new and emerging schools of thought such as Négritude, Pan-Africanism, Pan-Arabism, and African socialism, in addition to the rise of movements for Afro-Asian solidarity and tricontinentalism. 8 Decolonization shaped the rise of a distinct postcolonial modernism, producing some of the period’s most exciting developments in visual expression. Such “new” art forms were the result of a process of hybridization that shaped them in terms of media and material, technique, and personal and cultural identity.9 In the Arab and Islamic worlds, the rich tradition of the Arabic letter was available to artists in search of a new visual vocabulary. The letter and its various calligraphic styles generated complex and diverse forms of abstraction and figuration. In art-historical discourse this movement has come to be known by different terms, including al Hurufiyya (letterism) and calligraphism. 10 “Calligraphic abstraction” seems to me a more appropriate designation: the juxtaposition of calligraphy and abstraction encompasses more of this multifaceted movement, and of its multifarious intersections with Western and transnational modernism. Although nationalism remains central to any analysis of postwar art in the context of decolonization in North Africa and the Arab world, African and Arab modernist artists had crossed geographic and cultural boundaries since the early twentieth century, moving beyond national identities to express themselves in a transnational visual language that incorporated an array of motifs, images, and objects. Arab literacy, and a well-developed corpus of art and literary criticism, facilitated forms of Pan-Arabism and Pan-Islamism in the modern visual arts. In North Africa and the larger Arab world, this tendency was further reinforced by a phenomenon of “diglossia” specific to Arabic, namely the coexistence of two forms: the standardized “high” version of Arabic known as Modern Standard Arabic, which is used across the Arab world in education, the mass media, and the press, and the various vernaculars specific to regions and countries. Modern Standard Arabic further facilitated the diffusion of artistic and literary ideas across the Arabic and Islamic worlds in North Africa and the Middle East. As the vehicle of the Qur’an, the Arabic language is considered sacred, but given the fundamental role played by calligraphy in the aesthetic and style of classic Islamic art—the nonreligious poetic verses on the walls of palaces and on everyday items not intended for sacral use—this tradition did not forestall modernist experiment with the Arabic letter. In the context of the Arab and the larger Islamic world (North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia), calligraphic abstraction has evolved into a complex set of artistic practices. El Salahi, Shibrain, and Wagialla in the Sudan have pioneering counterparts elsewhere: Shakir Hassan Al Sa’id in Iraq, Nja Mahdaoui in Tunisia, Pervez Tanavoli in Iran, Sadequain in Pakistan—all have reworked Arabic calligraphic motifs in

2. Form Matters

modernist forms that defy any literal interpretation. These experiments continue among younger artists such as the Algerian Rachid Koraïchi and the Iraqi Dia Azzawi, who have developed a more conceptual approach. As Dadi argues in the context of Muslim South Asia, the imbrication of modernist calligraphy with post-Cubist art represents a broad artistic movement that can be understood in a variety of ways.11 In the work of these artists, abstraction and figuration can be interpreted as a renewal of a traditional artistic form in a modernist fashion; as a vehicle of individual expression and subjectivity; as fostering a renewed sense of

period, the search for a common denominator—for a Sudanese national culture that would cut across its ethnic, religious, and cultural diversity— became a focal point. Totalizing terms such as “Sudanese culture,” “Sudanese identity,” “Sudanese literature,” and “Sudanese art” became central to discourse, forming the basis for the vocabulary of a new social, literary, and artistic consciousness.13 The overall ideology guiding this intellectual drive evolved into what Ahmed El Tayib Zein El Abdein has called al-Sudanawiyya, “Sudanism,” an evolving cultural process through which Sudan has developed a

Fig. 3. Ibrahim El Salahi. The Last Sound. 1964. Oil on canvas, 121.5 × 121.5 cm. Collection of Abdulmagid A. Breish

nationalist pride; or, as in the case of El Salahi and Shibrain, as a critical engagement with Western modernism. While the art of Waqialla, Shibrain, and El Salahi resonates with these analogous visual vocabularies in other parts of North Africa and the Arab world, these artists are unique in the interconnectedness of their work with classical African forms, and in their quest for a new identity in the context of independent Sudan. No discussion of art and modernity in Sudan can be isolated from a deeper knowledge of the cultural geography of this ethnically diverse country, within which almost every major African ethnic or linguistic group is represented.12 In the decolonization

unique ethos based on principles of hybridity and layering of cultural continuities. Zein El Abdein understands this multiple layering as the common denominator that distinguishes Sudanese cultures—despite their internal variations and differences—from neighboring nations in Africa and the Arab world.14 The roots of the Khartoum School were intricately related to this larger quest for a shared Sudanese identity. Germane to our understanding of the school’s intellectual tenets is its relationship to the literary group Madrasat al-Ghaba wa al-Sahra’, the “Jungle and the Desert School,” which included major poets, literary critics, and intellectuals such as Muhammad al-Makki Ibrahim,

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Muhammad Abdul-Hai, and Salah Ahmad Ibrahim. The main ideological and intellectual concern articulated by this group was the creation of a true “Sudanese” literature, art, and aesthetic. Their literary production clearly reinforces the symbolism behind the name: the goal of representing not only the geographical landscape of the country but its hybrid cultural framing of Islamic and African elements.15 The poet Salah Ahmad Ibrahim passionately expressed such concern for hybridity and racial intermixture in his collection Ghabat Al Abanus (The forest of ebony) of 1958. He wrote, Liar is he who proclaims: I am the unmixed, the pure pedigree. The only. Yes!, a liar!16

I

ndeed, Waqialla, Salahi, and Shibrain, who were closely associated with the poets, novelists, and literary critics in the Jungle and the Desert School, shared the goal of constructing a new ethos for Sudanese identity in the visual arena. A major question was how far artists should be obliged to shake off Western and other influences in their schooling and to produce art that was uniquely “Sudanese.” Experimentation with calligraphic forms continued in Sudan into the 1980s, then took a more conservative ideological turn under the current Islamist regime, which came to power in 1989. A circle of artists that included Shibrain joined in the wave of Islamic revivalism that swept the region, mostly propelled by the success of the Islamic Revolution in Iran after the mid-1970s.17 In 1986, a group of artists led by the painter Ahmed Abdel Aal, a student of both El Salahi and Shibrain, issued the manifesto of a new school called Madrasat Al-Wahid, “the School of the One.”18 While acknowledging pioneers such as El Salahi and Shibrain, members of Madrasat Al-Wahid claim that a spiritual link with the Islamic faith gives their work a spiritual dimension. In advocating an exploration of the arts of Islam, especially calligraphy, Madrasat Al-Wahid echoes the ideas of the Iraqi modernist Al Sa’id, who claimed to have connected his concern with calligraphy as an artistic practice to spiritual salvation.19 Few of these artists abandoned figuration for pure calligraphic forms, but not all artists who use calligraphy work strictly abstractly. Indeed, calligraphy is an influential motif within representation for many Sudanese artists. To assert a Sudanese identity, many Sudanese who engaged with calligraphic abstraction emphasized local styles associated with popular Islamic schools, an approach known as the Khalwa style.20 In practice, the work of Madrasat Al-Wahid is a continuation of the Khartoum School’s attempt to synthesize the African and the Islamic elements of Sudanese culture. While Madrasat Al-Wahid puts more emphasis on the Arabic and Islamic identity, and (like Al Sa'id) its member artists claim to seek spiritual salvation through artistic creativity, its manifesto also acknowledges Sudanese culture as hybrid and Africanized. After all, the reworking of calligraphic forms in the art of Ahmed Abdel Aal, Ibrahim Al-Awam, and Ahmad Abdallah Utaibi differs little from the Khartoum School approach seen in the works of El Salahi and Shibrain.

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Calligraphic abstraction was intricately linked to the Western avant-garde tradition, which was significant in the revival of calligraphy in the context of a postcolonial modernism. Western modernist movements such as Cubism, Surrealism, Lettrism, art brut, and others proved more engaging for the mid-twentieth-century non-Western artist than did older realist and academic schools of European painting. This does not make calligraphic abstraction merely a derivative of Western modernism. Decolonization presented a challenge for Arab and African modernists, who faced the urgent task of recovering and reviving expressive visual practices that had been suppressed or interrupted in the colonial period. Nationalism offered one crucial avenue in the practice of calligraphic abstraction, whether in Sudan or elsewhere, but calligraphic abstraction is also a transnational aesthetic form that has been shared across the region. This becomes acutely important when we consider the facts of diaspora and mobility in the life and work of artists such as El Salahi, Shibrain, and Waqiallah, whose Western schooling, and experience of living in the West in the early 1950s, challenged them to create a new transnational modernism in which the development of forms out of experiments with calligraphic modes was fundamental.

2. Form Matters

at the College of Fine and Applied Art until 1954, when he formed Studio Osman, in the center of Khartoum. After Sudan won independence, in 1956, Studio Osman received major visual assignments, such as the calligraphic design on the first Sudanese currency, and served until 1964 as a meeting place for artists and others. 2 Al Sufi al Mu’azab is among the few surviving works dating to Waqialla’s post-Camberwell studies. This twelve-page manuscript, executed on large-format handmade paper (46 x 36 cm, 18 x 14 inches), is based on a famous poem by the late Sudanese poet Al Tijani Yusuf Bashir, “Al Sufi al Mu’azab.” The manuscript, which is bound in brown coated cloth and paper, is rendered in the classic Diwani style and framed in a colored calligraphic formation based on extracts from the poem, exemplifying Waqialla’s pioneering experimentation with calligraphic abstraction. 3 Ahmed Shibrain, quoted in Evelyn S. Brown, Africa’s Contemporary Art and Artists (New York: Harmon Foundation, 1966), p. 109. 4 It is worth noting that Shibrain rarely titled or dated his early works. 5 See Ulli Beier, “Ibrahim El Salahi, an Interview, Bayreuth,” Iwalewa-Haus archives, University of Bayreuth, 1983. Repr. in Salah Hassan, ed., Ibrahim El Salahi: A Visionary Modernist (New York: Museum for African Art, 2013), pp. 107–13.6. Iftikhar Dadi, “Ibrahim El Salahi: Calligraphic Modernism in Comparative Perspectives,” South Atlantic Quarterly 109, no. 3 (Summer 2010): 555. 7 See Hassan, How to Liberate Marx From His Eurocentrism: Notes on African/Black Marxism, dOCUMENTA (13): 100 Notes—100 Thoughts No. 091 (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012). 8 For more on the Afro-Asian solidarity movement in the art and literary arenas see issues of Lotus, the journal of the Afro-Asian Writers Association from the late 1960s to the late 1990s. Lotus was important in documenting the development of this body of thought, networks, and exchanges of ideas among African and Asian writers and artists in the 1960s and ’70s. See Hala Halim, “Lotus, the Afro-Asian Nexus, and Global South Comparatism,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 32, no. 3 (2012): 563–83. 9 See Amanda Alexander and Manisha Sharma, “(Pre)determined Occupations: The Post-Colonial Hybridizing of Identity and Art Forms in Third World Spaces,” Journal of Social Theory in Art Education 33 (2013): 86–104. 10 See Wijdan Ali, Modern Islamic Art: Development and Continuity (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997), chapters 15 and 16; Nada Shabout, Arab Art: Formation of Arab Aesthetics (Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 2007); and Sharbal Daghir, Al Hurufiyah Al-Arabiyah: Fan wa Hawiyah (Beirut: Sharikat al-Matbu’at Lil Twazi’ wa Al-Nashr, 1990). 11 See Dadi, Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). See also his article “Ibrahim El Salahi: Calligraphic Modernism in Comparative Perspectives,” South Atlantic Quarterly 109, no. 3 (Summer 2010): 555. 12 See Muhammad Abdul-Hai, Conflict and Identity: The Cultural Poetics of Contemporary Sudanese Poetry, African Seminar Series no. 26 (Khartoum: Institute of African and Asian Studies, University of Khartoum, 1976); Mohammed Omar al-Bashir, Cultural Diversity and National Unity in Sudan (Khartoum: Institute of African and Asian Studies, University of Khartoum, 1980); Muhammad al-Makki Ibrahim, Al Fikr Al Sudani Usuluh Wa Tatawurhu (Khartoum: Ministry of Culture and Communication, 1976); and Ali A. Mazrui, “The Multiple Marginality of the Sudan,” in Yusuf Fadl Hasan, ed., Sudan in Africa (Khartoum: Institute of African and Asian Studies, University of Khartoum, 1971), pp. 240–55. 13 In the 1930s, Hamza al-Malik Tambal, an influential Sudanese literary critic and editor, proclaimed that “Sudanese identity is an ideal to which we should all aspire, it must be reflected in all our work.” See Hamza al Malik Tambal, al-Adab al-Sudani wa Ma yajib an yakuna ‘alayhi, 1931 (repr. ed. Khartoum: New Edition, 1972), pp. 66-67, 77; see also Abdul-Hai, Conflict and Identity, pp. 7–10. This ideal has evolved into intellectual movements characterized by conflict and by attempts at reconciliation of identities. 14 Ahmed El Tayib Zein Al Abdein, “Al-Sudanawiyya,” Majallat Al Thaqafa Al Sudaniyya no. 15 (July 1998): 30–35. 15 For an excellent recent autobiographical reflection on the Jungle and the Desert School see Muhammad al-Makki Ibrahim, Fi Zikra al-Ghaba wa al-Sahra’ (Omdurman: Abdul Karim Mirghani Center, 2007). 16 Salah Ahmad Ibrahim, from Ghabat Al Abanus (Beirut, 1958), p. 45, trans. in Abdul-Hai, Conflict and Identity, p. 52. 17 In the early 1980s members of the fundamentalist Islamic group the Muslim Brotherhood formed a Society for Islamic Thought, which, though, has tried to recruit artists and writers who are not fundamentalists. 18 See my translation of the manifesto of the School of the One in Clementine Deliss, ed., Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa (Paris and New York: Flammarion, 1995), pp. 244–46. 19 See Shakir Hassan Al-Said, al-Usul al-Hadariya wa al-Jamaliya lil Khat al-Arabi (Baghdad, 1988). 1 Osman Waqialla was a poet, journalist, and broadcaster as well as a visual artist. After

20 The Khalwa style is closer to the Kufic-derived Maghribi tradition, known in North and

studying at the Camberwell School of Art, London, in 1946–49, he attended the School of

West Africa as Sudani and in North Africa as ifriqi style, than to the Naskh tradition popular in

Arabic Calligraphy and College of Applied Arts in Cairo. Returning to Sudan in 1951, he taught

the eastern part of the Islamic world.

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MATERIAL FACTURE Geeta Kapur

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T

he title “Material Facture” layers this essay with a double emphasis on materiality. In modernist discourse, “facture” means the treatment of materials, the manner of making, or the formal and material qualities of a work. It has conceptual and ideological significance because it surfaces within Constructivism, for which reason it also correlates with the terms “techne” and “construction.” 1 Transported to postwar art (including painting), “facture” implies an enhanced materiality, foregrounds surface textures as tactile affect, and confounds the difference between form and formlessness with gestural manifestations of materiality. The 1920s avant-garde had two major aspects, each with a distinct form of materiality.2 The Surrealists, following Dada and Marcel Duchamp, unraveled a newly theorized unconscious into tantalizing miracles on the ground of art. In revolutionary Russia, Suprematists such as Kazimir Malevich and Constructivists such as Vladimir Tatlin saw abstraction as both transcendent and rational and proclaimed it the language for a new world. One move spelt subversion and excess; the other mapped the universe conceptually, materially, ethically, and gave it a utopian dimension. World War II and the Holocaust devastated such claims. Consciousness and language were sundered, the efficacy of art annulled. Witness literature narrates the destruction of experience, the destruction of the body, the destruction of the image.3 Important postwar artists strategized nihilist agendas. In 1959, Gustav Metzger, an émigré transported as a child from the Nuremberg of the Nazis to England, issued his manifesto “Auto-Destructive Art” and soon staged a series of “destructions” in civic sites, incendiary acts using acid or technologically devised implosions. In South Bank Demonstration of 1961, for example, Metzger sprayed hydrochloric acid on three large tarpaulins—white, black, and red, after the palette of Malevich—stretched over a set of frames. His 1966 Destruction in Art Symposium (DIAS) in London elicited the participation of international artists and gave the countercultural underground a platform for performance and a credo for hyphenating creation and destruction as a compound pair. Metzger’s work drew attention to the violence immanent within postwar politics. 4 John Latham’s assemblages and performances, made in England in the same period, involved pulping, burning, devouring, and entombing books, which he called “skoobs” (fig. 1). His idea of the “Event Structure” troped postwar crisis with a critique of liberal societies and presented a complex realignment of social, economic, and political structures with concomitant aesthetic and knowledge systems. He participated in the Artist Placement Group, founded in 1966 to position artists in industry, science, and government for direct intervention and creative employment. Continuing this theme, this essay foregrounds the postwar practice that was material-driven, improvisatory, and, in relation to modernist “integrity,” antiform. Cruelly distorted by the violence of the midcentury, the figure-ground gestalt reconfigured itself as moral obduracy

and mnemonic form. Philosophically, modernism harbored existential doubt and semantic ambiguity and placed ethics on a par with formalist aesthetics. Jean Dubuffet swirled his deformed bodies in mud and packed them in filth. Jean Fautrier’s “Otages” (Hostages) series, made during the war, cast human heads as fatal lesions. In a new language of abstraction, artists built up paint as matter, turning the picture plane into wall or ground and converting surface opacity into sign-laden templates. If the painting had been seen as a window, Antoni Tàpies boarded it up, erected a wall of crumbling sand and plasterlike paint etched with graffiti. He gave the formalist credo of surface and support an existential and political resonance, as did Lucio Fontana, who abstracted trauma, transcribing it into gesture, slashing and perforating the canvas. Piero Manzoni replaced the image with an artifice masked in white, as in the object-studded kaolin-soaked canvases in the “Achromes” series (1961–62). Alberto Burri compacted several strategies to build up reliefs that were at once imagist, haptic, and visceral. As a former doctor and

Fig. 1. John Latham. Soft Skoob. 1964. Books on canvas and spray paint, 25 × 132 × 50 cm. Courtesy Lisson Gallery

prisoner of war, he memorialized mutilation and blood with humble materials—sutured sack-cloth bandages for the symbolic wound. There is both aesthetic conceit and abjection in messing with grit and slime, in using wax, nails, resin, tar, metal, burlap. All stuff, whether abstruse or enchanting, transmutes in the artist’s hands. In the Vienna Actionist movement, blood and shit proffered meaning in myth and ritual, were believed to substantiate the experiences of desire, death, and regeneration, and translated into extravagant blood ceremonies— arguably a modern artist’s claim to apotheosis. There was renewed reference to Georges Bataille’s metaphysics of “base materialism.”5 Infantile dreams gained sanction, and so, along with them, did sinful and ludic

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acts. The hand probed the gash, slipping to the underbelly of the absent subject and messing with excremental stuff. As magician, surgeon, and bricoleur, the artist staged encounters that inverted ontological attributes. Living subjects were snatched away from humanist rendering. Joseph Beuys's objects, (over)signified metonyms for amnesiac recovery, become amenable to psychoanalytical reading. In the 1960s, women artists, progenitors of feminist art in the United States, extended the aesthetic of enhanced materiality. Carolee Schneemann melded body and paint and installed her exposed self as votive figure and desacralized form. Niki de Saint Phalle used a pellet gun to burst sacs of color, transforming white surfaces into color fields. Her many Nana figures culminated in Hon-en-Katedral (She-a-Cathedral, 1966), a giant reclining Nana open to public entry between her legs. In this perverse and productive mayhem, form matters.

Saburo Murakami crashed through framed paper walls as through barricades, ruptured the mise-en-scène, and (literally) collapsed (fig. 2). Having left Japan for Paris in 1962, Tetsumi Kudo made lurid, object-based performances/Happenings. Add to this the Fluxus-related performative acts of Shigeko Kubota and Yoko Ono, the one provocative, the other conceptual, and the scandalous excess of Yayoi Kusama’s performances and installations, which mimicked psychedelic experience. The spectators witnessed a theatricalization of the encounter on feminist ground. If this is art in extremis, I pause to consider an altogether different aesthetic, indeed a reverse aesthetic that looped around modernist canons and signaled, again but differently, the metaphysical basis for abstraction. Here was a turn to Far Eastern conventions that transposed spirit and language and understood phenomenology and aesthetics in terms of immanence. Certain artists extended modernist formalism,

Fig. 2. Saburo Murakami. At One Moment Opening Six Holes. 1955. Performance. Courtesy Fergus McCaffrey

A retroactive understanding of postwar practice must start with the assumption that art produced across the world, from Brazil to Japan, is not reducible to the conventional art-historical litany of origin, chronology, precedence, and derivation. Works from this vast “elsewhere” are often positioned in an agonistic relationship to mainstream EuroAmerican art. Within a decade of the war’s end, for example, Japanese artists launched the Gutai movement to enact postwar rage—against Japanese fascism, against American imperialism.6 They pushed against the boundaries of Jackson Pollock’s method, preempted Allan Kaprow’s celebrated Happenings. The surface of wall or ground was damaged, abused, held on to in desperation. Kazuo Shiraga’s Challenging Mud (1955), a manic performance with field mire, produced a stressed indexicality.

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treating the compaction of surface and support as affording perceptual and cognitive lucidity. I refer to the work of two Korean artists, begun between the mid-1950s and the mid-’60s: Lee Seung-taek put together, tied, and laid out materials ranging from stones to human hair, inducing the viewer to sublimate the quality of touch into a discreet act of contemplation. The diasporic artist Lee Ufan’s gestural paintings recalibrate the modernist language of painterly touch with the virtuoso hand of oriental calligraphy. His later installations in stone, metal, and found objects spatialize the act of chance-determined meditation. Beginning in the late 1950s, V. S. Gaitonde, an Indian artist inspired by Zen, developed a numinous aesthetic with color-saturated paintings aglow with viscuous, roller-spread paint-matter animated by spare tachist markings (fig. 3).

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In rethinking postwar art, there are distinctions to be made between artists in countries directly affected by the war (that is, artists in Fascist or Fascist-occupied territories and in the liberal and Communist countries constituting the Allied forces) and those involved indirectly, through colonial recruitment, or not at all. Further, the postwar period is charged with alternate histories of countries where national liberation struggles led to active decolonization and shaped the Third World. Mid-twentieth-century art was made the more complex by a situational ethics relevant not only to newly enfranchised citizens/subjects but also to migrant, marginalized refugee populations that remained in effect disenfranchised. Narratives of belonging and unbelonging materialized new subjectivities, new communities, as well as conditions of exile that made the right to a new aesthetic a political call. If the claim that form matters is not limited to academically recorded modernism, it must include art’s materiality as it was elicited from a cultural ethos both inspired by living traditions and committed to a modernizing process supporting radical self-realization. If we make the ideological assumption that modernity is coproduced by the colonizers and the colonized, several strategic positions are viable. The historical project of postcolonial reconstruction might become strongly nationalist, as in India.7 At the same time, artists might break away from Western (imperialist) antecedents but realign themselves with Marxist-socialist politics rooted in Western modernity, or forge international political alliances, as the Egyptian Surrealists did. 8 Here we should look at the contentious term “indigenism,” deployed in relation to resurgent cultures of South America and aligned with radical politics in Mexico and Brazil. A creative response to

between art and life. In their different ways, both Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica drew on the phenomenological sentience of living communities and transformed the mise-en-scène of ritual to host performative installations. There was a subtle recalibration of material traditions and thus of the concept of facture, followed by a bold reinterpretation of matter, means, and form—all of which made Brazilian art a culturally charged avant-garde. Three famous categories of Oiticica’s art remain unique even within modernism’s long engagement with poor materials. These were the Bólides (Fireballs), exquisitely

Fig. 4. Nildo of Mangueria wearing Hélio Oiticica's P15 Parangolé capa 12, “Eu incorporo a revolta” (1967), c. 1968. Courtesy Projeto Hélio Oiticica

Fig. 3. V.S. Gaitonde. Untitled. 1962. Ink and watercolor on paper, 55.9 × 76.2 cm. Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi

colonial hege­mony and its cultural hubris led to a canny paradox: the Brazilian concept of antropofagia (roughly translated as cannibalism) and its critique of humanist modernism had remained a tendentious inscription in cultural history since the 1920s. In the 1960s, Brazil’s Neo-Concretist and Tropicália movements developed a vitalist affect and embraced an avant-garde principle: active engagement

simple assemblages; the human-scale Penetrables, resplendent with color and light; and the Parangolés, rough capes worn by favela youth in improvised performances (fig. 4). Clark’s formal aesthetic distilled simple materials into objects that were also communicative devices seeking to change subjective lives and social relations. Her practice gave feminist art forms of therapeutic embodiment; it also prefigured the conceptual and linguistic transmission that characterizes later feminist practice. In continuation with the drive toward indigenism, consider how the replay of fetishism envisaged pure presence, how totems turned into new linguistic signs, how craft (inversions) produced bricolage, and how ornamental calligraphy yielded esoteric diagrams. The material surfaces of walls and earth became a cultural resource. The Armenian-Iranian artist Marcos Grigorian’s framed tablets of patterned earth were constructed, congealed, and

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meditative. Mohan Samant’s canvases, with their fragile surfaces of paint and sand, recall the ritually painted and easily erased markings on mud walls in rural India. Inspired by Bengal’s seventeenth- and eighteenth-century terra-cotta temples, the horizontal relief mural installed by K. G. Subramanyan in the Lucknow Rabindralaya in 1963 set around 13,000 terra-cotta tiles in a figural pattern (fig. 5). Its motif derived from a play by Rabindranath Tagore, founder of the culturally syncretic, Asia-oriented university at Santiniketan, where Subramanyan was educated. Subramanyan’s engagement with living traditions articulates artisanal practices in semiotic rather than ethnic terms, as a language and grammar sustainable within modernizing societies. I select another example from the Indian context, the (only) exhibition of Group 1890, in Delhi in September 1963. 9 Jagdish Swaminathan—Communist, journalist, and, later, artist/“anarchist”—wrote

(then) margins of canonical modernism: it was a claim to authorial self-signification. Group 1890 refused representation as well as composed and painterly (School of Paris) abstraction. It assumed a style of self-“primitivization” to bait pictorial protocols. There was a deskilling and a retooling of the hand. Much later, Swaminathan developed a virtual thesis prioritizing the cultural, cultic, and linguistic contribution of India’s ancient adivasi/tribal communities. 10 As an artist/ideologue in the postcolonial mode, Swaminathan denounced modernity’s guilt and, ironically, favored untethered contemporaneity over historical time. By the 1960s, the manifold cultural imaginaries looped into global contemporaneity needed to be retranslated into semiotic structures based on a principle of difference. Take three artists from the Asian diaspora. The Filipino artist David Medalla, founder, with Paul Keeler,

Fig. 5. K.G. Subramanyan. King of the Dark Chamber (detail). 1963. Terra-cotta mural, 2470 × 270 cm. Courtesy Asia Art Archive

the (unsigned, collective) manifesto printed in the catalogue. Octavio Paz, then Mexican ambassador to India (and a friend of Indian artists), wrote a text, “Surrounded by Infinity.” Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru opened the exhibition. A full account of this conjuncture would unpack histories of modernism and indigenism, and of statist, liberal, and radical perceptions within Indian and Third World discourse in the 1950s and ’60s. While that story cannot be told here in detail, I offer a few pointers to the material and formal choices made in this context. The foremost artist in Group 1890 was Jeram Patel, who rendered the modernist project in erotic-nihilist terms enacted as violence. He hammered nails and scrap metal into wooden supports, layering them with shoveled tar and globules of color-dyed glue; he gouged out forms with a blowtorch in thick-layered plyboard. While traveling in Europe in the late 1950s and early ’60s he was attracted to Tàpies and Burri, but if Burri’s wounded and bandaged surfaces suggested the need for haptic healing, Patel asserted psychic potency through an aesthetic of destruction, declaring exactly why form mattered to an artist at the

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of the Signals Gallery, London, was a key avant-garde figure in the 1960s. His itinerant and contrarian practice privileged an ebullient formlessness, as in his “Cloud Canyons” series and in participatory projects with indigenous antecedents such as A Stitch in Time (1968–72), cloth murals stitched with associative fragments by volunteer contributors. Rasheed Araeen’s provocations began in Karachi; his mimicry of England’s ethnic typecasting developed into militant partisanship as an editor of the critical journals Black Phoenix and Third Text, and his wood-andindustrial-pipe constructions engaged the international art language from a (claimed) level ground. The Iranian artist Siah Armajani realized a diasporic internationalism on a monumental scale through symbolic bridge projects made for public spaces in the United States. Three concluding propositions: Disparate cultures within or without the modern—an attribution that remains complicated—function through a locus of knowledge that

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produces a revisionist understanding of modernism itself. Art history can be less reparative and more engaged if it is, in equal measure, archival and dialogic. If the Western world has suffered a fading of the utopian vision, the future must be placed as a key motif in that narrative: the socialist revolution in conjunction with World War I, decolonization before and after World War II. This historical paradigm facilitates a hermeneutics whereby given narratives and annotated interpretations generate both doubt and affirmation. This also permits a turn to a negative aesthetics. The compact of destruction and creation produces a performative poetics: ironic, activist, and emancipatory.

1 See John E. Bowlt, ed. and trans., Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism 1902–1934 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1976), pp. 205–7, 216–17, 223–25, and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “From Factura to Factography,” in Formalism and Historicity: Models and Methods in Twentieth-Century Art (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2015), pp. 256–68. 2 For an ideologically annotated chronology of twentieth-century avant-garde art see Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Buchloh, Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (London: Thames & Hudson, 2012). Especially relevant to this essay are pp. 125–29, 174–76, 190–95, 208–11, 373–78. 3 See Theodor W. Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” in Prisms (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1983), pp. 17–34. See also Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The

Matter relates to materials and means of production. Form contours the act of perception and signifies a phenomenology of encounters. That form matters is an instance of how historical materialism aspires to the more esoteric operation of a dialectic.11

Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books, 2000), esp. the chapters “The Witness” (pp. 15–39) and “The Archive and Testimony” (pp. 137–69). 4 See Paul Schimmel and Kristine Stiles, Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949–1979, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, 1998). This catalogue is widely referenced in this essay. 5 See Georges Bataille, “Base Materialism and Gnosticism,” 1930, in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), pp. 45–52, and Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss, “The Destiny of the Informe,” in Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997), pp. 235–54. 6 See Alexandra Munroe, Ming Tiampo, Yoshihara Jiro, et al., Gutai: Splendid Playground, exh. cat. (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2013). The book includes Jiro’s Gutai Manifesto. 7 I cite India as a way of indicating the material and ideological struggles that often characterized transitions from nascent nationhood to a postcolonial nation-state. India’s political leadership differed on strategy but recognized Britain, its colonial oppressor, as an antifascist force. The tumultuous decade leading up to independence, in 1947, had seen a “volunteer” Indian army of 2 1/2 million soldiers recruited to fight for the Allies, the Quit India Movement of 1942, and the Bengal famine of 1943 (a collateral effect of the war economy), which left c. 3 million dead. India and Pakistan gained independence after the violence of Partition, in which 200,000 or more were killed and 14 million displaced—the largest mass migration in human history. Gandhi’s civil disobedience movement placed trust in the populace, and especially in village India, and was averse to the monolithic nation-state. The new republic’s constitution was largely formulated by B. R. Ambedkar, a militant leader of India’s oppressed dalit caste. Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, shaped a modernizing, socialist-inclined nation-state. Because of him, India became a leading member of the Afro-Asian and NonAligned movements, part of what became the Third World. In art, the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group (1947) developed mytho-realist and expressionist genres (M. F. Husain and F. N. Souza respectively). Satish Gujral, who trained in Mexico in the 1950s, practiced a form of social-realist expressionism. Abstraction developed in the early 1960s (S. H. Raza, Mohan Samant, V. S. Gaitonde). On Group 1890 of 1963 see below. 8 The Egyptian Surrealists, active from the late 1930s and working under the name “Art and Liberty Group” (the Arabic initials are JFH), were part of a worldwide network of comrades with special connections to Mexico. During and after the war, Egyptian and British authorities began to imprison and exile these revolutionaries for their political (at first Trotskyite) affiliations. Surrealist theorist and painter Ramses Younan was arrested in 1947, went to Paris, aligned himself with anarchists, and was active in the early 1950s. Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalist military coup in 1952 confirmed the state’s hostility toward Surrealism. 9 In 1962, artists from Delhi, Baroda, Ahmedabad, and Madras met to draft a new aesthetic. They started with a critique of the Paris–London–New York axis that had, they argued, overdetermined India’s art since the country’s independence. The twelve artists of Group 1890 (the number in the address of the house in Bhavnagar where they met) exhibited together in 1963, aligning themselves with their Mexican friend Octavio Paz’s tilt toward a surrealist/ anarchist, indigenist, and material-based language. These artists were not fully cognizant of contemporary art in Brazil and Japan. 10 See Jagdish Swaminathan, The Perceiving Fingers: Catalogue of Roopankar Collection of Folk and Adivasi Art from Madhya Pradesh, India (Bhopal: Bharat Bhavan, 1987). 11 See Fredric Jameson on Bertolt Brecht and Theodor Adorno (differing protagonists of form), in Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972).

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0 TO 1 Richard Shiff

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W

e speak, write, and read, all without attending to the shape and patterning of our language. Its everyday use grows so customary that we need not probe it to understand it. Painting and sculpture similarly operate as thoroughly established modes of communication. These media present images, raise cultural issues, and offer speculative arguments, while implicitly excluding their materiality as an additional focus of interpretive effort. Identifying an object of depiction, an issue in question, or the gist of an argument nevertheless becomes secondary when a medium reveals its material core. Exposure of the fundamentals is shocking, as if a veneer

an image (Spatial Concept, Expectation, 1962; fig. 1). Similarly, in viewing works by Jackson Pollock, we may be struck by fluidity; in Beauford Delaney, viscosity; in Frank Auerbach, thickness; in Jean Fautrier, smears; in Ellsworth Kelly, nothing but color; in Piero Manzoni, colorlessness; in Yayoi Kusama, repetitive texture; in Tetsumi Kudo, skeins; in Helen Frankenthaler, stains; in Simon Hantaï, creases; in Alberto Burri, cracks; in Ramsès Younan, accumulation; in Hermann Nitsch, corporal physicality. The list could continue. Physical gesture guides Willem de Kooning’s mimeticism (Woman, 1952; plate 131). Engagement with gravity, letting it hang, shows Eva Hesse what sculpture can be (Untitled, 1965; plate 79). The material assumes its form, which becomes the form of a novel art. “How it went, that’s how it was”: Barnett Newman’s rhetoric of monosyllables conveys the elemental directness of the drawings he

Fig. 1. Lucio Fontana. Spatial Concept, Expectation. 1962. Oil on canvas, 100.5 × 81.3 cm. Private Collection, Wassenaar

of cultural civility had been removed. In reaction to the wartime loss of political civility, arts of the postwar period offered a homeopathic remedy by returning to base materiality—aesthetic experience lacking aesthetic development, experience lacking history. Beginning in 1949, Lucio Fontana punctured his canvases, destroying the integrity of the pictorial surface, shifting a viewer’s attention from the potential for depiction to the physical condition of the object. By 1958, Fontana was using razor cuts, sometimes just a single one, causing the materiality of canvas to become the image rather than the support for

produced in 1944 and 1945, as the war ended in moral ambiguity, with fire-bombing in Dresden and atom bombs in Japan (Untitled, 1944; fig. 2).1 Newman’s art may be the clearest expression of a postwar aesthetic devoid of prewar and wartime baggage. His modest compositions— groupings of strokes in ink, crayon, or watercolor: straight, angled, looping, squiggly, rubbed—marked his return to visual art after a midwar hiatus. He was reassessing what art should be. The war itself demonstrated the extent of a collective moral failing that threatened continued global disorder. Newman was pessimistic; he perceived little difference

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Fig. 2. Barnett Newman. Untitled. 1944. Oil and crayon on woven paper, 50.5 × 37.8 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington. The Nancy Lee and Perry Bass Fund. Acc. n.: 1998.59.1

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among fascists, nationalists, communists, capitalists, and imperialists, condemning the lot for tacitly accepting a Hegelian sense of progress. Hegelianism provided dialectic cover for destructive policies: “The science of history is the curse of the world.”2 Each political institution, restricting itself to the ordering principles of its ideology, had become repressive. Through the noninstitution of art, Newman would restore the world not to order but to vitality. The drawings of 1944–45 resulted from his realization that he needed not only to begin again but, before beginning, to intuit “how to begin,” as if his evolutionary position had been set back to the chaotic formlessness of state 0 rather than the elemental primacy of state 1. All imagery, both representational and abstract, seemed tainted, all methods were suspect: “The Depression and the War made the history of painting … obsolete.”3 So Newman’s renewal enlisted no familiar imagery, deployed no accepted method; at state 0, an artist has neither orientation nor commitment, even to cultivated techniques of the hand. Newman’s action amounted to exercising intimate physical gestures with a sense of the natural inclination of the materials: “With an automatic move you could create a world.”4 The artist would occupy this world, becoming an element of it, in sympathy with the configured form. The collaboration of artist and material would raise the consciousness of both, rendering the sensitivity of the artist more acute, revealing form as mind-in-matter. Newman imposed no forms that were entirely of his invention. He was not tracing an image onto his paper ground, as if it could exist elsewhere. Instead, the form he drew was as much of the pigment and the paper as it was of the artist’s imagination. By 1946, Newman was creating radically abstract paintings that lacked all traditional features of composition. Compositional devices would have been impositions, violations of the freedom of “how it was.” He would later say that his paintings had not only been “a confrontation with surrealism” (too much of an escapist fantasy for times of political crisis) but also, more significantly, “a confrontation with abstraction.”5 His strategic choices implied a distinction between what we might label material (or materialist) abstraction and a more pictorial, image-oriented abstraction of either geometric or organic elements in harmony and dynamic balance (Piet Mondrian, Wassily Kandinsky). Where Newman placed verticals he included no compensating or competing horizontals; pictorial dialectic was not at issue (The Beginning, 1946; plate 33). Likewise, where he used horizontals there were no corresponding verticals. He removed from his practice the traditional means of pictorial articulation, just as philosophers, seeking a foothold in state 0, speculated on removing conventional signification from their use of language. Newman’s contemporary Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote, “Philosophy … asks of our experience of the world what the world is before it is a thing one speaks of … before it has been reduced to a set of manageable, disposable significations; [philosophy] addresses itself to that compound of the world and of ourselves that precedes reflection.”6 “How it went” preceded Newman’s

reflection on how it should go. His action was a Merleau-Ponty–like “compound” of world and self—the reciprocal articulation of the two aspects of being, rather than a top-down expression of an artist’s aesthetic authority. Yet to reach such a conclusion is to repeat a massive generalization that, in theory, could be applied to any creative—signifying, communicative, meaningful—human act. Modern theory is replete with chiasmus: human volition, we claim, does not act without the resistance of what it acts upon, which in turn acts upon it; language, we contend, has a rhetoric and a sensory effect that resist its message even as they generate it. In the postwar context, however, it did not seem that artists merely invoked a philosophical truism when they took aesthetic, even antiaesthetic action in recognition of the material ground of meaning. Newman attempted to revivify aesthetic experience by passing from state 0 to state 1—and no further— through every work he fashioned. Analogously, Fontana developed no composition with his cuts; he merely cut. Extremes of form offered liberation from the history of painting, as oppressive as the dialectical science of history. Postwar politics failed to assure Newman that humankind was regaining its humanity. Like many intellectuals, he worried over increasing rule by technocracy. In 1946, the United States began to conduct atomic tests at isolated South Pacific atolls, seemingly oblivious to the local environment and the island culture it sustained. Shortly before the first test, Newman published an introduction to an exhibition of Oceanic art, noting that the remote Pacific could no longer serve artists as “the romantic dream of our time” (as it had served Gauguin and Matisse). The atolls had always been sites of “intangible” terror, their existence threatened by unpredictable tsunamis.7 Now the entire world was experiencing an analogous intangible terror, but manmade: the bomb. In prehistoric ages or perennially in Oceania, when humans faced terrifying phenomena, they took solace in primitive magic, becoming “maker[s] of gods that had animate life [and] intrinsic meaning.” 8 Experiencing new terrors, Newman returned his art to a materialist version of primitive magic. Philosophers, not to mention the physicists of the bomb, argued that matter, base materiality, holds a magical vitalism within; an evolutionary continuity exists between mineral life and animal life, independent of any actualized evolution. The continuity is at every moment potential. All matter has some mind, though not much. This notion was prevalent around 1900, expounded by Charles Sanders Peirce, Henri Bergson, and others. “Matter is effete mind,” Peirce wrote—passive and habit-bound, like the law-abiding elements of nature.9 Through a process of ideological stultification, the technocratic mind devolved to become immobile like rock. In 1956, Gilles Deleuze published on Bergson; his essay reads as if reflecting the philosophical position Newman and others had reached inadvertently through a primitive manipulation of materials. Deleuze argued that matter represents the lowest degree of the life force, life at its most distended. In its passivity, thoroughly removed from living consciousness, it becomes a mere object of instrumentality. The single life

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force, extended as matter, converts to mind when contracted down to a spatial point and a temporal instant: this is consciousness.10 The differentiation of life into mind and matter may seem tantamount to a dualistic, even a dialectical system of negations, but is instead chiasmic, in reciprocal flux, so that mind finds itself in matter and matter in mind. The chiasmic element amounts to rhetorical sleight-of-hand—the philosopher’s magic act, relieving a dialectical impasse. It encourages speculation that intelligent life and obtuse matter might interact in mutual respect, even in the form of the tsunami or the bomb, certainly so in materialist art. Materials become energized like living bodies and

or force is capable not only of responding to us but also of initiating the exchange, “speaking” to us, like the Oceanic spirit or mind of the tsunami? This is the magic of matter and its form, acknowledged by Newman and Deleuze, and simultaneously by the Japanese Gutai group (fig. 3): “Gutai art does not change the material but brings it to life. … In Gutai art the human spirit and the material reach out their hands to each other, even though they are otherwise opposed” (differ­ entiated as mind and matter).13 The metaphoric use of animating verbs, such as speak and reach out, replacing the undemonstrative likes of represent and signify, indicates more than rhetorical flourish. The formal

Fig. 3. Kazuo Shiraga. Challenging Mud. 1955. Performance. Courtesy Fergus McCaffrey

convey their feelings to receptive minds. Newman spoke of stretching a color “until it broke”: it would break (as if exercising a will to break); he would not break it himself.11 Manipulating matter does not equate with controlling it. When we think this way, we imagine that matter must think also. Perhaps we merely project abstract thoughts onto matter as an indirect way of representing and objectifying those thoughts as external form. Is it like film projection, with a thought-image that can alight on any surface, leaving no material trace? This would be imposed, top-down thinking. Deleuze suggests that the material medium we use to express our thoughts and feelings absorbs our excess of psycho-sensory “vibrations,” with the result that the material itself receives a boost in sentience—its sensory form.12 Otherwise why would we feel that any material object

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matter of material abstraction communicates directly, as if, among all material stuff, it attained the highest degree of sentience. To develop art that speaks outside the static culture of ideological programming, begin with 0 to 1. Self-consciousness occurs when we turn our thinking and feeling upon our thinking and feeling. We exchange self for matter. We treat our subjectivity, not as if it were condensing and projecting onto a material surface, but as if it were penetrating into the surface, becoming the object. At moments of self-consciousness, we view our conscious actions as an emergent work of art having material presence. Autonomous will yields to compelling sensation. When passing from 0 to 1, no self-expression is involved. No self yet exists to be expressed; it will precipitate from the encounter with matter—part mind, part

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matter—constituting an impersonal moment of discovery. The art of 0 to 1 is anonymous, with names merely temporary place-holders. The various forces and qualities are transient markers—not possessions or expressions—of individuals who incorporate them as art. Materials do what materials do; they assume form. The artistry that gains our respect induces us to per­­ceive elemental quality, form’s primordial emergence. Groping for a metaphor, Peirce associated this first level of material awareness with the equation of quality to consciousness: not “a waking consciousness. … A sleeping consciousness, perhaps.” 14 Bridget Riley called it “the somnambulist element in perception,” what “we cannot quite see.” 15 Ideology inhibits perception of what cannot ordinarily be sensed; terror does the same. Philosophers and artists agree that perception is best advanced by ceding a degree of conscious control: “How it went, that’s how it was.” At state 0, no control: terror. At state 1, some control, yet no ideology to dull the mind. State 1 is a place of discovery—of magic as well.

1 Barnett Newman, in conversation with Thomas B. Hess, 1968; see Hess, Barnett Newman (New York: Walker and Company, 1969), p. 26. 2 Around 1944, Newman drafted an anti-Hegelian diatribe, unpublished during his lifetime; see Richard Shiff, “Newman’s Time,” in Reconsidering Barnett Newman, ed. Melissa Ho (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2005), p. 161. 3 Newman, in conversation with Hess, 1969; see Hess, Barnett Newman, pp. 25–26. 4 Newman, interview with Alan Solomon, May 20, 1966. Unedited transcript, Barnett Newman Foundation, New York. 5 Newman, “Letter to the Editor, Artnews,” May 13, 1968, in Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. John P. O’Neill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 234. 6 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 102. Merleau-Ponty’s text remained unfinished at his death, in 1961. 7 Newman, “Art of the South Seas,” 1946, Selected Writings and Interviews, pp. 98, 100. 8 Newman, “Painting and Prose/Frankenstein,” 1945, in ibid., p. 93. 9 Charles Sanders Peirce, “The Architecture of Theories,” 1891, in Collected Papers, ed. Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss, and Arthur W. Burks (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958–60), 6:20. 10 Gilles Deleuze, “Bergson, 1859–1941,” 1956, in L’Ile déserte et autres textes, ed. David Lapoujade (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2002), p. 42. 11 See Shiff, “Until It Breaks,” Source 29 (Fall 2009): 39. 12 Deleuze, Bergsonism, 1966, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1988), pp. 74–75. 13 Jiro Yoshihara, “Gutai Art Manifesto,” 1956, in What’s Gutai?, ed. Shoichi Hirai (Hyogo: Bijutsu Shuppan-Sha, 2004), p. 84. 14 Peirce, “The Origin of the Universe,” 1898, Collected Papers, 6:149 (emphasis eliminated). 15 Bridget Riley, “The Artist’s Eye: Seurat,” 1992, in The Eye’s Mind: Bridget Riley, Collected Writings 1965–2009, ed. Robert Kudielka (London: Ridinghouse, 2009), pp. 267, 273 (original emphasis).

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ABSTRACTION AND IDEOLOGY: CONTESTATION IN COLD WAR ART CRITICISM Terry Smith

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I

n 1957, the British-Australian author Nevil Shute published On the Beach, a novel that follows a number of Australians, immigrants, and American naval personnel in Melbourne as they face the death inevitably coming their way as radiation from the nuclear war that has obliterated life in the Northern Hemisphere floats toward them across the Pacific.1 Two years later in the same city, a group of artists released a statement in which they fought back against a different kind of virus. Known as the Antipodean Manifesto, the document opens with this salvo:

Today tachistes, action painters, geometric abstractionists, abstract expressionists and their innumerable band of camp followers threaten to benumb the intellect and wit of art with their bland and pretentious mysteries. The art they champion is not an art sufficient for our time, it is not an art for living men. It reveals, it seems to us, a death of the mind

“Socialist Realism in the East.” Instead they sought a middle path, one along which they might, as Australians, serve “a young society still making its myths,” and “the society of man” more generally, by making art about subjects of national and universal concern and by using a visual language accessible to all—that is, through the image, which “communicates because it has the capacity to refer to experiences the artist shares with his audience.” While specific to the art worlds in Melbourne, Sydney, and London, the battle lines drawn within the Antipodean Manifesto are a microcosm of those that shaped postwar art discourse throughout the world: abstraction versus figuration, nationalism versus “international styles,” peripheries versus centers, artistic autonomy versus social obligation, dependence versus nonalignment, democracy versus socialism. Another, less remarked recurrence is the pivotal role of art critics, acting as champions of one artistic group or tendency against another and

Fig. 1. Lithographic poster for the Antipodeans' exhibition at the Victorian Artists Society, Melbourne, 1959

and spirit. And yet wherever we look, New York, Paris, London, San Francisco or Sydney, we see young artists dazzled by the luxurious pageantry and colour of non-figuration.2 The signatories of the Antipodean Manifesto were artists Charles Blackman, Arthur Boyd, David Boyd, John Brack, Robert Dickerson, John Perceval, and Clifton Pugh, along with art historian and critic Bernard Smith. The last was its primary author, shaping drafts by the artists into his own unmistakable language.3 While deploring “the triumph of non-figurative art in the West,” the Antipodeans also opposed

promoting one or the other side of these dichotomies. As we shall see, the debates were never black-and-white divisions between clearly marked positions. Local circumstances, the changing relationships among places, and above all the constant contrariness of artists made them always, everywhere, volatile. In the immediate prehistory of contemporary art—that is, the transformative moment of the later 1960s and early ’70s and the postwar period just before it—the figure of the art critic seems to catch more light than other actors. If attention today seems captivated by collectors and auctioneers, in the 1990s and early 2000s curators were both celebrated

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Fig. 2. Sidney Nolan. Ned Kelly. 1946. Enamel paint on composition board, 90.8 × 121.5 cm. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Gift of Sunday Reed 1977

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and attacked for creating the most visible buzz. Less obviously, but insistently, theorists came to the fore in the 1980s, while in the late 1960s and ’70s it was artists who offered the most powerful accounts of what art was and could be. These artists—so the story goes—had displaced the critics who seemed so prominent in the 1950s and early ’60s. Generalizations such as these are mostly rhetorical fictions, but their persistence signals energies that were alive in at least certain times and places. (This decade-by-decade story is mainly a North American one.) We need to ask more specific questions: in the reconstituting and soon expansionist art worlds of the major European centers, and in ascendant New York and some of the rapidly growing art worlds elsewhere, such as Tokyo and Buenos Aires, did certain writers succeed in recording, defining, and even setting artistic agendas to a degree that their predecessors rarely achieved? If so, how did they do it—with which arguments, about what kinds of art, using what kinds of acumen, and with what effects? Did they remain “men of letters” (litterateurs, critics of the arts in general) or did they redefine the role of the critic as a medium specialist? What were the issues that impelled them to write? How did they mobilize the evolving elements of art-critical practice—selection, description, interpretation, evaluation—in sizing up the situation for art in their location? Many places were in the early phases of becoming art worlds—what role did critics play in building their infrastructures? Above all, given that the European wars of the twentieth century had resonated throughout the world, not least in accelerating the collapse of colonial empires, what was distinctive and what shared among writers in the many different art centers that were being rebuilt or were under construction at the time? Unfortunately there is no single survey of the history of modern art criticism on which to draw to find ready answers to these questions. In the rare encyclopedia entries on the subject, postwar writing in New York is taken as the gold standard, to the virtual exclusion of everything and everywhere else. 4 From this perspective, critics are valued to the degree that they were influential explicators of “The Triumph of American Painting,” a story that goes like this: initially shaped in the crucible of Depression-era social realism, inspired by the arrival during World War II of Europe’s most innovative artists of the interwar years, a loose cohort in New York turns first to a universalizing primitivism, then to an existentially expressive action painting (as Harold Rosenberg characterized it) or a kind of post-Cubist pure abstraction (as defined by Clement Greenberg), thus arriving, instinctively, intuitively, but unmistakably, at a distinctively American kind of art. By the mid-to-late 1950s, however, ironic literalism, allusive figuration, and popular imagery enter the picture, inviting on the one hand a debate about the exact nature of artists’ attitudes (are the Pop artists for or against U.S. consumerism?) and on the other a principled refusal of interpretation in the face of the art’s evident singularity (Susan Sontag). Despite objections and reconsiderations, this story has been repeated so often that it has become the rock upon which even the most critical accounts of postwar art continue to be

erected, even as they complicate it and slowly but surely reject it.5 The good news is that a generation of scholars is finally focusing on critics as worthy of the kind of close attention paid to artists. They are doing so from a contemporary global perspective, alert to the complexities of the relationships among the multiple modernities of actual, existing modern art. Andrea Giunta and Inés Katzenstein have done pioneering work in the case of Argentina, as have Charles Green and Heather Barker for Australia. 6 Pierre Restany is an obvious focus of studies of Nouveau Réalisme, as is Michel Tapié for art informel.7 Reiko Tomii has highlighted the role of critics such as Miyakawa Atsushi, Nakahara Yūsuke, Tōno Yoshiaki, and Haryū Ichirō in defining the acute sense of “international contemporaneity” (kokusai-teki dōjisei) in Japan when information about art informel in Europe and Happenings in the United States arrived there after the innovations of the Gutai group. 8 Research into postwar art criticism elsewhere (including the Soviet Union, Eastern and Central Europe, and the Middle East), however, remains in the early stages. Documents from the archives of art critics are being gathered, notably by the Archives de la critique d’art, Rennes, and the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, and some are being published, as in the “Primary Documents” book series produced by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, which now includes Eastern Europe, China, Japan, Argentina, Venezuela, and the influential Brazilian critic Mário Pedrosa.9 There is promise in enterprises such as the Documents of 20th-Century Latin American and Latino Art Digital Archive, hosted by the International Center for the Arts of the Americas at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.10 Symposia and conference sessions devoted to individual critics are appearing with increasing frequency, so we can anticipate more publications along the lines of the recent collection of studies of Lawrence Alloway.11 Any comprehensive picture of the role of art critics during the postwar period—indeed, of any period—must await the results of such research. What follows are provisional notes about the work of certain representative and in various ways exemplary critics, critics who played crucial roles within the debates about the dichotomies mentioned earlier. Each did so in a different way, according to the context in which he (it is, unfortunately, overwhelmingly “he”) operated.

THE CRITIC AS AMANUENSIS, PUPPET-MASTER, AND MEDIATOR If, with the great exception of poet/activist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto of 1909, statements by artists were the primary written documents of the early-twentieth-century avant-gardes, it is striking that the key texts of postwar art were in many places authored by art critics. They spoke, usually, as the voice of a specific group of artists, whom they joined in defining the option that they believed would best secure art’s future. In such contexts, criticism became engaged in contestation

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about the direction of art, which just about everyone presumed would indeed flow in one or another major direction. In the postwar period, such criticism was also, unavoidably and necessarily, engaged in the Cold War culture wars. On April 4, 1958, in the culture supplement of the Mexico City newspaper Novedades, painter and graphic artist José Luis Cuevas published a pivotal document of postwar Mexican art. Headlined “Cuevas: The Enfant Terrible versus the Sacred Monsters,” the essay tells the story of Juan, son of a bribe-taking official, as he strives to forge a career as an artist, inspired by predecessors in Mexico and contemporaries abroad, yet slowly succumbs to the compromises and bad faith of an art world dominated by officials in obsequious thrall to an ossified and unpopular muralism. “I protest,” Cuevas writes, “against the crude, limited, provincial, nationalistic Mexico of the Juans,” a condition he names “la cortina de nopal” (the cactus curtain) to link Mexican muralism to Soviet Socialist Realism. He praises the few artists, writers, and filmmakers whose art he believes represents “the true, universal Mexico, open to the whole world without losing its essential characteristics. … What I want in my country’s art are broad highways leading out to the rest of the world, rather than narrow trails connecting one adobe village with another.” 12 These sentiments reflect Cuevas’s relationship to the Cuban critic and curator Jóse Gómez Sicre, from 1946 to 1968 head of the Visual Arts Unit of the Pan American Union, which operated within the Organization of American States. From his base in Washington, D.C., and with the support of U.S. political and cultural figures such as Nelson D. Rockefeller and Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Gomez Sicre traveled tirelessly, promoting the idea of “Latin American Art” as a loose collation of regional modernisms and, after the Cuban Revolution (which he did not support), a vital part of a pan-American cultural front against the spread of Communism. Cuevas wrote his barbed essay from Philadelphia, where he was a member of a tour organized by Gomez Sicre. Recent research has shown that the young artist and the worldly critic actually collaborated on most of Cuevas’s writings from this period, including the famous “cactus curtain” text.13 Gomez Sicre celebrated Cuevas as the model of the self-creating Latin American artist: inspired by local traditions, alert to international tendencies, but an individualist, finally beholden to neither. It is no surprise that caricatures of the two as puppet-master and puppet circulated in the Mexican press.14 Similar patterns may be found throughout the Caribbean and Latin America. In Argentina during the 1960s, artists such as Tomás Maldonado, Kenneth Kemble, and Marta Minujín, patrons such as Guido di Tella, but above all critics such as Julio Llinás and Jorge Romero Brest engaged in a constant struggle to influence the direction of culture in their country. 15 Everyone involved believed art to be vital to Argentina’s polity and all were aware of the country’s economic and political vulnerability to American interests. Without hesitation, all understood that taking up art styles and adopting critical postures meant adopting ideological allegiances. At the same time, the most influential critics of the period, while not afraid to take positions (or, if afraid, taking them anyway), also sought to modify the

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disabling practice of matching categories of art, and particular styles, to exclusionary ideologies. Their role was to act as public and private mediators between competing, indeed incommensurable visions of what art could become.

ARTICULATING ARTISTIC CHANGE Published in Rio de Janeiro in the Sunday supplement of the Jornal do Brasil on March 21–22, 1959, the Manifesto neoconcreto was signed by the poet and critic Ferreira Gullar, the artists Franz Weissmann, Amílcar de Castro, Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, and Cláudio Mello e Souza and the poets Theo Spanudis and Reynaldo Jardim (fig. 3). Associated with a show at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, it sought to put the exhibiting artists at a small but significant distance from the Constructivist tendency then defining modernism in Brazilian art and also, by implication, from the developmentalist ideology inspiring the “New Brazil,” expressed most visibly in the building of the new capital, Brasília. “Neo-Concrete art, born out of the need to express the complex reality of modern humanity inside the structural language of the new plasticity, denies the validity of scientific and positivist attitudes in art and raises the question of expression.” This is the language of the group. It was, however, Gullar who sought to define what this meant as a description of what was distinctive in the works of these artists: “We do not conceive of the work of art as a ‘machine’ or as an ‘object,’ but as a quasi corpus; that is to say, as something which amounts to more than the sum of its constituent elements; something which analysis may break down into various elements but can only be understood by phenomenological means.”16 A few months later, realizing that Clark’s art of the time could not be characterized as either painting or sculpture but constituted a new kind of artwork, Gullar wrote his essay “Theory of the non-object.” 17 He recognized that these artists had moved to “rupture the frame and eliminate the base,” with the result that the artwork became “a primary formulation of the world,” one that occurred in the phenomenological field between the artist and the spectator. 18 Gullar was one of the first to articulate the spirit of conceptualism, over a decade before it was formalized as Conceptual art.

OUT OF THE COLONIES: CRITICISM AS CULTIVATION In Africa, the first formulations of contending perspectives on the desired direction of the visual arts are replete with paradox. From the 1930s through to the ’60s, Nigerian artist and teacher Aina Onabolu

2. Form Matters

vigorously promoted a rigorous Western academicism as the way forward for African artists, while his colleague Kenneth Murray was equally convinced that the elements of folk art were essential to the modernization of Nigerian art.19 Igbo artist Ben Enwonwu forged a synthesis of these opposing positions in his work and writings.20

that there is “very little genuine abstraction and no naturalistic art of any importance”; rather, “the more powerful African artists are drawn to expressionist or Surrealist forms.”21 We are immediately in a discursive space quite other than that of the dichotomies prevailing in Europe, the United States, and their modernized cultural colonies in much of South

Fig. 3. Amílcar de Castro, Lygia Clark, Ferreira Gullar, Reynaldo Jardim, Cláudio Mello e Souza, Lygia Pape, Theo Spanudis, and Franz Weissmann. Manifesto neoconcreto. 1959

Along with his short study Art in Nigeria, from 1960, Ulli Beier’s 1968 volume Contemporary African Art is arguably the first art-critical text that attempted to survey the emergence in Africa of a kind of art that neither perpetuated traditional, local practices nor sought, through imitation or expatriation, to join other, usually European artistic currents. A German writer, educator, translator, and institution-builder, Beier had moved to Nigeria in 1950 to teach at the University of Ibadan. He notes

America and in Australia. It is a tentative, exploratory one, searching for a language appropriate to its fresh yet fragile experience of possibility. Contemporary African Art opens with an acknowledgment of the decline of traditional African art, steering blame not only to European colonialism but also to the “inherent weaknesses” and “decadence” of many local cultures.22 Against this, Beier notes the recent exuberance of many kinds of popular and tourist–oriented art, which heralds “the

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coming of the intellectual African artist,” one who “refuses to be fossilized,” who accepts the challenge of Europe, and “does not hesitate to adopt new materials, be inspired by foreign art, look for a different role in society,” such that “New Forms, new styles and new personalities are emerging everywhere” and “this contemporary African art is rapidly becoming as rich and as varied as were the more rigid conventions of several generations ago.”23 He demonstrates this claim through evaluations of the work of artists from across the continent, many of whom have subsequently become widely acknowledged. While noting that “superficially a common vocabulary can be detected among many of these artists: the mask, the sacrifice, spirits, and folklore,” Beier underscores that “the way in which this mythological vocabulary is used differs considerably from artist to artist.” For example, while Uche Okeke collects and illustrates Igbo folklore, Skunder Boghossian rejects the imagery of his country (Ethiopia) in favor of a painstaking constructed personal mythology.24 Prefiguring the future for art in Africa, this is an art driven by its own differences. Beier remarks that many artists “regret and rightly so that art criticism is a field hardly explored by Africans themselves at the moment,” but that “they certainly want to communicate” about art.25 Oddly, he does not cite Okeke’s “Natural Synthesis” manifesto, written in 1960, the year of Nigeria’s independence. It is a call to the “young artists in a new nation” to reject the confusion of Western art (“What form of feelings, human feelings, can void space inspire in a machine artist?”) and, equally, the copying of “our old art heritages, for they stand for our old order.” Instead, Okeke urges artists to create a synthesis based on openness to all possibilities, “a natural synthesis, for it should be unconscious not forced.”26

In the postwar period, critics took sides within the various artistic tendencies and attitudes, favoring one over another and often becoming its public spokesperson. Art-world position-taking nearly always aligned with one or another competing ideological or political perspective within each center, and was readily understood to be so aligned by others in the same discursive world. A competition of styles dominated discourse and, to a large degree, practice. Nevertheless, within the period, counter-tendencies arose and countercurrents swirled. By the mid- and late 1960s, things were changing: while these markers persisted for the growing audiences for art, artists deliberately set out to complicate them, and increasing numbers of younger critics took on the responsibility to do the same.

CRITICISM AS A POSTWAR PRACTICE These few examples of different critical practices, undertaken in wildly differing situations, have introduced us to some of the challenges critics faced in their immediate localities during a period when international connections between art worlds were gathering pace, inequities between them were becoming more evident, and these differences were being both codified and contested. There are marked inequities between the dense concentrations of critics in the modern metropolitan centers and their relative isolation in towns within internal provinces, in the cities of colonies and ex-colonies, and in peripheral countries. In such settings, certain individuals, many of them artists, took on multiple roles as critics, curators, art dealers, educators, and administrators. Everywhere critics took for granted that their basic task was to describe and evaluate the kinds of art being made and exhibited in their location. With exceptions (including Sontag, Dore Ashton, and Marta Traba), and usually late in the period, it was rare for women to take prominent roles as critics, but some (such as Dorothy C. Miller at MoMA) curated significant exhibitions.

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(accessed June 2016); and Kerr Houston, “A History of Art Criticism,” An Introduction to Art Criticism: Histories, Strategies, Voices (New York: Pearson Education, 2013), pp. 23–81, available online at https://www-pearsonhighered-com-prd.pearson.com/assets/samplechapter/0/2/0/5/0205835945.pdf (accessed June 2016). See also Lionello Venturi, History of Art Criticism 1936 (rev. ed. New York: Dutton, 1964), and James Ackerman, “Art History and the Problems of Criticism,” Daedalus 89, no. 1 (Winter 1960): 252–63. 5 Landmarks include Irving Sandler, Abstract Expressionism: The Triumph of American Painting (London: Pall Mall, 1970); Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); Ann Gibson, Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); Anne Wagner, A House Divided: American Art since 1955 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); and Katy Siegel, Since ’45: America and the Making of Contemporary Art (London: Reaktion Books, 2011). Few individual critics have won monographic studies, with Clement Greenberg being the most evident exception. 6 Inés Katzenstein, ed., Listen, Here, Now!: Argentine Art of the 1960s: Writings of the Avant-Garde (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2004). Charles Green and Heather Barker’s No Place like Home: The Idea of Contemporary Australian Art, 1960–1988, forthcoming, is a sustained analysis of three generations of critics. 7 See Jill Carrick, Nouveau Réalisme, 1960s France, and the Neo-avant-garde: Topographies of Chance and Return (Burlington: Ashgate, 2010), and Julia Robinson, ed., New Realisms: 1957–1962. Object Strategies between Readymade and Spectacle, exh. cat. (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, 2010). 8 See Reiko Tomii, “Historicizing ‘Contemporary Art’: Some Discursive Practices in Gendai Bijutsu in Japan,” Positions 12, no. 3 (Winter 2012): 611–41. 9 Mário Pedrosa: Primary Documents, ed. Gloría Ferreira and Paulo Herkenhoff (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2016). 10 Online at https://www.mfah.org/research/international-center-arts-americas/icaa-documents-project/ (accessed June 2016). 11 Lucy Bradnock, Courtney J. Martin, and Rebecca Peabody, eds., Lawrence Alloway: Critic and Curator (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2015). 12 José Luis Cuevas, “Cuevas: El niño terrible vs. los monstrous sagrados,” México en la cultura no. 473 (April 4, 1958): 7. Eng. trans. as “The Cactus Curtain: An Open Letter on Conformity in Mexican Art,” Evergreen Review 2, no. 7 (Winter 1959): 111–20, this quotation 119–20. 13 See Claire F. Fox, Making Art Panamerican: Cultural Policy and the Cold War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), chapter 3, esp. pp. 151–59. 14 See ibid., p. 150. 15 See Andrea Giunta, Avant-Garde, Internationalism, and Politics: Argentine Art in the 1960s (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007). 16 “Manifesto neoconcreto,” Jornal do Brasil, March 22, 1959, Sunday supplement, pp. 4–5. Extracted in Mari Carmen Ramírez and Héctor Olea, Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America, exh. cat. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, in association with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2004), pp. 496–97. 17 Ferreira Gullar, “Teoria do Não-Objeto,” Jornal do Brasil, December 19–20, 1959, Sunday supplement. Eng. trans. in Kobena Mercer, ed., Cosmopolitan Modernisms (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, and London: Institute of International Visual Arts), pp. 170–74. 18 Ibid., p. 174. See also Michael Asbury, “Neoconcretism and Minimalism: Cosmopolitanism at a Local Level and a Canonical Provincialism,” in ibid., pp. 174–89. The contemporary resonance of Gullar’s essays has eclipsed the fact that the dominant Brazilian critic at the time was Mário Pedrosa; see Mário Pedrosa: Primary Documents, ed. Gloría Ferreira and Paulo Herkenhoff (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2015), and the introductory essay’s discussion of the relationship between the two critics. 19 See Ola Oloidi, “Art Criticism in Nigeria, 1920–1996: The Development of Professionalism in the Media and the Academy,” in Katy Deepwell, ed., Art Criticism and Africa (London: Saffron Books, 1997), pp. 41–49. See also comments by Olu Oguibe in the same volume, pp. 99–101. I thank Nicole Coffineau for research assistance and Jennifer Josten and Paulina Pardo for

20 See Sylvester Ogbechie, Ben Enwonwu: The Making of an African Modernist (New York:

helpful suggestions.

University of Rochester Press, 2008).

1 Nevil Shute, On the Beach (London: Heinemann, 1957).

21 Ulli Beier, Contemporary Art in Africa (New York: Praeger, 1968), p. 168.

2 The Antipodean Manifesto is most readily accessible in Ann Stephen, Andrew McNamara,

22 Ibid., p. 3.

and Philip Goad, eds., Modernism & Australia: Documents on Art, Design and Architecture

23 Ibid., pp. 13, 14.

1917–1967 (Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 2006), pp. 694–97.

24 Ibid., pp. 169, 168.

3 See Bernard Smith, The Antipodean Manifesto: Essays in Art and History (Melbourne: Ox-

25 Ibid., p. 167.

ford University Press, 1975), p. vii.

26 Quoted in Clémentine Deliss, ed., Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa (London:

4 For example, James Elkins, “Art Criticism,” Dictionary of Art (London: Macmillan, 1996),

Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1995), pp. 208–9. See also Chika Okeke-Agulu, Postcolonial Mod-

2:517–19; Donald Burton Kuspit, “Art Criticism in the 20th Century,” Encyclopedia Britannica,

ernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria (Durham, N.C.: Duke University

available online at www.britannica.com/topic/art-criticism/Art-criticism-in-the-20th-century

Press, 2015).

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FORM MATTERS Plates

Shafic Abboud Rasheed Araeen Siah Armajani Frank Auerbach Antonio Berni Lee Bontecou Vladimír Boudník Alberto Burri John Chamberlain Ahmed Cherkaoui Lygia Clark Willem de Kooning Niki de Saint Phalle Beauford Delaney Jean Fautrier

Lucio Fontana Helen Frankenthaler Ivo Gattin Marcos Grigorian Philip Guston Raymond Hains Eva Hesse Jiˇr í Kolá rˇ Leon Kossoff Lee Krasner Tetsumi Kudo Yayoi Kusama Maria Lassnig John Latham Lee Seung-taek

Lee Ufan Ernest Mancoba Piero Manzoni David Medalla Gustav Metzger Marta Minujín Joan Mitchell Ernst Wilhelm Nay Hermann Nitsch Hélio Oiticica Alfonso Ossorio Jeram Patel Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio Jackson Pollock Carol Rama

Mohan Samant Carolee Schneemann Anwar Jalal Shemza Shozo Shimamoto Kazuo Shiraga Antoni Tàpies Emilio Vedova Jacques (Mahé de la) Villeglé Wols (Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze) Ramsès Younan Prinzessin Fahrelnissa Zeid

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Jackson Pollock There Were Seven in Eight c. 1945 oil, enamel, and casein on canvas The Museum of Modern Art, New York

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Jackson Pollock Number 23 1948 enamel on gesso on paper TATE, London

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Willem De Kooning Black Untitled 1948 oil and enamel on paper, mounted on wood The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

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Ernest Mancoba Composition 1951 oil on canvas Gordon Schachat Collection, Johannesburg

52 Ernest Mancoba Untitled 1962 oil on canvas Moderna Museet, Stockholm

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Lee Krasner The Seasons 1957 oil and house paint on canvas Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

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Princess Fahrelnissa Zeid My Hell 1951 oil on canvas Istanbul Museum of Modern Art

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Leon Kossoff City Building Site 1961 oil on board Private European Collector

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Frank Auerbach Shell Building Site 1959 oil on board Hartlepool Borough Council

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Helen Frankenthaler Lorelei 1957 oil on untreated cotton duck Brooklyn Museum, New York

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58

Wols (Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze) Composition jaune (Yellow Composition) c. 1947 oil on canvas Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie

59

Philip Guston Untitled 1958 oil on canvas Private Collection

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60 Ernst Wilhelm Nay Augen (Eyes) 1963 oil on canvas Ernst Wilhelm Nay Stiftung, Cologne

61 Ernst Wilhelm Nay Meteor 1964 oil on canvas Ernst Wilhelm Nay Stiftung, Cologne

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John Latham Untitled (Roller Painting) 1964 spray paint on white duck Lisson Gallery

62 267

63

Joan Mitchell Lucky Seven 1962 oil on canvas Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon

Joan Mitchell Chemin des Ecoliers 1960 oil on canvas Joan Mitchell Foundation, New York

64 269

65

Piero Manzoni Achrome 1958 parts of canvas, impregnated with kaolin, and glue on burlap MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main

66 Siah Armajani Prayer 1962 oil and ink on board Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

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67

Maria Lassnig Selbstporträt (Self-Portrait) 1957 oil on Wood Maria Lassnig Foundation, Vienna

68 Beauford Delaney Untitled c. 1958 oil on canvas Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, LLC, New York

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Kazuo Shiraga Work II 1958 oil on canvas Hyōgo Prefectural Museum of Art, Kobe

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Tetsumi Kudo The Flowing Movement and Its Condensation in Mind 1958 watercolor on cotton fabric Aomori Museum of Art

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Ramsès Younan Cristaux rocheux (Rocky Crystals) 1960 oil on fiberboard Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna

71

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72

Jeram Patel Untitled 1961 oil on Masonite board Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi

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Jean Fautrier Sunset in Alabama 1957 oil on paper mounted on canvas Musée d'art moderne de la ville de Paris

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Rasheed Araeen Before Departure (Black Paintings) 1963-64 oil on canvas 3 panels from a series of 5 Sharjah Art Foundation Collection

74

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75 Anwar Jalal Shemza Composition in Three Parts 1963-64 oil on canvas on hardboard Estate of Anwar Jalal Shemza, London

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Anwar Jalal Shemza City Wall 1960 oil on board Private Collection, New York

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Shafic Abboud Composition 1954 oil on canvas Antoun Nabil Sehnaoui

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Ahmed Cherkaoui Le Couronnement (The Coronation) 1964 oil on canvas Centre national des arts plastiques, Paris

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Eva Hesse Untitled 1965 painted cord wrapped around plastic tubing and ring in wood and metal Moderna Museet, Stockholm

79

80

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Vladimír Boudník

Vladimír Boudník

Krajina (Landscape) 1960 mixed media on paper The National Gallery in Prague

Krajina (Landscape) 1960 mixed media on paper The National Gallery in Prague

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Vladimír Boudník Kompozice (Composition) 1960 mixed media on paper The National Gallery in Prague

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83

Alberto Burri Sacco e oro (Sackcloth and Gold) 1953 burlap and gold on canvas Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini Collezione Burri, Città di Castello

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84

Lucio Fontana Concetto spaziale (Spatial Concept) 1949 paper on frame Fondazione Lucio Fontana, Milan

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Lee Ufan Pushed-Up Ink 1964 ink on Japanese paper mounted on wood Private Collection

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Antoni Tàpies Forma negra sobre quadrat gris (Black Form on Grey Square) 1960 mixed media on canvas Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona

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Hermann Nitsch Blutbild (Blood Painting) 1962 fabric, blood on canvas Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna

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Niki de Saint Phalle Fragment de l'Hommage au Facteur Cheval (Fragment of a Homage to Postman Cheval) 1962 paint, plaster, assemblage of small found objects, wire mesh on wooden board Private Collection

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Niki de Saint Phalle Grand Tir - Séance de la Galerie J (Big Shot – Gallery J Session) 1961 plaster, paint, string, fence, plastic on chipboard, wire, mesh, wooden board, plastic balloons Private Collection

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Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio La sirena e il pirata (The Mermaid and the Pirate) 1958 mixed media on canvas roll Galerie van de Loo, Munich

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Raymond Hains Les nymphéas 1961 torn posters on zinc sheet panel Centre Pompidou, Paris, Musée national d'art moderne – Centre de création industrielle

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Jacques (Mahé de la) Villeglé Palissade aux palmiers (Fence with Palm Trees) 1957 ripped posters mounted on wood Private Collection

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Marta Minujín My Mattress 1962 mattresses, cardboard, patching plaster, and paint Collection of the Artist, Buenos Aires

94

Shozo Shimamoto Sakuhin (Work) 1955/92 galvanized steel painted on both sides Axel & May Vervoordt Foundation, Antwerp

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Emilio Vedova Berlin '64 1964 relief, paper, iron, mixed media on wood Fondazione Emilio e Annabianca Vedova, Venice

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Carol Rama Ovale Nero (Black Oval) 1961 mixed media and oil on canvas Aishti Foundation, Beirut

97 Lygia Clark Obra mole (Soft Work) 1964 (replica) industrial rubber The Associação Cultural O Mundo de Lygia Clark, Rio de Janeiro

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98 Carolee Schneemann Conversions 1961 wood, paint, rope, metal on board Private Collection, London

99

Carolee Schneemann Colorado House 1962 wood, stretchers, wire, fur, strips of painted canvas, bottles, broom handle, glass shards, flag, photograph, plywood base Private Collection

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100 Lee Bontecou Untitled 1962 welded steel, epoxy, canvas, fabric, saw blade, and wire The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

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John Latham Belief System 1959 books, plaster, metal, light bulb, and paint on canvas on board TATE, London

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John Latham Little Red Mountain 1960-62 timber base, books, plaster, wires Lisson Gallery

102

103

Marcos Grigorian Untitled 1963 sand and enamel on canvas Grey Art Gallery, New York

104

Jiˇrí Koláˇr Rasierklingengedicht (A Poem of Razors) 1962 assemblage, cords, and razor blades on cardboard, wooden frame with glass Neues Museum - Staatliches Museum für Kunst und Design in Nürnberg, Nuremburg

Lee Seung-taek > Non-Sculpture 1960 rope, paper, and wooden stick Gallery Hyundai, Seoul

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< Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama

Ladder 1963 mixed media Des Moines Art Center

No. E.R.F 1960 mixed media Private Collection

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Gustav Metzger Recreation of First Public Demonstration of Auto-Destructive Art 1960 (remade 2004) glass, fabric, table, trash bag, paper, plastic, and steel TATE, London

108

Tetsumi Kudo Philosophy of Impotence 1959 cord and resin on painted panel Private Collection

109

Helio Oiticica B17, Glass Bólide 05 “Homage to Mondrian” 1965 glass, textile, water, pigment, cork TATE, London

110

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111 Ivo Gattin Red Surface with Two Slashes 1962 resin, pigment, burlap Marinko Sudac Collection, Zagreb

112 Mohan Samant Green Square 1963 synthetic polymer paint, sand, and oil on canvas The Museum of Modern Art, New York

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David Medalla Cloud Gates - Bubble Machine 1964 stainless steel, methacrylate, water pump, water, soap, and acrylic Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid

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John Chamberlain Wildroot 1959 automobile parts; iron, lacquered, and welded MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main

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115 Alfonso Ossorio Rescue 1961 mixed media on panel Philadelphia Museum of Art

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Antonio Berni La pampa tormentosa (The Stormy Pampas) 1963 oil, tempera, wooden sticks, metals (including sheet metal, corrugated metal with paint residue , scrap and tin plate), cardboard , imprint on paper , plastic buttons , threads and fragments of lace on two plywood panels Private Collection

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Section Introduction Yule Heibel Sarah Wilson Homi K. Bhabha Plates

3 NEW IMAGES OF MAN

NEW IMAGES OF MAN

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iroshima and Nagasaki, Auschwitz and the other camps, and colonialism had laid bare the failures of Western civilization. In the wake of these shocks came ambivalent political attempts to establish more just geopolitical systems, using new legal forms such as the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—putatively global but in fact dominated by Western authority. At the same time, people in former European colonies struggled for full citizenship and autonomy. Philosophers and artists sought to inquire into human nature itself, in debates that included the discourses of Négritude and existentialism and of the rights of individuals and groups within larger (often oppressive) social and political entities. “New Images of Man” features pictorial versions of such inquiries. Here, humans often appear battered, deformed by the horror of modern life, rent by the question of their own value. The artists making this work often deliberately combined figuration and materialist facture, refusing the choice between abstraction and representation—or between physical and social life, seeing the binary as not only ideologically false but also deeply destructive. The most significant counterforce to universalist Western humanism came, in different veins, from the former European colonies. Sometimes, as with Frantz Fanon's “new man,” the formerly colonized claimed a moral right to define humanism broadly and universally, a right abrogated by the West, and offered a correspondingly more positive, future-oriented vision of humanity.

Introduction

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GERMANY’S POSTWAR SEARCH FOR A NEW IMAGE OF MAN Yule Heibel

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ermany reentered a contested public life had learned to despise modernism as degenerate “Judeo-Bolshevism.” after the Allies defeated Nazism. The many Since they had also mostly exhausted their appetite for “heroics,” modpublications that sprang up between 1945 ernist artists who wanted to risk what Nay called “openness and selfand the currency reform of 1948 gave writcreation” through vitalism could not count on young audiences to supers and critics platforms on which to probe port their work.7 Nor, in the late 1940s, was there any young German 1 version of the New York critic Clement Greenberg, who was effectively Germany’s situation. Much ink was spilled over the idea of the Menschenbild (image shaping a narrative about the American painting of the time, tying it to of man), by 1950 a pressing enough issue French modernism while championing its heroic American direction. 2 to justify a conference in Darmstadt. Twelve years of Nazi rule, a GerThe closest any German critic came to linking German and French man destruction of states that entrenched Hitler’s racialized view of the modernism was Will Grohmann, who by the end of the decade was world, and the murder of millions of Jews by Germans and their helpin his sixties, and was more than twenty years older than Greenberg. ers had created an unprecedented crisis in Europe.3 The critical focus In postwar Germany it was (weirdly) up to relatively older writers like fell mainly on politics and philosophy but the question also mattered Grohmann to lead German youth to an understanding of modern art. deeply in modernist art, especially abstract painting, where the troubled Yet Nay persisted. In 1945–48 he embarked on his “Hekate” series, a Menschenbild prompted anxieties around expression and expressivity. group of Cubist- and Expressionist-inspired works that take the human Those anxieties in turn provided figure, often severely abstractparameters for art’s reception. ed, as their starting point. 8 The formal vocabulary Nay created Fast-forward to 1965 and an here would serve him even in his exhibition at Munich’s Galerie most abstract works, the 1954–62 Franke by the abstract painter “Scheibenbilder” (Disk Paintings). Ernst Wilhelm Nay. In opening Consider a 1948 “Hekate” penremarks at the show, Nay told viscil drawing, Begrüßung Außerhalb itors that since West Germany’s (Meeting Outside; fig. 1), a work “general restoration,” the nation with the controlled affective had become “anaesthetized,” incharge that would prove characcapable of accepting “openness teristic of Nay’s postwar art. We and self-creation” (Selbsterfindrecognize two figures emergung). 4 A practitioner of vitalism— the belief that all living matter ing from and receding into the is determined by an almost suhatched and shaded ground. pernatural life force not found in Their eyes are set in faces that dead matter—Nay was one of the resemble Pablo Picasso’s quotaFig. 1. Ernst Wilhelm Nay. Begrüßung außerhalb (Meeting Outside). 1948. Pencil on paper, 21 × 30.5 cm. Private Collection country’s few abstract painters tions of African masks, and their of the period who leaned on the sexual markers—the round forms lessons of Cubism. Most postwar abstractionists of his generation pracof buttocks and bellies, triangular breasts set off by darker dots for nipticed “absolute” painting, abstraction without reference to the material ples—repeat in circles that could be pupils, vertebrae, or umbilici. A kind world.5 For some, this postwar German abstraction had turned into wallof “vitalist” agitation is suggested by arms that fling upward, but all is 6 paper decoration. But was postwar Germany, divided into eastern and held parallel to the picture plane. Never does Nay ignore the basic limits western zones, in fact “anaesthetized” and its art merely decorative? Or of the picture’s two-dimensional support, or—as he himself put it—does had the patient submitted to a kind of cultural triage in which successive he let objects “float” on their ground. He had disparaged “floating” aboperations had stitched up the tattered Menschenbild until “he” (the “imstraction as early as 1948, instead praising formalism, the close adherage of man” was most decidedly male) could once again confidently take ence to modernism found in Cézanne and Picasso, because it led to the sides in a polarized Cold War world? “picture-form,” a “Cubism of Juan Gris [which] must combine with the Most postwar German critics failed to note even obvious differnew style, the modern vitalism.”9 Here we find him describing verbally exactly what he was working on visually. ences between abstract styles such as Nay’s and “absolute” painting. Nay’s position was unusual insofar as most of his contemporarTheir reviews might differentiate between “abstract tendencies” and ies, if they were abstractionists, wanted to stay away from physical vi“realism,” but they couldn’t seem to differentiate within abstraction itself. tality and instead to seek refuge in Geist, the mind. 10 Compare Nay’s Consider, too, the generational problem facing the country: many young work to that of Fritz Winter, a member of Zen 49. The title of Winter’s Germans had spent their youthful enthusiasm on Nazism, where they

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Klänge (Sounds, 1949; fig. 2) already suggests disembodiment. Two Vitalism or physical expressivity could be seen as dangerous types of shapes float across the picture plane: the soft layers of mutor dirty, then, through association with the recent past, whereas Geist ed color that constitute the ground are bisected by a brown, semiseemed above it all. The distinction is akin to that drawn between the transparent arc that attenuates at the support’s edges, while on top of Dionysian (“vitalist”) and Apollonian (“spiritual”). “Absolute” abstracthis arc, eight earth-toned vertical bars, tinged with yellow-gold, are tion, which eliminated the body, was the safer bet. As the Cold War arrayed in a cluster. This is an abstraction that eschews all references to deepened and the safe as opposed to the experimental set the agenthe physical world. da,13 it became even less desirable to venture into vitalism, or to see differences within abstraction. Expression and affect were hot-button But why this turn away from physicality? A look at the discourse issues in postwar Germany, especially for people who had expended shaping up in the postwar publications I mentioned at the outset is inas much vehement feeling as the Germans had on Hitler and his racial structive. Take Werner Krauss’s 1947 analysis of the role of slang in firing war. Surely German “wildness” was dangerous. A return to that other up young men’s romantic enthusiasm for military life under Hitler. WorkGerman tradition of Geist, on the other hand, offered a safe harbor. ing from a short story in a Nazi schoolbook, Krauss shows how and why As an old-boys' network returned to power in the wake of currenslang was viscerally authentic. A fighter pilot gets “blown full of holes” cy reform (1948), partition but avoids getting “snuffed” as (1949), and rebuilding, discushis motor “gags” and “croaks”; sion of the Menschenbild conon the lower-class social levels tinued.14 The “thousand-year where slang like this circuReich” had upended social lated, Krauss argues, bodily norms, and Nazi rites had disfunctions were ascribed to placed civic behaviors. Ernst machines, and this form of Cassirer observed in 1947 that language was compelling, rites were designed to eradieven dangerous because it cate the subject’s sense of self: engaged a visceral response, in Nazi racial politics, “Not a way of thinking through the individual, but the group, the body that shaped identiis the ‘moral subject.’” 15 The ty. Reflection, which requires individual was left precarious. distance, was canceled out. Similar concerns came This formal strategy molded from the conservative camp, the reader’s thinking: “Argot typically couched within forces its world view on all more general indictments those who speak it,” Krauss Fig. 2. Fritz Winter. Klänge. 1949. Mixed media on paper. Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen Sammlung Moderne Kunst in der Pinakothek der Moderne München, Munich of modernity. Consider Max writes. “As long as one spoke Picard’s book Hitler in uns the language of the infantry11 Selbst (Hitler in Ourselves) (1946), which emphasized the nonhumanness man, he was bound to the infantryman’s faith.” Geist was altogether different. Consider Joseph Fink’s paean to the of Nazism, its seeming alienness to civilized norms. The book also gave ideal Greek countenance, published in the same year as Krauss’s disGermans a kind of pass by setting the Nazis’ crimes beyond human cussion of slang. Fink wants to explain why the Greeks pursued a Menbounds: “They are so monstrous that one cannot in any way explain schenbild reflecting “the high, the elevated, the affinity to the gods.” The them through any human cause that still acts as a cause within human Greeks, he writes, discovered “the human portrait in a spiritualized order. … Nazi cruelty … no longer has human measure, but rather the sense”—not physiognomy (the particular, the bodily) but countenance measure of something beyond the human,” emanating from “a human (the eternal, mental aspect of the face). In championing Geist it was who has become a total apparatus.”16 Cassirer’s description of Nazism as producing new political myths that “did not start by dictating man’s also once again perfectly all right to be just a little colonial: Fink writes, ability to do or not do, [but instead] undertook in the first instance to “Recall the goggly-eyed faces of early, non-Greek artists. … Their con12 alter man himself, in order then to regulate and control his actions” here quest was the spiritual deed of the Greek artists.”  As “goggly-eyed” physiognomy is conquered by a colonizing ideal of “countenance,” the meshes with Picard’s conservative critique.17 “Man” was mutable. Ironi­ cally, this realization was brought home by an ideology, Nazism, that had body dies so that Geist may live. Physical being changes but Geist is eterpretended to give “man” a fixed, eternal contour. And with this realizanal. Geist also requires middle-class leisure: contemplation can’t happen tion of mutability, foundational beliefs—that the Menschenbild was secuif one is preoccupied with gagging and croaking. rely rooted in Western rationality—caved. It was impossible to go back to

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the way things were after Nazism had destroyed fundamental “truths” about man. The Cold War subsequently provided an escape hatch. It was obvious that Germans had to choose sides, East or West. Some critics cemented the rift by mapping cultural qualities onto geographical regions. 18 In the East, Berlin’s Kulturmagistrat encouraged a Soviet-­ style Menschenbild in which comrades could strive in solidarity for the messianic future promised by socialism. The West’s Menschenbild was different: capitalism doesn’t encourage the deferred satisfactions of the messianic worldview, it runs on near-instant gratification. Its ideal “man” is the bourgeois liberal individual, into which former Nazi Germans had to be reeducated. This isn’t to say that Americanization anaesthetized West Germany, but many Germans welcomed the opportunity to bury the body of history by transubstantiating it into inoffensive Geist. If the ensuing form of modernism was wallpaper, that made it no less expensive.

1 This essay is based on my book Reconstructing the Subject: Modernist Painting in Western Germany, 1945–1950 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). For details on Germany’s postwar publications see p. 153, n. 34. 2 See Hans Gerhard Evers, ed., Darmstädter Gespräch. Das Menschenbild in unserer Zeit (Darmstadt: Neue Darmstädter Verlagsanstalt, 1950). 3 Hitler “thought that the world was a planet covered by races rather than a globe covered by states.” Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2015), p. 241. 4 E. W. Nay, Bilder und Dokumente 1902–1968 (Munich: Prestel, 1990), p. 206. 5 Grouped around Willi Baumeister in Stuttgart, Zen 49 brought together metaphysical abstractionists. See Jochen Poetter, ed., Zen 49. Die ersten zehn Jahre–Orientierung, exh. cat. (Baden-Baden: Staatliche Kunsthalle, 1986). 6 See Günter Grass, “Geschenkte Freiheit. Versagen, Schuld, vertane Chancen,” originally published in Die Zeit 40, no. 20 (May 17, 1985), available online at www.zeit.de/1985/20/ geschenkte-freiheit/seite-5. 7 Visiting Frankfurt in 1947, the German architect and Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, in exile in the United States during the war, was “devastated”: “My only hope I place in the spirit of the older generation that finished school before Hitler. The younger generation … is cynical, and relations with them are very difficult.” Quoted in Hermann Glaser et al., Soviel Anfang war nie. deutsche Städte 1945–1949 (Berlin: Wolf Jobst Siedler Verlag, 1989), p. 221. See also Hans Grundig, “Berichte und Berechtigungen. Dresdener Bilanz. Betrachtungen zur ersten allgemeinen deutschen Kunstausstellung,” Prisma 1, no. 2 (1946): 33–34. It is also worth noting that American Abstract Expressionism wasn’t shown in Germany until the early 1950s. See my Reconstructing the Subject, pp. 77–78. 8 See Nay’s catalogue raisonné, available online at http://www.ewnay.de/werkverzeichnis.html. 9 Nay, letter to Herr Voigt, September 19, 1948. Nay file, Archiv für bildende Kunst, Nuremberg. 10 Space constraints prevent me from discussing the wrangling, especially in divided Berlin, where a Communist-led Kunstmagistrat tried to set an agenda of social realism while attacking “formalism.” But consider the case of Carl Hofer, a supporter of socialism who had the misfortune of running afoul of both the Communist leadership (for refusing to subordinate his work to Soviet “extra-artistic demands”) and West German students (for signing an address to the World Peace Congress that was published in the Communist journal Vorwärts in 1949). 11 Werner Krauss, “Über den Zustand unserer Sprache,” Die Gegenwart 2, no. 2/3 (1947): 30. 12 Joseph Fink, “Das griechische Antlitz,” Aussaat 1, no. 10/11 (1947): 39. 13 Konrad Adenauer’s slogan in the West German federal election of 1957 was “Keine Experimente!” (No experiments!) See http://www.kas.de/wf/de/71.5230/. 14 The art historian Edwin Redslob’s postwar careerism seems typical. See my Reconstructing the Subject, pp. 117–20. 15 Ernst Cassirer, “Der Mythos als politische Waffe,” Amerikanische Rundschau 3, no. 11 (1947): 34. 16 Max Picard, Hitler in uns Selbst, 1946 (Erlenbach-Zürich: Eugen Jentsch Verlag, 1949), p. 58. This edition of 1949 was the book’s third printing. 17 Cassirer, “Der Mythos als politische Waffe,” p. 34. 18 See, e.g., J. A. von Rantzau, “Geschichte und Politik im deutschen Denken,” Die Sammlung 1 (1945–46): 544–54. In von Rantzau’s view, “Eastern” thinking creates Romanticism (and is linked to the “Asiatic”), which damages “Western” (“Occidental”) rationality. In a postwar context, anti-East, anti-Soviet attitudes neatly meshed with rationalism and anti-Communism. 18 On the OMGUS–ECR (Office of Military Government for Germany, United States–Education and Cultural Relations Division) see Heibel, Reconstructing the Subject, passim, esp. pp. 126–31.

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NEW IMAGES OF MAN: POSTWAR HUMANISM AND ITS CHALLENGES IN THE WEST Sarah Wilson

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umanity is not something man simply has. He must fight for it anew in every generation and he may lose his fight. … One need only look at the dehumanizing structure of the totalitarian systems in one half of the world, and the dehumanizing consequences of technical mass civilization in the other half. In addition, the conflict there may lead to the annihilation of humanity. —Paul Tillich, New Images of Man, 19591

with rage, spirituality, compassion—even with hope or a new beauty. Expressing both pathos and human resilience, this art contrasted with the technological imagery of the future: London’s Skylon sculpture (1951), for example, or the Atomium structure built for the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair. Western European philosophy had dual origins as well in the thought of Ancient Greece (pre-Socratic, Platonic, Aristotelian) and in Christianity, with Protestant individualism countering the Vatican. Eighteenth-century Enlightenment and nineteenth-century German Romanticism would join these twin heritages to subtend modern philosophy’s arguments, its institutional edifices, and national tradiHumanism was never so passionately debated as during the aftermath tions. René Descartes’s famous proposition “I think, therefore I am,” of World War II, a period of relative stability thanks only to the fearful nominally Christian, would resonate with the atheist philosopher consensus of the Cold War. In 1959, the exhibition New Images of Man at Jean-Paul Sartre, who celebrated the 350th anniversary of Descartes’s The Museum of Modern Art in New York explored this humanism unbirth in 1946.3 To rethink the “I” in a period of mourning and psychic disarray was Sartre’s challenge. der pressure. It was the last great muse Existentialism’s influence expand­um exhibition of the twentieth century in ed to Eastern Europe and the Unitthe United States to unite European with ed States, while Sartre and Simone de American artists. Alberto Giacometti’s Beauvoir, writing in the heart of SaintTall Figure (1949) was the show’s emblem. Germain-des-Près in Paris, were the Many of the same key figures—such doyens of a movement whose appeal as the Americans Jackson Pollock and substantially impacted upon popular Willem de Kooning, Europeans Francis culture. It offered the possibility for Bacon and Jean Dubuffet, as well as influself-reinvention: man is not only “what ential though lesser-known players such he conceives himself to be” but “what he as Karel Appel—have been brought towills,” Sartre wrote, an appealing prosgether again, along with Tall Figure, in the pect to those with dreadful memories current exhibition, Postwar. or to the young born in the aftermath In Europe following the war, civof war. 4 Sartre gave his lecture “Exisilization had devoured itself: millions tentialism Is a Humanism” in October of human bodies had been physically 1945 as a riposte to the French Commudestroyed. With the dropping of atomnists against charges of individualism ic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and despair, and to the Catholics who in August 1945, mass civilian deaths accused him of irresponsible nihilism. from a devastating new breed of weapHe acknowledged a Christian strand ons joined the genocidal legacy of Nazi Fig. 1 Cover of the exhibition catalogue New Images of Man with Alberto Giacometti's sculpture Tall Figure (1949), 1959 in his thought (originating in Søren concentration camps. Realpolitik; arms Kierkegaard’s attack on Hegel) and a dealing; the desire for conquest; nastrain of existential atheism via Martin Heidegger. “Existentialism is tional, international, and supranational antagonisms—all continued not a humanism,” retorted the Communists in 1947.5 throughout the atomic age. The complex origins of humanism were The Americans, wary of the Soviet threat, began pouring money spelled out clearly in 1949 at a conference in Geneva: “There are two into Western Europe for reconstruction. The Truman Doctrine was sources of humanism: on the one hand antiquity, Greco-Roman cullaunched, followed by the Marshall Plan in 1948; the battle to discredit ture, and on the other, Christianity. In Greece, in art and thought, it Communism intensified; France would choose U.S. and NATO prois the image of man which emerged. In Christianity, man was recogtection. In contrast, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, joint editor with Sartre of nized as the image and semblance of God. And God himself became 2 Les Temps Modernes, would attempt to rationalize the Soviet system as a man.” The material fabric of Europe reflected both sources, and now the emblems of both—whether classical and neoclassical buildings “means justifying the end” in Humanism and Terror. 6 In 1946, Paris became the headquarters of the United Nations or the gothic heritage of medieval cathedrals—had been reduced to Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), estabruins or rubble. Architectural modernism banished references to lished to foster peace via transnational exchange in the three broad the past, but painting and sculpture responded to ruins and wounds

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areas that constituted the organization’s name. At its inaugural conference there was a split between “Latin” and “Anglo-Saxon” clans, with the French ideal of elite intellectual cooperation clashing immediately with the American preoccupation with the masses, with radio and television (Theodor Adorno’s despised “culture industry”).7 Meanwhile, the desire for a “unique world culture” and universal “rights of man” sat uncomfortably with UNESCO's de facto acceptance of

Linked to UNESCO, a series of conferences in Geneva debated urgent matters, notably “A New Humanism” in 1949. Here the origins of humanism were expanded beyond ancient Greek philosophy and Christianity to reference Confucian, Buddhist, and Brahmanistic thought, and contemporary constructs were brought to bear as well: structuralism, anthropology, psychoanalysis, Marxist biology, mathematics, and physiology. In the wake of the Nuremberg trials and

Fig. 2. Germain Richier. L'Eau (Water). 1953–54. Dark patinated bronze, 146 × 63 × 101 cm. Private Collection. Courtesy Dominique Lévy Gallery, New York

“non-autonomous territories”—that is, dependent colonies. Despite this tension, UNESCO's new director, the Mexican statesman and poet Jaime Torre Bodet, declared in 1948, “The Chinese and Peruvians, Arabs and the French, Australians and Turks, the Czechs and the Polish, Anglo-Saxons from Great Britain and Anglo-Saxons from America [sic], Negroes [sic] from Liberia or Indians from Mexico, Bolivia or the Equator: all have a distinctive and original voice here.” 8

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speaker Karl Jaspers’s Question of German Guilt (1946), the debate was remarkably abstract. 9 The Geneva delegates were well intentioned, conservative, middle-aged, competitive in regard to their rhetorical performances, and, of course, entirely male. In contrast, the painting and sculpture produced in the postwar period, transcending language barriers, was capable of a far more powerful dialogue of forms.

3. New Images of Man

The focus on the body was crucial. For Sartre, Giacometti’s human figures embodied the relationship between base matter (clay or bronze) and the notion that one’s identity is constituted by the gaze of an “Other” (l’Autre). The noncorresponding gazes of the male bust and female figure in Giacometti’s Cage (1950) emphasize their solitude and entrapment— and the absurd, Sartre’s crucial complement to “anguish.” Sartre also articulated the disturbing continuity of primitive instincts, between the prehistoric “man of Altamira” and the “martyrs of Buchenwald.” 10 The unleashing of killer and survival instincts in war set against the rational response—choice, engagement, altruism, even suicide—rhyme Sartre’s plays. And beyond “the gaze,” the sight of distorted, pierced, or charred sculptures provoked feelings of identification, instinctual and empathic. De Beauvoir, author of The Second Sex, declared the “Other” to be Woman (challenging Sartre). French sculptor Germaine Richier was proud of her links to Auguste Rodin, Émile-Antoine Bourdelle, and the classical tradition. Her work embodies the hybrid classical/Christian sources of humanism. Ismail Fatah’s seated female bronze figure from 1965 recalls Richier’s Water (1953–54; fig.2), incorporating a classical amphora. Richier’s well-known insect sculptures, however, looked to medieval gargoyles; her “existentialist” crucifix caused an international scandal.11 Conversely, Alina Szapocznikow was Jewish, a Holocaust survivor. Is her memorial to the Warsaw ghetto, Hand. Monument to the Heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto II (1957; plate 8), her own left hand or a gesture toward Christ’s tortured fingers nailed to the cross à la Grünewald? The work of contemporary sculptors cast in bronze necessarily implied a relationship to history and to masterpieces of the past, the sort that might feature (in photographic reproduction) in what France’s first Minister of Culture, André Malraux, famously called the musée imaginaire, or the “imaginary museum.” 12 The brutalized surfaces of postwar sculptures found an equivalent in art informel painting. Jean Fautrier’s "Otages" (Hostages) paintings originated in his sculpture: features obliter­ated, except for a crested profile, were repeated like bloody scars in the painted series. Fautrier’s surfaces refer to cave painting and prehistoric art—the discovery of the Lascaux caves in France in 1940, and the Stone Age Venus of Lespugue.13 A featureless body is all that is left in La Juive (1943; plate 1), which recalls Watteau’s fêtes galantes in its delicate pastoral palette. Painting conceals the horror of the act: the Nazi rape of a Jewish female hostage in the woods. Like Giacometti, Wols (Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze) also developed an intense relationship with Sartre; he demonstrated that art informel painting, with its traces of the hand and perceptual ambiguities, was as inscribed with the human as any figurative art.14 Wols’s painting recalls both the bomb and the body’s viscera. He asked Camille Bryen to write his 1945 catalogue; Bryen would initiate what he called the peinture-cri, shouting as he attacked the canvas, and abhumanisme, a supra- and infrahumanism “without man as we know him.”15 This inside-­ outside reading of art informel spread throughout Europe, becoming even bloodier in the liquid traces by Czech artist Vladimír Boudník. It reached farther east across Asia, to the Gutai movement in Japan and to

Korea—a nation especially prominent in the Paris Biennales of the 1960s, after the Korean War. A reaction to the “virility” of Jackson Pollock’s drip painting, art informel becomes paysagisme abstrait (abstract landscape painting) in the works of Joan Mitchell, the American artist who chose to live near Claude Monet’s gardens at Giverny. The energy and open remit of the informel explains its crucial position in Umberto Eco’s Open Work of 1962, comparable to Stéphane Mallarmé or James Joyce in literature, or to Karlheinz Stockhausen’s new music: it offered an “epistemological metaphor” of being itself.16 Jean Dubuffet adapted Fautrier’s dense pictorial matter but meta­ phorically started from scratch with his violent, graffiti-based art. He collected art brut: the work of naive artists, schizophrenics, and “outsiders.”17 In the misogynistically pink Woman’s Body—Butcher’s Slab (1950; plate 132), the nude stretches out as body, liquid, orifices, filling the oblong of the canvas; compare Full Mother (1951; plate 137), the work of Dubuffet’s Filipino friend Alfonso Ossorio, or, from London, Magda Cordell’s figure with its skeleton drawn in red-hot orange onto the skin.18 Dubuffet was now exhibiting in New York while Ossorio and Pollock were showing in France, thanks in part to Michel Tapié, the critic who coined the term informel and later art autre: an “other” kind of art.19 Pablo Picasso, once the staple of the pre- and postwar Museum of Modern Art, now caused major problems for curators—and for the FBI—as the most famous Communist in the West.20 His Massacre in Korea (1951; plate 117) became a European icon. With sources in Poussin, Manet, and Degas’s Young Spartans Exercising (1860), it was not explicit or “socialist realist” enough for the Communist apparatchiks in Paris, but in a reversal of its initial pro-Communist intent, it proved perfect for Polish anti-Communist protests against the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956.21 The ground was laid for New Images of Man at MoMA. Curator Peter Selz had grown up in Europe, then fled Nazi Germany for America in 1936. He spent 1949–50 in Paris and 1953 in Brussels—hence the concept of exhibiting art from both sides of the Atlantic. He chose Protestant theologian Paul Tillich to write the preface to the catalogue, a text that, while a powerful plea for reconciliation under the aegis of humanism, did not mention the Holocaust. But Rico Lebrun’s Buchenwald Pit (1955) and Study for Dachau Chamber (1958) were paintings in which discernible body parts and skulls demonstrated an unresolved, displaced mourning.22 Abstraction was on display, as in the five black-and-white works by Pollock, but Selz’s choices were mostly figurative; the fact that these all were from American collections signaled a major change of taste and the enthusiastic commitment of dealers. The sole European loan, Reg Butler’s Woman (1949), a “geometry of fear” sculpture, came from London’s Tate Gallery, to accompany his Unknown Political Prisoner (Project for a Monument) (1951–53).23 New Images of Man followed the triumphant return to MoMA of The New American Painting (1958–59), the exhibition whose eight-country tour exemplified the devastatingly effective push of American “soft power” into Europe.24 “The Unknown Political Prisoner”

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competition in London similarly reflected the CIA’s (covert) investment in anti-Soviet propaganda. While the competition itself exposed the argument between pierced sculptures of the human form and abstract works, Butler’s winning entry was remarkable precisely because of its “inhuman,” quasi-totalitarian surveillance aerial. 25 This challenge to humanist pathos in New Images of Man signaled the end of an era, as did H. C. Westermann’s Neo-Dada assemblages, anticipating Pop, including the one-eyed Memorial to the Idea of Man If He Was an Idea (1958). 26 In Europe, the charismatic neo-Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser displaced Sartre; his texts on the Italian painter Leonardo Cremonini marked the passage to what he called “a radical antihumanism.”27 These followed a so-called “humanism quarrel” in the French

Fig. 3. Atelier of Alina Szapocznikow on Brzozowa street, Warsaw, 1965.

Communist Party in the context of Nikita Khrushchev’s Soviet thaw. It was in 1965, however, and in America—in the midst of war against Communist Vietnam—that the German émigré Erich Fromm’s international symposium Socialist Humanism managed to pierce the Iron Curtain, inviting many philosophers from Eastern Europe but also Léopold Sédar Senghor, president of Senegal, and Raya Dunayevskaya, author of Nationalism, Communism, Marxist Humanism, and the Afro-Asian Revolutions (1961).28 Forgotten in the MoMA-driven twentieth-century conception of the Western museum of modern art, artists from the East and the South now come to rejoin the humanist conversation in the current exhibition. Sartre’s 1948 text Black Orpheus, celebrating the poetry of Négritude, transposed the discourse of Self and Other onto the colonial paradigm.29 Subsequently, Martinique-born Frantz Fanon published Peau noir, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks) in 1952, reconfiguring the insights of ethnopsychiatry within the discourse of the Other. Fanon spoke at the First Congress of Black Writers and Artists—inconceivable in a still-segregated America—held in Paris in September 1956, with a follow-up in Rome three years later.30

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Let us return to Jaime Torre Bodet’s global aspirations for UNESCO in 1948. Throughout the 1950s and after, Paris experienced a focused internationalist dialogue in its art world, one where people came together from all countries and then stayed or returned to their homelands, enriched with the very spirit of “universalism” that the cultural diplomats and bureacracies of UNESCO found difficult to achieve: witness, for example, the international community represented by a slim book of 1956 on the “new school of Paris.” 31 Zao-Wou Ki from China, Avigdor Arikha from Israel, and, later, African American sculptor Barbara Chase-Riboud followed this path of intellectual discovery, fueled by artistic conviviality and personal passions.32 So did many of the artists who would ultimately appear in Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945-1965: Gerard Sekoto, the artist and jazz musician, friend of Ernest Mancoba, who left the Transvaal for Paris in 1947; Iba N’Diaye from Senegal, protégé of sculptor Ossip Zadkine, jazz aficionado and student at the École des Beaux-Arts; Charles Hossein Zenderoudi, who moved from Tehran to Paris in 1961. And the mission of Malraux was to bring the art of India to Paris on a grand scale in 1960; the art of Iran in 1961; the art of Africa, historical and contemporary, from the festival he originated in Dakar in 1966; and of Tutankhamun’s Egypt in 1967, making his “imaginary museum” a contemporary reality. The “humanism debate” became scholastic and then was eclipsed. The commodity-based imagery of Pop, geometric abstraction, Op, and kinetic art corresponded more vitally to early-1960s optimism and space-race competition. The 1959 “Kitchen Debate” in Moscow between Nikita Khrushchev and Richard Nixon has a place in history more prominent than New Images of Man. Yet the power of this art, and the global aspirations of humanist thought implicit in its forms, are given a new life and context in the current exhibition, and are all the more relevant today in contradistinction to postmodernism’s culture of instantaneity and the insatiable appetite for kitsch.

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2 Nikolai Berdyaev, Rencontres Internationales de Genève (Neuchâtel: Éditions de la Baconnière, 1948), 2:85. 3 See Jean-Paul Sartre’s introduction and selection of texts in Descartes, 1596–1650 (Geneva: Traits, 1946). 4 Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, trans. Philip Mairet (London: Methuen, 1948), p. 28. 5 Jean Kanapa, L’Existentialisme n’est pas un humanisme (Paris: Éditions Sociales, 1947). 6 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanisme et terreur. Essai sur le problème communiste (Paris: Gallimard, 1947). 7 Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung (Amsterdam: Querido, 1947). 8 Jaime Torre Bodet, quoted in Chloé Morel, Histoire de Unesco. Les Trente Premières Années, 1945–1974 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2010), p. 55. 9 See Karl Barth et al., Pour un nouvel humanisme, Rencontres Internationales de Genève (Neuchâtel: Éditions de la Baconnière, 1949), with contributions by the theologian Barth as well as Marxist Henri Lefebvre and orientalist René Grousset. 10 Sartre, “The Search for the Absolute,” in Alberto Giacometti, exh. cat. (New York: Pierre Matisse Gallery, 1948). 11 See Sarah Wilson, “A Very Great Sculptor: Germaine Richier,” in Wilson, Anna Swinbourne, and André Pieyre de Mandiargues, Germaine Richier: Sculpture, 1934–1959, exh. cat. (New York: Dominique Lévy and Galerie Perrotin), pp. 10–17. 12 See André Malraux, Museum without Walls (London: Secker and Warburg, 1965). 13 See Robert Ganzo, Lespugue (Paris: Durand, 1942), with eleven lithographs by Fautrier. 14 See Sartre, “Doigts et non-doigts,” in Wols en personne, acquarelles et dessins (Paris: Delpire, 1963), pp. 10–21. 15 Camille Bryen and Jacques Audiberti, L’Ouvre-Boîte. Colloque abhumaniste (Paris: Gallimard, 1952) 16 Umberto Eco, “The Open Work in the Visual Arts,” in The Open Work, 1962, Eng. trans. Anna Cancogni (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 84–104. 17 For further contextualization of Jean Dubuffet’s art brut see Wilson, “From the Asylum to the Museum: Marginal Art in Paris and New York, 1938–1968,” in Parallel Visions: Modern Artists and Outsider Art, ed. Maurice Tuchman and Carol S. Eliel (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1992), pp. 120–49. 18 Jean Dubuffet, Peintures initiatiques d’Alfonso Ossorio (Paris: La Pierre Volante, 1951). Ossorio wrote the preface for Jackson Pollock’s first show in Paris and later housed Dubuffet’s art brut on Long Island. 19 Michel Tapié, Un Art autre, où il s’agit de nouveaux dévidages du réel (Paris: Giraud, 1952). 20 See Wilson, “Loyalty and Blood: Picasso’s FBI File,” in Picasso and the Politics of Visual Representation, ed. Jonathan Harris and Richard Koeck (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), pp. 110–24. 21 See Wilson, Picasso/Marx and Socialist Realism in France (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), pp. 154–61, 174–75. 22 Rico Lebrun, artist’s chapter, in Selz, New Images of Man, pp. 96–101. Naples-born, Lebrun emigrated to the United States in 1924. 23 For “geometry of fear” see Herbert Read, New Aspects of British Sculpture, exh. cat. (Venice: XXVI Venice Biennale, British Pavilion, 1952), n.p. 24 The New American Painting, as Shown in Eight European Countries 1958–1959 (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1959). 25 Reg Butler also references the Crucifixion, however. See Robert Burstow, “The Limits of Modernist Art as a ‘Weapon of the Cold War,’” The Oxford Art Journal 20, no. 1 (1997): 68– 80, and Axel Lapp, “The Freedom of Sculpture–The Sculpture of Freedom …,” The Sculpture Journal 2 (1998): 113–22. 26 H. C. Westermann, artist’s chapter, in Selz, New Images of Man, pp. 141–45. 27 Louis Althusser, “Cremonini, peintre de l’abstrait” [1964–66], in Écrits philosophiques et politiques (Paris: Stock/IMEC, 1997), pp. 592–609. 28 Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Socialism Is a Humanism,” in Socialist Humanism, ed. Erich Fromm (New York: Doubleday, 1965–66), pp. 53–67; and Raya Dunayevskaya, “Marx’s Humanism Today,” in ibid., pp. 68–83. 29 Senghor, ed., Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malagache de la langue française, précédé d’ “Orphée noir” de Jean-Paul Sartre (Paris: PUF, 1948). 30 “Présence Africaine,” Le 1er Congrès international des écrivains et artistes noirs, Paris, Sorbonne, 19–22 septembre 1956, nos. 8–10 (June–November, 1956). 31 Hubert Juin, Seize peintres de la jeune école de Paris (Paris: Georges Fall, 1956), featured artists from Algieria, Belgium, France, Holland, Japan, Poland, Switzerland, and the United States. 32 See Jean-Hubert Martin and Thierry Raspail, eds., Partage d'exotismes: 5e. Biennale d'art 1 Paul Tillich, “A Prefatory Note by Paul Tillich,” in Peter Selz, New Images of Man, exh. cat.

contemporain de Lyon, 2 vols. (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 2000), and Martine

(New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1959), p. 9.

Franck and Germain Viatte, From Other Lands, Artists in Paris (Arles: Actes Sud, 2011).

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REMEMBERING FANON: SELF, PSYCHE AND THE COLONIAL CONDITION Homi K. Bhabha

3. New Images of Man

O my body, make of me always a man who questions! —Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 1952

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emories of Frantz Fanon tend to the mythical. He is either revered as the prophetic spirit of Third World liberation or reviled as an exterminating angel, the inspiration to violence in the Black Power movement. Despite his historic participation in the Algerian revolution and the influence of his ideas on the race politics of the 1960s and ’70s, Fanon’s work will not be possessed by one political moment or movement, nor can it be easily placed in a seamless narrative of liberationist history. Fanon refuses to be so completely claimed by events or eventualities. It is the sustaining irony of his work that his severe commitment to the political task in hand never restricted the restless, inquiring movement of his thought. It is not for the finitude of philosophical thinking nor for the finality of a political direction that we turn to Fanon. Heir to the ingenuity and artistry of Toussaint L’Ouverture and Léopold Sédar Senghor, as well as to the iconoclasm of Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and JeanPaul Sartre, Fanon is the purveyor of the transgressive and transitional truth. He may yearn for the total transformation of Man and Society, but he speaks most effectively from the uncertain interstices of historical change: from the area of ambivalence between race and sexuality; out of an unresolved contradiction between culture and class; from deep within the struggle of psychic representation and social reality. To read Fanon is to experience the sense of division that prefigures—and fissures—the emergence of a truly radical thought that never dawns without casting an uncertain dark. His voice is most clearly heard in the subversive turn of a familiar term, in the silence of a sudden rupture: “The Negro is not. Any more than the white man.” The awkward division that breaks his line of thought keeps alive the dramatic and enigmatic sense of the process of change. That familiar alignment of colonial subjects— Black/White, Self/Other—is disturbed with one brief pause and the traditional grounds of racial identity are dispersed, whenever they are found to rest in the narcissistic myths of Négritude or white cultural supremacy. It is this palpable pressure of division and displacement that pushes Fanon’s writing to the edge of things, the cutting edge that reveals no ultimate radiance but, in his words, “exposes an utterly naked declivity where an authentic upheaval can be born.” […] As Fanon attempts such audacious, often impossible transformations of truth and value, the jagged testimony of colonial dislocation, its displacement of time and person, its defilement of culture and territory, refuses the ambition of any “total” theory of colonial oppression. The Antillean evolué cut to the quick by the glancing look of a frightened,

confused white child; the stereotype of the native fixed at the shifting boundaries between barbarism and civility; the insatiable fear and desire for the Negro: “Our women are at the mercy of Negroes. ... God knows how they make love”; the deep cultural fear of the black figured in the psychic trembling of Western sexuality—it is these signs and symptoms of the colonial condition that drive Fanon from one conceptual scheme to another, while the colonial relation takes shape in the gaps between them, articulated in the intrepid engagements of his style. As Fanon’s text unfolds, the “scientific” fact comes to be aggressed by the experience of the street; sociological observations are intercut with literary artifacts, and the poetry of liberation is brought up short against the leaden, deadening prose of the colonized world … . What is this distinctive force of Fanon’s vision that has been forming even as I write about the division, the displacement, the cutting edge of his thought? It comes, I believe, from the tradition of the oppressed, as Walter Benjamin suggests; it is the language of a revolutionary awareness that “the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a concept of history that is in keeping with this insight.” And the state of emergency is also always a state of emergence. The struggle against colonial oppression not only changes the direction of Western history but challenges its historicist “idea” of time as a progressive, ordered whole. The analysis of colonial depersonalization not only alienates the Enlightenment idea of “Man” but challenges the transparency of social reality as a pregiven image of human knowledge. If the order of Western historicism is disturbed in the colonial state of emergency, even more deeply disturbed is the social and psychic representation of the human subject. For the very nature of humanity becomes estranged in the colonial condition, and from that “naked declivity” it emerges, not as an assertion of will nor as an evocation of freedom, but as an enigmatic questioning. With a question that echoes Freud’s What does woman want?, Fanon turns to confront the colonized world. “What does a man want?” he asks, in the introduction to Black Skin, White Masks, “What does the black man want?” To this loaded question where cultural alienation bears down on the ambivalence of psychic identification, Fanon responds with an agonizing performance of self-images: I had to meet the white man’s eyes. An unfamiliar weight burdened me. In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema. ... I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects. ... I took myself far off from my own presence. ... What else could it be for me but an amputation, an excision, a hemorrhage that spattered my whole body with black blood? From within the metaphor of vision complicit with a Western metaphysic of man emerges the displacement of the colonial relation. The black presence ruins the representative narrative of Western personhood: its past tethered to treacherous stereotypes of primitivism and

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degeneracy will not produce a history of civil progress, a space for the Socius; its present, dismembered and dislocated, will not contain the image of identity that is questioned in the dialectic of mind/body and resolved in the epistemology of “appearance and reality.” The white man’s eyes break up the black man’s body and in that act of epistemic violence its own frame of reference is transgressed, its field of vision disturbed. “What does the black man want?” Fanon insists, and in privileging the psychic dimension he changes not only what we understand by a political demand but transforms the very means by which we recognize and identify its human agency. Fanon is not principally posing the question of political oppression as the violation of a human essence, although he lapses into such a lament in his more existential moment. He is not raising the question of colonial man in the universalist terms of the liberal-humanist (“How does colonialism deny the Rights of Man?”); nor is he posing an ontological question about man’s being (“Who is the alienated colonial man?”). Fanon’s question is not addressed to such a unified notion of history nor such a unitary concept of man. It is one of the original and disturbing qualities of Black Skin, White Masks that it rarely historicizes the colonial experience. There is no master narrative or realist perspective that provide a background of social and historical facts against which emerge the problems of the individual or collective psyche. Such a traditional sociological alignment of self and society or history and psyche is rendered questionable in Fanon’s identification of the colonial subject, who is historicized as it comes to be heterogeneously inscribed in the texts of history, literature, science, myth. The colonial subject is always “overdetermined from without,” Fanon writes. It is through image and fantasy—those orders that figure transgressively on the borders of history and the unconscious—that Fanon most profoundly evokes the colonial condition. […] For Fanon such a myth of man and society is fundamentally undermined in the colonial situation where everyday life exhibits a “constellation of delirium” that mediates the normal social relations of its subjects: “The Negro enslaved by his inferiority, the white man enslaved by his superiority alike behave in accordance with a neurotic orientation.” Fanon’s demand for a psychoanalytic explanation emerges from the perverse reflections of “civil virtue” in the alienating acts of colonial governance: the visibility of cultural “mummification” in the colonizer’s avowed ambition to civilize or modernize the native, which results in “archaic inert institutions [that function] under the oppressor’s supervision like a caricature of formerly fertile institutions”; or the validity of violence in the very definition of the colonial social space; or the viability of the febrile, fantasmatic images of racial hatred that come to be absorbed and acted out in the wisdom of the West. These interpositions, indeed collaborations of political and psychic violence within civic virtue, alienation within identity, drive Fanon

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to describe the splitting of the colonial space of consciousness and society as marked by a “Manichean delirium.” The representative figure of such a perversion, I want to suggest, is the image of post-Enlightenment man tethered to, not confronted by, his dark reflection, the shadow of colonized man, which splits his presence, distorts his outline, breaches his boundaries, repeats his action at a distance, disturbs and divides the very time of his being. This ambivalent identification of the racist world—moving on two planes without being in the least embarrassed by it, as Sartre says of the anti-Semitic consciousness—turns on the idea of man as his alienated image, not self and other but the “otherness” of the self inscribed in the perverse palimpsest of colonial identity. And it is that bizarre figure of desire, which splits along the axis on which it turns, that compels Fanon to put the psychoanalytic question of the desire of the subject to the historic condition of colonial man. “What is often called the black soul is a white man’s artefact,” Fanon writes. This transference, I’ve argued, speaks otherwise. It reveals the deep psychic uncertainty of the colonial relation itself: its split representations stage the division of “body” and “soul” that enacts the artifice of “identity”; a division that cuts across the fragile skin—black and white—of individual and social authority. What emerges from the figurative language I have used to make such an argument are three conditions that underlie an understanding of the process of identification in the analytic of desire. First: to exist is to be called into being in relation to an otherness, its look or locus. It is a demand that reaches outward to an external object, and, as J. Rose writes, “it is the relation of this demand to the place of the object it claims that becomes the basis for identification.” This process is visible in the exchange of looks between native and settler that structures their psychic relation in the paranoid fantasy of boundless possession and its familiar language of reversal: “when their glances meet [the settler] ascertains bitterly, always on the defensive, ‘They want to take our place.’ It is true for there is no native who does not dream at least once a day of setting himself up in the settler’s place.” It is always in relation to the place of the other that colonial desire is articulated; it is, in part, the fantasmatic space of “possession” that no one subject can singly occupy that permits the dream of the inversion of roles. Second: the very place of identification, caught in the tension of demand and desire, is a space of splitting. The fantasy of the native is precisely to occupy the master’s place while keeping his place in the slave’s avenging anger. “Black skins, white masks” is not, for example, a neat division; it is a doubling, dissembling image of being in at least two places at once, which makes it impossible for the devalued, insatiable evolué (an abandonment neurotic, Fanon claims) to accept the colonizer’s invitation to identity: “You’re a doctor, a writer, a student, you’re different, you’re one of us.” It is precisely in that ambivalent use of “different”—to be different from those that are different makes you the same—that the unconscious speaks of the form of otherness, the

3. New Images of Man

tethered shadow of deferral and displacement. It is not the colonialist self or the colonized other but the disturbing distance in-between that constitutes the figure of colonial otherness—the white man’s artifice inscribed on the black man’s body. It is in relation to this impossible object that emerges the liminal problem of colonial identity and its vicissitudes. Finally, as has already been disclosed by the rhetorical figures of my account of desire and otherness, the question of identification is never the affirmation of a pregiven identity, never a self-fulfilling prophecy—it is always the production of an “image” of identity and of the transformation of the subject in assuming that image. The demand of identification— that is, to be for an other—entails the representation of the subject in the differentiating order of otherness. Identification, as we inferred from the illustrations above, is always the return of an image of identity that bears the mark of splitting in that “other” place from which it comes. For Fanon, as for Jacques Lacan, the primary moments of such a repetition of the self lie in the desire of the look and the limits of language. The “atmosphere of certain uncertainty” that surrounds the body certifies its existence and threatens its dismemberment.

narrative of fulfilment or an imaginary coincidence between individual interest or instinct and the general will. […]

In his more analytic mode Fanon can impede the exploration of these ambivalent, uncertain questions of colonial desire. The state of emergency from which he writes demands more insurgent answers, more immediate identifications. At times Fanon attempts too close a correspondence between the miseen-­scène of unconscious fantasy and the phantoms of racist fear and hate that stalk the colonial scene; he turns too hastily from the ambivalences of identification to the antagonistic identities of political alienation and cultural discrimination; he is too quick to name the other, to personalize its presence in the language of colonial racism—“the real Other for the white man is and will continue to be the black man. And conversely.” These attempts, in Fanon’s words, to restore the dream to its proper political time and cultural space can, at times, blunt the edge of Fanon’s brilliant illustrations of the complexity of psychic projections in the pathological colonial relation. Jean Veneuse, the Antillean evolué, desires Look, a Negro! … Mama, see the not merely to be in the place of the Negro! I’m frightened! … I could white man but compulsively seeks no longer laugh, because I already to look back and down on himknow there were legends, stories, self from that position. The white history and above all historicity … man does not merely deny what he Then, assailed at various points, fears and desires by projecting it on Fig. 1. Marc Riboud. Algiers, July 1st 1962 (Women in Algiers stand in front of a the corporal schema crumbled, its “them”; Fanon sometimes forgets wall painted with the word “oui” [“yes”] on the day of the Algerian independence referendum). 1962. Photography place taken by a racial epidermal that paranoia never preserves its poschema … It was no longer a quessition of power, for the compulsive tion of being aware of my body in the third person but in a triple peridentification with a persecutory “They” is always an evacuation and son … I was responsible for my body, for my race, for my ancestors. emptying of the “I”. Fanon’s sociodiagnostic psychiatry tends to explain away the In reading Black Skin, White Masks it is crucial to respect the difambivalent turns and returns of the subject of colonial desire, its masference between “personal identity” as an intimation of reality, or an querade of Western man and the “long” historical perspective. It is intuition of being, and the psychoanalytic problem of identification as if Fanon is fearful of his most radical insights: that the space of the that, in a sense, always begs the question of the subject—“What does body and its identification is a representational reality; that the polia man want?” The emergence of the human subject as socially and tics of race will not be entirely contained within the humanist myth psychically authenticated depends upon the negation of an originary of man or economic necessity or historical progress, for its psychic

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affects question such forms of determinism; that social sovereignty and human subjectivity are only realizable in the order of otherness. It is as if the question of desire that emerged from the traumatic tradition of the oppressed has to be denied, at the end of Black Skin, White Masks, to make way for an existentialist humanism that is as banal as it is beatific: Why not the quite simple attempt to touch the other, to feel the other, to explain the other to myself? … At the conclusion of this study, I want the world to recognize, with me, the open door of every consciousness. Such a deep hunger for humanism, despite Fanon’s insight into the dark side of man, must be an overcompensation for the closed consciousness or “dual narcissism” to which he attributes the depersonalization of colonial man: “There one lies body to body, with one’s blackness or one’s whiteness in full narcissistic cry, each sealed into his own particularity—with, it is true, now and then a flash or so.” It is this flash of “recognition”—in its Hegelian sense, with its transcendental, sublative spirit—that fails to ignite in the colonial relation, where there is only narcissistic indifference: “And yet the Negro knows there is a difference. He wants it … . The former slave needs a challenge to his humanity.” In the absence of such a challenge, Fanon argues, the colonized can only imitate, never identify, a distinction nicely made by the psychoanalyst Annie Reich: “It is imitation … when the child holds the newspaper like his father. It is identification when the child learns to read.” In disavowing the culturally differentiated condition of the colonial world—in demanding Turn White or disappear—the colonizer is himself caught in the ambivalence of paranoic identification, alternating between fantasies of megalomania and persecution. However, Fanon’s Hegelian dream for a human reality in itself-for-itself is ironized, even mocked, by his view of the Manichaean structure of colonial consciousness and its nondialectical division. What he says in The Wretched of the Earth of the demography of the colonial city reflects his view of the psychic structure of the colonial relation. The native and settler zones, like the juxtaposition of black and white bodies, are opposed, but not in the service of “a higher unity.” No conciliation is possible, he concludes, for of the two terms one is superfluous. No, there can be no reconciliation, no Hegelian “recognition,” no simple, sentimental promise of a humanistic “world of the You.” Can there be life without transcendence? Politics with­out the dream of perfectibility? Unlike Fanon, I think the nondialectical moment of Manichaeanism suggests an answer. By following the trajectory of colonial desire—in the company of that bizarre colonial figure, the tethered shadow—it becomes possible to cross, even to shift the Manichaean boundaries. Where there is no human nature, hope can hardly spring eternal; but it emerges surely and surreptitiously in the strategic return of that difference that informs and deforms the image of identity, in the margin of otherness that displays identification. There may be no Hegelian negation but Fanon must sometimes be reminded that the disavowal

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of the other always exacerbates the “edge” of identification, reveals that dangerous place where identity and aggressivity are twinned. For denial is always a retroactive process; a half acknowledgment of that Otherness which has left its traumatic mark. In that uncertainty lurks the white-masked black man; and from such ambivalent identification—black skin, white masks—it is possible, I believe, to redeem the pathos of cultural confusion into a strategy of political subversion. We cannot agree with Fanon that “since the racial drama is played out in the open the black man has no time to make it unconscious,” but that is a provocative thought. In occupying two places at once—or three, in Fanon’s case—the depersonalized, dislocated colonial subject can become an incalculable object, quite literally, difficult to place. The demand of authority cannot unify its message nor simply identify its subjects. For the strategy of colonial desire is to stage the drama of identity at the point at which the black mask slips to reveal the white skin. At that edge, in between the black body and the white body, there is a tension of meaning and being, or some would say of demand and desire, which is the psychic counterpart to the “muscular tension” that inhabits the native body: The symbols of social order—the police, the bugle calls in the barracks, military parades and the waving flags—are at one and the same time inhibitory and stimulating: for they do not convey the message “Don’t dare to budge”; rather, they cry out “Get ready to attack.” It is from that tension—both psychic and political—that a strategy of subversion emerges. It is a mode of negation that seeks not to unveil the fullness of man but to manipulate his representation. It is a form of power that is exercised at the very limits of identity and authority, in the mocking spirit of mask and image; it is the lesson taught by the veiled Algerian woman in the course of the revolution as she crossed the Manichaean lines to claim her liberty. In Fanon’s essay “Algeria Unveiled” the colonizer’s attempt to unveil the Algerian woman does not simply turn the veil into a symbol of resistance; it becomes a technique of camouflage, a means of struggle—the veil conceals bombs. The veil that once secured the boundary of the home—the limits of woman—now masks the woman in her revolutionary activity, linking the Arab city and the French quarter, transgressing the familial and colonial boundary. As the “veil” is liberated in the public sphere, circulating between and beyond cultural and social norms and spaces, it becomes the object of paranoid surveillance and interrogation. Every veiled woman, writes Fanon, became suspect. And when the veil is shed in order to penetrate deeper into the European quarter, the colonial police see everything and nothing. An Algerian woman is only, after all, a woman. But the Algerian fidai is an arsenal and in her handbag she carries her hand grenades. Remembering Fanon is a process of intense discovery and dis­ orientation. Remembering is never a quiet act of introspection or retrospection. It is a painful remembering, a putting together of the

3. New Images of Man

dismembered past to make sense of the trauma of the present. It is such a memory of the history of race and racism, colonialism and the question of cultural identity, that Fanon reveals with greater profundity and poetry than any other writer. What he achieves, I believe, is something far greater: for in seeing the phobic image of the Negro, the native, the colonized, deeply woven into the psychic pattern of the West, he offers the master and slave a deeper reflection of their interpositions, as well as the hope of a difficult, even dangerous freedom: “It is through the effort to recapture the self and to scrutinize the self, it is through the lasting tension of their freedom that men will be able to create the ideal conditions of existence for a human world.” Nobody writes with more honesty and insight of this lasting tension of freedom in which the self—the peremptory self of the present—disavows an image of itself as an orginary past or an ideal future and confronts the paradox of its own making. For Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks, there is the intricate irony of turning the European existentialist and psychoanalytic traditions to face the history of the Negro, which they had never contemplated—to face the reality of Fanon himself. This leads to a meditation on the experience of dispossession and dislocation—psychic and social—that speaks to the condition of the marginalized, the alienated, those who have to live under the surveillance of a sign of identity and fantasy that denies their difference. In shifting the focus of cultural racism from the politics of nationalism to the politics of narcissism, Fanon opens up a margin of interrogation that causes a subversive slippage of identity and authority. Nowhere is this slippage more visible than in his work itself, where a range of texts and traditions—from the classical repertoire to the quotidian, conversational culture of racism—vie to utter that last word which remains unspoken. In the case of display … the play of combat in the form of intimidation, the being gives of himself, or receives from the other, something that is like a mask, a double, an envelope, a thrown-off skin, thrown off in order to cover the frame of a shield. It is through this separated form of himself that the being comes into play in his effects of life and death. —Jacques Lacan The time has come to return to Fanon; as always, I believe, with a question: how can the human world live its difference? How can a human being live Other-wise?

A longer version of this essay was published initially as a foreword to: Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 1952, Eng. trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto Press, 1986), pp. vii-xxvi.

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NEW IMAGES OF MAN Plates

Affandi Fateh Al-Moudarres Frank Auerbach Francis Bacon Georg Baselitz Magda Cordell Willem de Kooning Alén Diviš Jean Dubuffet Ibrahim El Salahi

Ben Enwonwu Ismail Fattah Alberto Giacometti Leon Golub Philip Guston Maqbool Fida Husain Asger Jorn Marwan Kassab-Bachi Ivan Kožaric´ Wifredo Lam

Maria Lassnig Luis Felipe Noé Colette Oluwabamise Omogbai On Kawara Alfonso Ossorio A. R. Penck Pablo Picasso Gerhard Richter Gerard Sekoto

Jewad Selim David Alfaro Siqueiros Lucas Sithole Francis Newton Souza Alina Szapocznikow Rufino Tamayo Tony Tuckson Jack Whitten

117 Pablo Picasso Massacre en Corée (Massacre in Korea) 1951 oil on plywood Musée national Picasso, Paris

359

118

Ibrahim El Salahi Funeral and the Crescent 1963 oil on hardboard Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca

119

Ibrahim El Salahi Self-Portrait of Suffering 1961 oil on canvas Iwalewahaus, Universität Bayreuth

361

120 Francis Bacon Pope 1955-56 oil on canvas Brooklyn Museum, New York

121 Alberto Giacometti La cage (première version) (The Cage [first version]) 1949-50 bronze Fondation Giacometti, Paris

363

Alberto Giacometti La Clairière (The Clearing) 1950 bronze Fondation Giacometti, Paris

122

Alberto Giacometti Grande figure II (Tall Figure II) 1948-49 plaster Fondation Giacometti, Paris

123

Alberto Giacometti Femme de Venise IX (Woman of Venice IX) 1956 (cast 1958) bronze with black patina North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh

124 367

Lucas Sithole Lazarus I 1961 bronze Laurie Slatter

125

126

128

127

Ismail Fattah

Ismail Fattah

Ismail Fattah

Reclining Man and Shield 1960 bronze with brown patina on natural bronze base QM/QF - Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha

Untitled 1965 bronze with brown patina on natural bronze base QM/QF - Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha

Untitled 1965 bronze sculpture Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah

369

Ben Enwonwu Anyanwu 1954-55 bronze Private Collection

129

130

Willem de Kooning Woman 1953-54 oil on paper board Brooklyn Museum, New York

131

Willem de Kooning Woman 1952 pastel and pencil on paper Glenstone Museum, Potomac

373

132

Jean Dubuffet Corps de dame – Pièce de boucherie (Woman’s Body – Butcher’s Slab) 1950 oil on canvas Fondation Beyeler, Basel

133

Jean Dubuffet La dame au Pompon 1946 mixed media, oil on canvas National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

375

134 Wifredo Lam Lunguanda Yembe 1950 oil on canvas Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon

135 Wifredo Lam Seated Woman 1955 oil and charcoal on canvas Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

377

Magda Cordell Figure 59 c. 1958 oil and acrylic on Masonite Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo

136

137

Alfonso Ossorio Full Mother 1951 oil and enamel on canvas Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, LLC, New York

379

138

Asger Jorn Il Delinquente (The Delinquent) 1956 oil on canvas Galerie van de Loo, Munich

139

Asger Jorn De gule Øjne (Yellow Eyes) 1953 oil on Masonite Galerie van de Loo, Munich

381

140

Frank Auerbach E.O.W. Looking into the Fire I 1962 oil on paper board Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

141

Fateh Al-Moudarres Untitled 1962 mixed media on canvas QM/QF - Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha

383

142

Rufino Tamayo Terror cósmico (Cosmic Terror) 1947 oil on canvas INBA/Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico City

143

Philip Guston The Tormentors 1947-48 oil on canvas San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

385

144 Georg Baselitz Große Nacht im Eimer (Big Night down the Drain) 1962-63 oil on canvas Private Collection

145 Georg Baselitz Der Soldat (The Soldier) 1965 oil on canvas Kunstmuseum Bonn, Permanent loan from a Private Collection

387

Gerhard Richter Neger (Nuba) (Negroes [Nuba]) 1964 oil on canvas Larry Gagosian

146

389

147

Jack Whitten Head I 1964 acrylic on canvas Collection of the Artist, New York

148

Jack Whitten Head IV 1964 acrylic on canvas Collection of the Artist, New York

391

149

Jack Whitten Head VII 1964 acrylic on canvas Collection of the Artist, New York

150

Jack Whitten Head VIII 1964 acrylic on canvas Collection of the Artist, New York

393

151

A.R. Penck Umsturz (Coup d'Etat) 1965 oil on canvas

395

152 Leon Golub L´Homme de Palmyre 1962 lacquer on canvas Hauser & Wirth, New York

397

153

Francis Newton Souza Head of a Man Thinking 1965 oil on canvas Collection Amrita Jhaveri

154

Francis Newton Souza Two Saints (After El Greco) 1965 oil on canvas Grosvenor Gallery, London

399

155 Maqbool Fida Husain Man 1951 wood, metal, Masonite, oil Peabody Essex Museum, Salem

401

156

Alén Diviš Maska ticha (Mask of Silence) 1947 oil on canvas National Gallery in Prague

157

On Kawara Thinking Man 1952 oil on canvas Chiba City Museum of Art

403

159 158

Maria Lassnig

Maria Lassnig

Selbstporträt mit Ordenskette (Self-portrait with Livery Collar) 1963 oil on canvas Klewan Collection, Munich

Schwarzer Kopf des Vaters (Black Head of the Father) 1956/57 oil on fiberboard Maria Lassnig Foundation, Vienna

160

Alina Szapocznikow Head VII 1961 Lead The Estate of Alina Szapocznikow, Paris

405

161

Tony Tuckson Black Woman, Half Length 1956 oil on paperboard Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

162

Marwan Kassab-Bachi Das Bein 1965 oil on canvas Collection of the Artist

407

163

Luis Felipe Noé ¿A donde vamos? O presente (Where Are We Going? Or Present) 1964 oil, paper collage, synthetic on canvas and wood Collection of the Artist

164

David Siqueiros Cain in the United States 1947 pyroxlin on Masonite Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil – Secretaria de Cultura – INBA, Mexico City

409

165

A.R. Penck Elektrischer Stuhl (Electric Chair) 1959-60 oil on Masonite Private Collection

166

Affandi Pengemis Cirebon (Beggar in Cirebon) 1960 oil on canvas Museum Lippo, Jakarta

411

167

Gerard Sekoto Prison Yard 1944 oil on canvas Gordon Schachat Collection, Johannesburg

168

169

Jewad Selim

Gerard Sekoto

Untitled 1951 oil on canvas Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah

Head of a Man 1962 watercolor on paper Grosvenor Gallery, London

413

Ivan Kožari c´ Figura (Figure) 1956 bronze Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb

170

171

Colette Oluwabamise Omogbai Agony 1963 oil on hardboard Iwalewahaus, Universität Bayreuth

415

Section Introduction Alejandro Anreus Ekaterina Degot Anneka Lenssen Gao Minglu Nikolas Drosos and Romy Golan Plates

4 REALISMS

REALISMS

A

n important aesthetic feature of the Cold War binary was the Socialist Realism of the Soviet Union, China, and Eastern and Central Europe. Here, to a greater extent than in the Western countries, institutional appropriation came before artistic production, not after it. Yet accounts of this category are often narrow. Even in the heyday of its governmental enforcement, Socialist Realism was not a single style. Under Mao Zedong, Chinese artists produced large official portraits of the chairman and scenes depicting model workers, but they also made traditional ink paintings, if adding appropriate symbols of the new order, such as the red flag. In the Soviet Union, art from the 1940s to Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953 is primarily characterized by affirmative images of labor and, especially, by heroic images of party leaders. During the post-Stalinist thaw, genre work influenced by the nineteenth-century “Wanderers” school of Russian painting became more prominent, as well as the “severe” style, influenced by Soviet art of the 1920s and early ’30s. Outside the Soviet Union there was considerably more latitude for officially sanctioned artists, and their works, while depicting authorized subjects, introduced personal drawing styles and Surrealist elements. The “Realisms” section of the exhibition also features the similarly ideological and popular work of artists in other parts of the world and from different points on the political spectrum, from the United States to Mexico, Western Europe, and the Middle East. Along with some works of moderate size intended for museums, this section emphasizes enormous public works, popular prints, and documentation.

Introduction

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WHATEVER HAPPENED TO REALISM AFTER 1945? FIGURATION AND POLITICS IN THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE Alejandro Anreus

4. Realisms

I

n the early 1920s the Mexican muralists José Clemente Orozformal experimentation. If in 1932 Siqueiros had defined his realism as co, Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and others created a “dialective-subversive” painting rooted in an antianecdotal formalfigurative language that was monumental, narrative, and pubism,5 after World War II he began to utilize the terms “critical realism,” “new integral formalism,” and “new realism”6 to define his production. lic. Their styles had certain visual connections with European At the same time, he began to critique apolitical artists like Rufino trends associated with the “return to order” in art after World Tamayo and the academic Socialist Realism of the USSR and its allies. War I, and shared an ideological agenda fueled by the evolving Ironically, while Siqueiros’s mural work became a parody of itself politics following the consolidation of the Mexican Revoluin the 1950s, his easel pictures from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s tion in the early 1920s. In the period between the two Eurocontinued to be engaging in their formal concerns while their content pean world wars, Mexican muralism was one of the most influential acquired a powerful symbolic dimension. Even so, the postrevolutionary avant-garde movements in the Western hemisphere, affecting artists in 1 Mexican state that had stabilized its identity and power after World War both Latin America and the United States. The height of the presence and influence of Orozco, Rivera, and Siqueiros among the internationII was cleverly able to co-opt the formal vocabulary of both Siqueiros and al avant-garde coincided with the antifascist and Popular Front poliRivera while divesting it of its original revolutionary content. When the tics of the 1930s. After the war, however, their place in the discourse of novelist José Revueltas, in 1967, accused both the late Rivera and the still modern art dramatically shifted: they went from key avant-garde artactive Siqueiros of having painted murals that functioned as ideological 2 ists before 1945 to ideological and aesthetic casualties of the Cold War. fetishes and deformed concepts serving the “national myth of Mexico” By the late 1940s, Rivera’s art had promoted by the Mexican state, settled into a mannered and sentiRevueltas was lucidly framing the conmental vocabulary that bordered on tinuity of Mexican muralism after 1945.7 Photography became a source the folkloric. This was not the case of imagery for Siqueiros; in the years with either Orozco or Siqueiros. In from 1945 to 1956, he came to believe 1944 Orozco began the easel work that photography could replace drawLa victoria (Victory; fig. 1), a violently ing as the primary preparatory medipainted piece depicting a grotesque um for painting, and he himself would female nude waving a flag. She is surpose and set up the shots. 8 A work like rounded by a burning ocean with exNuestra imagen actual (Our Current plosions on the distant horizon, while Image, 1947), which is based on a phoa horde of skeletal Holocaust survivors tograph of the artist, manifests a trougesticulates and screams to her lowbling combination of force (the muscuer right. The overall palette is of reds, lar body) and alienation (a dense stone oranges, purples, and dirty browns. for a head, container of both the intelOrozco, a former anarchist, saw the lect and the senses). Thus Siqueiros emerging postwar world as fraught Fig. 1. José Clemente Orozco. La victoria (Victory). 1944. Oil on canvas, 51 × 62 cm. Collection Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, INBA, Mexico City represents the West as a powerful monwith new holocausts, atomic exploster whose redemptive option may be a sions, and a noxious Pax Americana. Communist revolution. Caín en los Estados Unidos (Cain in the United Two years before his death, in 1949, he completed a series of large panStates, 1947; plate 164) takes up a theme Siqueiros had depicted earlier: el paintings titled “Los teules” (The White Gods). Superficially about the the lynching of African Americans. A white mob, with strong white brutal encounter between the Spanish conquistadors and the natives bodies but the heads of birds of prey, forms a unit that drags a tied-up of Mexico, they are also about empire and colonialism, as ruthless in black man from a jail cell. In such a work Siqueiros is not just referencthe late 1940s as in the 1500s. Toward the end of Orozco’s life, his reing the continuing reality of lynching in the world’s leading capitalist alism had evolved into a language where bold drawing and an acidic democracy but possibly also reflecting the brutality of colonialism for palette served an enraged expressionism. people of color. In 1946, Siqueiros was readmitted to the Mexican Communist Party. 3 In the 1950s, Siqueiros’s life became a kind of road movie throughExpelled from it in 1930, he had remained a vociferous theorist of mural painting and a hardline Stalinist throughout the 1930s and early out the Third World—he visited China, India, Egypt, and Cuba, arguing ’40s. In 1944, back in Mexico after a period of exile, he created the Centro for a kind of realism that had a social function but did not degenerate into de Arte Realista, a platform for his definition of a politically charged, non­ Soviet Socialist Realism, which was academic, formulaic, and mechaniillustrative realism. 4 The following year he received a mural commission cal.9 His visit to Egypt seems to have impacted the early work on paper of Inji Efflatoun, with its massive forms and social content. In India he was from the Mexican government wherein he continued his technical and

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feted and embraced by the government of Jawaharlal Nehru, but artists such as the Progressive Artists Group preferred the mythic and painterly work of Rufino Tamayo.10 In Europe, Siqueiros's efforts to propose an alternative to Socialist Realism found common ground with fellow Communist painters like Renato Guttuso and Júlio Pomar. Yet where their paintings became more expressive in the 1960s, and politically embraced Euro-Communist positions by the 1970s, the Mexican could not evolve and grow. Paradoxically, Siqueiros’s attempt to practice and promote a realism that had social agency, pictorial rigor, and ran counter to Soviet officialdom, was critically absorbed by artists who embraced an irreverent figuration in the early 1960s, such as Argentina’s Antonio Berni (1905–1981) and Carlos Alonso (b. 1929).11 After the end of Juan Perón’s dictatorship in

collage and depicting butchers at work, the kitchens and bedrooms of working-class people, and solitary children playing in abandoned urban parks. The works took on the rough, ragged surface of arte povera to communicate a harshness akin to Italian neorealism in all its mediums. Rejecting sentimentality for a kind of brutalism, Alonso’s realism is charged with an existentialist despair that could be the grounding of political rebellion. Marta Traba, an art critic very much associated with the rise of the New Left, would see Alonso’s work, and particularly his drawings, as “a critical eye, a brave deformer, an inventor capable of interminable transpositions. … When Argentinean art loses all meaning, Alonso dives into the abyss of the human condition, he becomes temporal, historical, critical, ethical.” 14 Between 1966 and the mid-’70s, Alonso’s drawings and paintings would echo the loud colors, flatness, and collage

Fig. 2. Antonio Berni. La gran tentación o La gran ilusión (The Great Temptation or the Great Illusion). 1962. Oil, wood, burlap, canvas, paper, ornaments, iron, cardboard, plastic, glass, glue, lithographic image and feathers on plywood, 245 × 241.5 cm. Collection MALBA, Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires

Argentina, Berni’s work began to emerge from a barren and mechanical period; while remaining grounded in the principles of his essay “Nuevo realismo” of 1936, he adapted formal strategies from both Abstract Expressionism and Pop.12 Recycling the detritus of consumer society as the pictorial matter of his paintings, he told the telenovela-like stories of the slum boy Juanito Laguna and the seamstress-turned-prostitute Ramona Montiel. In the world of these personages, atomic explosions, environmental degradation, and the pursuit of materialism à la U.S.A. are everyday threats. Through formal disruptions and narrative parody Berni renewed realism with a certain tongue-in-cheek ferocity. Alonso, a Communist from 1945 to late 1967, has always believed in the human figure as the vehicle through which “we can, with an incorruptible memory, fix the wounds that reality leaves on us.” 13 Between 1960 and 1965 he produced an extraordinary group of works combining drawing and

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strategies of Pop art, yet since then, and up to the writing of this essay, he has been painting and drawing with a realism that simultaneously converses with the realist tradition and collects the fragmentation and emptiness of contemporary life.15 In 1959, the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, and its eventual self-definition as Marxist-Leninist, brought forth polemics among artists and intellectuals in favor of either realism or formal experimentation. Fidel Castro put an end to these polemics in a speech to intellectuals at the Biblioteca Nacional in June 1961, rejecting Socialist Realism and allowing experimentation unless it was critical of the revolution: “Within the revolution everything, against the revolution nothing.” 16 By 1965, “the real” as expressed through realism had long left behind Siqueiros’s strategies. The realities of a postatomic, consumerist world bursting with anticolonial revolutions had found a more convincing

4. Realisms

1 Latin American artists as diverse as Eduardo Abela (Cuba), Antonio Berni (Argentina), Candido Portinari (Brazil), and José Sabogal (Peru) were influenced by Mexican muralism. In the United States their impact is visible in the work of John Biggers, Jacob Lawrence, Ben Shahn, and Charles White, the early work of Jackson Pollock and Clyfford Still, and the post–World War II work of both Leon Golub and Rico Lebrun. 2 Not only was entry to the United States denied to both Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, but their works and José Clemente Orozco’s in the permanent collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art were moved from the main galleries to marginal spaces like hallways, next to the restrooms, etc. The panel depicting Lenin in Orozco’s mural at The New School for Social Research was covered throughout the 1950s. Their mention in the literature became minimal. See Alejandro Anreus, Orozco in Gringoland (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001), pp. 110–11. 3 Siqueiros’s expulsion from the Communist Party was due to his chaotic personal life and inability to follow orders in that regard, not to policies or aesthetics. Interview between the author and Raquel Tibol, May 27, 1995, Mexico City. 4 In May of 1940, Siqueiros and a number of his assistants attempted an assassination of Leon Trotsky in his Coyoacán home. Siqueiros was arrested and questioned; eventually, with help from the poet Pablo Neruda, he fled to Chile and spent the years 1941–43 traveling, lecturing, and painting in South America and Cuba. Trotsky was assassinated by Stalinist agent Ramón Mercader on August 20, 1940. 5 See Siqueiros, Palabras de Siqueiros, ed. Tibol (México, DF: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1996), pp. 62–78. He first used this term in a lecture at the John Reed Club, Los Angeles, on September 2, 1932. This and all translations from the Spanish by the author. 6 He uses these terms in pamphlets, articles, and lectures such as No hay más ruta que la nuestra (1945), Hacia una nueva plástica integral (1948), and La crítica de arte como pretexto literario (1948), in ibid., pp. 252–57, 287–92, 293–307. 7 José Revueltas, “Escuela mexicana de pintura y novela de la revolución,” in Cuestionamientos e intenciones, vol. 18 of Revueltas’s Obras Completas (México, D.F.: Era, 1978), pp. 241–74. 8 See Siqueiros, “La función de la fotografía,” initially published in the magazine Hoy, August

Fig. 3. Carlos Alonso. Carnicero Nº 2 (Butcher No. 2). 1965. Crayon, graphite, ink, and collage on paper, 150 × 100 cm. Collection of the Artist.

4, 1945, repr. in Palabras de Siqueiros, pp. 227–31. 9 Politically Siqueiros remained a rigid Stalinist until his death in 1974, supporting the invasions of both Hungary and Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops. Unlike his fellow Stalinist and friend

representation in a brutalist neo-figuration.17 It would take artists like Argentina’s Luis Felipe Noé, Cuba’s Antonia Eiriz, and others to redefine “the real” as tattered, bloated, and ragged human images. With his usual intellectual clarity, Berni would write that the new and most realistic art to emerge in the 1960s would need to partake of and critique “a world of imported aesthetic chewing gum or of drinking a Coca-Cola type of universalism,” where artists “aren’t as alienated as the rest by the publicity of the mass media controlled by transnational monopolies.” 18 An art like Berni’s, made materially of recycled garbage and from the perspective of the disempowered and the marginal, who nevertheless are drowning in Coca-Cola and chocolate candy bars, would be the most realistic representation of the world that emerged after World War II.

the poet Pablo Neruda, he was unable to reinvent himself through the New Left in the 1960s. 10 See Siqueiros, Me llamaban el coronelazo (México, D.F.: Grijalbo, 1977), pp. 447–60. In his posthumously published memoirs Siqueiros describes these stops in his “road movie” as not simply triumphs but instances of confrontation with the new formalism promoted by the United States and the “retardaire” naturalism of Soviet Socialist Realism. In a sense, he was reviving his many travels of the 1930s, when he acted as an “evangelist” for muralism in both the United States and Latin America. From the mid-1950s to the early 1960s he was paradoxically both a cultural ambassador for the Mexican culture industry and an avowed Communist. Although jailed from August 9, 1960 to July 13, 1964 for his involvement in an unauthorized strike by railroad workers, once released he would assume his “representation of the Mexican Mural movement” for the state. 11 As a former Communist but active fellow-traveler, Berni exhibited his work in the Warsaw Pact nations at the height of the Cold War. His prints in particular were well received by young artists in Czechoslovakia in 1959 and Poland in 1966 and 1968. 12 Berni, “El nuevo realismo,” Forma (Buenos Aires) no. 1 (August 1936): 8, 14. In this key text Berni called for a realism that was not “a simplistic imitation of the style of Cézanne or Picasso, but an interpretation of one’s own era with its new phenomena and realities, the spirit and originality of the moment.” 13 Carlos Alonso, in a questionnaire from the author, December 3, 2009. On Alonso’s history see Alejandro Anreus, “Carlos Alonso’s Anatomy Lesson,” Third Text 24, no. 3 (May 2010): 353– 60. Alonso’s slow but steady disillusionment with the Argentinean Communist Party reflects his responses to Stalinism, the repression of workers in East Berlin in 1953, and the invasions of Hungary in 1957 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. 14 Marta Traba, Dos décadas vulnerables en las artes plásticas latinoamericanas: 1950–70, (México, DF: Siglo Veintiuno, 1973), pp. 77–78. 15 In July 1977, Alonso’s daughter Paloma, a university student and activist, was “disappeared” by the military junta that was ruling the country with the support of the U.S. government. The artist and the rest of his family had to flee the country for their own safety, living in exile in Italy and Spain until returning in 1981, two years before democracy was restored through the election of Raúl Alfonsin in 1983. This personal tragedy recharged Alonso’s commitment to a political realism. 16 See Robert E. Quirk, Fidel Castro (New York: Norton, 1993), pp. 381–85. 17 The work of the Otra figuración group in Argentina, Antonia Eiriz in Cuba, and Jacobo Borges in Venezuela are prime examples of this neo-figuration. 18 Berni, Escritos y papeles privados (Buenos Aires: Tema Grupo Editorial, 1999), pp. 137, 140.

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COMMITMENT TO HUMILITY Ekaterina Degot

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ussia’s October Revolution of 1917 may have announced itself to the world with a blare of brand-new abstract geometrical shapes, but it was in figurative images with a classical pedigree that the new society recognized itself, and it would maintain this commitment to realism as its main visual and epistemological tool until the dissolution of the Soviet Union, in 1991, and beyond. Discussions in the early 1930s canonized the formula “Socialist Realism,” even if the radical left-wing scene preferred “proletarian realism,” “dialectical-materialist realism,” and other terms.1 In any case, “realism” marked the difference from the previous dominant tendency in Russian art. Futurism, insofar as it was deemed that the future anticipated by the Futurists, had now become everyday. “Socialist” was meant to demarcate this new realism from bourgeois nineteenth-century realism, thought to have betrayed itself and started the descent into modernist formalism—the main adversary of Socialist Realism for many years to come. By the 1930s, the Soviet avant-garde had grown dissatisfied with modernist art, which they saw as translating social alienation into its symbolic representation through flatness and fragmentation. Instead, Communist artists gravitated toward holistic, synthetic forms that defied social alienation rather than mimicking it. The radical left shifted toward various forms of documentary, photomontage, and film (a tendency they called “factography”), but also toward politically engaged figurative painting. In its violent rejection of autonomous art, seen as a comfortable bourgeois institution, this postabstract propagandistic realism set out to be destructive rather than descriptive. The new institutional system stood almost unchanged from the 1930s to the early 1990s. In an unprecedented challenge to earlier patterns of individual production, division of labor, and the market, the new art positioned itself as an element of the new, noncapitalist public sphere. Artworks were ideally to be produced collectively (or at least, more realistically, through advance collective discussions among producers) and were intended for a mass audience that, also ideally, would engage with them through political debate. In the total absence of a private market, production would rely on state commissions, which in turn were distributed through artists’ unions and cooperatives. Murals, public sculptures, illustrated books, film, and photography allowed access to the masses, but easel painting was also integrated into this system through a vital emphasis on distribution through the media: publishing houses issued art magazines and postcards by the millions of copies, constituting the staple of the Soviet art system alongside traditional museums. To some extent, originals kept in museums were seen as master copies for further reproductions, whether mechanical or, more often than not, manual. During the Stalinist period—that is, until 1953—the initial egalitarian impulse of this system was violently repressed. Debates within artists’ unions, once to some extent democratic, stopped. A politically servile artistic bureaucracy emerged, negotiating enormous fees that made its members extremely well off in comparison to an average worker

or an artist in the provinces. No independent art criticism was possible, corrections to dominant aesthetic paradigms were imposed by party decree, and the stakes were high: an attack on an artist in the central press would almost certainly lead to expulsion from the artists’ union, a loss of commissions, exclusion from teaching positions, and ultimately a kind of social death.

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TRIUMPHALIST DECOLONIZATION

mmediately after World War II (which in the Soviet Union was given the deeply felt name the “Great Patriotic War”), in party decrees and in the public sphere, the rhetorics of class struggle and internationalism disappeared and resistance to the bourgeois order received a cultural interpretation. The Soviet victory over Nazism (Japanese imperialism was too far away from Moscow to be acknowledged), achieved through Joseph Stalin’s tactical reconciliation with the Russian Orthodox Church, among other things, was seen as a victory over Western colonial dominance. (To some extent this may have been justified, since Hitler’s policies in Eastern Europe were implicitly colonial.) The cultural war on the West became intense after 1946, when campaigns against so-called “rootless cosmopolitanism” and “kowtowing to the West” were declared. In 1948, an aggressive press campaign ostracized dozens of theorists and critics, almost exclusively of Jewish descent. Basically, internationalism and modernism were stigmatized as Jewish. Victors over the West took classical Western art as booty both literally and metaphorically. Vasiliy Yakovlev’s Portrait of Georgy Zhukov (1946; plate 172), a neoacademic tour de force, shows Marshal Georgy Zhukov, a Russian commander during the battle for Berlin, riding on a mighty white stallion. He triumphs not just over Nazi Germany and German culture—both swastika banners and medieval churches are shown falling behind him—but over the whole European tradition of neo-baroque portraiture, which Yakovlev proudly appropriates and tames just as Zhukov tames his horse. (Besides being a painter, Yakovlev ran the restoration department of Moscow’s Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, where he specialized in restoring paintings by Rubens. Secular painting was imposed on Russia in the eighteenth century by Peter the Great; some 200 years later, in a triumphalist justification of ancient self-colonization, Yakovlev was claiming the right to the Western style because the West had now betrayed its true “westernness,” having embraced modernism. In a different but related dynamic, this antiinternationalist decolonization was accompanied by colonization of the Soviet Union’s own margins, called “national republics” in an assumption that Russia was not one. The artists of the non-Russian republics were expected to represent their region’s life in a style bearing no resemblance to its traditional art, since the decorative qualities of traditional arts were

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Fig. 1. Semyon Chuikov. Daughter of Soviet Kirgizia. 1948. Oil on canvas, 120 x 95 cm. The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

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seen as a kind of formalism. In 1947, the Ilya Repin Leningrad Institute for Painting, Sculpture and Architecture set up a “studio of nationalities” to prepare young artists from outside the European tradition for the vicissitudes of drawing from nature. Semyon Chuikov’s Doch’ Sovetskoi Kirgizii (Daughter of Soviet Kirgizia, 1948; fig. 1), for example, was praised as a successful example of the cultural awakening not just of a girl from the steppes, who prioritized study over tending sheep, but of Kirgiz national realist painting, a previously unknown genre. The republics were forced to embrace a high culture represented by a generic realist visual language interpreted as the national Russian style. Russian culture, understanding itself as supranational, was spread abroad, too: in the 1950s, the painter Konstantin Maksimov was sent to China to teach the methods of realist art there.

REALISM OF THE POSSIBLE Soviet realist aesthetics were heavily influenced by Vladimir Lenin’s famous essay “Leo Tolstoy as the Mirror of the Russian Revolution” (1908), in which Lenin praised Tolstoy as a “genius who has … drawn incomparable pictures of Russian life.”2 This pictorial metaphor brought the narrative and the visual into a dialectical embrace that later critics had in mind when they tended to evaluate each art through the criteria of the other. A realist text had to be as vivid as a painting, while a realist painting, without losing its sensuous credibility, had to encompass the whole range of reality, the fullness of its connections and relations, past and future—something that only a novel could perhaps have at least hoped to offer. One new genre promised just that: “thematic painting,” a political statement embedded in a visual narrative. A paradigmatic example is Fyodor Shurpin’s Utro nashei rodiny (Morning of our Motherland, 1946– 48; plate 173), a portrait of Stalin significantly never positioned as a portrait of Stalin: it claimed a higher ambition. The narrative here, however, is minimalist to say the least: there is almost nothing to be seen but the indirect glow of the sun and the figure of Stalin. Yet the viewer is asked to imagine a magnificent future. In 1946, in a country devastated by the recent war, to ask for that sort of imagination was to ask for the superlative public-spirited exertion that in the Soviet Union would come to be called shock work. One can, and probably should, dismiss this painting for its utter glorification of the tyrant, but it also marks an important shift in Soviet realism from the actual to the potential. A later Soviet dictionary of aesthetics would argue that “artistic reflection is high aesthetic selectiveness, orientation to the possible and the probable.”3 For Soviet critics, realism had to represent not so much the current reality as hopes for a better one; this sort of realism “presupposes possibility beyond already existing reality,” as Ernst Bloch put it, describing the “warm movement in Marxism.”4 The haunting of the real by the possible also challenges the normative idea of quality. If the audience had to discern a Communism yet to

come in a still imperfect reality, why would it not “foresee” painting itself in its different state—better, stronger, closer to the ideal, as if created by one of the classic humanist painters, realists avant la lettre, whom Soviet painters and art historians idolized during the entire Soviet period. If, through their painterly style, artists expressed the ambition to be a Rembrandt or a Velázquez, a Zurbarán or a Chardin (and many did), they were showing themselves at their best not just in an aesthetic but in an ethical sense. And since they knew they were not Velázquez after all, they also demonstrated humility. The viewer might then give them the benefit of the doubt—Bloch’s “principle of hope”—by looking at what the painting might have been, might still become, rather than at what it was and at the limitations it had. The theory of Socialist Realism as an epistemological tool was based on Lenin’s theory of reflection, which stated the correlation between objective reality and cognition, but in both directions: according to Lenin, cognition mirrors reality in an active, transformative way, bringing out the best of it (and that, one can deduce, works better than cognition per se, only possible through a process of necessarily limited approximations).5 Slavoj Žižek is right to see Lenin’s theory as implicitly idealistic, since the very idea of mirroring divides objective reality and consciousness.6 Marxism and Questions of Linguistics, signed by Stalin (but not necessarily written by him) and published in 1950, goes still farther, proclaiming the relative independence of society’s superstructure from its base—something that was never contested, even during the years of de-Stalinization, and became the most important ideological platform for arts seeking the ideal.

THE POWER OF TRUTH On March 5, 1953, Stalin died; in February 1956, the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union condemned his “cult of personality” and called for a “return to Leninist norms of party life.” That opened the short period of “socialism with a human face,” which ended in 1968 when an even more humanly faced socialism in Prague was crushed by Soviet tanks. The party’s greeting to the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Artists, in 1957, called for works providing “a feeling of genuine aesthetic pleasure and joy for millions, which enrich their spiritual world, which ennoble and elevate man.”7 The assumption that “rich” and “noble” were positive qualities was rather unexpected. In the same way, the autonomy of art was partly rehabilitated, insofar as artists gained it de facto. Artists’ unions now controlled media distribution and museum acquisitions, and by the 1960s, at least in Moscow and Leningrad, had turned into a relatively privileged caste of professionals isolated from the rest of society. For the artists of the “austere style” of the early 1960s, as well as for the first generation of conceptualists later in the decade, this autonomy enabled a self-reflexive process: both groups were reflecting on the choices made in the 1920s, the figurative turn in the first place.

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“Austere style” (surovyj stil) was a term invented by critics to describe the work of young artists of the time (Pavel Nikonov, Viktor Popkov, Tahir Salahov and others) who developed a sober and monumental visual language and linked the sensuous to the political. 8 Their protagonists—everyday heroes, workers, almost exclusively

representation, i.e., less idealization, but rather a more rhetorical presence of Communist ideals in everyday life. This is what is at stake in Popkov’s Builders of Bratsk Hydro-Electric Power Station (1960–61; plate 175), which stages an artificial, theatrical mise-en-scène. This limelight composition is rooted in a Brechtian alienation effect and the breaking of the fourth wall, but also, digging deeper, in the famous Hegelian idea that “the essence reveals itself,” which remained central to Soviet realism. The artists of the austere style were supported by the critic Nina Dmitrieva, who herself was influenced by Mikhail Lifshitz, the main Marxist theorist of realism. Lifshitz, who in the 1930s had worked closely with György Lukacs and published an important anthology of early Marxist literature on the role of art, was committed to the idea of real-

Fig. 3. Geliy Korzhev. Raising the Banner. 1960. Oil on canvas, 156 x 290 cm. State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg

Fig. 2. Geliy Korzhev. Homer. 1960. Oil on canvas, 290 x 140 cm. State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg

male—are represented as anti-Stalinist political subjects who do not just follow orders but are architects of their own destiny, who combine physical strength with independent minds, and whose labor on behalf of society allows them time for their own intellectual development. In contrast to the mythomaniac art of the Stalinist period, artists of the “austere style” insisted on truthfulness. That did not mean more credible

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ism as a cognitive tool and sensuous instrument in the search for truth. Truthfulness for Lifshitz was the representation of what, after Hegel, he called veritas rei—the truth of things, the best in them, their ideal projection. The very fact of revealing something in sensuous form was already considered aesthetic, but the highest form of this revelation would be the revelation of the universal inside and through the unique. The idea of the hard ascension, physical as well as spiritual, toward the ideal, the universal, toward something that transcends even the notion of class, is at the core of Geliy Korzhev’s iconic triptych Communists (1957– 60). In the central panel a worker raises a heavy flag that has fallen from the hands of a dead comrade (fig. 3); to the right, The Internationale, two brave horn-players raise their instruments and defy death in a battle in the Russian Civil War (fig. 4). In the lefthand panel, Homer, we see what all this was for: in a studio after the war, two former soldiers copy, meticulously and modestly, a bust of Homer, elevating themselves above their own background and past to the universalist and classless level of the humanist culture of European antiquity (fig. 2). This ennoblement and elevation is achieved, notably, through mimetic copying, an activity a dedicated realist like Korzhev identified with. And it was precisely this copying that, for him, opened the door to the immensity of the “absolute truth” that transcends any categorization, be it epistemological or sociological.

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The category of the general—vseobschchee, a term that can also be translated as “universal,” “overall,” “generic” in the sense of going beyond divisions, or “common” in relation to property—was extremely important for Soviet Marxists (Lifshits, Evald Iljenkov) as well as for literary and art criticism. The general is the abstract that has overcome

though it might exist within the harsh conditions of class society or might be produced by the bourgeoisie, exists and realizes itself as art regardless of this class society, albeit under its influence. According to this standpoint, shared by many Soviet aestheticians, all art must be potentially proto-communist.”9 Only through a specific Soviet attitude to copying and reproduction, however, could this potential be fulfilled. In the bourgeois institution of art, the classical heritage is instrumentalized as the mechanism of the production of elites, but what Korzhev assumes, in his own work as well as in antique sculptures, is not a unique object for individual consumption, rare, expensive, and hard to find, but a potential for immediate mass reproduction, reaching millions. The “true” character of these reproductions, however, directly correlates with the degree of realism of the original. Abstract painting is easily reproducible, but this reproduction has no value; the truth of the reproduction can only be guaranteed by the memory of the “primal scene” of an artist copying from nature.

1 See Matthew Cullerne Bown, Socialist Realist Painting (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 140–41. 2 The essay is available online at www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1908/sep/11.htm (accessed May 2016). 3 Estetika. Slovar’ (Moscow: Izdatelstvo politicheskoe literatury, 1989), p. 246. Fig. 4. Geliy Korzhev. The Internationale. 1957–58. Oil on canvas, 285 x 128 cm. State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg

4 Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 1954–59, excerpted in Richard Noble, ed., Utopias, Documents of Contemporary Art (London: Whitechapel Gallery, and Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2009), p. 44. 5 Vladimir Lenin, Philosophical Notebooks, 1915.

its abstractness, the concrete that is deeply reflected in its concreteness, the realistic that is more than just representation, the proper and unique that opens up toward a higher level of generalization. It is high culture and philosophical thinking that have freed themselves from their historical limitations and joined the common, classless future. The contemporary theorist Keti Chukhrov points out that in Soviet aesthetics, “art, even

6 Slavoj Žižek, “Afterword: Lenin’s Choice,” in Lenin, Revolution at the Gates: A Selection of Writings from February to October 1917, ed. Žižek (London: Verso, 2002). 7 Iskusstvo no. 4 (1957): 3. 8 The translation “severe style” is common, but has a punitive note absent from the original Russian term, which rather stresses asceticism. 9 Keti Chukhrov, “Classical Art and Human Resignation in Soviet Marxism,” in Georg Schöllhammer and Ruben Arevshatyan, eds., Sweet Sixties: Specters and Spirits of a Parallel Avant-Garde (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014).

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EXCHANGEABLE REALISM Anneka Lenssen

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ne September evening in 1959, a large crowd filled Cairo’s el-Gomhoreya Square in protest against the recently announced French plan to conduct nuclear-weapons testing in the Algerian Sahara. Their group contained many students from the decolonizing nations of the Third World, present in Cairo to attend an Afro-Asian Youth Conference. Delegations of young Somalis, Indonesians, and others had gone to the square holding signs reading “No to de Gaulle” and “No to nuclear bombs in Africa.” 1 There they heard both students and Egyptian government officials deliver speeches denouncing imperialism from a central stage decorated with the image of a mushroom cloud exploding over the African continent and flanked by a doubled “No!” in

Nasser. Egypt had already claimed military leadership of the Arab bloc, a position of influence that, as of February 1958, included a complete but ultimately temporary political union with Syria as the United Arab Republic (UAR).3 By also taking a lead in Afro-Asian solidarity, the critical geopolitical entity inaugurated at the Bandung Conference in 1955, Egypt claimed still greater bargaining power. 4 All this played out as Nasser pursued increasingly repressive security measures at home, carrying out mass arrests of Communist Party members, including Egyptian artist Inji Efflatoun (in Cairo) and Syrian artist Nazir Nabaa (in Damascus). To interpret artistic realism in the United Arab Republic, or in another of the Arab countries pledged to the antiimperialist cause in 1959, is to negotiate the paradoxes of an international system of self-representation that turned upon matters of moral fortitude

Fig. 1. “La! Ya Di-jawl” (No! Oh, De Gaulle). Editorial feature in the Egyptian magazine al-Musawwar, September 11, 1959

English and in Arabic. The event’s National Union organizers had succeeded in staging a photogenic rally. The Egyptian magazine al-Musawwar printed a stunning full-spread image showing the protesters facing off against the motifs of industrial warfare, thereby conceptually linking the cause of Algeria’s active struggle for independence from France to the collective fate of the Arab countries, the African continent, and the entirety of the colonized world (fig. 1).2 The Afro-Asian liberation struggle so pictured would have real historic consequences. And yet, like any show of solidarity, its images also worked to sustain a number of simulations, including, in this case, promotion of the moral authority of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel

and human goodness, often in tension with actual policies or experiences. Many Arab art critics called for an art that engaged reality, but the works of art they prized typically drew their authority not from conformity to observable appearances but rather from the authenticity of the artist’s intentions and capacities.5 As the young Syrian artist Ghazi al-Khaldi put it in March 1959, it was impossible to separate the artist from his production, for both emerged from the same experience of life.6 To al-Khaldi, a painting or other art object would need to be evaluated in an organic continuum with social and physical forces, which made an artist’s sovereign expression less important than his or her demonstration of humanity.7

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These realist expectations would increasingly find sustenance in a developing circuitry of government exchange programs that kept artists and artworks mobile across the Second and Third Worlds, thereby demonstrating the universal exchangeability of the cause. Syrian artists, for example, began to study in the Eastern bloc in addition to the Italian academies they had once preferred, with Elias Zayyat going to Sofia, Bulgaria, in 1956 and Abdul Manan Shamma to Moscow in 1958. In 1959, the Moroccan artist Farid Belkahia, who had been studying in Paris, left for Prague, where he hoped to observe a Communist approach to culture and where he was able to mix with left-wing writers and artists passing through on their way to Beijing or Moscow. 8 That same year, Egypt sent Hamed Owais—a consummate painter of the worker and of populist causes—to Poland to stage two exhibitions, and the Moroccan artist Ahmed Cherkaoui undertook a year’s study in Warsaw beginning the following year. Exchanges of collective exhibitions proliferated at the same time. Poster art by Eastern European designers became a fixture in the National Museum of Damascus, with Syria returning the favor with touring exhibitions of painting, sculpture, and folk arts. In Baghdad, an exhibition of watercolors, woodcuts, and antique masterpieces sent from Beijing impressed students with its technical virtuosity.9 Given the diversity and volume of these artistic exchanges, it is instructive to consider the nature of the training offered to those who took fellowships abroad. Notably, the positive character of the realist paradigm hinged upon the cultivation of recognized skill, typically via the highly structured environment of a national academy. From the memoirs of Iraqi artist Rafa al-Nasiri, for example, we learn that the Chinese exhibit in Baghdad motivated him to pursue a four-year fellowship at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, where he immersed himself in a refined tradition of master printmaking.10 His time at the academy, 1959–63, coincided with the extreme hardships of the Great Leap Forward, but his recollections focus on the estimable skill of instructors such as Li Hua and his own student work attends to the quotidian and the wholesome. His woodcut Chinese Girls (1961), for example, depicts two figures lacing ice skates, preparing to enjoy Kunming Lake in the wintertime (fig. 2). From the progress reports submitted for Egyptian students, who also went to Beijing, it is possible to glean further detail about intended outcomes. Heba Enayat and Tomader Turki (a married couple) attended the Central Academy in 1957–62, completing sequences of training—one year of “national painting,” twenty-six months of woodcut, thirty-four months in studio workrooms, and nine months of study tours in the countryside—that resulted in the ability to, among other skills, depict different Chinese minorities, render figures, landscape, flowers, and birds in national styles, and print woodcuts in both the Western and the Chinese manner.11 The final year of degree study included individual work and an exhibition, but even these fell under a single, shared framework of evaluation. Enayat and Turki earned nearly identical commendations, having each “succeeded in extracting something nutritive from Chinese traditional art” and

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having applied it to their own creative work. 12 The sheer iterability of these exchanges gave them an ideological power. Within this circuit of ongoing and collective effort, Egyptian, Iraqi, and Chinese artists alike might take “something nutritive from Chinese traditional art.” Artists worked synthetically, acting as sensitive instruments for conveying the vitality of cultural inheritance. Back in Cairo, the College of Fine Arts was admitting increasing numbers of students from other Arab states, including a large contingent from Syria, which did not yet have its own degree-granting art school. The curriculum, in accordance with the populist emphases of Nasser’s government, brought field observation of Egypt-in-construction to the fore, sending art students to depict the Aswan High Dam

Fig. 2. Rafa Al-Nasiri. Chinese Girls. 1961. Woodcut print, 15 × 20 cm. Courtesy Rafa Nasiri Studio

project (it would be launched officially in 1960, with the help of Soviet financial credits, expertise, and equipment) and to produce portraits of members of the urban proletariat.13 The Syrian contingent included al-Khaldi, who in 1959 wrote a charming article on life in Cairo to be published back home in al-Jundi, the cultural magazine of the Syrian military.14 Al-Khaldi’s essay is particularly concerned with conveying the esprit de corps between himself and his roommates, fellow Syrians Burhan Karkutli and Hisham Zamriq, and provides detailed accounts of each one’s routines and personality quirks. Zamriq, we learn, awoke at sunrise, took a cigarette and coffee, and went to the college to paint, then returned at noon to prepare a meal and nap, followed by work at home on still life or portrait exercises and nights devoted to listening to classical music. Karkutli, by contrast, preferred to fill his days conversing with the neighborhood children. So anchored in the dailiness of artistic life, al-Khaldi’s article helps to point to one other crucial aspect of the realism produced by this international circuitry of studentship, which is that it needed to continue moving and undergoing exchange. Neither Cairo nor Damascus could contain the work that these artists hoped to do. Al-Khaldi tells his

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Fig. 3. Hamed Owais. At the Aswan Dam. 1965. Oil on canvas, 99 × 85 cm. State Museum of Oriental Art, Moscow

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readers how he and Zamriq daydreamed about escaping aristocratic Cairo and going to Mexico to study its school of “humanist realism.”15 They had come to imagine a future world order in which a youthful artist needed only his or her talent to flourish, not permission or financing from the authorities. Al-Khaldi’s article even concludes with a glimpse of that very future, reporting that Karkutli had just left Egypt for Spain, where he would try to use his humanity as currency. Carrying no money, the Syrian artist instead held a sign announcing, “I am an Arab student continuing my study at my own expense. I paint pictures for five piasters.” 16 If these young Syrian artists hoped to find ways to mobilize themselves and their work more directly, then others in the system would continue to pursue the calm realism of observation rooted in shared humanity. Owais is the exemplary figure in this regard. Nearly twenty years older than the College of Fine Arts students, he had been formed by the upward-mobility discourses of the 1930s and ’40s and had then come into professional prominence after the 1952 revolution as a visual interpreter of a strong and populist Egypt.17 His oeuvre includes grand visions of Nasser in his role as a great leader, as in the well-known 1957 painting Nasser and the Nationalization of the Canal, which places the president in the center of the lucrative Suez trade nexuses he had reclaimed for Egyptian control, buttressing him with a sea of expectant though not yet exultant citizens (plate 191). But Owais’s revolution was almost always an anticipatory rather than a finished one; his subjects appear wary, and even consumed by the precarity of their lives. In Peasant Family (1959), for example, we see both father and mother scowl with anxiety—an emotion Owais recognized as universal to any working family—on their move toward an unknown future. Even paintings ostensibly devoted to solidarity, such as We—The People (1960), cast the faces of the participant types—urbanized builder, agricultural worker, and peasant mother—in gray shadow, as if to foreclose the possibility of an allegorical reading. 18 Because Owais maintained such a principled commitment to the quality of immediacy in his pictures, his occasional deviance from this norm becomes all the more compelling as his testimony shifts to the larger system of exchange. Consider, for example, his 1965 painting of the Aswan High Dam, now in the collection of the State Museum of Oriental Art in Moscow (fig. 3). Tucked into a riveted contraption high above the newly created Lake Nasser reservoir, men work on the construction of transmission towers and power grids. Here Owais depicted a vertiginous space of labor, bringing together several perspectival modes, from a bird’s-eye view of the barges to an assembly of cascading pipes and braces. And, unusually for him, he opted to denote his human actors by means of abstract geometry, giving the two hard hats the perfect circular shape of cogs. Presumably, Owais intended to convey the awesome power of human and nonhuman collaboration in the painting, linking flesh to steel and water to electricity. Yet in using this schematic shorthand, he also left the immediacy of his realism behind, signaling submission to industrial power.

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This is not to suggest that Owais had lost faith in the necessity of national development (indeed, in this work he would seem to be interested in conveying a technological sublime). Rather, it is to note that the ostensible subject of Owais’s painting—a triumphant model of state-led development—had begun to slip from grace. As Owais well knew, the same art students who had formed their political consciousness in the heyday of Afro-Asian solidarity had, by 1965, grown impatient with the bureaucracy that once had promised to liberate them. Before the end of the decade, many would come to seek immediacy in direct action, embracing the “new man” heroism of guerrilla resistance and embedding their work in armed struggle.19

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1 “La! Ya Di-jawl,” al-Musawwar, September 11, 1959. 2

Ibid.

3 I thank Nalini Sairsingh and Allison Gordon for their assistance in tracking imagery of Afro-Asian solidarity produced in the UAR, 1958–61. 4 For discussion of how Bandung articulated a “critical geopolitical entity” see Anthony Gardner and Charles Green, “Biennials of the South on the Edges of the Global,” Third Text 4, no. 123 (July 2013): 446. 5 See Clare Davies, “Arts Writing in 20th-Century Egypt: Methodology, Continuity, and Change,” ARTMargins 2, no. 2 (June 2013): 19–42. 6 Ghazi al-Khaldi, “Sanna Kamila fi al-Qahira min Rassamayn min al-Aqlim al-Suri,” al-Jundi, March 31, 1959, p. 34. On similar qualities in literary realism see Fredric Jameson, “A Note on Literary Realism in Conclusion,” in Matthew Beaumont, ed., Adventures in Realism (London: Blackwell, 2007), p. 261. 7 I explore this organic mode of nationalist aesthetics in greater detail in my forthcoming book Being Mobilized, a study of painting and populist politics in Syria and the Arab East, 1930–67. 8 See Kenza Sefrioui, La revue Souffles, 1966–1973. Espoirs de révolution culturelle au Maroc (Casablanca: Éditions du Sirocco, 2012), p. 339. 9 See Rafa Nasiri: 50 Years of Printmaking, ed. Vincenza Russo (Milan: Skira, 2013), p. 25. 10 Ibid. 11 Egyptian National Archives (Dar al-Watha’iq al-Qawmiyya), Delegations file, 4031-103334. 12 Ibid. 13 See Khaldi: 50 Years of Painting, 1950–2000 (Paris: Union of Plastic Artists/Unesco, 2000), and Nazeer Nabaa: An Eye on the World … An Eye on the Soul (Damascus: Tajalliyat Gallery, 2009). 14 Al-Khaldi, “Sanna Kamila fi al-Qahira.” 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. Burhan Karkutli would go from Spain to Morocco, where he lived for several years, working as a graphic designer for the Union nationale des étudiants du Maroc, among other activist groups. 17 On pedagogical attitudes before 1952 see Dina A. Ramadan, “Cultivating Taste, Creating the Modern Subject: Sawt el-Fannan and Art Criticism in 1950s Egypt,” MESA Bulletin 42, no. 1/2 (Summer/Winter 2008): 26–31, and Patrick Kane, “Egyptian Art Institutions and Art Education from 1908 to 1951,” The Journal of Aesthetic Education 44, no. 3 (Fall 2010): 43–68. 18 The painting is reproduced in Galina Lassikova, Contemporary Painting and Graphic Works of Arab Countries in the Collection of the Moscow State Museum of Oriental Art: Catalogue (Moscow, 2007), p. 30. 19 On this subsequent phase see Kristin Ross, “New Men,” in Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1994), pp. 155–96; Anneka Lenssen, “The Plasticity of the Syrian Avant-Garde,” ARTMargins 2, no. 2 (June 2013): 43–70; and Davies, “Decolonizing Culture: Third World, Moroccan, and Arab Art in Souffles/Anfas, 1966–1972,” Essays of the Forum Transregionale Studien (February 2015).

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THE HISTORICAL LOGIC OF CHINESE NATIONALIST REALISM FROM THE 1940s TO THE 1960s Gao Minglu

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I

n twentieth-century Chinese art history, the years from 1945 The second decade of the century, following the establishment to 1965 were the first two phases of Mao’s “revolutionary mass of the ROC in 1911, saw a series of movements in art and literature first art.” The third phase, from 1966 to 1976, was the Cultural advocated not by artists and writers but by influential Chinese thinkers Revolution. Although the year 1945 fell under the calendar and philosophers such as Chen Duxiu, Cai Yuanpei, Kang Youwei, Liang of the Republic of China (ROC), ruled by Chiang Kai-Shek’s Qichao, and Lu Zheng. In 1918, Chen, a leader of the New Culture MoveKuomintang (KMT) government, it had a dual historical meanment and, in 1921, the first chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, ing, marking both the end of World War II (and the beginning was explicit in his call for a “revolution in literature” (wenxue geming) and of the Cold War) and the beginning of the year full-scale Civil a “revolution in art” ( yishu geming).3 The revolutionary change he sought in art was to abandon the traditional style of ink painting known as “Four War (quanmian neizhan or jiefang zhanzheng) between Mao’s CommuMasters” (Si Wang) and find a modern Western form suitable to the funist army and the KMT (1946–49). Mao’s army ultimately defeated the ture establishment of a modern Chinese art. The primary demand was KMT, allies of the United States, and the aftermath of the victory was the for a Chinese art and literature that would be as rational and modern as establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. science and would create an “art for people’s life” ( yishu wei rensheng). From 1949 to the end of the Cultural Revolution, in 1976, revolu Although this movement was still intrinsically born of an elite tionary mass art, or Socialist Realism, was the dominant and official modern culture, it shifted the direction of art from a traditional, cultiart form. Although this art was highly influenced by Soviet Socialist Revated art of and for the literati to an art that, although elite, was aimed alism, it cannot be considered only an import from the Soviets; it also at enlightening the masses. Eventually, because of the continuing inarose out of China’s own historical legacy from the late Qing dynasty, fluence of Marxism, the dynamic activity of the Association of Left which ended in 1911, and the early ROC period (1912–49), and specifically Wing Writers (zuoyi zuojia of “Revolution in Art,” a Chilianmeng) and the Association nese intellectual movement of Left Wing Artists (zuoyi that emerged in the first two meishujia lianmeng, both esdecades of the twentieth tablished in Shanghai in century and was strongly 1930), and the outbreak of antitraditional and rationthe Second Sino-Japanese alist. Mao had never given War in 1937, this “revoluup his ambition to establish tion in art” ( yishu geming) China’s nationalistic realism was transformed into Mao’s as a realism “combining rev“revolutionary art” (geming olutionary realism as well as de yishu). Further manifested revolutionary romanticism.”1 We can trace the beginning as “making art for the enof this nationalist realism lightenment of the masses” to 1942, and it peaked dur( yishu hua dazhong), it finaling the Cultural Revolution. ly became Mao’s “popular Mao’s realism pushed art to art for and by the masses” serve people and the masses (dazhonghua yishu). 4 Fig. 1. Shi Lu. Beyond the Great Wall. 1959. Ink and color on paper, 91.5 × 132.5 cm. National Museum of China, Beijing The humanist conas he always claimed, but in cerns of the early 1930s an extremely popular way. were further developed by the left-wing art movement, including the In the early twentieth century, when many European modernists Woodcut Movement and the group known as Street Art (Zouxiang shiconsidered realism a dead genre, their Chinese counterparts saw it as the zi jietou de yishu). Both were based in Shanghai, the former being led by force that could rescue them from “literati art” (wenren hua), a conservLu Xun, one of the most influential modern Chinese writers, and the ative style dating back to the tenth century. Literati art required a high latter favoring literature and art, including music, film, and graphics, level of technique. Focusing on landscape (shanhui) and “birds-flower” that represented the life of the urban working class.5 The proletarian (huaniao) painting, it dealt with neither court politics nor social comsympathies of the Woodcut Movement ultimately led these artists to mentary, instead valuing contemplative, meditative self-expression. For consider art more a moral instrument than their contemporaries did, late-Qing reformers such as Kang Youwei, literati art was “ridiculous”: for example a modernist group led by Lin Fengmian, Shanghai’s Storm “How can those who paint just for fun in their spare time capture the Society, and a group of traditional ink painters including Qi Baishi, Pan true character of all things on earth? It is totally wrong to regard the lite2 Tianshou, and Chen Shizeng, who viewed their art as a locus of tradition. rati spirit as the orthodox school of painting.”

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Consequently, the Woodcut Movement and other left-wing artists converted to Mao’s revolutionary art principles and distinguished themselves as a radical avant-garde force. After the Long March (1934–35), many artists from this group traveled to Yan’an, the headquarters of the Communist Party. This was when this previously elite avant-garde turned to Mao’s “proletarian mass art” (wuchanjieji dazhong yishu). This transition was accomplished under Mao’s 1942 Great Rectification in Yan’an (Yan’an zhengfeng yundong), where he gave a speech, the “Speech on Literature and Art at the Symposium in Yan’an” (zai yan’an wenyi zuotanhui shangde jianghua; widely known as the “Yan’an Talk”), that is undoubtedly the most concentrated and comprehensive expression of his thoughts on art.6 It was in the Yan’an Talk that he first clearly asserted that “we are advocates of Socialist Realism.” Mao’s proletarian mass art was obviously influenced by Soviet Socialist Realism, which had been formally established as an artistic method at the First Congress of Soviet Writers, in Moscow in 1934. Like Joseph Stalin’s theory then, the Yan’an Talk argued that art should serve the worker, the peasant, the soldier, and the revolution. But Mao’s mass art went farther than Soviet Socialist Realism: in particular, art was to carry “a Chinese nationalistic style” (zhongguo qipai) and it was to be

Fig. 2. Quan Shanshi. Heroic and Indomitable. 1961. Oil on canvas, 233 × 217 cm. National Museum of China, Beijing

popular, was to make the masses “happy to hear and see” (xiwen lejian).7 Rather than transform the revolutionary masses, art was to be received by them in this particular popular way; it was the artists themselves who were to be reeducated by the masses, eventually becoming proletarianized. The purpose of revolutionary art, then, was not only to change the point of view on revolutionary reality, the way of thinking about and

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representing it, but also to convert the artists’ identities. This was to be a thorough transformation: Mao said, “If you want to merge with the masses, you have to make up your mind to undergo torturous longterm temptation and endurance.” 8 For him, “popularization” or mass style (dazhonghua) meant that intellectuals needed to abandon their bourgeois visual language and to adopt the language of peasants and workers. Otherwise they were engaging in mere “popularlessness” or “small circles” (xiaozhonghua). 9 After the Yan’an Talk was published in 1942, Mao’s slogan “Art shall serve the worker, the peasant, and the soldier” became a guideline for artists. From the mid-1940s to 1965, Mao’s revolutionary mass art went through two phases. The first—the phase discussed above, from an elite avant-garde art influenced by European expressionism, especially the German woodcut, and manifesting a bourgeois sympathy for the proletariat, to a proletarian revolutionary art embodied by a folk/realistic style, still mainly in woodcut—lasted until the early 1950s. The art was simple, economical, and made to serve not only the peasants but war propaganda. The second shift took place between the early 1950s and the start of the Cultural Revolution. This phase saw a shift from a propagandistic art characterized by folk simplicity to a propagandistic art in a refined, academic style influenced by the Soviets: in the early 1950s, Soviet and Chinese artists visited each other often to exchange ideas and exhibit their work. From 1953 to 1956, twenty-six significant Chinese artists studied at the Repin Institute of Art in Leningrad, and in 1955 the Soviet painter Makchmobk.M held a training class in the Chinese Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, which some of China’s most promising artists attended during this period.10 The impact of the Soviet influence was not really felt, however, until the late 1950s, and particularly around 1959, the ten-year anniversary of the founding of PRC. In the first half of the 1950s, early in the second phase of Mao’s art, two phenomena—the New Year Painting Movement (xinnianhua yundong) and the debates on the reformation of traditional ink painting—demonstrated the newly founded nation’s need for a renewal of nationalist identity. For a thousand years, the Chinese had enjoyed buying and hanging “new year paintings” (nianhua) in their homes at the Chinese New Year. These pictures were mainly colorful woodcuts, showing images and subjects of good omen. After Mao’s Yan’an Talk they became effective revolutionary media and were widely produced in the Communistcontrolled Liberation Area ( jiefang qu). After the founding of the PRC, the Chinese government immediately launched the New Year Painting Movement to develop this legacy for purposes of national propaganda. On November 23, 1949, the official newspaper People’s Daily published a mandate promoting new year painting. In the early 1950s, the genre was developed on a large scale to eulogize Mao, the Communist Party, and the new life through which the working people would become masters of the country. Since the early 1950s, artists had grappled with the problem of how to represent this new life under the Communist party and to integrate a distinctly Chinese style with Western realism. Jiang Feng and others

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advocated transforming traditional Chinese painting through the integration of Western techniques of sketching and drawing from life. Although some Chinese traditional artists opposed this idea, many did make life drawings, a technique never previously applied to traditional ink painting. The use of a traditional style of landscape painting to describe the industrial landscape ( gongye shanshui) also became fashionable. The works of Li Keran, Fu Baoshi, Shi Lu, and other artists had far-reaching effects during this innovative era. In his ink painting Beyond the Great Wall (1954; fig. 1), for instance, Shi Lu used railroad tracks cutting through the Great Wall, along with an unseen train, its presence indicated through the presence of a Mongolian family watching it come, as metaphors for the effects of industrialization and socialist modernization on the new nation. The painting also involved another metaphor, one of unification, in the form of the Mongolian family gazing at the out-of-frame train. Although the Great Wall was a symbol of the past, when it had blocked the nomad people beyond it from approaching Han society, it was in transition to join the new. A parallel approach appears in an early oil painting by Dong Xiwen, Spring Comes to Tibet (1954), in which a group of Tibetan women watch the approaching bus connecting Tibetan and Han people. Like the railroad in Shi Lu’s painting, the bus was a symbol of modernization. Meanwhile, regardless of the painting’s political subject matter, its color, composition, and historical topic all reveal the early-1950s pursuit of an original model for a nationalist style. Even later, when the Soviet-influenced Socialist Realist style reached its peak, the art of the early period of the People’s Republic of China retained a strong tendency toward nationalism. In fact the greatest influence on the Chinese artists of the 1950s was not Soviet Socialist Realism but the art of the nineteenth-century Peredvizhniki (Wanderers), notably Ilya Repin and Vasili Surikov. Chinese artists of course learned of the school through the Soviets, who had begun to advocate for it in the early 1930s. There were several reasons why these Russian painters affected the Chinese so deeply. First, most of the Peredvizhniki painters came from the lower class, and so were inclined to feel that art should serve the needs of the people and should align itself with their emotions and sentiments. Second, these painters paid attention to national traditions in their choices of both artistic language and topic. Third, they were essentially romantic. Chinese artists long misunderstood them as critical realists, but the critical realists were really the previous generation of Russian artists, who had exposed the dark side of society and held an elite view of social inequality. The Wanderers instead expressed their own feelings in their paintings, affirming the masses’ hopes for the future by depicting their daily lives. Fourth, Chinese artists admired and emulated the skillful academic techniques of the Peredvizhniki.11 Before this time in China, artists such as Xu Beihong, Wu Zuoren, and others had studied in France and been exposed to European academic art, but they were few in number and had no major influence during this period. Most Chinese artists had no opportunity to view European academicism directly, they could learn

some aspects of it from the Peredvizhniki. This accumulation of academic skills, combined with a romantic approach, paved the way for the advancement and refinement of Maoist art in the late 1950s and the first half of the 1960s. In the burst of nationalism at the time of the Great Leap Forward, in 1958, Mao replaced the slogan “Socialist Realism” with “Combining revolutionary realism with revolutionary romanticism.” This had two implications. First, it reflected Mao’s nationalist consciousness and his desire to distinguish China from the Soviet Union. This tendency had manifested previously; in 1956, for example, Lu Dingyi, Mao’s

Fig. 3. Sun Zixi. In Front of Tiananmen Gate. 1964. Oil on canvas, 153 × 294 cm. National Museum of China, Beijing

head of propaganda, had stressed an opposition to “national nihilism” and wholesale Westernization, terms used in the 1950s to warn artists not to follow the Soviet example unquestioningly.12 Second, it reflected Mao’s approach to proletarian art, more romantic and utopian than the art of any other national ideology. It is clear that Mao’s ultimate model of art combined a nationalist style with a peasant’s distaste for elite expression and academicism. From the late 1950s until 1966, however, art practice seemed oriented against Mao’s ideas, especially after the political changes incurred when he resigned as national chairman and was replaced by Liu Shaoqi, in 1959. The change was a result of the failure of Mao’s Great Leap Forward policy the previous year. In comparison with Mao’s radical revolutionary sentiment, Liu took a more realistic, constructive, and professional approach to national affairs. Under his leadership, art moved toward a more academic socialist model. A number of the finest Maoist popular artworks created in this style appeared between 1958 and 1964, after several years of Sovietization. These pictures used academic realist techniques to depict romantic and symbolic themes. Works portraying models of heroism, for example, include Zhan Jianjun’s Five Warriors on Langya Mountain (1959) and Quan Shanshi’s Heroic and Indomitable (1961; fig. 2). These oil paintings, by artists who had trained either in the Soviet Union or under Soviet artists in the 1950s, produced a number of what I call “academic Socialist Realist works” (xueyuan shehuizhuyi xianshizhuyi). Sun Zixi’s painting In Front of Tian’anmen Gate (1964; fig. 3) is another

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such piece. The large clay sculpture Rental Collection Yard (1965; fig. 4), too, made by a team of sculptors at the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, highlighted conflicts in the class-struggle drama but was cast with academic realistic techniques that had never been achieved before. Works with a monumental symbolic significance were gradually replacing plotted storylines. Their styles are quite different from the simple narration of Yan’an woodcuts and the works sometimes called tu youhua (folk oil paintings) produced in the early 1950s by artists such as Dong Xiwen. The folk oils continued to be made, however, often depicting the happy lives of the people and usually focusing on peasant topics.

Extremely dissatisfied, Mao finally launched the Cultural Revolution against the “capitalist headquarters” (zichanjieji silingbu) that he alleged Liu represented within the Party. The goal was to “liquidate seventeen years” (pipan shiqinian), the years from 1949 to 1966. Mao also negated the direction of the Cultural Ministry by giving it a new name, “Ministry of bel-esprit and beauty” (Caizi jiaren bu). For more than twenty years, from the 1940s to the ’60s, he had undertaken a campaign of rectification to reeducate the leftists and early avant-gardists, but it ended in frustration and disappointment. In 1966, he finally abandoned the avant-garde artists of the time by launching the proletarian Cultural Revolution. Meanwhile, on the global level, Mao’s extreme nationalism during the Sovietization period to a certain degree planted an antagonism against the older Soviet brother, which grew until the early 1960s, the lead-up to the Cultural Revolution, when the two nations’ cordial relationship ended. Finally, during the period of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), the Red Guard launched a violent attack on Soviet-influenced academic Socialist Realism. It is the art of the Cultural Revolution, in particular Red Guard art, that defines the uniqueness of Mao’s art, which can be considered a perfect synthesis of revolutionary and mass art. At this point Chinese art history returned to the original thesis of the “revolutionary masses” or “Red pop” from the Yan’an Talk. The difference was that the proletarian masses were no longer the objects served by art; instead they became the masters of art. Workers and peasants could be artists, as exemplified by Luda and Yangquan’s workers’ art and the peasants’ pictures of Huxian county. In giving the lower classes the right not only to appreciate art but also to maintain their own discourse in the creation and interpretation of art, Mao rejected and undermined all modernist and elite socialist theories of popular culture.

Fig. 4. Ye Yushan and sculptors from the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts. Rental Collection Yard (detail). 1965. Clay. Liu's Manor Museum, Dayi County

In 1963, a movement to “rectify” literature and art began and seemed to interrupt this peak of aestheticized Socialist Realism. In terms of cultural ideology, this reflected the final confrontation between the concepts of Maoist mass art and 1930s left-wing art and literature. Within the previous decade, Mao had launched several political and literary rectification movements to criticize and remove certain intellectuals, including well-known representatives of the 1930s left wing. They were punished because, despite their efforts at accommodation, they could not abandon the idea of the autonomy of art, and the creation of art according to superior professional standards, in contradiction of Mao’s theory that art should serve as a tool reflecting the thoughts of the masses.

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Author's Note: Parts of this essay previously appeared in my book Total Modernity and the Avant-Garde in Twentieth-Century Chinese Art (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2011). 1 In his talk at the Second Conference of the Eighth National Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, in 1958, Mao Zedong said, ”The methodology of our proletarian literature and art is the combination of revolutionary realism and revolutionary romanticism.” This principle was later officially conveyed through leading members of the Chinese Writers Association, such as Zhou Yang. See Mao Zedong Sixiang Dacidian (Shanghai: Shanghai Dictionary Press, 1993), p. 804. 2 Kang Youwei, Travels in Eleven European Countries, quoted in Lawrence Wu, “Kang Youwei and the Westernisation of Modern Chinese Art,” Orientations, March 1990, pp. 47–48. 3 Chen Duxiu, “Meishu geming,” in Xinqingnian 6, no. 1 (January 1918): 85–86. 4 See Gao Minglu, “Lun Mao Zedong de dazhongyishu moshi,” Ershiyi shiji (Hong Kong Chinese University) no. 20 (December 1993): 61–73. 5 For more on the Woodcut Movement see Shirley Sun, “Lu Xun and the Chinese Woodcut Movement, 1929–1935,” PhD diss., Stanford University, 1974, and Tang Xiaobing, Origins of the Chinese Avant-Garde: The Modern Woodcut Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). 6 Mao Zedong, Zai yan’an wenyi zuotanhui shangde jianghua (Talks on the Yan’an forum on literature and art), in Selected Works of Mao Zedong (Mao Zedong Xuanji) (Beijing: People’s Press, 1967), 4:804–35. Available in Eng. trans. online at https://www.marxists.org/reference/ archive/mao/selected-works/volume-3/mswv3_08.htm (accessed June 2016). The speech has two parts: an introduction, given on May 2, 1945, in Yan’an, and a conclusion on May 23. 7 Ibid. Mao first mentioned “xiwen lejian” in 1938, after he watched a Shanxi opera (qinqiang) with some villagers. See Ai Sike, Yan’an wenyi yundong jisheng (Beijing: Culture and Art Press, 1987), pp. 77–78. 8 Mao, “Speech on Literature and Art at the Symposium in Yan’an,” in Selected Works of Mao Zedong (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1967), 3:73. 9 Mao, “Oppose Stereotyped Party Writing” (Fandui dangbagu, February 8, 1942), Selected Works of Mao Zedong (Beijing: People’s Press, 1967), 3:798. Also in English version Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung, 3:63, where “dazhonghua” is translated as “mass style” and “xiaozhonghua” as “small circles.” 10 Of the twenty-six artists, Qian Shaowu, Li Tianxiang, Chen Yongjiang, and Chen Zunsan went in 1953; Xiao Feng, Lin Gang, Quan Shanshi, Qi Muer, and Zhou Zheng in 1954; Deng Shu, Guo Shaogang, Wang Baokang, Ji Xiaoqiu, Ma Yuanhong, Zhou Benyi, Shao Da Zhen, Xi Jingzhi, Chen Peng, and Luo Gongliu in 1955; and Zhang Huaqing, Xu Minghua, Feng Zhen, Li Jun, Dong Zuyi, Tan Yongtai, and Wu Biduan in 1956. Xiao Feng, interview with the author, 2008. Xiao was the previous president of the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou. 11 On the Peredvizhniki see Elizabeth Valkenier, Russian Realist Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), pp. 76–97. My argument here is also inspired by Marian Mazzone, “China’s Nationalization of Oil Painting in the 1950s: Searching Beyond the Soviet Paradigm,” graduate seminar paper, History of Art 976 (Modern Chinese Art), Ohio State University, 1991. 12 Lu Dingyi, “Baihua qifang, baijia zhengming,” People’s Daily, June 13, 1956.

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REALISM AS INTERNATIONAL STYLE Nikolas Drosos and Romy Golan

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asiliy Yakovlev’s Portrait of Georgy Zhukov (1946; plate 172) and Andrzej Wróblewski’s Rozstrzelanie z Gestapowcem (Executed Man, Execution with a Gestapo Man, 1949; plate 10) represent the split aftermath of the war. The Soviet marshal is depicted on horseback against the ruins of conquered Berlin, replete with crushed Nazi emblems and an apocalyptic sky, in an infinite quotation of equestrian portraits, from Jacques-Louis David back to the Romans. Against this public display of triumph, Wróblewski’s private picture is a flashback to 1939, when, as a boy in Wilno, Poland (today Vilnius, Lithuania), the artist had his life turned upside down by a double invasion—first by the Nazis, then by the Soviet army, within one month. The Nazis’ summary executions of civilians gave way to more violence when the country was soon “liberated” by the Red Army. Wróblewski shows a young man the upper half of whose body is capsized and trapped inside the lower half, a cadavre exquis of Poland’s wounded body politic. Between him and the viewer is a Nazi executioner in jodhpurs, seen from the back. Rozstrzelanie z Gestapowcem ghosts one brand of realism—one strangely akin to Ma­g ritte’s “realist Surrealism”—inside another one: Soviet Socialist Realism as it was being solidified and exported to the Soviet satellite states of Eastern Europe. There had in fact been a previous ghosting: a few months earlier, Wróblewski had painted an abstract image on the recto of the canvas.1 In the Soviet Union, the first years after the war were marked by the final triumph of Socialist Realism. Known as zhdanovshchina after its architect, Andrei Zhdanov, a prominent member of the Politburo and founder of Cominform (the organization created in 1947 to coordinate among international Communist parties), this was the culmination of a process formally begun in 1934 at the First Congress of Soviet Writers, in which Zhdanov had been a protagonist. Contrasted with naturalism, which was seen as a disinterested and therefore ideologically suspect form of mimesis, Socialist Realism in essence involved an affirmative aesthetic judgment. It involved clearly defined criteria codified by several, often interchangeable and overlapping terms: narodnost’, for example, a “people-ness” that conveyed nationally and ethnically specific forms as well as “popular” artistic sensibilities. Others were typichnost’ (the focus on typical situations in order to supersede the depiction of superficial phenomena and explore essential truths) and ideinost’ (ideological content), or more specifically klassovost’ (class consciousness). Most consequential, even among fellow travelers beyond the Iron Curtain, was partiinost’ (party-mindedness), a key Leninist principle that stipulated partisanship as an antidote to the objectivity that the bourgeoisie claimed to employ to mask its interests. If art was to be realist, it had to take a firm political stance. Dutifully following such prescriptions, Dmitrii Mochal’skii’s Vozvrashchenie z demonstratsii (Oni videli Stalina) (Return from the Demonstration [They’ve Seen Stalin], 1949; fig. 1) manages to transform even a saccharine genre painting of cheerful children into a clear political statement.

Fyodor Shurpin’s Ytro nashei Rodiny (Morning of our Motherland, 1946–48; plate 173) combines the traditional academic genres of landscape and portraiture into an ideologically unequivocal image. The war is over and an aged Joseph Stalin has removed his khaki military overcoat and contemplates the vastness of the Soviet empire. Punctuated by transmission towers, the landscape alludes to Lenin’s famous dictum that “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.” The same trope of vastness appears in Young America (1950; plate 185), by Andrew Wyeth, who stated in an interview that it represents “the vastness of America and American history.”2 The Soviets and their allies did not own realism; Wyeth’s brand, although increasingly marginalized by the triumph of abstraction at the time, had a native pedigree in the American Regionalist school of the 1930s, whose populism can be seen as a home-bred narodnost’. Shurpin’s celebration of electrification, though, contrasts sharply with Wyeth’s pastoral mood. The ubiquitous cars on the new American highways are banished from Wyeth’s painting in favor of a singular bike, whereas the Soviet landscape exaggerates

Fig. 1. Dimitri Mochalski. Vozvrashchenie z demonstratsii (Oni videli Stalina) (Return from the demonstration [They’ve seen Stalin]). 1949. Oil on canvas, 69 x 131 cm. The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

a mechanization that was actually still lagging. Belonging to parallel universes, these paintings share an affirmative, triumphant approach to reality, fittingly for the superpowers, arguably the only ones to emerge truly victorious from the war.

CULTURE WARRIORS AND FELLOW TRAVELERS The death of Zhdanov, in 1948, fell in the same timeframe as the establishment of the people’s republics of Eastern Europe in East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, and Albania, as well as of the People’s Republic of China. This initiated a Soviet cultural rayonnement and the exportation of a mature, highly crystallized Socialist Realism to this newly formed bloc. A spectacular case of technical transfer took place when the quintessentially Western medium of

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oil painting was eagerly adopted by Mao’s party officials. As they well PAINTINGS IN CIRCULATION understood, no medium could better deliver both the pictorial eviUntil the mid-1950s, Soviet paintings barely circulated outside the dentiary detail necessary for what Roland Barthes called the “reality Communist bloc, leading André Breton to ask in 1952, “Why is contemeffect” and the aura necessary to sanction a rewriting of China’s his3 porary Russian painting being hidden from us?”6 Yet this was also a time tory. Konstantin Maksimov’s Warrior of the Chinese Revolution (1955) is a token of this artistic exchange. Maksimov was a respected Soviet acadof increasing traffic of realist paintings across the Iron Curtain. In a oneemician whom the Chinese government beckoned to teach the pictoway pilgrimage that aimed at Moscow but did not reach it before the end of rial formulas of Socialist Realism in their country. Since he assumed the decade, Western Communist painters exhibited systematically in the an active role in the spread of Socialist Realism beyond Soviet borders, Soviet satellite countries of Eastern Europe.7 This is how paintings from André Fougeron’s cycle “Pays des mines,” his 1951 tribute to the striking coal his painting can be read as the self-portrait of an artist enlisted in the miners of northeast France, are to be found today in collections in Olocultural wars of the time. mouc, Warsaw, and Bucha While China aimed to rest (fig. 2). Similarly, Renato be more Zhdanovist than Guttuso’s marching peasthe Zhdanovists, in France ants in Occupazione delle terre and Italy, the two Western incolte in Sicilia (Occupation nations with the largest of Uncultivated Land in Communist parties, realSicily, 1949–50), a denunism was one option among ciation of the perennially many, and the term served impoverished condition of more as a marker of politItaly’s South, ended up in ical engagement than as a the Akademie der Künste strict stylistic category. If in East Berlin. 8 the Soviets purged all signs Against these ideologof “formalism,” holding ical alignments, the Polish the horizon of reference to artist Wojciech Fangor’s sanctioned nineteenth-cenPostaci (Figures, 1950; plate tury precursors such as 178) occupies a more ambigIlya Repin, the French and uous territory. Unlike Sovithe Italians were open to a Fig. 2. André Fougeron. Terres cruelles from “Pays des mines” series. 1951. et counterparts that never modicum of stylization, Oil on canvas, 170 × 250 cm. Muzeum ume�ní Olomouc (Olomouc Museum of Art) quite depict the capitalist namely the “Picasso-isms” other, this painting interinherited from the Spanish nalizes the binary logic of the Cold War, playing out the East/West artist’s immensely influential Guernica (1937). Operating within capiconfrontation both in clothing and in different pictorial modes of retalist societies, Western Communist artists swapped the affirmative alism: the affirmative Soviet and the critical and in this case almost Soviet model for a critical stance toward life in the West, focusing on 4 parodic Western. The result is a tongue-in-cheek picture that strikscenes of class struggle. Boris Taslitzky’s Riposte, dating from 1951 and shown at the Paris Salon d’Automne the same year, depicts a riot in 1949 ingly breaks with orthodox realism, staging an unlikely encounter when police unleashed dogs on dock workers near Marseille who had between a proletarian couple and a smartly dressed Western womrefused to load arms on ships bound for France’s neocolonial war in an. The couple are construction workers standing in front of a monIndochina (plate 182). umental building typical of Stalinist Poland; she wears a little sum The United States had its own contingent of fellow travelers. As mer dress decorated with words such as “Wall Street,” “London,” and Alice Neel, considered by many a pioneer of Socialist Realism in Amer“Coca-Cola,” as well as the spectacular sunglasses made famous by ican painting, declared in 1951, “I am against abstract and non-objecPeggy Guggenheim, who emerged as the doyenne of American and tive art because such art shows a hatred of human beings. East Harlem European abstraction at the 1948 Venice Biennale. is like a battlefield of humanism, and I am on the side of the people The year 1950, when Postaci was painted, was in fact the only year here, and they inspire my paintings.” 5 The dandyish pose struck by the during the postwar period when Poland did not participate in the young Georgie Arce in his portrait by Neel is but a thin veneer over the Biennale. It was also the year of a backlash against the victory of abviolent life of teenagers of color in Spanish Harlem. straction at the previous Biennale: what attracted critics’ attention this time was the Mexican Pavilion, which featured realist works by Diego

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of Socialist Realism and an increased circulation of Soviet and Eastern Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, the tres European art in the West. In the 1956 Biennale, the Soviet Pavilion includgrandes of Mexican muralism. With works like Siqueiros’s Madre camped many iconic works, such as Semyon Chuikov’s Doch’ Sovetskoi Kirgizii esina (Peasant Mother, 1929), El Sollozo (The Sob, 1939), and Cain en los (Daughter of Soviet Kirgizia, 1948). An emblem of Socialist Realism’s Estados Unidos (Cain in the United States, 1947; plate 164), politically enexpansion into the various Soviet republics, as well as of the imperative gaged realism gained center stage. As Rivera boasted back home, “It is for “national character” in art, the painting showed a Central Asian girl in an important victory over art purism in a place that had been until 9 on her way to school. As such, and fittingly exhibited in the most internow the shrine of this tendency.” Emboldened by their success, Guttuso’s envoi to the following, 1952 Biennale was a huge history painting, national of art exhibitions, it symbolized both the global aspirations of La battaglia di Ponte dell’Ammiraglio (The battle of Ponte Ammiraglio, the Soviet system and its purported respect for cultural difference. En1951–52) depicting scores of red-shirted Garibaldini disembarking in visioned as a method adaptable to all cultures, Socialist Realism was Parlermo in 1860 to spearhead thus presented as always althe Italian Risorgimento.10 ready global. The Pavilion’s Stalin’s death in the curator, German Nedoshivin, spring of 1953 ushered in a remarked, “We are inclined to moment of confusion. The consider our art as an initial negative attitudes toward stage on a long road turned abstraction in Stalin’s time toward the future. Now, in take on a tone of quasi-panic many countries, art passionin Guttuso’s Boogie-Woogie ately seeks to return to real(1953; plate 181), his conism. Soviet Art also follows tribution to the 1954 this road.” 12 Lo and behold, the Soviets had now become Biennale. It depicts a group of fellow travelers! Yet arguably teenagers dancing freneticalthey had arrived in Venice too ly in front of Piet Mondrian’s late, at the end of the political Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942– system that had sustained 43), its neoplasticist language Socialist Realism, and against of right angles and primary a growing network of realist colors mimicked by their works in which Siqueiros and garishly colored, checkered Guttuso were central nodes, clothes. Guttuso’s visual pun overshadowing their Soviet demotes one of Mondrian’s Fig. 3. Fernand Léger. Les Constructeurs. 1951. Oil on canvas, 160 × 200 cm. Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow comrades. best-known works to the sta While the fortunes of a tus of disco decoration. Ironglobal abstraction not necessarily aligned with the United States is now ically, in Venice it hung in the Giardini’s Central Pavilion, just a few steps well documented, that of a global realism independent of Moscow’s comfrom the American Pavilion, which that year was acquired by New York’s mand remains elusive. A case in point is the Egyptian artist Hamed Museum of Modern Art, the proud owner of Mondrian’s painting. (The Owais, who exhibited in Venice in 1952, the year of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Museum would retain ownership of the Pavilion until 1986.) And yet, in a Egyptian Revolution. Owais’s encounter with left-wing artists such as curious mirror effect, a similar jousting between realism and abstraction Guttuso and the Mexican muralists had taken place in Venice earlier unfolded in the American Pavilion itself that year, with the odd curatorial on, and was formative for his socially engaged realism, already influpairing of the Social Realist Ben Shahn with the Abstract Expressionist enced by Egypt’s Group of Modern Art.13 His Nasser and the NationalizaWillem de Kooning.11 Meanwhile the Soviet Pavilion stood empty, as it had been since tion of the Canal (1960; plate 191) depicts a foundational moment for the 1934, the year Socialist Realism was adopted as the Soviet Union’s modern Egyptian state, and one that led to the Suez Crisis of 1956, official style. Soviet art would not return to the Biennale until 1956, with a setback for France and Britain in the Middle East but a success for an ambitious retrospective of about 160 works from three generations the Soviet Union and its relationship with Egypt. Exalting and affirmof artists. A few months earlier, Nikita Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” of ative in the Soviet mode and probably based on a photograph, the February 25 had denounced Stalin and his crimes in a closed-door session painting is nonetheless executed in the faux-naïf manner of Rivera’s of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The murals. Owais’s work is an example of an increasingly global realist ensuing “Khruschev Thaw” brought a loosening of the strict formulas mode, this time committed to a nationalist and anticolonial cause.

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With decolonization and the emergence of new states, realism’s twin functions of affirmation and critique operated in an increasing variety of political contexts. The long pictorial tradition of a victimized yet heroic peasantry continued to empower artists to voice a strong “J’accuse!” against regimes of political domination. The Portuguese artist Júlio Pomar thus painted the monumental female rice-pickers in Etude para Ciclo do Arroz II (Study for Rice Cycle II, 1953; plate 183) under the dictatorship of António Salazar, while Ismail Shammout’s scenes of fleeing peasants in Beginning of the Tragedy and A Sip of Water, also of 1953, voiced the calamity of the unfulfilled national aspirations of the Palestinians (plates 286, 287).14

UNFINISHED BUSINESS Chuikov’s prominent acknowledgment of the Kirghiz girl’s race is significant within the Cold War context. In the early 1950s, Soviet propaganda often contrasted the rampant racial segregation in the United States with the equality afforded—in theory, at least—to all the races and nationalities of the Soviet Union.15 In both cases access to education was crucial. In his History of Negro Education in Morris County, Texas (1955; plate 176) John Biggers adapts the idioms of Rivera and Thomas Hart Benton, which he had encountered while studying at the Hampton Institute, Virginia, in the 1940s, to produce a mural on the history of the first black school in the area.16 Replete with portraits of contributors to the school’s history, Biggers’s realism is a thoroughly engaged one. This particular work was made a year after the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, a key moment in the civil rights movement. Almost a decade later, school desegregation in the South was still lagging. Norman Rockwell, hitherto known for saccharine illustrations of wholesome American life, faced the problem head-on in his first assignment for Look magazine, producing a foldout commemorating the tenth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. The Problem We All Live With (1964) depicts Ruby Bridges, the first African American girl to be integrated into a white school in New Orleans, escorted there by U.S. marshals for her protection. Heavily reliant on John Steinbeck’s detailed description of the incident in his Travels with Charlie (1962), Rockwell’s meticulously rendered painting is a transcription of a textual realism into a pictorial one.17

DIVERGENT REALISMS In the early 1960s the internal reforms of the Soviet system during the Thaw eventually led to the revision of high Socialist Realism into a new form of painting, alternatively called “severe” or “contemporary” style. 18 While still fitting the established prescriptions for realism,

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works such as Viktor Popkov’s Stroiteli Bratskoy GES (The Builders of Bratsk Hydro-Electric Power Station, 1960; plate 175) and Tahir Salahov’s Remontniki (Maintenance Workers, 1961) rejected the unfettered optimism of their predecessors in favor of a more somber, introverted reflection on labor. Standing on the construction site of a hydroelectric power station in Irkutsk or the oil rocks of Baku in Azerbaijan, these workers toiling on the periphery of the Soviet Empire come closer to non-Soviet forms of realism in other media, such as the depictions of the working class in Italian neorealist cinema during the preceding decades. Arbeitpause (Break, 1959; plate 177), by the East German Willi Sitte, further updates the representation of labor by shifting the focus to rest and leisure. His construction worker sits on scaffolding high in the sky, relaxed, legs crossed, a cigarette between his fingers, absorbed in a book. The lightheartedness of this painting may have owed a debt to Fernand Léger’s series Les Constructeurs (Construction Workers; fig. 3), which had circulated east of the Iron Curtain in the previous years.19 Chinese Communism, on the other hand, remained entrenched, resistant to the pressures of de-Stalinization. Quan Shanshi’s Unyielding Heroism (1961), painted at the apex of the Sino-Soviet split, embodies China standing its ground. Shanshi had studied at the Repin Institute of Art in Leningrad. This work, executed in the painterly late Socialist Realist style, is one of the most famous among those selected by the party for display in the National Museum of China. In Jia Youfu’s Marching across the Snow-Covered Mount Minshan (1965; plate 188) a Socialist Realist image of Mao leading his Long March is superimposed on a monochromatic mountain landscape, signaling a new direction in the 1960s, that of a fusion of traditional and Western techniques. While the medium and technique are Western, the flat bright colors and the graphic ornamental pattern of the mountain peaks aim to evoke Chinese New Year prints.

BEYOND THE FRAME When Siqueiros completed De Porfirismo a la Revolución (From the Dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz to the Revolution, 1957–65; plate 186), his vast, undulating mural for the Castillo de Chapultepec in Mexico City, the mural had already been a “native” format for decades. Siqueiros heightened the drama by compressing his multifigure composition around a specific, explosive historical event. The year is 1906, when Mexican workers went on strike to demand equal pay with American miners working alongside them at the Canadea Consolidated copper mines, a scene that typifies the exploitation of Mexico’s natural resources by foreign powers during the Díaz regime.20 Glorifying the anti-imperialism of the early years of the Mexican Revolution at a time of continuing neocolonial American involvement in Latin America, Siqueiros’s mural has implications both specific and global. Simultaneously a style, a method, and a political stance, realism always carried an intrinsic mandate: to point to social and geopolitical realities beyond the frame. Its global ambition was unmatched in the postwar period.

4. Realisms

1 See Éric de Chassey and Marta Dziewan´ska, eds., Andrzej Wróblewski: Recto/Verso (Warsaw: Museum of Modern Art, 2015). 2 Andrew Wyeth, quoted in “American Realist,” Time 58, no. 3 (July 16, 1951): 72, 75, cited in Francine Weiss, “Kindred Spirits: Robert Frost and Andrew Wyeth,” in David Cateforis, ed., Rethinking Andrew Wyeth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), p. 145. 3 See Chang-Tai Hung, “Oil Paintings and Politics: Weaving a Heroic Tale of the Chinese Communist Revolution,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 49, no. 4 (October 2007): 783–814, and Mao’s New World: Political Culture in the Early People’s Republic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011). 4 See Jeannine Verdès Leroux, “L’art de parti. Le parti communiste français et ses peintres 1947–54,” Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales 28 (June 1979): 33–55, Sarah Wilson, “‘La Beauté Révolutionnaire’? Réalisme Socialiste and French Painting 1935–1954,” Oxford Art Journal 3, no. 2 (October 1980): 61–69, Wilson, Picasso/Marx and Socialist Realism in France (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), and Nicoletta Misler, La via italiana al realismo. La politica culturale artistica del PCI dal 1944 al 1956 (Milan: Mazzotta, 1973). 5 Alice Neel, quoted in Andrew Hemingway, Artists on the Left: American Artists and the Communist Movement, 1926–1956 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 248. 6 André Breton, “Pourquoi nous cache-t-on la peinture russe contemporaine?” Arts, January 11, 1952. 7 See Antoine Baudin, “Why is Soviet Painting Hidden From Us?: Zhdanov Art and Its International Relations and Fallout, 1947–53,” in Thomas Lahusen and Evgeny Dobrenko, eds., Socialist Realism Without Shores (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), pp. 227–56. 8 See Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius, “How the West Corroborated Socialist Realism in the East: Fougeron, Taslitzky, and Picasso in Warsaw,” Biuletyn Historii sztuki 65, no. 2 (2003): 303–29, and “Remapping Socialist Realism: Renato Guttuso in Poland,” in Jérôme Bazin, Pascal Dubourg Glatigny, and Piotr Piotrowski, eds., Art Beyond Borders: Artistic Exchange in Communist Europe (1945–1989) (Budapest: Central University Press, 2016), pp. 139–50. 9 Diego Rivera, quoted in El Nacional, June 18, 1950, and quoted here from Philip Stein, Siqueiros: His Life and Works (New York: International Publishers, 1994), p. 187. 10 See John Berger, “A Socialist Realist Painting at the Biennale,” The Burlington Magazine 94, no. 595 (October 1952): 294, 296–97. 11 Francis K. Pohl, “An American in Venice: Ben Shahn and the United States Foreign Policy at the 1954 Venice Biennale or Portrait of the Artist as American Liberal,” Art History 4, no. 1 (March 1981): 80–113. 12 German A. Nedoshivin, “U.R.S.S.,” in XXVIII Biennale di Venezia (Venice: Alfieri Editore, 1956), pp. 508–9. 13 See Liliane Karnouk, Contemporary Egyptian Art (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1995). 14 See Júlio Pomar, Alexandre Pomar, and Natalía Vital, Júlio Pomar. Catalogue raisonné (Paris: Différence, 2001), and Gannit Ankori, Palestinian Art (London: Reaktion Books, 2006). 15 In response to this pressure, the U.S. Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World Fair contained an exhibit on civil rights Unfinished Business. See Michael L. Krenn, “Unfinished Business”: Segregation and U.S. Diplomacy at the 1958 World’s Fair,” Diplomatic History 20, no. 4 (Fall 1996): 591–612. 16 See Ollie Jensen Theisen, Walls That Speak: The Murals of John Thomas Biggers (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2010). 17 See Karal Ann Marling, Norman Rockwell (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997), and Maureen Hart Hennessey and Anne Knutson, eds., Norman Rockwell: Pictures for the American People (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999). 18 See Matthew Bown and Matteo Lafranconi, eds., Socialist Realisms: Soviet Painting 1920– 1970 (Milan: Skira, 2012). 19 See Antoine Baudin, “Les Constructeurs de Fernand Léger. De la Place Smolensk à la Vallée de la Chevreuse, ou quelques tribulations d’un chantier pictural,” Matières no. 2 (1998): 68–75, and Jérôme Bazin, “Le réalisme socialiste et ses modèles internationaux,” Vingtième siècle. Revue d’histoire 109 (January–March 2011): 73–87. A prominent painting in the series was donated to the Soviet Union in 1969 by Léger’s widow, Nadia Khodasevich, and is now in the collection of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. 20 See Mary K. Coffey, How a Revolutionary Art Became Official Culture: Murals, Museums, and the Mexican State (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012).

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REALISMS Plates

John Biggers Beauford Delaney Inji Efflatoun Wojciech Fangor Renato Guttuso

Vasiliy Yakovlev Jia Youfu Gelij Korschew Li Xiushi Alice Neel

Hamed Owais Júlio Pomar Viktor Popkov Fjodor Schurpin David Alfaro Siqueiros

Willi Sitte Boris Taslitzky Chua Mia Tee Andrew Wyeth

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Vasiliy Yakovlev Portrait of Georgy Zhukov, Marshal of the Soviet Union 1946 oil on canvas The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

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Fyodor Shurpin The Morning of our Motherland 1948 oil on canvas The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

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Geliy Korzhev Raising the Banner 1957-60 oil on canvas The State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg

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Viktor Popkov The Builders of Bratsk Hydro-Electric Power Station 1960 oil on canvas The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

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John Biggers The History of Negro Education in Morris County, Texas 1955 conté crayon and gouache on paper Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, LLC, New York

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Willi Sitte Arbeitspause (Break) 1959 oil on hardboard Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig

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178

Wojciech Fangor Postaci (Figures) 1950 oil on canvas Museum Sztuki, Łodz

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Beauford Delaney Portrait of James Baldwin 1945 oil on canvas Philadelphia Museum of Art

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Alice Neel Georgie Arce 1953 oil on canvas The Estate of Alice Neel, New York

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Renato Guttuso Boogie-Woogie 1953 oil on canvas Mart, Museo di arte contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto

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Boris Taslitzky Riposte 1951 oil paint on canvas TATE, London

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183

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Júlio Pomar

Júlio Pomar

Étude para Ciclo do Arroz II (Study for Rice Cycle II) 1953 oil on Masonite Private Collection, Lisbon

Resistência (Resistance) 1945 oil on Masonite Câmara Municipal de Lisboa / Museu de Lisboa, Lisbon

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Andrew Wyeth Young America 1950 egg tempera on gessoed board (“Renaissance Panel”) Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia

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David Alfaro Siqueiros From the Dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz to the Revolution - The People in Arms (detail) 1957–65 mural Reproduction authorized by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historiar, Mexico City

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Inji Efflatoun Portrait of a Man 1958 oil on canvas Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah

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Jia Youfu Marching Across the Snow-Covered Mount Minshan 1965 ink and color on paper CAFA Art Museum, Beijing

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Li Xiushi Morning 1961 oil on canvas CAFA Art Museum, Beijing

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Chua Mia Tee Epic Poem of Malaya 1955 oil on canvas National Gallery Singapore

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Hamed Owais Al Zaim w Ta'mim Al Canal (Nasser and the Nationalisation of the Canal) 1957 oil on canvas QM/QF - Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha

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Section Introduction Pedro Erber Andrea Giunta Mari Carmen Ramirez Plates

5 CONCRETE VISIONS

CONCRETE VISIONS

W

hile the abstract style that dominated the postwar international world was primarily materialist and gestural, prewar geometric abstraction did persist, albeit with an impetus quite distinct from that of European prewar artists. In South America, Neoconcrete art united the vitalism of Joaquín Torres García with European modernism and became an entirely independent phenomenon. Modernist forms were adopted early on, in parallel to a nationalist developmentalism that did not simply stand against Western capitalism but figured in competition with it. Concrete art in Latin America—by the Madí group, for example—was quickly followed by Neoconcretism, its forms apparently similar but quite different in spirit. As Lygia Clark said, “We use the term ‘neoconcrete’ to differentiate ourselves from those committed to nonfigurative ‘geometric’ art and particularly the kind of concrete art that is influenced by a dangerously acute rationalism … none of which offers a rationale for the expressive potential we feel art contains.” Instead, South American Neoconcrete art was imbued with an antirational vitalism, made socially specific, physically participatory, and psychologically liberating. In this sense, it rhymes with the nonprogrammatic, everyday formalism of artists around the world whose “geometric” art eschewed the rationalism and, still more broadly, the authority and dogmatism of earlier avant-garde movements.

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OUT OF WORDS: THE SPACETIME OF CONCRETE POETRY Pedro Erber

5. Concrete Visions

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ygia Pape’s Livro da criação (Book of creation, 1959–60) is a set of fifteen three-dimensional geometric compositions, made in gouache on cardboard, intended to be handled and interacted with by viewers, and entirely without words. It can at first be hard to think of each of the individual compositions as pages of a book. If anything it may be the work’s title—and perhaps some knowledge of Pape’s creative trajectory and aesthetic affiliations—that first suggest to the viewer its identity as a (very special) kind of artist’s book and its place within the context of the experimental poetry practiced by members of the Rio de Janeiro–based Neoconcrete group. In its absence of words and letters, Livro da criação is not alone among book works of Pape’s such as Livro da arquitetura (Book of

commentary on the suspicion and paranoia that dominated the early days of Brazil’s military dictatorship. In Japan during the same period, the avant-gardist Kitasono Katue published “plastic poems” composed of photographed newspaper cutouts, some of them including foreign (mostly French) writing and others containing no writing at all (fig. 2). But can such works still be called poetry? If they are entirely without words, what would make them belong to the realm of poetic experimentation rather than to that of the plastic arts? Suspending for a moment any verdict on the poetic identity of such works, it is worth examining how they came to be designated as poems: that is, through their continuity and dialogue with a certain trajectory in the materialization of poetic language, a trajectory seen in a significant share of avant-garde poetry in the postwar era. If, following the critics

Fig. 1. Lygia Pape. Livro do tempo (Book of Time). 1961–63. Tempera and acrylic on wood, 365 parts, 16 × 16 × 3 cm (each). Courtesy Projeto Lygia Pape

Architecture, 1959–60; plate 240) and the monumental Livro do tempo (Book of Time, 1961–65; fig. 1), in which she stretched the concept of the book even further by attaching its 365 compositions to the wall, eliminating the interactive aspect of the previous pieces. Indeed, some of the most radical poetic experiments of the postwar years in Brazil and beyond lack verbal language. In 1964, working with photographs cut from printed media, the São Paulo–based concrete poet Augusto de Campos produced Olho por olho (Eye for eye), a poignant

Lucy Lippard and John Chandler, the Conceptual art of the late 1960s and 1970s has been repeatedly described in terms of the “dematerialization” of the art object, postwar avant-garde poets performed the opposite operation.1 Emphasizing the visual and vocal aspects of verbal language, they pursued a radical materialization of the poetic word, a process that culminated, in some cases, in the disappearance of verbal language from poetic composition.

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Fig. 2. Kitasono Katsue. Prospérité solitaire. 1974. Gelatin silver print, 15.5 x 13 cm.

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The search for a concrete form of poetic expression—for poems that could not just create but be their own objects, rather than representing external reality through what was often described as the partial or abstract means of communication characteristic of verbal discourse—was one of the strongest and most original marks of postwar experimental poetry. It also gave poetry an unheard-of proximity to, indeed an overlap with, the visual arts. As Kitasono, quoting the French art historian Michel Ragon, put it in his 1966 essay “A Note on Plastic Poetry,” “The era of the spoken word is past and the era of the written word is ended. We have reached the era of image.”2 A widespread sense of the limitations of verbal language, particularly as it is phonetically represented in modern Western script, and an attempt to overcome those limitations emerged contemporaneously in the work and programmatic writing of poets throughout the world. But not by chance, it was concrete poetry—a transnational

poetic practice and in dialogue with a carefully chosen set of texts from a wide range of literary traditions—the time and space (or “spacetime,” as they termed it, after James Joyce) of poetry and, more generally, of art in all its diverse forms. As Augusto de Campos elaborated elsewhere, the concrete poets took seriously—indeed almost literally—Jean-Paul Sartre’s claim that while prose understands words as signs, poetry must understand them as things. 4 The Noigandres group were certainly not the first to incorporate graphic space as a meaningful element of poetic expression. In fact these poets were keen on acknowledging their predecessors, regarding their experiments as part of a lineage that extended back to Guillaume Apollinaire’s Calligrammes and, most significantly, to Stéphane Mallarmé’s Coup de dés. Even further back, it is possible to trace the origins of visual poetry in European languages to at least the Hellenistic peri-

Fig. 3. Ferreira Gullar. Onde. 1959. Acrylic on wood and vinyl, 40 × 40 cm. Collection Ferreira Gullar

avant-garde movement started by the Brazilian poets Décio Pignatari and the brothers Haroldo and Augusto de Campos, together with Ulm-based Swiss-Bolivian poet Eugen Gomringer—that most characteristically embodied such aspirations, to the point of becoming nearly synonymous with postwar visual poetry. “Concrete poetry: tension of word-things in spacetime,” reads the “Plano-piloto para poesia concreta” (Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry), the movement’s manifesto, which was signed by Pignatari and the Campos brothers and published in 1958 in the fourth issue of the group’s journal, Noigandres.3 One of many definitions of the scope of their endeavor provided in this brief text, the sentence introduces not only a convergence between word and thing but an attempt to theorize—through

od, with Simias of Rhodes’s axe-shaped poem from the third century B.C .5 Yet it was precisely because of its historical consciousness, and its self-reflective and explicitly theoretical attitude toward the literary tradition and toward poetic composition itself, that concrete poetry came to occupy a hegemonic position in postwar visual poetry and poetics. Borrowing the adjective “concrete” from music and the visual arts, the Noigandres group proposed to bring poetic technique up to date, to “synchronize” it with other realms of artistic creation. On the one hand, they argued, in the work of Piet Mondrian, Josef Albers, and others, time had intervened in painting, an art of space par excellence; on the other, Anton von Webern and his followers had introduced space into music, which is fundamentally an art of time. 6 Meanwhile,

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poetry occupied a more ambivalent position, since both its spatial and its temporal aspects could be taken as crucial depending on whether its written or its recitative form were privileged. Since its historical origins lay in spoken words, though, its temporal aspect could fairly be said to have predominated, and the mobilization of space for communicative potential is accordingly what first and most clearly distinguished concrete poetry (a quality that resonated with a number of contemporaneous poetic trends, notably Pierre Garnier’s spatialisme). Yet this emphasis on space was coupled with a heightened focus on the poem’s vocal, recitative element. Borrowing again from Joyce, the Noigandres poets referred repeatedly to the “verbivocovisual” essence of poetic composition. Indeed, in emphasizing space, it was ultimately the temporal aspect of poetry that their poems most deeply challenged and transformed. A clear example appears in the poems collected in Augusto de Campos’s volume Poetamenos (Minuspoet, 1953), such as “lygia fingers” and “dias dias dias” (days days days), in which the use of graphic space and different-colored types was also meant to function as a guide for recitation in multiple voices. The concrete poets were fascinated with Sino-Japanese ideographic script. Through the work of Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa, they discerned in the ideogram a model for poetic composition that could “share the advantages of nonverbal [visual] communication without giving up the word’s virtuality.” 7 What interested them, more than the actual role of the ideogram as an element of Chinese and Japanese writing systems, was its function “as a method of composition based on direct—analogical, not logical-discursive—disposition of elements,” in brief, as the “other” of Western linear script. 8 In opposition to the linear succession of apprehensive acts prescribed by phonetic script, the ideogram model was thought to allow for the synchronous apprehension of multiple meanings in a single act. The project of concrete poetry might sound like a rather formalistic utopia but it is worth emphasizing that what was at stake here was also to some extent a geopolitical endeavor. In the ideographic model of composition the concrete poets envisioned the basis for a new mode of transnational, translingual communication based on the “lowest common denominator of language”—a mode that could almost dispense with the need for translation.9 In challenging linguistic borders they sought to establish a universal poetic syntax and ultimately a new kind of poetic universalism. Indeed, the Campos brothers’ dedication to the theory and practice of translation from a wide range of languages was an aspect of their conscious effort both to overcome the supposedly peripheral position of Brazilian culture in the global panorama of cultural exchange and to challenge the center/periphery model in general. Transnationalism was an important feature of postwar artistic culture, but few artists were more actively engaged than the concrete poets in creating connections across national borders and in establishing an international community around an artistic ideal. In this context “synchronization” also implied the establishment of transnational contemporaneity by creating direct ties with artists in distant locales,

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including periphery-to-periphery connections that could (ideally, at least) dispense with mediation by the center. One example of such periphery-to-periphery connections was the long exchange between Brazilian and Japanese avant-garde poets during the 1950s and ’60s. For the most part, the Noigandres poets’ relationship to ideographic writing remained on an ideal and ideological level. Considering their strong interest in non-Western scripts, their failure to mention previous examples of visual poetry written in non-Western scripts, or of contemporary visual poets writing in Chinese and Korean, would be remarkable were it not an omission they shared with most European writers and scholars at the time.10 But they did forge a connection with Japanese poets that left an enduring mark on the panorama of avant-garde poetry in both countries. Introduced by Pound, Haroldo de Campos and Kitasono corresponded for years, and translated and published each other’s poems. In 1960, the poet L. C. Vinholes, stationed in Tokyo as a Brazilian diplomat and well acquainted with the Japanese poetic avant-garde, organized an exhibition of Brazilian concrete poetry at the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, further facilitating this exchange. Later on, the Japanese poet Niikuni Seiichi allied himself with the concrete movement, publishing a Japanese translation of the Noigandres poets’ “Plano-piloto.” 11 Even today, the resonance of Brazilian concretism can be spotted in the work of Gōzō Yoshimasu, one of Japan’s most important contemporary poets. Temporality, a fundamental issue for concrete poetry from its earliest stages, was also a crucial site of dissent between the Rio-based poet and critic Ferreira Gullar and the Noigandres poets of São Paulo, a dissent that culminated in Gullar’s publication of the Neoconcrete Manifesto in 1959.12 For Gullar, the synchrony envisioned by the Noigandres group was a useless pursuit. The concrete poem, he claimed, could at most provide the illusion of such simultaneity, since reading, unlike the act of viewing a painting, inevitably implies a succession of instants; it cannot take place in a single apprehensive act.13 In lieu of the search for synchrony, for the embodied, material relationship with the poem as a concrete thing Gullar proposed a poetics of duration, and he created devices to return the act of reading to its fully embodied essence. Since his first book-poems of 1956, he had been experimenting with the embodied temporality of the act of reading. With odd-sized pages containing as little as one single word, the book-poem calls attention to the act of reading as a participatory activity entailing as much bodily as intellectual praxis. Later on, in his spatial poems, words were hidden beneath a sort of wooden lid, and revealed only upon the lid’s removal by the reader/participant (fig. 3). With their increased emphasis on the bodily character of the act of reading, first in the simple act of turning pages and later in more complex ways to uncover writing—such as by lifting objects and even walking down stairs—Neoconcretism brought poetry closer to things and, to some extent, farther from words. Gullar’s “Poema enterrado” (Buried Poem, 1960), in which the viewer must literally enter the “poem” and remove several objects in order to unveil a single word, can be regarded as the climax of this process. Yet Pape’s books bring concrete poetry to an even

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more radical level, insofar as they entirely eliminate verbal discourse from poetic composition. While Gullar put a sudden end to his Neoconcrete poetic experiments, afraid of having wandered too far from the poetic field and into the realm of the plastic arts, Pape refused to give up on the poetic identity of her wordless books. In their ambiguous position between poetry and the visual arts, between artistic practice and theoretical speculation, such works remain as open questions, both shortening and expanding the distance between words and things in the spacetime of concrete poetry.

1 See Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, 1973 (reprint ed. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), also Lippard and John Chandler, “The Dematerialization of Art,” in Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson, eds., Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1999), pp. 46–51. 2 Kitasono Katue, “Zo¯kei-shi ni tsuite no no¯to [A Note on the Plastic Poem],” Kaban no naka no getsuya: Kitasono Katue no zo¯kei-shi [Moonlight in a bag: The plastic poems of Kitasono Katsue] (Tokyo: Kokusho, 2002), p. 61. 3 Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos, and Décio Pignatari, “Plano-pilôto para poesia concreta,” Noigandres 4  (1958), Eng. trans. as “Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry” in Haroldo de Campos, Novas. Selected Writings (Evanson: Northwestern University Press, 2007), p. 218. 5 Augusto de Campos, “Poesia Concreta,” in Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos, and Pignatari, Teoria da Poesia Concreta. Textos críticos e manifestos (1950–1960) (São Paulo: Edições Invenção, 1975), p. 34. 6 On Simias of Rhodes’s “Axe” see Luis Arturo Guichard, “Simias’ Pattern Poems: The Margins of the Canon,” in Hellenistica Groningana: Beyond the Canon, ed. Annette Harder et al. (Leuven: Peeters Publishers, 2006), p. 91. 7 Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos, and Pignatari, “Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry,” p. 218. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., p. 217. 10 Ibid., p. 218. 11 On modernist visual poetry in Taiwan and its relationship to the transnational avant-garde see Andrea Bachner, Beyond Sinology: Chinese Writing and the Scripts of Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), pp. 74–91. On the political underpinnings of visual poetry in colonial Korea and the poetics of Yi Sang see Travis Workman, Imperial Genus: The Formation and Limits of the Human in Modern Korea and Japan (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016), pp. 240–48. 12 See L. C. Vinholes, “Intercâmbio, Presença e Influência da Poesia Concreta Brasileira no Japão,” available online at www.usinadeletras.com.br/exibelotexto.php?cod=43689&cat= Artigos (accessed March 2016). 13 Ferreira Gullar et al., “Manifesto Neoconcreto [Neoconcrete Manifesto]” in Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, March 22, 1959, repr. in Aracy Amaral, ed., Projeto Construtivo Brasileiro na Arte, exh. cat. (Rio de Janeiro: Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, 1977), pp. 80–84. 14 Gullar, “Letter to Augusto de Campos,” in Gullar, Experiência neoconcreta: momento limite da arte (São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2007), p. 113.

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SIMULTANEOUS ABSTRACTIONS AND POSTWAR LATIN AMERICAN ART Andrea Giunta

Chapter 5. Concrete 2 · Form Visions Matters

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he German occupation of Paris in 1940 shocked the international intelligentsia with the realization that the world as they knew it was coming to an end. The question arose of where the new center of modern art would emerge.1 Underlying this question was the construction of the logical narrative of modern art, whose crucial city was now plunged into a void. It was no longer possible to expect the next step to come from Paris; to go there to see its art was equally unthinkable. Europe was showing signs of defeat, but modern art remained absorbed by the idea of the future. The metropolises of South America, though involved in the war in different ways,2 had not experienced it directly. The artists and intellectuals of Europe’s desperate diaspora found new interlocutors in these cities. By then, the narrative of modern art as a succession of movements had been established and its lessons adopted all over the world. If art was to be defined by the impulse of innovation characteristic of the avant-gardes, its movement could be taken up anywhere. The sense of mission that permeated the avant-gardes was no longer an exclusively European matter. Journeys to new territories began to take place before the war and intensified once it began. In 1934, after a long absence in Europe and New York, Joaquín Torres-García had returned to his native city of Montevideo, Uruguay, intending to found a new school. The following year he gave a lecture proposing a “School of the South”: “I have said ‘School of the South’ because in reality our North is the South. There should be no North for us, except in opposition to our South … now we know what our true position is, and is not the way the rest of the world would like to have it.”3 The most eloquent aspect of this strategy of decentering was the inversion of the map of the South American continent with the south at the top, the north at the bottom, and Montevideo as the new center. Torres-García’s program of Universalismo constructivo (Universal constructivism) elaborated on and exceeded elements not only of European Surrealism and abstraction but of pre-Columbian art, and proposed a new model of abstraction. The young abstract artists of Buenos Aires, Argentina, across the Rio de la Plata from Uruguay, visited Torres-García to understand his program but soon excluded its symbolic elements. The exchange is noted not to suggest genealogy but to highlight the effects of the European diaspora, and its relationship to the young Latin American artists who looked at the cultural deposits of the European avant-garde as toolboxes. “Invention” was the word used to name their creative place in the new map of the world. The term appeared in the single issue of Arturo magazine, published in 1944 by the young Argentine artists Gyula Kosice, Tomás Maldonado, and Edgar Bayley and the Uruguayans Rhod Rothfuss and Carmelo Arden Quin. Its pages trace a regional map: Torres-García, the Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro (founder thirty years earlier of the literary movement Creacionismo, or Creationism), the Portuguese artist Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (in exile in São Paulo, Brazil), the Brazilian

poet Murilo Mendes, and the Argentine abstract artist Lidy Prati. They also reproduce works by Vasily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian. After the war, visual artists, poets, and musicians moving between São Paulo, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, and Santiago, Chile, created a regional formation around abstract aesthetic programs. In 1939 the Argentine artist and poet Godofredo Iommi had arrived in Chile, where he eventually joined the faculty of Valparaíso’s architecture school, the Escuela de Arquitectura y Diseño, and cofounded the Ciudad abierta (Open city), a utopian community in the countryside outside that city. In Buenos Aires abstract art was a symbolic capital in dispute, as the Arturo initiative broke into groups: Madí (which included Kosice, Arden Quin, Rothfuss, Martín Blaszko, and Diyi Laañ) and the Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención, or AACI (which included Maldonado, Alfredo Hlito, Raúl Lozza, Juan Melé, and others), from which Lozza separated in 1947 to create the Perceptismo group. Each group generated its own manifestos and magazines (Boletín Arte Concreto Invención, Madí, Perceptismo, Arte Nuevo, etc.). While the AACI focused on the rational principles of concrete art in the line initiated in Holland by Theo van Doesburg, Madí was closer to Dada in its introduction of games and its coexistence of different approaches. The poetics of the concrete artists are not understandable through the genealogy of Torres-García, earlier Buenos Aires abstract artists (Emilio Pettoruti, Juan Del Prete, Lucio Fontana), or the traditions of European abstraction. Their solutions came, more exactly, from the outbreaks and the dispersion of the principles of both historical and recent European abstract avant-gardes: Mondrian and de Stijl, French Art Concret, Kazimir Malevich, the Bauhaus, the Swiss Allianz group, and the Konkrete Kunst exhibition, organized by Max Bill in Basel in 1944. The South American artists understood these avant-gardes as repositories of ideas from which to create new visual concepts. Two such, in 1945, were the shaped canvas (explained by Rothfuss in Arturo), and the coplanar structure, in which interrelated elements activated the plastic relevance of the surrounding space. The artists were analyzing paintings by Europeans such as Malevich and Mondrian, subverting their postulates, and proposing the next step. They presented themselves as artists of the international abstract avant-garde. It is important to understand, however, that these young artists had not visited Europe and had not seen the original works. (The South American museums of the time had no European abstraction in their collections.) They extracted their conclusions and generated their solutions from a print culture made up of texts as well as of reproductions. To the extent that the printed images they saw flattened or eliminated texture and modified color, the available reproductions diverted the original programs. Years later Kosice remarked, “What I wanted was to be unlike anyone else.”4 From that perspective the art of the European avant-gardes was more loot than heritage. It is also important to understand that these artists were working to conceive a new society. In 1945, the Argentine Communist Party newspaper, Orientation, named Hlito, Maldonado, Manuel Espinosa, and Claudio

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Fig. 1. Grete Stern. Photomontage for Madí, Ramos Mejía, Argentina. 1946–47. Gelatine silver print, 59.8 × 49.4 cm. Courtesy Archivo Lafuente

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Girola as artists of the concrete movement who adhered to the Party. It was the time of the populist democracy of Juan Domingo Perón, which the Buenos Aires intelligentsia associated with the fascist regimes that had been overthrown in Europe. Unlike the Nazis, Peron never persecuted abstract art, but it was not his regime’s preferred style.5 In response, the artists activated the oppositional and emancipatory meaning that abstraction had taken on in the context of the European war. The stance reinforced their representation of themselves as avant-garde both aesthetically and politically. They believed that it was possible to join Marxism with concrete art, which, however, the Communist Party condemned. Maldonado read the polemics between Elio Vittorini and Palmiro Togliatti in Milan and between André Breton and Tristan Tzara in Paris—debates over artistic independence in relation to the aesthetic choices of the Communist Party. Making a similar attempt to allow for an abstract alternative within the Argentine Communist Party, he failed and left the Party in 1948. Postwar abstract innovation spread in a complex network through Latin America. In Chile it reached its peak in Valparaíso’s Escuela de Arquitectura, the Ciudad abierta project to integrate architecture with landscape and with Latin American roots, and the development of the various abstract programs of artists such as Gustavo Poblete, Ramón Vergara Grez, and Matilde Pérez.6 Bayley and Arden Quin visited Brazil in 1942, establishing contacts reflected in Arturo. In 1947, the magazine Joaquim, produced in Curitiba, Brazil, published the AACI’s Invencionista manifesto along with reproductions of several Argentine works, among them Maldonado’s and Lozza’s shaped-canvas and coplanar structures. In 1950 the Argentine critic Jorge Romero Brest lectured in São Paulo and in 1951 he was a jurist in the first Bienal de São Paulo (where his support for abstract art allowed the main prize to go to Bill’s Tripartite Unity of 1948–49, a steel sculpture shaped as a Möbius strip). That same year, Maldonado and Prati visited the Brazilian critic Mario Pedrosa in Rio de Janeiro. Romero Brest’s magazine Ver y Estimar included collaborations with Bill and Mathias Goeritz, a German artist residing in Mexico. Brazil also developed its own chronology of postwar abstraction. In 1945, the Askanasy gallery in Rio de Janeiro presented the Exposição de arte condenada pelo III Reich (Exhibition of Art Condemned by the Third Reich);7 in 1947, the Prestes Maia gallery in São Paulo organized the exhibition 19 Pintores (19 painters), which included works by Luiz Sacilotto and Lothar Charoux. Here they came in contact with Waldemar Cordeiro, an Italian who had arrived in São Paulo in 1946. Abstraction was well installed in Brazil by 1949, when Cordeiro and Charoux published the single issue of the magazine Novissimos, including work by the poets (and brothers) Haroldo and Augusto de Campos. Cordeiro was the engine of the manifesto and exhibition Ruptura, which opened at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo in 1952. In 1954, the artists’ group Grupo Frente exhibited at the Instituto Brasil-Estados Unidos in Rio de Janeiro. Led by Ivan Serpa, Frente included artists such as Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, and (by its second exhibition, at the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro in 1955) Hélio Oiticica.

In Brazil, Mondrian and Bill were also repertoires to explore. In 1957, when the strength of the concrete-art movement was waning, Clark wrote a fictional letter to Mondrian, asking the dead master whether she should break with the group. In 1958, her paintings began to question the boundaries of the frame, opening it to space (Unidades 1–7; fig. 2). The edge of the work became a living border, the line began to breathe; form activated space, and planes became a mobile, flexible structure whose shapes depended on the viewer’s decisions in manipulating them. (Kosice had explored this kind of mobility in works such as Royï, of 1944.) By 1963, form had dissolved in experience: Caminhando (1964), arising out of the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, asks us to cut a paper Möbius strip with scissors, generating knowledge through the experience of creating ephemeral forms.

Fig. 2. Lygia Clark. Unidade VI. 1958. Industrial paint on wood, 30 × 30 cm. Collection MALBA, Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires

Oiticica likewise disturbed orthogonality in his Metaesquemas (1957–58; fig. 3, plate 207) and invaded space with his Relevo espacial (Spatial Relief, 1959; plate 226). Both he and Clark embarked on works involving textures, materials, movement, and the body: Oiticica investigated exterior space with his Parangolés, Clark explored inner perception with her therapies using perceptual objects. Oiticica’s Bólide vidro 05 “Homenagem a Mondrian” (Glass Fireball 05 “Homage to Mondrian”; plate 110), of 1965, subverted Mondrian. Visually it might almost have been a poetic version of a Molotov cocktail, appropriate in a climate of growing politicization under Brazil’s dictatorship, 8 yet the work was not a weapon but a texture empowered with color to impregnate the skin of the viewer who touched it. Clark and Oiticica can be seen as introducing a powerful critique of the evolutionary model of modernity, destabilizing its autonomy by inserting life itself (space, motion, bodies) into its abstract forms.

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It is important to remember the the second Bienal de São Paulo, in 1953, included a Mondrian exhibition. The presence of these paintings in Brazil allowed artists to discover that their surfaces were not homogeneous, as the Argentine concrete artists had understood them to be. These were not mere structures; between the lines it was possible to see underlying colors, to feel the artist’s hand moving over the canvas. The Neoconcrete Manifesto, written by Ferreira Gullar in 1959, which questioned rationalistic interpretations of Mondrian, was now seen as the destroyer of surface, plane, and line, the creator of a new space that surpassed rational readings of his works.9 Pape’s Livro da criação (Book of Creation, 1959–60) set shapes in motion: simple geometric figures, metaphors of a story (the creation, the first discoveries).

Breaking the limits of architecture, Goeritz activated the imaginary of the avant-garde. The European émigrés included two women artists who represent unique experiences, isolated from the avant-garde formations. Both developed self-contained bodies of work. Mira Schendel, born in Zurich and living in Milan, came to São Paulo in 1949. Escaping from the persecution of war and forced to change her country and her language, Schendel developed intimate, sober monochrome forms, barely distinguishable from their context. Born in Hamburg, Gertrude Goldschmidt (Gego) emigrated to Venezuela in 1939 to escape the Holocaust. Her three-dimensional drawings made of metal rods and wires seem to invade space through the use of lines and transparencies.

Fig. 3. Hélio Oiticica. Metaesquema. 1958. Gouache on cardboard, 39.5 × 57 cm. Collection MALBA, Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires

Goeritz joined the faculty of the Universidad de Guadalajara’s Escuela de Arquitectura in 1949, organizing an exhibition and educational program there. He described the school to Romero Brest as a new Bauhaus. 10 Artistic abstraction was difficult to establish in Mexico, home of the figurative mural; Goeritz did so through an alliance with architecture. His Museo Experimental El Eco in Mexico City (1952–53) was conceived as an experimental museum; its courtyard, where Walter Nicks rehearsed a ballet with choreography by Luis Buñuel, contained a black serpent of welded metal. Thematic elements of Mexican culture—golden altarpieces, pumpkins, the snake, the use of colors derived from popular traditions—transformed Goeritz’s vocabulary.

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Gego’s works, drawing in space while modeling the human milieu, led to a critique of the concept of sculpture.11 The repetition of lines and the reduction of visual resources in both her work and Schendel’s has parallels in the work of Agnes Martin in the United States and of Nasreen Mohamedi in India. Schendel, Gego, and Mohamedi also share an abstract repertoire that seems to be connected with the trauma of war and exile. In this sense, the abstraction of the postwar period constituted a language with which to imagine a future or a resource with which to investigate interiority and develop the trauma of desolation.12 The various bodies of abstract art in Latin America were not peripheral episodes of European modernity. Departing from similar

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references, they carried out innovative strategies conceived from different contexts. In this regard, Latin American, European, and North American postwar avant-gardes were simultaneous—or, put differently, after 1945 they were all in a peripheral position toward the historical avant-gardes.13 These modern interventions established imaginaries that subverted the European traditions, whose projects of the future had exploded with the war. Latin American artists used their splinters as materials for reimagining the world.

1 See Harold Rosenberg, “On the Fall of Paris,” Partisan Review 7, no. 6 (December 1940): 440–48. 2 Brazil declared war on the Axis in 1942, Argentine in 1944, and Chile in 1945. 3 Joaquín Torres-García, speech delivered at the Asociación Cristiana de Jóvenes, Montevideo, February 1935, in Torres-García, Universalismo Constructivo (Buenos Aires: Poseidon, 1944), pp. 213–19. 4 Gyula Kosice, in Gyula Kosice in Conversation with Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro (New York and Caracas: Fundación Cisneros, 2012), p. 39. 5 In 1949, Juan Perón’s minister of education, Oscar Ivanissevich, called abstract art “perverse,” but abstraction was included in an exhibition on Argentine art at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires, in 1952. Abstract artists were also in the Argentine representation at the second Bienal de São Paulo, in 1953. See my Avant-Garde, Internationalism and Politics: Argentine Art in the Sixties (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 27–54, and María Amalia García, El arte abstracto. Intercambios culturales entre Argentina y Brasil (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2011). 6 María Berríos, “Invisible Architecture and the Poetry of Action,” in Erica Witschey (ed.), Drifts and Derivations: Experiences, Journeys and Morphologies, (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2010), pp. 72–81; and Cristina Rossi, “Redes latinoamericanas de arte constructivo,” Cuadernos del Centro de Estudios en Diseño y Comunicación (Universidad de Palermo) 60, (2016): 103–125. 7 The exhibition included works by Max Ernst, Wassily Kandinsky, Alfred Kubin, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Lasar Segall, and Wilhelm Woeller. 8 The review of the exhibition Tucumán Arde (Rosario and Buenos Aires, 1968) in the French magazine Robho also connected the aesthetic and the political avant-gardes. See “Dossier Argentine: Les Fils de Marx et Mondrian,” Robho (Paris) no. 5–6 (1971): 16–22. 9 Ferreira Gullar, “Manifiesto neo-concreto,” Jornal do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro), March 22, 1959. 10 Mathias Goeritz and Jorge Romero Brest had met in Spain during the experience of the Escuela de Altamira (1948–49). See Andrea Giunta, Goeritz/Romero Brest. Correspondencias (Buenos Aires: Instituto de Teoría en Investigaciones Estéticas Julio E. Payró, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de Buenos Aires, 2000), p. 46. 11 See Catherine de Zegher, “Gego’s Traces of Traces,” in Gego: Between Transparency and the Invisible (Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, and Buenos Aires: malba Colección Costantini, 2006), pp. 50–77. 12 See Abigail Winograd, “The Trauma of Dislocation and the Development of Alternative Abstractions in Latin America: Renegotiations of Space, Experience, and Self in the Work of Gego (Gertrud Louise Goldschmidt) and Mira Schendel,” in Transnational Latin American Art from 1950 to the Present Day (Austin: The Permanent Seminar in Latin American Art and Meeting Margins, 2010), available online at http://utexasclavis.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/2009_FORUM_PAPERS.pdf (accessed June 2016). 13 See Giunta, “Farewell to the Periphery: Avant-Gardes and Neo-Avant-Gardes in the Art of Latin America,” in Concrete Invention. Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros. Reflections on Geometric Abstraction from Latin America and Its Legacy (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2013), pp. 105–17.

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THE NECESSITY OF CONCRETENESS: A VIEW FROM THE (GLOBAL?) SOUTH Mari Carmen Ramírez

5. Concrete Visions

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DESTRUCTION / CONSTRUCTION

he end of World War II generated radical changes of unprecedented scale and intensity across the globe. In conferences in Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam, the planet was divided into areas or blocs encompassing everything from geopolitics to economics to art and culture. At the same time, the devastation produced by the destruction of urban centers and the generation of millions of victims (both dead and living) in Europe, Russia, and East Asia led to the decline of Europe’s civilizational prestige and world dominance and to the rise of the United States as a hegemonic superpower. Fueled by technology, unparalleled prosperity, and the assimilation of the consumeroriented “American way of life,” U.S. ascendancy ushered in a new era of rational planning and organization. Under the advertising image of the postwar reconstruction effort (the Marshall Plan, for example), an urban and industrial revolution of unrivaled scale provided the foundation for a postwar economic and military-industrial complex. Last but not least, the period also saw the displacement of traditional cities by large-scale preplanned models of suburban living and social organization.1 This tense dynamic of destruction and construction found powerful expression in everything from architecture to urban planning and the visual arts. In Europe, it became embodied in a new kind of figure emerging from the debris, inspiring the visceral humanism of a vital part of postwar painting and sculpture. Yet the postwar decades also produced forms of concrete and geometric art, linked to architecture and urban design, that reset the stage for a type of positivistic aesthetic rationalism moving from Russian Constructivism to the International Style (an offspring of World War I), from the Bauhaus to the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm, the school’s postwar reincarnation. The ideas of precision, purity, and even an undeniable minimalism at play here were indicative of the urge to start anew by “constructing” the construct at stake: modern societies capable of erasing in a stroke the chaos generated by the six-year devastation. This overarching tendency toward rational organization—toward analytical and synthetic insight, farsighted cognitive approaches, and grid-based functionalism, as in the Bauhaus—I term the “necessity of concreteness.” Yet the rational impulse animating this project was not untouched by the humanism that was emerging from postwar circumstances. This drive manifested itself in the active presence of the subject, whether artist or viewer, within the concrete proposal. The articulation of this new subjectivity embedded in the concrete was particularly relevant for artists from the emergent countries and regions of what I call “the Global South.” There, the universal parameters of concrete trends provided a partial vehicle through which to participate in the construction of new postwar societies, while in the process articulating alternative forms of modernism. The presence of this new subjectivity in turn radically transformed Eurocentric manifestations into unique, off-center theoretical and artistic proposals.

The concrete push, far from being limited to Europe, operated in a transnational mode and had multiple centers.2 It appeared not only in the United States—which succeeded war-torn Paris as the international center for art—but in Japan, the Americas, and Eastern Europe, places that had been in a dialogic relationship with Western modernism. The fact that the concretist impulse did not follow the worn-out center/ periphery axis speaks volumes about an innovative participation that negated all trace of obedient dependency, erasing the stigma of being “derivative.” Indeed, ideas about the need to implement concreteness in art circulated openly at the global level, not only in the hegemonic centers of the West but in countries recently liberated from colonialism, such as India, Pakistan, Lebanon, Korea, and Nigeria, where artists engaged actively in back-and-forth sui generis dialogue with international modes of geometric and constructive art.

Fig. 1. Max Bill. Dreiteilige Einheit (Tripartite Unity). 1948/49. Stainless steel, 113.5 × 83 × 100 cm. Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo

CORRECTIVE TO UNDERDEVELOPMENT The exhaustion broadly experienced by Europe after 1945 sharply contrasted with the economic momentum of younger, previously marginalized geopolitical enclaves. In this volatile context, the necessity of concreteness was nurtured not only by the need to reconstruct and update national societies but by the possibilities offered by a tabula rasa to these developing countries and regions. This was particularly the case in Latin America, which emerged during this period as a key scenario for activity and innovation in concrete art. Having benefited economically from World War II, major countries of the region, notably Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Venezuela, set in motion national projects of modernization that impacted the cultural sphere through a will to be

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updated and modern. In the words of the Brazilian critic Mário Pedrosa, TRANSNATIONAL BRIDGES “we [Brazilians] are condemned to modernity.”3 The 1959 Cuban RevoThe transnational network that supported the postwar concrete art lution also provided the framework for the development of a politicized 4 movement can be seen as operating on the basis of what in Spanish geometric and concrete art movement. In such a context (as Nicolau Sevcenko has argued for Brazil), the need for systemic organization are called bisagras, hinges—key agents for a specific conception of art based on accurate, objective, and specific foci—one possible translation that in terms of its originality was relevant for the avant-garde on both of “concreteness”—was an intrinsic aspect of the period’s developmensides of the center/off-center axis. The cases of concrete- and contalist push.5 It could accordingly be argued that if in Europe the concrete structive-art pioneers Joaquín Torres-García, in Uruguay, and Max Bill, project aimed at correcting the chaos left by the war, in Latin America and in Switzerland, serve to anchor this point. Torres-García (most of other supposedly peripheral enclaves it became a corrective to the endemwhose career preceded the postwar period, so that he is not included ic lag of modernization generated by colonialism and underdevelopment. in the present exhibition) spent his life between Europe (Italy, France, The Latin American developmentalist momentum ran paraland Spain), the United States (a short period in New York in the early lel to the European recovery, in 1920s), and Latin America (Mongood part because of the increase tevideo), contributing in all places in exports from the region due to to key theoretical and practical dethe Marshall Plan. The optimism velopments. Combining elements generated by the consequent ecoof Surrealism, Dada, and concrete nomic boom and developmental and constructive art, he arrived at push—exemplified by the estaba unique abstract language that he lishment of steel foundries (Moncoined Constructive Universalism. terrey and Monclova in Mexico; He not only “imported” the idea of Volta Redonda and Voturantim concrete art to Uruguay but was a in Brazil) and automobile plants decisive influence in the Río de la in the region—not only propelled Plata region for the Argentinean the search for universal languagMadí and Arte Concreto-Invención es as a means of expression but groups, respectively represented also inspired the hope that these in this exhibition by Gyula Kosice countries could finally claim their and Tomás Maldonado. As for Bill, place on the world stage. In the already influential in Europe before cultural realm, the establishment the war (albeit with a stalled career), of the Bienal de São Paulo in 1951; he emerged after it as the rightful the construction of Brasília in heir to Theo van Doesburg’s vision 1956–61, the Ciudad Universitaria of a rational, scientifically or mathin Mexico City in 1952–54, and the ematically based notion of concrete Ciudad Universitaria in Caracas art. Ironically, however, his teachin 1954; and the experimental acings were more quickly assimilated tivities of the Instituto Torcuato in Latin America than in Europe, di Tella in Buenos Aires (1958–70) providing a turning point for major stand as emblems of the utopian artistic movements in Brazil and thrust of that decade. The conArgentina. In 1951, the first Bienal Fig. 2. Tomás Maldonado. Untitled. 1945. Tempera on board, 79 × 60 cm. Private Collection. crete poetry movement (1952–85) de São Paulo awarded Bill a prize put Brazil at the same level of exfor his sculpture Dreiteilige Einheit perimental innovation as Germany and Japan, and there were also (Tripartite Unity, 1948; fig. 1). This paradigmatic work embodied the principles—Form-Funktion-Schönheit (Form, function, beauty)—of the developments in industrial and graphic design and in photography, 6 all of which paved the way for the “concrete sensibility.” Swiss master’s version of concrete art, establishing his version of the concrete-art canon in Latin American soil.7 To these crucial figures must be added many artists who not only pioneered modern art in their countries of origin but, more important, served as active bisagras for the creative translation of both central and

492

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vernacular paradigms of geometric and concrete art. Although Ellsworth Kelly is seldom considered in this context, he can be said to have fulfilled a hinge role between the postwar Paris avant-garde and the American Minimalists. The London-trained Pakistani writer and painter Anwar Jalal Shemza was one of the first artists to introduce modern geometric abstraction in his home country while shuttling back and forth between there and London. In Lebanon, Saloua Raouda Choucair is considered the first Arab artist to exhibit abstract painting, combining elements of postwar Parisian abstraction with Islamic designs. Similarly, the Indian Nasreen Mohamedi produced exquisite drawings in dialogue with U.S. Minimalism. In postwar Japan, the Gutai group (represented in Postwar by Tanaka Atsuko, Sadamasa Motonaga, and Kazuo Shiraga) emerged as a powerful catalyst for radical experimental art that combined elements of the European avant-garde (exemplified by tachism, the ZERO group, and Yves Klein) with elements of Japanese theater and Zen philosophy.

of 1960, a massive swath of contorted steel in the stylized shape of a serpent (plate 229). By capturing the actual condensation of water inside a pristine cube of transparent Plexiglas, Hans Haacke, in Condensation Cube (1963; plate 211), can be said to have contaminated orthodox concretism. By contrast, in the Nigerian artist Erhabor Emokpae’s Struggle between Life and Death (1963; plate 241), the inclusion of handprints to the sides of a finely textured black and white circle gives what is essentially a geometric composition a life/death symbolism. At the core of the idea of concreteness espoused by these postwar artists is an inherent grasp of abstraction (whether subjective or not) as imbued with traces of the natural world. This contradiction serves as the starting point for the originality of several off-centered postwar experimental proposals.11 The new forms of concretism, while anchored in the postwar rational project and its exaltation of objective principles, had more flexible formal and conceptual parameters than prewar manifestations, a freedom they expressed through unconventional resources: color, chance, hand-drawn lines, visible brushwork, organic surfaces, nonindustrial materials, destabilized grids. For Bill, color was not an end in itself

A DIFFERENT KIND OF CONCRETENESS: VERSIONS, INVERSIONS, SUBVERSIONS As Héctor Olea has suggested in a discussion of “the artist as theoretician” as a mark of artistic practice in Latin America, 8 the historical and political conditions of the postwar period functioned to mold concrete art movements into heterogeneous versions, inversions, and subversions of the original model outlined in 1930 by Theo van Doesburg in his manifesto “Base de la peinture concrète” (Basis of Concrete Art). This seminal text spelled out a fairly rigid credo for concrete art based (once again) on principles of universality, rationalism, and self-referentiality. (As German theoretician Max Bense stated, “Alles Konkrete ist nur es selbst” [What is concrete is that which is itself].)9 Van Doesburg’s conditions would manifest themselves in art above all through a rejection of the artist’s subjectivity in favor of visual precision and clarity, as well as through the complete absence of references to the natural world. From this point of view, as illustrated by Bill’s White Square (1946), an avowed aim of the concrete artist was to erase any trace of individuality or subjectivity in favor of lines, colors, and sleek surfaces that in their objective status would come close to industrially produced objects. These fundamental traits of concrete-art orthodoxy proved easy for postwar concrete artists to renounce, instead favoring more iconoclastic approaches that nevertheless sought to take advantage of the universality of concretism. In Untitled (1945; fig. 2), for example, Maldonado consciously quoted from Kazimir Malevich’s well-known Suprematist painting Painterly Realism of a Boy with a Knapsack—Color Masses in the Fourth Dimension (1915). Rather than merely copy the original, though, he rearranged Malevich’s black and red abstract shapes against the white background, “anthropomorphizing” the relationship between them.10 Goeritz employed a similar strategy in a monumental steel sculpture

Fig. 3. Anwar Jalal Shemza. Square Composition 3. 1963. Oil on hardboard, 61 × 61 cm. Courtesy the Estate of Anwar Jalal Shemza

but a basic element of the “Kraftfelder” (energy fields), or objectively determined chromatic progressions, that distinguished concrete art from abstract art in general.12 Yet in the hands of postwar artists, the use of color sequencing seemed to hinge more on chance and subjectivity than on any scientific principle of chromatic behavior. The Brazilian artist Waldemar Cordeiro and the Cuban Sandú Darié, for example, used the type of chromatic progression favored by Bill in, respectively, Movimento (1951; plate 217) and Sin titulo (Untitled) (c. 1950; plate 216), yet whereas the Swiss artist followed strict rules of sequencing and

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interaction, they favored a more dynamic, purely rhythmic approach vision (afterimage, retinality), later through an immersive experience to color and form. Cordeiro introduces noncanonical secondary colors encompassing the senses (touch, the gaze, and the like).13 Hence in Lygia Clark’s concrete works, exemplified by the “Superficies moduladas” such as purple and green, while Darié transforms sequences into circles (Modulated Surfaces) series (1957–59; plate 202), the incised line takes on a activating space. Meanwhile Kelly, for his well-known Spectrum Colors life of its own, functioning first to articulate the work, then to inscribe the Arranged by Chance (1951)—a series of eight large collages that launched surrounding space, and ultihis lifelong investigation of color, mately to establish a relation berepresented in the exhibition by tween subject and object. This numbers V and VIII (plates 214, feature is further explored in the 215)—began with a mathematiseries known as Bichos (Critters), cal system that paired numbered hinged aluminum structures slips of paper to eighteen differthat, like Darié’s Untitled, ent hues, yet made the end result Transformable Structure (c. 1950s), a product of chance. require the viewer’s action to ma Other versions of postwar nipulate them (plates 203, 218). By concrete art adopted formal contrast, in Lygia Pape’s Livro da principles and elements derived criação (Book of Creation, 1959–60; from vernacular traditions and fig. 4), each book page is renlocal contexts. In Shemza’s Square dered as a colorful, autonomous Composition 3 (1963; fig. 3) and geometric composition for the Square Composition 6, the grain of viewer to manipulate playfully, the wood support is left deliberFig. 4. Lygia Pape. Book of Creation Walking (detail). 1959. Gouache on cardboard, 18 parts, 30 × 30 × 0.2 cm (each). creating his or her own storybook ately exposed, inserting an eleversion of humanity’s origins. ment of the natural world into The incorporation of the subject in concrete art went hand in hand the blend of symmetry and asymmetry that grounds these arrangewith the transition from two-dimensional supports to unconventional ments of circles and half-circles over squares. In a similar vein, Choucair’s objects and forms. That transition can be read as the ultimate exaltation interlocking modular grid-sculptures (plates 234, 235) are made out of concrete art on the part of experimental artists seeking to reimagine of terra-cotta and biscuit clay, preindustrial elements that speak to art by erasing the line between it and everyday life. Tanaka’s Work (Yellow long-standing Islamic material traditions. In works such as Big Red Cloth) (1955; plate 236) consists of a monochrome painting made of (1964), the African American painter Daniel LaRue Johnson created yellow cloth; it shows no traces of the human hand but exists as a self-concompositions of squares within squares that merge painting with fragtained object. In a similar vein, color becomes a concrete entity in Aluíments of objects from everyday life. sio Carvão’s Cubocor (1960; plate 209), made of oil and pigment applied to a block of cement. And, after a long process that begins with Hélio Oiticica’s two-dimensional Metaesquemas (1957–58; plate 207), it takes on a body in his Relevos espaçiais (Spatial Reliefs; plate 226), Bólides (plate BEYOND WHAT IS CONCRETE 110), and Parangolés.14 It was through such strategies that artists in Rio de Insofar as these artists were unable to ignore the new subject of the Janeiro (though not in São Paulo, where the parameters of concrete art postwar era, their proposals were invariably infused with subjectivity. were set more rigorously) sought an antagonist stance against “advancThis tense contradiction had a deep impact on the theory and practice es in physics and mechanics that widened the horizons of objective of the avant-garde groups under consideration. The most radical manthought and led those responsible for deepening the artistic revoluifestation of the trend appeared in Brazil, where the almost overnight tion to an ever increasing rationalization of the process and purposes shift from a referential, figurative discourse to a self-referential, nonobof painting.”15 In this way they came to restore the vital dimension—i.e., the subjective, expressive, and phenomenological dimension—that had jective plastic one went hand in hand with the articulation of a kind of been dismissed, according to the Neoconcrete Manifesto, by the “conseparticipative viewer—the subject of the emerging social order. Whether cration of the objectivity of science and the precision of mechanics.” grounded in a Marxist model of production—as in early Constructive art The exaltation of concreteness certainly pushed these proposals beyond trends and later in Concretismo—or supported by the type of existential the “dangerous rationalist extreme,” opening the way for a radically new humanism (tempered with a dose of phénoménologie de la perception and artistic subjectivity.16 Gestalttheorie) shown later by Neoconcretismo, both tendencies ultimately sought the projection of subjectivity, first through the values of pure

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Some parts of this text first appeared in “The Necessity of Concreteness: An Abstract Art That Is Not an Abstraction,” my keynote address at the symposium Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965, Haus der Kunst, Munich, May 21–24, 2014. 1 On these transformations see Nicolau Sevcenko, “Brazilian Concretismo: Introductory Remarks on Postwar History and Culture,” in Héctor Olea and Mari Carmen Ramírez, eds., Building on a Construct: The Adolpho Leirner Collection of Brazilian Constructive Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (Houston: The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2009), pp. 13–14. 2 Important in this regard is the fact that many of the concrete artists in Latin America were émigrés from Central or Eastern Europe, which helped them to operate transnationally. Gyula Kosice, for example, came to Argentina from what is today Slovakia; Mathias Goeritz, to Mexico from Germany (present-day Poland); Waldemar Cordeiro, to Brazil from Italy; Gego, to Venezuela from Germany; Sandú Darié, to Cuba from Romania. 3 The Brazilian critic Mário Pedrosa wrote, “Through the fate of our formation, we [Brazilians] are condemned to modernity.” “Brasília, a Cidade Nova,” a paper presented at the 1959 AICA Congress “Brasília—Síntese das Artes,” in Acadêmicos e Modernos, ed. Otília Arantes (São Paulo: EDUSP, 1998), 3:412–13. 4 The Cuban Concretos came together in 1959 at the Diez pintores concretos (Ten concrete painters) exhibition, Galería de Arte Color-Luz, Havana. They included Darié, Luis Martínez Pedro, and Loló de Soldevilla, the group’s leader. 5 Sevcenko, “Brazilian Concretismo,” p. 13. 6 See Alexander Wollner, “Art and Design: Discovery and Attitude,” in Olea and Ramírez, eds., Building on a Construct, pp. 83–99. 7 On Max Bill’s arrival on the Brazilian and Argentinean scenes and his reception there see María Amalia García, “Max Bill on the Map of Argentine-Brazilian Concrete Art,” in ibid., pp. 53–68, and El arte abstracto. Intercambios culturales entre Argentina y Brasil (Mexico City: Siglo XXI Editores, 2011). 8 Olea, “Versions, Inversions, Subversions: The Artist as Theoretician,” in Ramírez and Olea, Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America, exh. cat. (Houston: The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 443–52. See also the ninety-two documents on Latin American theoretical premises translated into English in the same book, pp. 453–39. 9 Max Bense, epigraph to the Portuguese edition of Kleine Aesthetik (São Paulo: Editora Perspectiva, 1978). 10 See Sean Nesselrode, “Art for Partisan Life: Nonobjectivity Translated to Buenos Aires, 1944–48,” ICAA Documents Project Working Papers, No. 3, November 2013, pp. 3–13. Available online at http://icaadocs.mfah.org/icaadocs/Portals/0/WorkingPapers/13.296%20 ICAA%20Working%20Papers3.rd4.pdf (accessed July 2016). 11 Many South American avant-garde manifestations feature what I have identified elsewhere as a “constructive will.” These include the vital structures of Joaquin Torres-García, exemplified by his toys and wood constructions of the 1920s and ’30s; the cutout frame and flexible sculptures proposed by the Buenos Aires–based Grupo Madí in the mid-1940s; and, finally, the most radical works of Neoconcrete artists Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica. See my “Vital Structures: The Constructive Nexus in South America,” in Ramírez and Olea, Inverted Utopias, pp. 191–201. 12 On color as a polemical and divisive element of the Brazilian constructive art of the 1950s see Ramírez, “Between corpus solidum and quase-corpus: Color in Concretismo and Neoconcretismo,” in Ramírez and Olea, Building on a Construct, pp. 271–91. 13 The Concretismo movement in Brazil was led by the São Paulo–based Grupo ruptura, founded in 1952 by Cordeiro, Geraldo de Barros, Lothar Charoux, and Luís Sacilotto. Following the theoretical principles elaborated by Van Doesburg in 1930 and further developed by Bill, the Concretos promoted objectivity and mathematical and geometrical logic as the determinants of the final aesthetic form. Neoconcretismo came together in March 1959, when the “Manifesto neoconcreto” was published in Jornal do Brasil. It was signed by a group of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo artists that included Clark, Oiticica, Amílcar de Castro, Aluísio Carvão, and Willys de Castro. The group focused on the reincorporation of subjectivity and the experience of both real time and space in the experience of the viewer-as-participant. As Olea has argued, the term “Neoconcreto” is a misnomer that does not capture the true objectives of the group, which was trying to abandon Concretismo altogether. See Olea, “Waldemar Cordeiro: From Visible Ideas to the Invisible Work,” in Olea and Ramírez, eds., Building on a Construct, p. 136. 14 See Ramírez, “The Embodiment of Color: From the Inside Out,” in Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Color, exh. cat. (Houston: The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2007), pp. 64–68. 15 Ferreira Gullar, Clark, Lygia Pape, et al., “Neoconcrete Manifesto,” Eng. trans. in Olea, “Versions, Inversions, Subversions,” document 50, pp. 496–97. 16 Ibid.

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CONCRETE VISIONS Plates

Carl Andre Rasheed Araeen Wifredo Arcay Max Bill Anthony Caro Aluísio Carvão Enrico Castellani Saloua Raouda Choucair Lygia Clark

Waldemar Cordeiro Sandú Darié Pedro de Oraá Erhabor Emokpae Gego (Gertrud Louise Goldschmidt) Mathias Goeritz Hans Haacke Carmen Herrera

Ellsworth Kelly Julije Knifer Gyula Kosice Tomás Maldonado Robert Morris Sadamasa Motonaga Albert Newall Hélio Oiticica Lygia Pape

Ivan Picelj Carol Rama Ad Reinhardt Dieter Roth Rhod Rothfuss Anwar Jalal Shemza Loló Soldevilla Aleksandar Srnec Tanaka Atsuko

Gego (Gertrud Louise Goldschmidt) Vibración en negro (Vibration in Black) 1957 aluminum painted black The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

192

193 Max Bill 22 1953/1980 marmor Kunstmuseum Winterthur

499

194

Carmen Herrera Iberia No. 25 1948 acrylic on burlap Lisson Gallery

195 Gyula Kosice Variation in Blue 1945 oil on canvas Gyula Kosice, Buenos Aires

501

Anthony Caro Capital 1960 steel, painted orange Barford Sculptures Ltd., London

196

197

Tomás Maldonado Trayectoria de una anécdota (Trajectory of an Anecdote) 1949 oil on canvas The Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection, Miami

198

Rhod Rothfuss Composición Madí (Madí Composition) 1946 enamel on wood The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

505

199

Carol Rama Tovaglia (Table Cloth) 1951 tablecloth, Plexiglas Archivio Carol Rama, Turin

200

Lygia Clark Contra Relevo (Counter Relief) 1959 industrial paint on wood Private Collection, São Paulo

507

201

Lygia Clark Casulo (Cocoon) 1959 automotive paint on metal Private Collection, Rio de Janeiro

202

Lygia Clark Planos em superfície modulada no. 1 (Planes on a Modulated Surface No. 1) 1957 Industrial paint on wood The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

509

203

Lygia Clark Bicho Caranguejo Duplo (Critter Double Crab) 1960 (replica) aluminum The Associação Cultural O Mundo de Lygia Clark, Rio de Janeiro

204

205

Lygia Clark

Lygia Clark

Bicho Sem Nome (Untitled Critter) 1960 (replica) aluminium The Associação Cultural O Mundo de Lygia Clark, Rio de Janeiro

Bicho em si (Critter in Itself) 1960 (replica) aluminium The Associação Cultural O Mundo de Lygia Clark, Rio de Janeiro

511

206

Anwar Jalal Shemza Meem 1964 oil on canvas Butcher Family Collection

207

Hélio Oiticica Metaesquema 1955 gouache on paper Private Collection, São Paulo

513

Ad Reinhardt Untitled (Composition #104) 1954-60 oil on canvas Brooklyn Museum, New York

208

209

210

Aluísio Carvão

Robert Morris

Cubocor (Color Cube) 1960 pigment and oil on cement Private Collection, Rio de Janeiro

Box with the Sound of its Own Making (exhibition copy) 1961 wood, internal speaker Original work: Seattle Art Museum

515

211

Hans Haacke Condensation Cube (exhibition copy) 1965/2006 Plexiglas, water MACBA. Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona

212 Carl Andre Timber Piece (Well) 1964/70 wooden railway sleepers (28 pieces) Museum Ludwig, Cologne

517

213

Ellsworth Kelly Red Yellow Blue White 1952 dyed cotton Philadelphia Museum of Art

519

214

Ellsworth Kelly Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance V 1951 collage on paper Private Collection

215

Ellsworth Kelly Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance VIII 1951 collage Private Collection

521

216

Sandú Darié Sin título (Untitled) c.1950 collage, pencil, ink, and watercolor on four paper panels on cardboard Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London

217

Waldemar Cordeiro Movimento (Movement) 1951 tempera on canvas Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo

523

Sandú Darié Sin Título (Estructura Transformable) (Untitled [Transformable Structure]) c. 1950s oil on wood elements, dimensions variable approximately Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London

218

219

Loló Soldevilla Sin título (Untitled) c.1960 mixed media on wood in artist's frame Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London

220

Loló Soldevilla Sin título (Untitled) 1954 bronze and wood Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London

527

Julije Knifer Meander in the Corner 1961 oil on canvas Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb

221

222 Ivan Picelj Composition XL-1 1952–56 oil on canvas Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb

Aleksandar Srnec Construction 53 1953 brass wire Marinko Sudac Collection, Zagreb

223

224 Enrico Castellani Superficie angolare nera (Black Corner Surface) 1961 acrylic on shaped canvas Fondazione Prada, Milan

Enrico Castellani Superficie angolare bianca (White Corner Surface) 1961 acrylic on canvas with reliefs and hollows HEART Herning Museum of Contemporary Art, Herning

225

226 Hélio Oiticica Relevos espacial 1960 painting on cut-out wood The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

227

Rasheed Araeen My First Sculpture 1959 (1975) steel Aicon Gallery, New York

535

228

Rasheed Araeen Burning Bicycle Tyres 1959 (1975) 9 photographic prints on paper Aicon Gallery, New York

537

Mathias Goeritz The Serpent 1953 painted wood Reconstruction authorized by Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura, Mexico City

229

539

230

Pedro de Oraá Sin título (Untitled) 1959 acrylic on canvas mounted on cardboard Private Collection, Coconut Grove

231

Albert Newall Composition No. 3 1957 oil on board Private Collection

541

232

Wifredo Arcay Proposition III 1962 relief painting on wood The Mayor Gallery, London

233 Albert Newall Helmet Head 1956 oil on board Private Collection

543

234

Saloua Raouda Choucair The Poem 1960 wood Sharjah Art Museum, Sharjah Museums Department

Saloua Raouda Choucair Poem 1963-65 wood Collection of the Artist

235

236

Tanaka Atsuko Work (Yellow Cloth) 1955 commercially dyed cotton Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

547

Sadamasa Motonaga Work (Water) 1956 installation Motonaga Archive Research Institution Ltd

237

549

238

Dieter Roth Bilderbuch (Picture Book) 1957 (1976) artist book, spiral-bound, 14 pages Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne

239

Dieter Roth Bilderbuch (Picture Book) 1955 (1962) artist book, spiral-bound, 14 pages Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne

551

Lygia Pape Livro da Arquitetura (exhibition copy) 1959–60 tempera on cardboard Projeto Lygia Pape, Rio de Janeiro

240

553

241 Erhabor Emokpae Struggle Between Life and Death 1963 oil on board Private Collection

555

Section Introduction Zainab Bahrani Catherine Grenier Courtney Martin Tobias Wofford Damian Lentini Plates

6 COSMOPOLITAN MODERNISMS

COSMOPOLITAN MODERNISMS

P

art of modernity’s allure has been cosmopolitanism, read as sophistication, worldliness, and openness, the commingling of cultures, ideas, and populations. But the loss of place for artists migrating from one culture or national frontier to another casts a deep shadow on this romantic ideal. Following the massive upheavals resulting from World War II, the terms of cosmopolitanism shifted radically. Massive populations—refugees, stateless people, and diasporas—were moving between continents, countries, and cities, forming dispersed lines of displacement, migration, exile, affinities, and settlements. “New hybridities,” as some scholars have put it, emerged when citizens of colonies and former colonies studied in the West, whether formally or informally, or when refugees fleeing oppression left their homelands to find safe places elsewhere. Postwar artists combined international-style abstraction with indigenous, traditional, or local imagery, creating new aesthetics. Particularly widespread was a kind of gestural mark-making that was as much iconic as it was indexical. That mark-making invoked identity and levels of meaning through allusion to language and legibility, challenging the universality of the modern. Artists from the Middle East and South Asia explored the Arabic letter; Japanese artists looked to traditional calligraphy. Conversely, Western artists adopted these practices and forms as well. The cosmopolitan was not always or only oriented toward the West: magazines such as Black Orpheus reveal a pronounced pan-African and pan-Arabic field of reference, and routes of travel included the destinations of Mexico and China, Nigeria and Senegal, as well as Paris, New York, and London.

Introduction

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BAGHDAD MODERNISM Zainab Bahrani

6. Cosmopolitan Modernisms

M

“

odernism,” the aesthetic of mooutside a story that the West tells itself about its own uniqueness. dernity, is the main term used to Most accounts of modernist art involve a similar narrative that defines describe what have come to be conit as a purely Western development including a rejection of an earlier, sidered the most creative and most representational aesthetic regime. Even if this pure modernism looked advanced arts of the twentieth cento objects from other cultures, such as African masks, that move is tury. As the word is mostly underseen as a Western discovery of aesthetic value in those objects since stood, whether in academic or in art itself is described as a Western phenomenon, unknown to the rest popular thinking, modernism is a of the world. Art historians have pointed out that these accounts have group of styles or systems of art that, by being avant-garde, make a fundaoccluded certain movements even within the corpus of twentiethmental break with the past and in some way anticipate the future. Often century Western art, for example feminist art. obscured in thinking about these definitions, though, is to what extent Modernism depends upon a historical logic that follows a single line wmodern” is a comparative historical term. “Modernism” too is clearly a or direction over time. According to the rules of this internal logic, both historical marker, in that it has been understood as the aesthetic manifesmodernity and the modernist paradigm in art must be exclusionary. In tation of the Western turn toward recent years this notional framemodernity, a phase in the historwork, which is certainly not limical narrative of the path toward ited to art, has been increasingly (so-called) advanced civilization.1 questioned. Some of these myths In these terms the modernist art have been revived in current movement of the Iraq of 1940–60 writings on the Middle East, Afrimay be seen as something of a ca, and Asia; today, the question contradiction: by definition a sysof why the West was able to modtem of Western art, modernism ernize while these other places is not considered an authentic could not or cannot appears inMiddle Eastern aesthetic, just creasingly in both popular and as historical writing conceives academic discourse. 4 But the teleological idea of a characterisof modernity itself as a Western 2 tically Western evolution toward category. But this triumphalist discourse of modernism is unmodernity has also been conconvincing, even if some of the tested, in critiques that describe earliest modernist artists in the the Western story of modernity, Fig. 1. Group portrait of the Ruwad (Pioneers) Group. Middle East also came to believe and of the historical phases that in that story of progress. led up to it, as a narrative frame 5 Before discussing those artists, we must remember that the methimposed on the wider world. Such conceptual frameworks may become normalized, however, to the point that they seem almost scientific od of global cultural comparison is basically a historian’s technique facts. Take the calculation of time, where the Gregorian calendar—the and is especially associated with the European historical writing of Christian calendar—has become universalized as a secular, scientific, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, where the questions of inter“neutral” time. The calculation of time is of course directly related to the est were those of the origins of capitalism and of the Industrial Revoframe of historical and art-historical periodization. If time can be calculution in Europe. In the realm of visual art, the claims of modernism lated in terms different from but as accurate as the Gregorian calendar, can perhaps be made only in a teleological history in which realistic or and if its correct calculation cannot be claimed by one culture (since it accurate representation must be seen as a precursor, in the same way was almost everywhere reckoned according to natural occurrences— that, for many economic historians, feudalism must be a precursor of the seasons, the movements of the sun and the moon, and so on), this is capitalism. Is it possible that the idea of modernity needed this teleoalso the case with art.6 logical history in order to cast the abrupt rupture we call modernism as The comparison of secular time to the art-historical notion of the art? Did modernist art need its opposite, its colonial other, its heart of 3 autonomy of modernist art may seem a stretch, but the two are not so darkness? It is clear that modernity, seen as a historical phase, has meandifferent: both require an almost mystical leap in which a local view is ings that are fundamentally political. The notion of modernity is a part seen as universally correct. Both also understand activities common to of a teleological history whose internal logic centers Western Europe all human beings as unique to the West, and both take ideas inextricaas its own pinnacle; modernity is therefore impossible to understand bly linked to politics and religion as part of a secular and autonomous

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Fig. 2. Jewad Selim. Monument of Freedom. 1960–61. Bronze relief mural, Courtesy Dr. Nada Shabout

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realm, untethered to any cultural and political context. For Jacques Rancière, politics revolves around the question of who has the ability to see and speak about a situation, what may be said or what may not be said, “the visible and the sayable”; this is the realm of both political representation and aesthetic practice.7

ANTICOLONIAL / POSTCOLONIAL ART IN IRAQ 1940–60 Iraq is commonly represented today as a land with no secular, modern, or contemporary intellectual traditions. Yet a public exhibition of modernist Iraqi art opened in Baghdad on November 14, 1941. A group of artists called Jami’yat asdiqa al fan (Friends of Art) had organized this

During these years leading to and following the 1958 revolution that overthrew the monarchy (which had been established under the British Mandate in 1921), Iraqi artists were not seeking to imitate the West, as some earlier Arab modernists had done elsewhere.9 This was a time of optimistic belief in the future of a secular state. Among the artists of the Ruwad and Baghdad groups, Selim had the greatest influence on the country’s modernist art and indeed, beyond that, its anticolonial political modernity. His Tahrir Monument, or Monument of Freedom (fig. 2), erected in Baghdad after the revolution, became the principal symbol around which a new national identity was formed. Like most public art, it was commissioned by the state, which, however, never lived up to the artists’ dreams of freedom for the people. In looking for new forms to represent new men and women—new citizens of the new postcolonial state—Selim turned to Near Eastern antiquity. He called this turn “istilham al turath,” a return to the past

Fig. 3. Khalid Al Rahal. Women in the Hammam. 1947. Relief sculpture

exhibit soon after the failed 1941 revolt against British rule, and two more exhibits followed in 1943 and 1946. In 1950, during the continuing struggle to end the British occupation of the country, some of the artists who had exhibited in that show formed a new group called Ruwad (Pioneers), which expanded on the earlier group and included many of its members (fig. 1). These artists saw saw themselves as participating in a cosmopolitan art world. A second group, Jama’at Baghdad lil Fan al-Hadith (the Baghdad Group for Modern Art), was formed soon after, in 1951. Led by Jewad Selim, the Baghdad group went farther in seeking to express a liberating sensibility for the new nation, now freed of both British colonial and Ottoman imperial rule. Selim sought an art form that was modern yet based on local heritage. The Baghdad group artists experimented with ancient Mesopotamian and other traditional artistic genres and styles, combining them with influences from Western Europe and North America, where many of them had studied. 8

in order to find the present.10 The Tahrir Monument, a massive continuous bronze relief on a white travertine background, thus refers to Assyro-Babylonian monumental art and cylinder seals.11 Linear in composition, the monument reads from right to left, like a visual version of Arabic text that at the same time refers to the Mesopotamian past. Selim and the other artists in the Ruwad and Baghdad groups consciously set out to formulate an art that would be a political intervention both within and beyond Iraq. They underscored a secular national identity that they sought to define by formulating an artistic idiom in itself revolutionary. They did so in conversation with, not in isolation from, the modernism that they had encountered in the West; yet the influence of the past—then emerging in excavations across the land and entering the archaeological museum in Baghdad, where several of them spent long periods working and studying—is resoundingly clear. Khalid al Rahal, for example, often took the people of Iraq as

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subject matter, but his early works echo the forms of Mesopotamian art. His 1947 relief Women in the Hammam (lost or destroyed in the 2003 war), representing women in the public baths, shows the emphatic sinuous lines and solid bodies of an Assyrian relief (fig. 3). These experiments of the 1950s and ’60s were vital in the development of modern art not just in Iraq but across the entire Arab world. Given the country’s history of occupation, the artists of the Ruwad and Baghdad groups wanted an art designed for the new postcolonial state, but their nationalism was not based on religious, ethnic, or sectarian identities. It was idealist in its revolutionary vision of art’s role in the nation, in the same way that the postcolonial state of that moment was idealist. The artists came from various backgrounds and did not privilege the religious and ethnic categories that are today such a focal point. They also included among their number women artists such as Selim’s younger sister, Naziha Selim (who had studied art in Paris), and Madiha Omar, whose foregrounding of the Arabic letter would have a major influence on Arab art. After 1968, the Pan-Arabist movement took over much of the artists’ rhetoric, a departure both in ideals and in ideology. At the same time that the artists of the 1940s through the 1960s consciously looked for inspiration in what they saw as their heritage, they acknowledged influence from Western Europe, where several had studied, and thought of their work as experimental, as modern, as participating in modernism, and as an art for the new nation state. Is this art then simply a colonial hybrid that mixes East and West, traditional Islamic decorative arts and modern art? Are we bound to define it in the oppositional terms of the usual operative duality of modernity? If modernism is a clear and even a primary category for describing the most experimental works of art in the first part of the twentieth century, what are its criteria? Some would list abstraction, the breaking up of pictorial space, the turning away from figurative art, but of course Western European artists did not invent these modes of expression. In Islamic art, for example, these criteria would be quite suitable for describing what falls under the traditional. This is why the artists of Ruwad and the Baghdad group did not see themselves as imitating Western modernism. Rather, having been exposed to it, they looked to their own past and found it to be a familiar aesthetic. In Selim’s words, they saw modernism as an “explosive continuation of the past.” 12 If Western modern art is thought of as emancipating art from representation, in the Middle Eastern context representational art never achieved the prominence, or the exclusive equation with fine art, that it once had in the West. The understanding of modernism as a break with mimetic representation runs into a kind of contradictory limit here, since abstraction and nonmimetic art forms are conventional and even conservative aspects of high art in the Islamic tradition. There, the characteristics of modernism that diverge from representation merge with older modes of artistic production. The characteristics of an epistemic shift dissolve. If modernist art is seen as an exclusionary Western category of autonomous art, art that occurs elsewhere can only be considered a pale imitation. Yet this kind of

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non-Euro-American modernism is even contradictory in the sense that it undermines the category of modernism itself. The museum of modern art in Baghdad was largely destroyed in the war of March and April of 2003, its collections looted and sold. The modernist and postcolonial tradition created by mid-twentiethcentury Iraqi artists has been erased from the archives of the country’s past. Iraq’s modernism is now a faint and distant dream, like the independent state that the artists had imagined was the future.

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1  On the historiographic assessment of modernism as an exclusionary category see my essay “Modernism and Iraq,” in Zainab Bahrani and Nada Shabout, eds., Modernism and Iraq (New York: Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University, 2007), pp. 11–22. 2  On the place of modernity and the politics of time in historical writing see Jack Goody, The Theft of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 3  See Olu Oguibe, “In the Heart of Darkness,” Third Text 23 (Summer 1993): 3–8. 4  For the Middle East, this viewpoint is exemplified in the work of Bernard Lewis; see, for example, his What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (London: Orion House, 2002). The recent popular diagnosis of radical Islam as a response to a modernity that it cannot tolerate may be seen as falling into this tradition. 5  See, e.g., Jerry Brotton, The Renaissance Bazaar: From the Silk Road to Michelangelo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); J. M. Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History (New York: The Guildford Press, 1993); Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); John M. Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); and Deborah Howard, Venice and the East (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). 6  See my Infinite Image: Art, Time and the Aesthetic Dimension in Antiquity (London: Reaktion, 2014). 7  Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics (London and New York: Continuum Press, 2006), p. 13. 8  See Shabout, Modern Arab Art: Formation of Arab Aesthetics (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007). 9  Shabout describes a different and conflicted emergence of modernism in Egypt, for example. See ibid., chapter 1. 10 See ibid., p. 28. 11 It is interesting to note that in 2004, after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, Coalition Provisional Authority and Interim Iraqi Government members discussing pulling the Tahrir Monument down, following a widespread policy, both official and unofficial, of removing public art. 12 Quoted in Bahrani and Shabout, eds., Modernism and Iraq, p. 27.

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PLURAL MODERNITIES: A HISTORY OF A COSMOPOLITAN MODERNITY Catherine Grenier

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or several years now there has been a growing from a “politically correct” aura, or would prompt fears of a neo-imperiawareness of the necessity to renew the conalist, globalizing intent. ventional discourse on modern art. Under the The task I undertook with the Modernités plurielles (Plural momentum of cultural studies and the political modernities) collection at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, attempted revision of twentieth-century history, art histoto provide a few answers to these questions. This completely rians have opened up new axes of research that new presentation of the museum’s collection, on view from October upset the established discourse on artistic mod2013 to March 2014, was the result of three years of research carernism. By opening the door to new artists and ried out by a large team of curators and young academics.1 Echoing initiatives by universities and international museums, and unprecnew criteria of inclusion, art history has been drawn into an essential edented in scale for the Centre Pompidou, it laid the foundation of change. The unified, linear, progressive narrative established after a historical revision. Based on a critical reconsideration of twentiWorld War II is in crisis. It must be updated and reestablished on new eth-century art history, it was the first milestone in a debate on the grounds. We are committed to this path by the critical reconsiderainterpretation and public presentation of this rich period of modern art. tion of Western modernity and the context of globalization, especially The preparation of the project since societies are now experiencing raised questions for which we were not the reemergence of communitarianreally prepared. In a museum, the question isms and nationalisms. of updating art history has both practical The challenging of dominant disand political meanings. What to show, how courses and established hierarchies, to show it, and in what direction should and acceptance of the inadequacy of the collection develop? These three questhe existing diagram in considering the tions are fundamental, and their answers international history of art, are urgent affect the future of the museum as an indictates for both academics and curastitution. Yet they are little discussed, and tors. Faced with the question of writmuseums of modern art have only rarely ing art history and catering to a wide, been substantially transformed since the diversified public, the museum has a development of the “Alfred Barr model” central position and a particular role. In (fig. 1), the chronological and phylogenetits educational mission, and in its presic model (an art history of “movements”) entation of its collections as an art hisdeveloped by Barr at The Museum of tory concretized in actual artworks, the Modern Art in New York, of which he was museum bears intellectual and political the founding director in 1929, and wideresponsibility for the story that it tells. ly adopted by Western museums since, Internationally most curators undersuperseding the historical and geographstand this, and recent meetings of the ical “Louvre model.” The creation of a International Committee for Museums museum protocol adequately addressand Collections of Modern Art have year ing the demands generated by the evoluby year become more geographically dition of models of thought is a challenge, versified. But if the museum’s position is Fig. 1. Alfred H. Barr, Jr.'s chart illustrating the development of modern art, 1936 and probably even the principal chalcrucial, it is also complex and uncomlenge, facing the museum of tomorrow. fortable: complex because most muse Inspired by the philosophy of the Enlightenment, the museums have neither the collections nor the research staff that would enable um was from the outset a place dedicated to knowledge, founded on them to undertake a presentation of a new, global, plural art history; and a universalist conception of culture and intended to participate in the uncomfortable because, when a museum does have the required works, individual’s emancipation and growth. As an interface between creation this rewriting would involve a change in habits that could shock, not the and the world, the museum is a depository of artistic riches, but it also general public (my experience in several “nonconformist” presentations proposes a “reasoned” history of art for the public’s pleasure and edificahas taught me that the public is much more open-minded than the suption. As a place of the interpretation and construction of meaning, and posedly informed assume), but the museum’s own staff and habitués. a bridge between the past, the present, and the future, the museum Misunderstandings can also create resistances and protests against a replays a key role in the social arena. This role has only become more writing of art history that would see the great masters of the traditional important in the present period of uncertainty and change, when the narrative of modernity effaced or obliterated by newcomers benefiting

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need to understand—to understand art, history, the world—prevails over the mere quest for aesthetic pleasure. The museum occupies an influential public dimension, and it would be naive to underestimate its role as a political organ. In a world in which knowledge is both growing and transforming its own nature, the independence of the museum in relation to conservative traditions and official discourses, and its capacity to evolve and to question itself, should be guarantors of its integrity and of its satisfactory execution of its mission. The art history deployed in the museum may seem objective but is in fact

Fig. 2. Installation view of The Other Story at the Hayward Gallery, London, c. 1989. Courtesy Rasheed Araeen

an intellectual construction, a narrative that the institution legitimizes. A chronological presentation provides no more guarantee of objectivity than an interpretative narrative, because it is the product of a system of inclusion and exclusion based on criteria subject to contestation. A history of artistic revaluations has shown us that these criteria are far from universal and immutable. Thus when the historical presentation of artworks is the chosen model, it must receive a revaluation of its pertinence. The usual narrative of the art history of the first half of the twentieth century has until now been based on a certain conception of modernity rather than on a genuinely historical presentation of the sequence considered. The works (or artists) designated as modern are not those belonging to the modern period but those subscribing to certain values of artistic modernity. The “big picture” of art history, as it has been dispensed until now by museums, is thus based on a typology of movements, classified according to progressive criteria and articulated in a genealogy. The artists highlighted are those whose work corresponds to established canons, and who have a role in the collective history through their implication in these modernist movements. This oversimplified, teleological, and self-referential conception developed and crystallized during the period of recostruction following the two world wars. The retrospective organization of the history of modern art was both the product of a crisis of Western modernity and the expression of a will to surpass that crisis by strengt-

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hening progressive values. In the name of artistic radicality and following the concept of classification, it underestimated or left to one side many individual and collective expressions regarded as hybrid or local, late or antimodern. In today’s very different historical and political context, the values and ideologies that have sustained this model are in question. Research by historians and in the social sciences has raised our awareness of the political dimension of art history and of its close correlation with the writing of history. Thus the canonical history presented in museums appears partial and obsolete; it takes into account neither the plurality of modernities produced in different parts of the world nor even the diversity and wealth of Western modernity, which has been progressively subjected to processes of simplification and exclusion. This model must be reformed to allow the introduction of a complexity and diversity that will enrich our understanding of the modern period. The museum must develop no longer one but several narratives capable of restoring the plurality of modernities. This task was doubly important for a French museum capable of reviving the memory of an exceptional period. Between 1900 and 1940, hundreds of artists flocked to Paris from all over the world to constitute the most cosmopolitan art scene of all time. Yet the richness and diversity of this population and its artistic expression have been considerably diminished in the narrative of the foundation of modernity. Recent revaluations of female artists, and even of some artists whose aesthetic was defined by one of the modernist movements, have not sufficed to reestablish the multifariousness of what has been inappropriately termed the “School of Paris.” Thus various “expressionisms,” notably those of many artists from Central Europe, and various “realisms” that the all-encompassing embrace of the “return to order” consigned to the category of “antimodern,” were marginalized by the history of modernism. A less ideological and more historical approach, and a challenging of overexclusive discriminatory criteria, are now changing the picture. One consequence of this new open-mindedness has been the revaluation of American, Latin American, Asian, African, and Middle Eastern artists, many of whom were recognized in their time but then ignored. On a worldwide scale, the hindsight with which we can regard the now historical period of the twentieth century allows us to view it through a more multifaceted prism informed by research in different fields of knowledge. Postcolonial studies have undertaken a critique of the West-centered history of art, prompting a new appreciation of the art forms practiced in non-Western countries and in zones hitherto considered “peripheral.” “Cultural studies” and “visual studies” have also played their part in upsetting hierarchies and taking a different view of underestimated or neglected areas such as women’s art, forms of art linked to minorities, and marginal or local aesthetics. Reintegration into the world as a whole tends to challenge the Western modes of classifying and understanding art. Discriminative criteria—“modern,” “antimodern,” “pioneering,” “late,” “major,” “minor”—lose their legitimacy. A new dynamic has been established that has ended the scorn for the art of “non-

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developed” and “provincial” cultural zones. The study of influences has been superseded by the study of exchanges, transfers, and resistances. Complexity is being reintroduced and highlighted. The hybrid and heterogeneous have regained their positive dimension. Historical determinism is being put into perspective and chronological frameworks are becoming more supple. The frontiers between “work of art” and “handicraft” and “tribal art” are falling into question. Even the most established terminology—“modernity,” “avant-garde,” “contemporary art”—now reveals ambiguities and incoherencies. The museum must follow historical and critical studies closely. To become a place of both expression and synthesis for the research and revaluation processes undertaken in the field of modern and contemporary art history, it must change paradigm and engage in a “historial” hermeneutic of art and art history. As Hans-Georg Gadamer advocated, one gains a fuller understanding of oneself by reflecting on the other (the past, otherness), without denying one’s own identity.2 When the American critic and curator Lucy R. Lippard declared, in 1980, that “feminism’s greatest contribution to the future of art has probably been precisely its lack of contribution to modernism,” she was opening the way for a reconsideration of the values of modernism far exceeding women’s art.3 When the Pakistani-born British artist Rasheed Araeen proposed “The Other Story,” that of “those men and women who defied their ‘otherness’ and entered the modern space that was forbidden to them,” he was stressing the questioning of the framework of modernism that the artists concerned were aiming to both penetrate and transform. He added: “Would it be possible to inscribe this story within the master narrative of modern art history?”4 The first response by museums to the challenge to the linear diagram of modern art history was exhibitions focusing on territories to be rediscovered, followed by a thematic presentation of their collections.5 “Plural Modernities” broadened the principle of a re-presentation of the museum’s collection to a no-longer-thematic but general and historical reconsideration of art history. Our project was to offer the public a new, open-ended, off-center vision of twentieth-century art. But this vision had absolutely no pretention to becoming canonical. The evolution of research and critical and historical thought is posing questions that are far from being resolved, and whose interest lies more in their mode of raising questions than in the production of new assertions. The critical deconstruction of the established history now underway must be followed by reorganization and proposals of new basic premises. “Plural Modernities”—like the present, the very ambitious project, Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965 which provides an unprecedented panorama of the postwar period—have, I hope, been major steps toward the reimagining of a cosmopolitan and cross-border cultural community, a community that will benefit from a revitalized view of the diversity and interactivity of modern art.

1 After March 2014, the installation remained open in a modified version until May 2015. 2 See Hans Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 1960, Eng. trans. as Truth and Method (London: Sheed and Ward, 1969). 3 Lucy R. Lippard, “Sweeping Exchanges: the Contribution of Feminism to the Art of the 1970s,” Art Journal 40, nos. 1–2 (1980): 362–65. 4 Rasheed Araeen, “Introduction: When Chickens Come Home to Roost,” in The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-War Britain, exh. cat. (London: Hayward Gallery, 1989), p. 11. 5 New York’s Museum of Modern Art was the first to do this, in 1999, followed shortly by Tate Modern, London, when it opened in 2000, then by the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in 2013. Some museums, such as Tate Modern and the Museo National Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, even adopted this more-thematic-than-historical mode on a permanent basis. “Plural Modernities” benefited from these examples, as did previous thematic experiments at the Centre Pompidou: Big Bang. Destruction et création dans l’art du XXe siècle, which I curated

Translated from French by David Wharry

in 2005, Mouvement des images in 2006, and Elles@centrepompidou in 2009. The recent reopening of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, was an ambitious example of a reconsideration of art history taking into account the diversity of the American scene.

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EXILES, EMIGRÉS, AND COSMOPOLITANS: LONDON’S POSTWAR ART WORLD Courtney J. Martin

6. Chapter Cosmopolitan 2 · Form Modernisms Matters

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fter World War II, Britain entered a prolonged period marked equally by its success in the war and the destruction of its major cities during the Blitz. Like its neighbors on the Continent, Britain spent the first few years after the war mourning the loss of life in a publicly gendered manner—in the form both of actual deaths of young men and of the dead’s lost potential to enrich the country as fathers, workers, and citizens—and rebuilding its cities. Unlike its neighbors on the Continent, Britain was undergoing a radical shift from an empire to, perhaps, only an island. Almost immediately after the war, its largest colony, the Indian subcontinent, left its control. In the summer of the following year, the arrival of the ship Empire Windrush from Jamaica brought with it the first wave of migration from the Anglophone Caribbean. Simultaneously, waves of white Britons were emigrating out, through a scheme engineered by the government, to the remaining far reaches of the Commonwealth— Australia, Canada, and New Zealand—for the promise of better lives and to maintain some degree of Englishness there.1 Added to this shift was the Americanization of Britain by way of the consumer goods being imported into the country, providing an escapist imperialism through every film watched, comic book read, and candy bar sold. Postwar London’s art world was a convex mirror of the city’s experience of rebuilding after the destruction of the war. Most of London’s museums had closed in 1939, just before or immediately after Britain entered the war, in September 1939. With their closures, their collections went into storage across the country for safekeeping. During the first part of the war, many artist émigrés, such as Marcel Breuer, Naum Gabo, Piet Mondrian, and others, had sought refuge in Britain—most often, though, fairly briefly, in transit to the United States. British artists had previously looked to Paris as the standard-bearer of modernism, but once the war entered its deep phase, they could no longer travel to the Continent or exchange mail back and forth with it. When the collections returned and the museums reopened, in late 1945 and 1946, most artists had been without daily contact with art for more than five years. One of the first major exhibitions to open after the war was a show of works by Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1945, reflecting the aesthetic dormancy of the war period and the expectation that artists, collectors, and patrons would return to Paris once the war was over.2 Almost immediately after the war, however, artists’ focus on Paris began to wane, replaced by an interest in New York that reflected the broader national desire for American popular culture. In the decade following the war, the U.S. government supported major traveling exhibitions of American art, organized by New York’s Museum of Modern Art and filled with the collections of a new patronage class of Americans who almost exclusively acquired abstract painting. Modern Art in the United States: A Selection from the Collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York traveled to the Tate Gallery in January 1956 and was followed a few years later by The New

American Painting in February 1959. If the first show introduced British artists to American painting, the second solidified the sense that the sphere of art had shifted to New York and that to be an artist required at least a visit there to experience this new phenomenon and ideally a permanent relocation there to fully participate in its largesse. In the same manner that men of working age and young families were solicited with opportunities in the Commonwealth, British artists went to the United States in great numbers. The American influence also occasioned a split in style. Artists working nonrepresentationally before the war, such as Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson, and Victor Pasmore, attributed their interest in abstraction to their interactions with artists in Paris. After the war abstraction became heavily identified with the United States, and representational painters such as Francis Bacon came to be seen as holdouts against American imperialism’s “intense artistic chauvinism.”3

Fig. 1. Frank Bowling with his painting Mirror (1966), c. 1966. Courtesy Frank Bowling Archive

The presence of artists from the Commonwealth and from the former Empire in Britain had long been a feature of London’s art world. Many artists came as students to attend art school, to obtain certification as art teachers for use in their home countries, or to bring their art to a larger public. This was the case, for example, with Rasheed Araeen, Frank Bowling, Avinash Chandra, Ben Enwonwu, Ibrahim El Salahi, Iqbal Geoffrey, Donald Locke, Althea McNish, David Medalla, Ronald Moody, Anwar Jalal Shemza, Francis Newton Souza, and Aubrey Williams, all of whom came to London between the end of the war and the early 1960s. Most of the Commonwealth artists who came to Britain were male and middle and upper class. A good number of these artists integrated into British life, though not necessarily into its art world, which— in the 1950s and ’60s—was largely defined by a few galleries in Mayfair

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offering modern European and British art to a small number of British abstraction binary and inserting himself into a wider market for abstract patrons. Most British artists got by on teaching or public commissions, painting.7 It seems reasonable to suggest that there was a politicized link between the reception of abstraction in Britain, the strong New York art rather than gallery sales or patronage, but the incoming artists were market, American imperialism, and the limited possibilities for nonrarely hired as permanent staff in art schools or offered public funding. white abstract artists in Britain in the mid-twentieth century. Stuart Hall categorized the wave of artists who came to Britain between For those who stayed in London, Britain’s transition from an empire 1945 and 1970 as creating a “problem space” that challenged the insecure 4 to a consolidated nation bankrupted by World War II constantly interBritish art world and its nationalist art history. Immigrant artists often found themselves in the cultural spaces rupted their practices. The loss of the country’s colonies from 1947 into of their home nations. Opened in Earls Court in 1955, the West Indian the mid-1960s only added to its uphill battle to rebuild its cities in the Students Centre was intended as a social center for West Indian studecades following the Blitz. Araeen, from Karachi, is often linked to othdents (primarily those affiliated with the West Indian Students Union) er artists from the subcontinent who found their way to London after in London. In due course it became a gathering place and event venue the war, such as Chandra, Geoffrey, Shemza, and Souza, and all are often for West Indians in all sectors. As such, it was one of the main meeting folded into the “terminal loss” (of family, country, religion, self, class, stasites for the Caribbean Artists Movement (cam), a cultural and litertus, civility) narrative of the exile. 8 But Araeen was only an acquaintance of these artists, and of the predicament attached to their practices in ary movement primarily composed of Caribbean writers resident in 5 London.9 At some point between Britain. Its founders were Edward Kamau Braithwaite, John leaving Karachi and settling in La Rose, and Andrew Salkey. London, he associated himself Textile artist McNish, sculptor with concerns of race, class, and Moody, and painter Williams imperialism that aligned him were active members. Like filmclosely with Pan-Africanism, maker Horace Ové, Bowling, black (American) nationalism, originally from British Guiana, and the Non-Aligned Movewas friendly with the group, ment, which, in turn, brought but was not a member, though him into regular contact with he is often described withartists who considered themin the discourse of Caribbean selves avant-garde and with the cultural practices in Britain. predominantly African-CaribbeBowling’s relationships centered an antiracist activists who were around artists from the Regent responding to the restrictive polFig. 2. Installation view of The Achievements of Jésus-Rafael Soto 1950-1965: Street Polytechnic and later the icies doled out to African and 15 years of Vibrations. A Retrospective Exhibition at the Signals Gallery, London, 1965. Courtesy England & Co, London Royal College of Art and the Asian immigrants in Britain. 6 Slade School. From his school That Araeen found himself beyears he was considered alongside those figurative painters, such as tween these two groups, who did not have organic connections to each Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud, and Leon Kossoff, whom R. B. other, speaks to his cosmopolitan status in London as both an artist and Kitaj would anoint the School of London. Paintings such as Swan I and an activist. Swan II (both 1964; plates 264, 265) show that Bowling’s figuration was In the 1960s, Araeen and Medalla became involved in artists’ heavily guided by a nationally influenced Pop art and mid-century design groups that employed performance, rather than objects, as protest, aesthetic, because British monarchs can claim ownership of all unwhile both became leading practitioners of Conceptual art. Araeen marked and unclaimed mute swans in open water in England and Wales. met Medalla in the fall of 1965 at Jésus-Rafael Soto’s first solo show at After the dominance of American art became accepted, a good the Signals Gallery (fig. 2). 10 The gallery began in 1964 as the Centre for Advanced Creative Study, a collaborative avant-garde space run by number of artists who might have journeyed to Britain for schooling, or Medalla, writer Guy Brett, Paul Keeler, Marcello Salvadori, and Gerto be a part of a larger art community, chose New York instead. Souza, man émigré Gustav Metzger, the author of the Auto-Destructive Art for example, showed with Gallery One in London beginning in 1955, but Manifesto (1960). Signals had a companion publication that, in addiby the 1960s had moved to New York. Similarly, Chandra, whose work tion to reporting on events at the gallery, featured free-form art provacillated between semiabstract and fully nonrepresentational painting jects and writing about international art, a task enhanced by Medalla’s while in London, moved to New York in 1965. By the mid-1960s, Bowling contacts in the United States and his frequent travel to Asia, Europe, too moved to New York, to paint abstractly and to write about art from and South America. a politicized perspective, removing himself from the British figuration/

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Along with the Indica Gallery (active 1965–67), Signals (active 1964–66) incubated an avant-garde arts scene in London. The mix of artists, musicians, actors, and social activists who frequented it turned the gallery into an international social space as much as an exhibition space. The American expatriate and kinetic artist Liliane Lijn, for example, moved from Paris to London at the gallery’s invitation.11 The Greek kinetic artist Takis (Panagiotis Vassilakis), Lijn’s ex-husband and a member of the Guerrilla Art Action Group (gaag), a more radical arm of New York’s Art Workers Coalition, showed in the gallery. Brazilian Neoconcrete artists Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark exhibited important works at Signals before having major exhibitions elsewhere.12 The Brazilian artist Sergio Camargo showed there and worked on the gallery’s bulletin. The Venezuelan artist Alejandro Otero had his first European retrospective at Signals, and the Chinese artist Li Yuan-Chia showed there as well. As a major port for artists seeking refuge from other places, the gallery allowed them to fold into the wave of immigration that swept Britain after the war. Signals was unself-consciously multiracial at a time when most London galleries would not have represented nonwhite and non-European artists. If these artists were misplaced in the rhetoric of exile, how then do we describe the internationalism born of immigration that produced the cosmopolitan atmosphere of London’s art world? Perhaps one way is to acknowledge that in our efforts to move beyond the East/West binary, we often overlook the fact that there was never a singular West. By the same token, why do we assume that the “postwar,” a term that points directly to the period after World War II, was a period of sameness? The London art world at mid-century was in a kind of limbo between its old attachments (Paris) and its new entanglements (New York), not completely divorced from or settled into one or the other. The arrival of new artists from its former empire further destabilized it. If, as historians have already made clear, the postwar period was not economically, intellectually or politically resolved well into the twentieth century, neither was its art history.

1 On postwar British emigration see Kathleen Paul, Whitewashing Britain: Race and Citizenship in the Postwar Era (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997). 2 In the exhibition at the Victoria and Albert, Henri Matisse showed paintings completed between 1896 and 1944 while Pablo Picasso showed only works made during the war. 3 This account follows British painter Patrick Heron’s description of American art’s influence on the British in his essay “The Ascendancy of London in the Sixties,” Studio International 172, no. 884 (December 1966): 280–81. Heron later called the presence of American art in Britain “cultural imperialism”: see “A Kind of Cultural Imperialism?,” Studio International 175, no. 897 (February 1968): 62–64. In both essays he adopted language used to describe the U.S. relationship to the “third world,” and specifically Vietnam, to define American art’s hegemonic relationship to British art and artists. 4 Stuart Hall, “Black Diaspora Artists in Britain: Three ‘Moments’ in Post-war History,” History Workshop Journal 61, no. 1 (2006): 1. By the close of the 1980s Rasheed Araeen would gather all of these artists for the exhibition The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-war Britain (London: South Bank Centre, 1989), on view at the Hayward Gallery from November 29, 1989, to February 4, 1990. 5 Frank Bowling’s participation in cam is cited in, e.g., a letter from Edward Braithwaite to Colin Rickards, February 6, 1967. George Padmore Institute, London. 6 Bowling was in residence at the Regent Street Polytechnic in 1957–59, before that art school merged with Chelsea Polytechnic in 1964 to form the Chelsea School of Art. 7 On Bowling’s activities in New York see Kellie Jones, “It’s Not Enough to Say ‘Black is Beautiful’: Abstraction at the Whitney 1969–1974,” in Kobena Mercer, ed., Discrepant Abstraction (London: Institute of International Visual Arts, and Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2006), and Courtney J. Martin, “They’ve All Got Painting: Frank Bowling’s Modernity and the Post-1960 Atlantic,” Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic, exh. cat. (Liverpool: Tate Liverpool, 2010), pp. 48–57. 8 Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile,” in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 173. 9 “Acquaintance” is a fair word to describe Araeen’s personal and professional relationships with each of these artists. Unlike him, the others came to London unquestionably acknowledged as artists or art students. 10 The Achievements of Jésus-Rafael Soto 1950–1965: 15 Years of Vibrations. A Retrospective Exhibition was organized by Paul Keeler for the Signals Gallery, London, October 28–December 24, 1965. 11 Liliane Lijn, National Life Story Archive (F7815–F7825), British Library. 12 See Guy Brett and Luciano Figueiredo, Oiticica in London, exh. cat. (London: Tate, 2007).

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THE BLACK COSMOPOLITANS Tobias Wofford

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osmopolitanism often invokes fantasies of unmediated cultural exchange, free of political and cultural borders. But cosmopolitan encounters are always enabled by the networks through which people, objects, and ideas circulate. These networks both facilitate cultural exchange and structure its possibilities. Nothing can be truer of the underlying networks that connected African and African American artists during the postwar period. The decades following World War II saw unprecedented exchange between African artists and their diasporic American counterparts, made possible by important institutions through patronage and organization. Yet in engaging with these institutions, artists also confronted postwar discourses of racial belonging, the struggles against colonialism and for civil rights, and even the politics of the Cold War. Institutions like the Harmon Foundation and the American Society of African Culture, for example, as well as forums like the First Congress of Negro Writers and Artists, in 1956, created contexts in which artists and artworks were entangled in a global terrain laden with the pressures of nationalism and the tensions of racial and cultural kinship. In fact these networks and the subjects that created them were often spaces in which the dialectic between national affinities and other global connections were tested.

Brady first sought to exhibit Enwonwu’s work at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, but she found limited interest there. A letter of Brady’s describes MoMA director Rene d’Harnoncourt’s response to her suggestion: “He feels that the Museum of Modern Art can only show the highly sophisticated and the type of art that they are sure will be accepted by the critics. He feels Africa is in a state of flux and that, while the material should definitely be shown, it should be shown more from the sociological basis.”3 Apparently mainstream American art audiences were not yet ready for contemporary African art. Yet the network of galleries and universities through which the Harmon Foundation traditionally promoted African American artists readily embraced the opportunity to exhibit works by Africans. In October 1950, the art gallery at the historically black Howard University, in Washington, D.C., featured Enwonwu’s first solo

AFRICAN ARTISTS IN AMERICA: THE HARMON FOUNDATION Black internationalism had precedents before 1945,1 but it wasn’t until after World War II that the United States hosted its first exhibitions of contemporary African art. In 1949, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., displayed a traveling survey of South African art. The show included only one black artist, the painter Gerard Sekoto, who, despite his marginal status in the exhibition, was praised in Time magazine for his “vivid, straight-speaking pictures of fellow natives in their tumbledown suburban ‘locations’ or moving through the rolling South African countryside.”2 Arguably the first major solo show of an African artist in the United States took place in 1950, when the director of the Harmon Foundation, Mary B. Brady, began to consider the possibility of exhibiting the work of the Nigerian modernist Ben Enwonwu. It was not a coincidence that the American debut of contemporary African art was facilitated by the Harmon Foundation: established in 1922, the foundation was best known for its large-scale patronage and sponsorship of African American artists. Further, not only did the foundation facilitate the exhibiting of work by black artists in the United States but its grants and awards helped African American artists to travel to artistic capitals like Paris. In this sense the foundation was also a major patron of the black internationalism of the interwar period.

Fig. 1. Vincent Kofi. Awakening Africa. 1959–60. Bronze, Courtesy National Archives, College Park, Maryland

exhibition in the United States. Enwonwu also undertook a well-received lecture tour and was celebrated in New York with an elaborate reception sponsored by the Harmon Foundation and hosted by African American artists Richard Barthé, Ellis Wilson, Jacob Lawrence, and Elton Fax. Spurred by the success of Enwonwu’s exhibition, the Harmon Foundation continued its support of African artists, organizing artist visits and using its vast network of contacts with exhibition venues to facilitate shows of contemporary African works. Venues like the Merton Simpson Gallery in New York and the Howard University Museum became important spaces of encounter between African artists and American audiences. Over the remaining seventeen years of its existence, the

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Harmon Foundation introduced a broad canon of important African modernists to the United States. 4 The Ethiopian artist Skunder Boghossian, for example, first exhibited in the United States at a Harmon Foundation exhibition in 1961.5 Having received the first of numerous solo shows at the Merton Simpson Gallery the following year, he soon established himself as an important artist in the U.S. and, after assuming a professorship at Howard University, he became an important interlocutor for the emergent Black Arts Movement. Other African modernists

Fig. 2. Poster for the Second Conference of Negro Writers and Artists by Gerard Sekoto, c. 1959

found similar success under the patronage of the Harmon Foundation, which promoted and collected Sekoto’s work, for example. The Ghanaian sculptor Vincent Akweti Kofi spent time in the United States under the patronage of the Harmon Foundation and the State Department. While in the U.S., Kofi created a bronze cast of his work Awakening Africa (1959– 60; fig. 1) and exhibited in New York and in historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in the American South.6 All of these contemporary African artists lived cosmopolitan lives, training in Europe and engaging in a mix of modernist styles and various traditional methods and imagery. Yet American curators and critics most often saw their work as representing an authentic access to Africa. The New York Times offered an enduring but limited interpretation of Boghossian’s work: “An Ethiopian artist industriously paints scenes and figures from his native country.” 7 In the American context, contemporary African artists and their works were variously absorbed into the discourses of racial and cultural difference that formed the underlying

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assumptions of the Harmon Foundation’s core mission and were latent throughout American art-critical discourse.

A MEETING IN PARIS, 1956 American art networks were just one environment of connection between African and African American artists in the postwar period. African and African American artists met and exchanged ideas at global events such as the First Congress of Negro Writers and Artists, in Paris in 1956, and its sequel in Rome in 1959. In fact Enwonwu presented a paper at the first event and Sekoto designed the poster for the second (fig. 2) (the poster for the first having been designed by Pablo Picasso). During these events, black cultural workers from around the world tested and debated their political and cultural bonds. Living in self-imposed exile in Paris, James Baldwin attended the 1956 congress, where writers, artists, and intellectuals from throughout Africa and its diaspora filled the Amphitheater Descartes at the Sorbonne for four days of papers and debates that considered the position (indeed the very possibility) of black culture at a moment of global transition. The congresses were in a way political gatherings, being explicitly tied by their organizers to the 1955 Bandung Conference in Indonesia, which had sought to reorient global politics as Europe’s colonial grip on much of the world loosened. 8 With their overt emphasis on culture, however, the events were equally concerned with imagining the role of the individual artist in this shifting world order. They saw African culture as potentially unifying and politically liberating on a global level, and imagined black artists and writers as agents in an ascendance to a hitherto denied equality with Europe and the West. As the organizers described the first congress in the published proceedings, “During those days at the Sorbonne we went through some exhilarating hours of fervor and enthusiasm—and, in spite of the diversity of our origins, backgrounds and convictions, the unanimity which emerged had nothing artificial about it. This Congress was a great event in the conscience of the world.”9 While clearly moved by the event, Baldwin responded to the 1956 congress less optimistically than its organizers did. In his essay “Princes and Power” he pointed to the many complexities and contradictions inherent in the international network that the congress represented.10 For one, the question of black culture (the meeting’s unifying premise) was already a point of debate. But even political unity was tenuous for this diverse and international group, because, while the attendees seemed to agree on the need to end the racism and colonialism facing people of African descent, they were not unanimous on the political strategies by which to gain this end. This was clear at the beginning of the proceedings when a letter from W. E. B. Dubois was read aloud, informing the conference that he had been denied a passport to leave the United States and insinuating that the members of the American delegation were little more than agents of American imperialism. Dubois asserted, “Any

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Fig. 3. Jacob Lawrence. Meat Market. 1964. Tempera and gouache on paper, 76.8 × 57.8 cm. Courtesy Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York

American Negro travelling today must either not care about Negroes or say what the State Department wishes him to say.” 11 Throughout Baldwin’s observations of the congress, one perceives the precarious position of the cultural worker attempting to mediate this tangled and shifting cultural and political terrain. For Baldwin, the American writer Richard Wright exemplified this dilemma. Like Baldwin, Wright lived in Paris as an expatriate in order to escape American racism. He participated in the congress, and, like others, found himself ambivalently situated between his national affiliation and the international network the congress had created. Both the American delegation and the African organizers claimed him as their spokesman. The poet and

future president of Senegal, Léopold Senghor, went so far as to deliver a paper identifying the African elements of Wright’s poetry. Yet as Baldwin observed, “In so handsomely presenting Wright with his African heritage, Senghor rather seemed to be taking away his identity.” 12 Wright’s dilemma was not unique. As much as the Congresses of Negro Writers and Artists sought to bring artists together under the umbrella of a shared global African culture, they also highlighted the varied political affiliations and cultural differences of their attendees. Overall, the meetings underlined the ambivalent intersectionality of the cosmopolitan artist.

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as Chika Okeke-Agulu has described, AMSAC’s exhibition spaces in Lagos were one of the city’s most important art venues.15It hosted exhibitions not only by African American modernists but by contemporary African artists such as Vincent Kofi.16 AMSAC’s major achievement was the organization of a 1961 festival in Lagos that brought thirty-three African American artists, musicians, and writers to Africa, including Hale Woodruff, Nina Simone, and Langston Hughes. Lawrence achieved one of the most successful debuts in Nigeria under AMSAC’s sponsorship. His work was featured in a solo exhibition at the Lagos galleries in 1961, and the artist undertook a ten-day trip to Nigeria that year under AMSAC’s patronage. Other exhibitions featuring panels of the artist’s Migration of the Negro (1940–41) followed in 1962. Lawrence was so taken with his experience in Nigeria that he returned with his wife for an eight-month stay made possible by the connections fostered during his initial visit.17 While in Nigeria, he attended numerous AMSAC events in Lagos and engaged with the artistic debates circulating in the newly independent country. Okeke-Agulu has convincingly argued that the work Lawrence created in Africa was deeply influenced by the sensorial experience of Nigeria’s cities.18 In light of American political policy in independence-era Africa, AMSAC’s activities were increasingly viewed with distrust as rumors circulated of the society’s funding sources. When the society participated in organizing the American delegation to the groundbreaking Fig. 4. Installation view of Jacob Lawrence's “Migration Series” (1941) and sculpture by Vincent Kofi, presumably at the Mbari Artists and Writers Club, Ibadan, 1962

AMERICAN ARTISTS IN AFRICA: THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF AFRICAN CULTURE The 1956 congress concluded with the formation of the Société Africaine de Culture (SAC), headed by Alioune Diop, the Senegal-born editor of the journal Présence Africaine. Inspired by the undertaking, the American delegation to the congress, headed by John A. Davis, established the American Society of African Culture (AMSAC) with the mission of broadening knowledge of the cultural contributions of Africans and people of African descent.13 Beginning in 1957, AMSAC organized conferences, sponsored publications, offered financial support to SAC, and in 1961, expanded its operations with offices in Nigeria. Dubois’s warning to the 1956 congress about the American delegation were at least half right, however: much of the funding that made AMSAC’s productivity possible were funneled to the society by the American Central Intelligence Agency—a fact that was likely known to AMSAC’s leadership.14 Still, AMSAC’s activities in Nigeria were hugely important in fostering direct connection between African American artists and African art networks. The society granted a number of important African American artists their first exposure to the African continent, and in the 1960s,

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Fig. 5. Ben Enwonwu and Jacob Lawrence, presumably at the Mbari Artists and Writers Club, Ibadan, 1962

First World Festival of Negro Arts, in Dakar, Senegal, in 1966, a number of observers considered the delegation’s curatorial choices with suspicion. In memoirs of his African travels, Hoyt Fuller, the American editor of Negro Digest, accused AMSAC of actively attempting to restrict exchange between black radicals in the United States and African independence movements.19 The CIA’s financial support of AMSAC was eventually made public in a New York Times report in 1967.20 The society, which had already closed its Lagos offices a year earlier, now became much less active, until it eventually suspended activities in 1969. 21

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Allegations of censorship and propaganda are difficult to substantiate, but in AMSAC’s role as a sponsor for the circulation of African American artists throughout Africa, its possibilities were almost certainly limited by the Cold War paranoias of the CIA. The postwar decades saw unprecedented exchange between African American and African artists. In the cosmopolitanism that resulted, however, artists were never free from the cultural and political tensions of a more connected world. If anything, they became more keenly aware of their varying positions in the shifting global terrain created by African liberation, the push for civil rights in the United States, and the long shadow of the Cold War. Their works responded poetically to this intersectional and conflicting context, often focusing intensely on the precarious position of subjectivities caught epistemically between the traditional and the modern and geopolitically between the West and Africa. Circulating on a global stage with the mobility of the jet age, and facilitated by increasing numbers of artists’ groups, institutions, and forums, African and African American artists developed new strategies for mediating the tensions of being black cosmopolitans.

1 See Theresa A. Leininger-Miller, New Negro Artists in Paris: African American Painters and Sculptors in the City of Light, 1922–1934 (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2001), and Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature Translation and Practice of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2003). 2 “Touring Africans,” Time 54, no. 6 (August 8, 1949): 53. 3 Mary Beattie Brady, letter to James Vernon Herring, July 11, 1950. Box 12, Jeff Donaldson Papers, circa 1960–2005, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 4 See Evelyn S. Brown, Africa’s Contemporary Art and Artists (New York: Harmon Foundation, 1966). 5 The exhibition included a broad range of contemporary art from Africa and was held at the Phelps-Stokes Fund, New York, December 28, 1961–January 19, 1962. See Harmon Foundation, Art from Africa of Our Time (New York: Harmon Foundation, 1961). 6 See ibid., p. 29, and Chika Okeke-Agulu, Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth Century Nigeria (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), pp. 159–60. 7 “This Week around the Galleries,” New York Times, March 4, 1962. 8 See James Baldwin, “Princes and Powers,” Encounter 8, no. 1 (January 1957): 52. 9 “Modern Culture and Our Destiny,” in “The First International Conference of Negro Writers and Artists, Proceedings,” Présence Africaine, special issue, June–November 1956, p. 3. 10 Baldwin, “Princes and Powers,” pp. 52–60. 11 W. E. B. Dubois, quoted in ibid, pp. 52–53. 12 Baldwin, “Princes and Powers,” p. 58. 13 American Society of African Culture (AMSAC), pamphlet, n.d. Southern Historical Collection #4340, Allard Kenneth Lowenstein Collection, Manuscripts Department at the Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Available online at through Jstor at www.aluka. org/stable/10.5555/al.sff.document.low139_42_01 (accessed May 2016). 14 See Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008). 15 See Okeke-Agulu, Postcolonial Modernism, p. 228. 16 See Brown, Africa’s Contemporary Art and Artists, p. 29. 17 See Carroll Greene, oral history interview with Jacob Lawrence, October 26, 1968. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Available online at www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-jacob-lawrence-11490 (accessed May 2016). 18 Okeke-Agulu, Postcolonial Modernism, p. 172. 19 Hoyt W. Fuller, Journey to Africa (Chicago: Third World Press, 1971), p. 92. 20 Neil Sheehan, “5 New Groups Tied to C.I.A. Conduits,” New York Times, February 17, 1967, p. 1. 21 Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer, p. 222.

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COSMOPOLITAN CONTAMINATIONS: ARTISTS, OBJECTS, MEDIA Damian Lentini

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racing the paths along which artists and their artworks traveled during the postwar period brings out a striking pattern: one begins to glimpse a series of networks and exchanges that challenge the standard linear trajectory associated with the term “avant-garde.” Artists did not simply “advance” from their birthplace toward one of the metropolises of Western modernism (London, Paris, and, increasingly, New York) commonly cited as the sites of the era’s major exhibitions;1 rather, they moved in multiple directions. The attempt to map these cross-cultural networks reveals a nuanced world of cross-fertilization circumventing the tired binary of “centers” and “peripheries.” To this end the idea of artists and artworks existing within transnational or cosmopolitan networks proves useful in considering how

encounter. 2 The history of postwar modernisms needs to be seen as an acceleration of the already nomadic tendency of both artists and artworks, with exhibitions and places of residence providing moments in which these various trajectories coalesced. These moments bring about what Kwame Anthony Appiah sees as the mutual contamination process brought about by encounters with strangers. He notes, “The early Cynics and Stoics took their contamination from the places they were born to the Greek cities where they taught; cosmopolitanism was invented by contaminators whose migrations were solitary.” 3 According to Appiah, rather than simply reinforcing entrenched or monolithic ideas of “culture,” the cross-pollination caused by the increased circulation of people and objects results in the twin commitments of pluralism and what he calls “fallibilism”: “the sense that our knowledge is imperfect, provisional, subject to revision in the face of new evidence.”4

Fig. 1. Paul Keeler and David Medalla installing the work of Lygia Clark at the Signals Gallery, London, 1965. Courtesy England & Co, London

exhibitions and schools have shaped discourses on modern art. It also provides a way of transcending the nationalist frameworks vociferously championed by critics writing in the shadow of the Cold War, arguments concealing the fact that the wide history of human culture is a story of movements and meetings—of “routes” rather than “roots,” as James Clifford has pointed out—with identities consistently shifting and modifying one another at the point of their mutual

Not only were these “contaminations” an intrinsic component of postwar artistic networks, they also produced a plurality of modernisms, including those that would initially appear removed from this discourse. Edward Said’s idea of “contrapuntal reading” helps to explain the importance of even supposedly counter-discourses within a cosmopolitan reading of exhibitions and exchanges. “In the counterpoint of Western classical music,” Said notes, “various themes play off one another, with

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only a provisional privilege being given to any particular one; yet in the resulting polyphony there is concert and order, an organized interplay that derives from the themes, not from a rigorous melodic or formal principle outside the work.” 5 Following this line of thought, a contrapuntal reading of modern exhibitions seeks not to privilege any specific narrative but to reveal the “wholeness” of overlapping and intermeshed histories of modern art and their mutual influence upon one another. If a fugue can contain “two, three, four or five voices [which] are all part of the same composition, [and yet] are each distinct,”6 a reading of modernism as univocal can be replaced with one that demonstrates “a simultaneous awareness both of the metropolitan history and of those other histories against which (and together with which) the dominating discourse acts.” 7 Finally we need to think of the spaces in which this cosmopolitan exchange and contamination take place in terms of Nikos Papastergiadis’s idea of the stoa, that area on the edge of the Athenian agora where the school founded by the Stoic Zeno gathered to discuss the principles of cosmopolitanism. 8 For Papastergiadis the arcades of the ancient stoa were a liminal zone independent of the more established spaces of the Athenian polis: I imagine the stoa as a spatial metaphor for the emergence of critical consciousness within the transnational public sphere. It is a space for criticality without the formal requirement of political deliberation and sociality without the duty of domestication. The stoa is the pivot point at which the public and private spheres interact and from which the cosmopolitan vision unfolds. 9 Using the metaphor of the stoa in thinking about the temporary spaces in which art and artists converged allows us to transcend the more universalizing tendencies of cosmopolitan theory that have developed since the time of Immanuel Kant. We can instead begin to consider the way these transnational gatherings allowed a “contamination” of ideas that contributed to postwar global modernisms.

INTERPERSONAL CONTAMINATIONS: CITIES AND SCHOOLS Cosmopolitan contamination occurs when people from different cultures meet and exchange ideas face-to-face. In the context of postwar art, this kind of contact was most prevalent within the cities to which artists flocked, perhaps to study at an art school or simply to situate themselves within the vibrant cosmopolitan culture of the metropolis. In terms of study, the primary destination for artists was once again Europe, especially the capitals of Paris, London, and Rome. Colonial and linguistic ties brought students to Paris, which attracted many from North Africa, and to London, which drew from the wider Commonwealth. Italy was

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also a popular destination, especially for artists from countries with a more ambiguous relationship to the West, such as Egypt, Syria, Iran, Lebanon, and Turkey.10 Outside Europe, the United States, and especially New York, benefited from the presence of the many artists and intellectuals who emigrated there before and during World War II, many of whom took up teaching positions at American universities and art schools and stayed on when the war ended.11 Despite the opportunities available in these cities, the concentration of artists in one place produced a highly competitive atmosphere, with success proving elusive for many, regardless of their national affiliation. As the biographies of artists such as Jacob Lawrence, Norman Lewis, and even Romare Bearden show, the New York art world of the 1940s and ’50s was a conflicted space for African American artists in terms of the difficulties of “encounter, negotiation, and multiple affiliation” in a social world polarized by boundaries of race and ethnicity.12 For many artists like Bearden, the influx of European artists to New York would in later decades produce a converse migration to cities such as Paris. Converse migration also manifested among the many artists who, having studied at a European academy, stayed on in the hope of engaging in the discourse of contemporary art but found themselves excluded from that discourse, which still favored a predominantly “national” identity.13 Unlike their prewar forebears, many of these figures arrived in these cities as “modern artists,” having already obtained a degree or established a reputation for themselves before their arrival. According to Stuart Hall, the motivation of a figure such as Francis Newton Souza—who arrived in England in the immediate postwar period with both an arts degree and an established reputation as one of the founders of the Progressive Artists’ Group in Bombay (which also comprised Maqbool Fida Husain, Krishen Khanna, and Mohan Samant)—was not altogether different from that in which Picasso and others went to Paris: to fulfill their artistic ambitions and to participate in the heady atmosphere of the most advanced centers of artistic innovation at that time. The promise of decolonization fired their ambition, their sense of themselves as already “modern persons.” It liberated them from any lingering sense of inferiority. Their aim was to engage the modern world as equals on its own terrain.14 Yet for artists such as Souza and Avinash Chandra, from India; Anwar Jalal Shemza, from Pakistan; Ugo Egonu, from Nigeria; and the British Guiana–born Frank Bowling, exclusion was evident the moment they set foot in the city. Bowling, for example, was told that his work was to be omitted from the important New Generation exhibition at London’s Whitechapel Gallery in 1964 because “England is not yet ready for a gifted artist of colour.” 15 Like African American artists in New York, these London-based artists found themselves in a sort of liminal space in relation to the wider institutional establishment: simultaneously in one of the centers of mid-century modernism yet locked out of a discourse to which they contributed.

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Moreover, even when these artists were included in group exhibitions, their participation was often circumscribed by being organized around colonial and geographic frameworks. A group called the “Young Commonwealth Group,” for example, participated in exhibitions at the renamed Commonwealth Institute (formerly the Imperial Institute) from 1962 onward.16 Although it facilitated important exhibitions of British-based artists in the early 1960s—its inaugural show Commonwealth Art Today, or the two versions of the Commonwealth Biennial of Abstract Art—many of its shows grouped artists according to their country of birth, rather than their residence, and inherently favored colonial-settler countries like Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.17 Where the Commonwealth Institute failed, other spaces emerged as platforms for the exhibition of what Kobena Mercer has

Fig. 2. Pierre Restany, Yozo Hamaguchi, Umbro Apollonio, Ciril Velepicˇ and Mr. and Mrs. Augustini in lively discussion at the Biennale Grafike, Ljubljana, 1963. Courtesy of Moderna galerija (MG+MSUM), Museum of Modern Art and Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, Ljubljana

dubbed “postcolonial internationalism.” 18 These included the New Vision Group (1951) and the subsequent New Vision Centre (1956); the “international cosmopolitanism” embraced by Victor Musgrave at his Gallery One (1953), which exhibited artists such as Souza, Shemza, and Chandra as “British” artists;19 as well as the Grabowski Gallery (1959), which similarly fostered a “global outlook.”20 Just as important were the early activities of the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), whose definition as “a hearth [around] which the artists and his audience can gather” aptly summarized the stoalike nature of its activities and resulted in important solo exhibitions of the likes of Princess Fahrelnissa Zeid and Wifredo Lam.21 The most distinct space for London’s cosmopolitan spirit was the Signals Gallery, opened in 1964 by David Medalla and Paul Keeler. Medalla had arrived in London, via Paris, from the Philippines in 1960 and promptly organized exhibitions with Keeler on kinetic art.22 They opened Signals in a warehouse space in the city’s West End, starting with a show by Takis, followed by solo exhibitions of Sergio de Camargo and Lygia Clark (fig. 1). Framing its program around new approaches to contemporary art—rather than attempting to reinscribe the works within nationalist paradigms—Signals provided

a space where artists from across the globe could encounter one another; many of the artists who exhibited at Signals would install their own exhibitions, as well as contribute to the gallery’s Newsbulletin. Indeed, with premises bigger than even the ICA’s space on Dover Street, Signals could rightly claim to be a more successful “hearth” than the older and more established ICA.

MOVING OBJECTS: BIENNIALS The most prevalent stoas of cosmopolitan exchange were exhibitions, which facilitated the circulation of both artists and artworks. The most evident examples were the many international art biennials that took place in the decades after World War II. Unlike biennials before 1945, these “second wave” events were distinctly global in purview.23 Between 1948 and 1964, for example, the Venice Biennale increased the number of national pavilions from sixteen to thirty-four, including for the first time representations from Egypt, Israel, Japan, Uruguay, Iran, India, Turkey, and the Philippines.24 There were also newer biennials that reflected this paradigm shift. While the first few iterations of the documenta exhibition series, begun in Kassel, West Germany, in 1955, in no way resembled the global survey of contemporary art that it is today,25 the global nature of this second wave was evident in the Bienal de São Paulo (1951), the Biennale de la Méditerranée (Alexandria, 1955), and the biennials in Tehran (1958), Paris (1959), and Saigon (1962), not to mention the many graphics biennials in Central and Eastern Europe and Latin America, beginning with the first Biennale Grafike in Ljubljana in 1955. Many of these events—with the exception of São Paulo and Paris— were overtly conservative, focused on unfashionable media (graphics), or persisted with the Venetian model of national pavilions. Yet they were also characterized by an atmosphere of international friendship and collegiality. Thus the first artistic director of the Bienal de São Paulo spoke of placing the modern art of Brazil “in living contact with the art of the rest of the world,”26 while the organizers of the remarkable—and sadly singular—biennial staged in war-ravaged Saigon could claim that the event would serve “as a gathering place where Vietnamese artists and artists from countries friendly to Vietnam may meet … in an atmosphere of friendly understanding and brotherhood.”27 What is particularly noticeable about the invitation extended to “countries friendly to Vietnam” (Argentina, China, Korea, Morocco, and the United States), and about similar lists of participant nations at other biennials, is the way so many transcended the usual East/West binary of those decades. Rather than isolating artists within national pavilions, many of these biennials actively sought to create shared territory between artists from various countries. In the Biennale de la Méditerranée, Egypt, France, Greece, Italy, Lebanon, Spain, Syria, and Yugoslavia were to share a “common denominator [that] is properly Mediterranean.”28 Despite the evident soft politics at play

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In other countries the spaces opened up by cyclical exhibitions of art here—evidenced by the direct involvement of Gamal Abdel Nasser in completely obviated such simple bifurcations and instead fostered a series the organization of the Biennale de la Méditerranée—biennials such of vibrant networks that operated parallel to the more common East/West as these were also able to bring together hitherto disconnected groups exchanges taking place in cities such as Venice. Emblematic of this is the of artists and other interested parties. Gardner and Green therefore so-called “concrete-kinetic-conceptual” nexus that emerged in the wake of note that their importance lies “less in the assemblage of artworks the Bienal de São Paulo.34 Building on the already strong network among than in the gatherings of artists, commissioners, writers and publics Latin American artists in Europe—the many exchanges between the Arfrom within and outside a given region. … Biennials allowed people to gentina-based Madí group and artists practicing in Paris, for example35 —the acquire visas and cross frontiers that would have been extremely diffiBienal generated a range of new transatlantic partnerships, with groups like cult, if not necessarily impossible, to cross without the justification of Brazil’s Grupo Ruptura being distinctively cosmopolitan in composition.36 attending the exhibition.”29 This form of gathering is evident In addition to drawing artists to from a photograph taken at the 1963 Latin America, the Bienal also indirectBiennale Grafike in Ljubljana, in which ly engendered the formation of cosmothe likes of the critic Pierre Restany, politan networks in Europe— the range the artist Yozo Hamaguchi, the Venof artists from Latin America, for examice jury-member Umbro Apollonio, ple, who, having encountered Max Bill the Slovenian curator Ciril Velepič, at the São Paulo Bienal, later traveled and the Rome-based publishers Mr. to study under him at the Hochschule and Mrs. Augustini appear in lively für Gestaltung, Ulm. Of the first wave discussion at the center of the exof graduates, Almir Mavignier would hibition space (fig. 2). Images such be crucial in the formation of the bianas this testify to the way biennials nual Nove Tendencije (New tendencies) staged in the liminal zones between exhibitions that took place in Zagreb the East/West divide were able to enin the 1960s and ’70s and similarly ingender transcultural networks and volved artists from a range of nations.37 Although the first of these exhibitions partnerships that were in many ways were hardly a critical success, the artist just as open as those born in more Manfredo Massironi notes that those established cities, such as Venice, 30 who took part in the series recognized and perhaps more so. What events such as these point to is that fact that its importance in providing “an opporalthough the notion of cosmopolitunity for meetings between many tanism was explicitly condemned in artists from diverse parts of Europe many of the Stalinist states of Eastern who, not being personally acquaintEurope (where it was used as an umed, could witness for themselves the brella term for a wider range of perstriking affinity between the works.” 38 Therefore, much like the aforesecutions that masked racist and/or Fig. 3. Issue no. 10 of the magazine Black Orpheus with a cover design by Ibrahim El Salahi, 1961 mentioned biennials, the greatest anti-Semitic undertones), 31 transnational partnerships were nonetheless legacy of the Nove Tendencije exhibiprevalent throughout the so-called “East,” not only in relation to detions was the manner in which it created a stoa-like space for artists bates on modernism but also within the vast networks of exhibitions from all over the world to meet and exchange ideas.39 32 and discussions around socialist realist art. Indeed, when viewed as a critically engaged counter-modernism—rather than simply an instrument of USSR propaganda—the influence of artists practicing in Communist-friendly countries such as Belgium, Italy, and France VIRTUAL COSMOPOLISES is just as prevalent as that of those from the Soviet Union, as is clear n other parts of the world, cosmopolitan contaminations involved from the exhibition of works by the likes of Renato Guttuso and An33 not only the circulation of people but movement through othdré Fougeron, and from the many trips and exchanges made by David Alfaro Siqueiros during this period. er forms of media. Among other things, the postwar period was defined by a rapid growth in the circulation of art, ranging from the

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increased distribution of magazines and periodicals to the frequency of large-scale touring exhibitions that traveled around the world. The Soviet Union and especially the United States were particularly active in organizing and sending works of art to all corners, 40 with the International Program of New York’s Museum of Modern Art producing a bilateral movement of artists and artworks in and out of the city. 41 In many of the world’s metropolises, this circulation of objects, magazines, and photographs supported the creation of what Partha Mitter terms a “virtual cosmopolis,” a condition that he sees among the prewar Bengali intelligentsia, who largely negotiated modernity via print media rather than through contact with Europeans. As Mitter notes, members of this “community” “may never have known one another personally, and yet shared a corpus of ideas on modernity. … The hybrid city of the imagination engendered elective affinities between the elites of the center and the periphery on the level of intellect and creativity.”42 This idea of the “virtual cosmopolis” is a crucial component in understanding the work of an artist such as Evgeny Mikhnov-Voitenko, who, without leaving the Soviet Union, was nevertheless able to engage with the art of various modernisms through Nikolai Akimov’s extensive library at the Theatre Institute in Leningrad. 43 In a similar vein, members of the Gutai group in the far-flung town of Ashiya, Japan, were able to draw on Yoshihara Jiro’s extensive library in order to develop what they considered “an international common ground where the arts of the East and the West will influence each other.”44 As is demonstrated by Yoshihara’s publication and circulation of the Gutai journal—whose circulation reached Jackson Pollock and Allan Kaprow in New York, Michel Tapié in Paris, and Heinz Mack in Düsseldorf—the Gutai artists saw themselves as active participants in this virtual cosmopolis, organizing joint exhibitions and publications with the likes of Tapié and viewing themselves as contributing to the discourse of postwar modernism. Nowhere is this reciprocity more evident than in the text Continuité et avant-garde au Japon, which Gutai published with Tapié, Haga Tōru, and the publisher Ezio Gribaudo in 1962 and which challenges the standard, derivative reading of Japanese art by linking the practices of Pollock, Alfonso Ossorio, Mark Tobey, Wols (Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze), and the like to a distinctly Japanese-centered Zen tradition and to “this open, symbiotic, and dynamic vision, to this world of living interparticipation.”45 As the members of Gutai understood, the ability to participate in a virtual cosmopolis was contingent on language and communication— hence their decision to publish the Gutai journal in both Japanese and English. Mitter notes that “hegemonic languages such as English and Spanish spread by colonial rule” were crucial in the formation of prewar modern groups. 46 In Africa, similarly, the notion of a common linguistic identity before the outbreak of World War II was initially shaped by artists and writers living abroad, 47 whose experiences of travel and migration informed identities at odds with the claim of the nation-state to be the primary basis of collective belonging. 48 After the hostilities ended, many of the French colonial countries to the south of the Saharan divide united around the idea of a pan-African identity, a

shift that resulted in engagement with the artistic and political ideals of the Négritude movement. This idea was further advanced by two major postwar conferences—the Fifth Pan-African Congress, held in Manchester in 1945, and the First International Congress of Black Writers and Artists, in Paris in September 1956—that called for the end of colonialism, as well as the development of a common African identity transcending the nation-states that had been inscribed by the colonial powers. 49 In addition to events such as these, the fostering of a common pan-African cosmopolis was facilitated by print media, particularly, in the Francophone world, the journal Présence Africaine, and in the Anglophone world Black Orpheus, which sought to connect the cosmopolitan activities of writers and artists in Nigeria to the wider diaspora across the English-speaking “Black Atlantic.”50 The magazine's editor, Ulli Beier, drew on an extensive global network to present the work of artists who he believed were confronting historical and cultural conditions comparable to those faced by Africans; he dedicating significant space in the journal to the works of diasporic artists such as F. N. Souza in London and Jacob Lawrence in New York.51 Beier also sought to combine his work on Black Orpheus with the exhibition program that he developed at the Mbari Artists and Writers Club in Ibadan. Comprising a café, a Lebanese restaurant, and an open-air courtyard, the Mbari Club functioned as a stoalike space; it was located in the middle of a central marketplace and facilitated discussions, exhibitions, and performances that could in theory be attended by anyone. Here Beier sought to bring significant artists and works from America, Asia and Europe to Nigeria for the first time, making the club a space “where the international dimension of postcolonial modernism became manifest.”52 In addition to diasporic artists living in Europe and the United States, Mbari’s exhibition program included the work of Africa-based artists on both sides of the Sahara, extending the parameters of pan-Africanism beyond the linguistic and colonial barriers that in many ways divided the continent. Particularly influential in this regard were exhibitions by the Sudanese artists Ibrahim El Salahi and Ahmed Mohammed Shibrain and the Ethiopian painter Skunder Boghossian, all complemented by articles in Black Orpheus (fig. 3). Mbari and Black Orpheus were important conduits for the work of artists from across the four major continents who were at the forefront of “defining modernisms inspired by the experience of colonization, racial discrimination, and the encounter between Western modernity and indigenous cultures.”53 As all of these case studies demonstrate, the development of postwar art and culture was indelibly shaped by cosmopolitan exchanges, both at the level of human interaction and through the circulation and distribution of artworks and print media. A contrapuntal reading of these various sites of cosmopolitan exchange can thus destabilize hitherto rigid categorizations of “culture” and “identity,” demonstrating instead how artists’ networks are in fact “worldly, productive sites of crossing: complex, unfinished paths between local and global attachments.”54

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1 See, for example, Bruce Altshuler’s histories of exhibitions: The Avant-Garde in Exhibition: New Art in the Twentieth Century (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994); Salon to Biennial: Exhibitions That Made Art History, vol. 1, 1863–1959 (London: Phaidon, 2008); and Biennials and Beyond: Exhibitions That Made Art History, vol. 2, 1962–2002 (London: Phaidon, 2013). Both of the latter focus on Europe and the United States, with the exception of one Gutai exhibition. 2 On nationalist frameworks, one thinks of texts such as Harold Rosenberg's “American Action Painters,” Artnews 51, no. 8 (December 1952); Clement Greenberg’s “‘American-Type’ Painting,” Partisan Review 22 (Spring 1955); or even Irving Sandler’s book The Triumph of American Painting (New York: Praeger, 1970). The quotation of James Clifford is from Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 1–13. 3 Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: Norton, 2006), p. 112. 4 Ibid., p. 144. 5 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), pp. 59–60. 6 Said, quoted in Colin Symes, “The Paradox of the Canon: Edward W. Said and Musical Transgression,” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 27, no. 3 (2006): 309. 7 Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 51. See also Geeta Chowdhry, “Edward Said and Contrapuntal Reading: Implications for Critical Interventions in International Relations,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 36, no. 1 (December 2007): 105, and “An Interview with Edward Said,” in The Edward Said Reader, ed. Moustafa Bayami and Andrew Rubin (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), pp. 419–44. 8 See Nikos Papastergiadis, Cosmopolitanism and Culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), pp. 81–82. 9 Ibid., pp. 91–92. 10 See Martina Corgnati, ed., Italia. Artisti arabi tra Italia e Mediterraneo/Italy: Arab Artists between Italy and the Mediterranean (Milan: Skira, 2008), pp. 23–27. 11 The key text on this phenomenon remains Serge Guilbaut’s How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 12 Kobena Mercer, “Introduction,” in Mercer, ed., Cosmopolitan Modernisms (Cambridge, Mass., and London: The MIT Press, 2005), p. 11. 13 This phenomenon was hardly confined to cities such as London and New York. Ernest Mancoba, a central figure in the Northern European CoBrA group, is often omitted from accounts of their development. See Chika Okeke-Agulu, “Modern African Art,” in Okwui Enwezor, ed., The Short Century, exh. cat. (Munich, London, and New York: Prestel, 2001), p. 31; or Willemijn Stokvis, Cobra 3 Dimensions: work in wood, clay, metal, stone, waste, polyester, bread, ceramics (London: Lund Humphries, 1999), p. 16. 14 Stuart Hall, “Black Diaspora Artists in Britain: Three ‘Moments’ in Post-war History,” History Workshop Journal 61, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 5. 15 Frank Bowling, quoted in Rasheed Araeen, “In the Citadel of Modernism,” in Araeen, ed. The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-War Britain, exh. cat. (London: Hayward Gallery, 1989), p. 40;this essay also discusses the exclusion alienation felt by the likes of Shemza and Ibrahim El Salahi while attending lectures at the Slade School of Fine Art. The predilection for selecting an increasingly small group of white male artists to represent “Britain” in international exhibitions is discussed in Eddie Chambers, “Coming In from the Cold: Some Black Artists

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6. Cosmopolitan Modernisms

Are Embraced,” in Chambers, Eddie, ed., Things Done Change: The Cultural Politics of Recent

University Press, 2013), and Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius, “How the West Corroborated

Black Artists in Britain (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012), pp. 210–11.

Socialist Realism in the East: Fougeron, Taslitzky and Picasso in Warsaw,” Biuletyn historii

16 As Bowling observed, the Young Commonwealth Group comprised artists “from places

Sztuki 2, no. 65 (2003): 303–29.

like Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean, Jamaica, Canada, Singapore, India, South Africa,

34 See Guy Brett, “A Radical Leap,” in Dawn Ades, ed., Art in Latin America: The Modern Era,

Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and a couple of very good sculptors from the southern part of Rhodesia.”

1820–1980 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 253.

Quoted in Leon Wainwright, “Frank Bowling and the Appetite for British Pop,” Third Text 22,

35 Maria Lluïsa Borrà, “Madí en el París de los años cincuenta” in Maria Lluïsa Borrà, ed.,

no. 2 (March 2008): 196.

Arte Madí, exh. cat. (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 1997), pp. 102-7.

17 See Sarah Scott, “‘A New Commonwealth’: The Exhibition Commonwealth Art Today and

36 See Ana Maria Belluzzo, “The Rupture Group and Concrete Art,” in Mari Carmen Ramírez

the Opening of the Commonwealth Institute (1962),” in Kate Darian-Smith, Patricia Grimshaw,

and Héctor Olea, eds., Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America, exh. cat. (New Ha-

Kiera Lindsay, and Stuart Mcintyre, eds., Exploring the British World: Identity, Cultural Pro-

ven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 203–9. The core members of the Ruptura

duction, Institutions (Melbourne: RMIT University Press, 2004), p. 708. In terms of the space

Group were Lothar Charoux (Austria), Waldemar Cordeiro (Italy), Geraldo de Barros (Brazil),

allocated to each nation in Commonwealth Art Today, only India could come close to the prom-

Kazmer Féjer (Hungary), Leopold Haar (Poland), Luiz Sacilotto (Brazil), and Anatol Wladyslaw

inence granted Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom; the Australian contingent was

(Poland).

lauded as “the richest of all” (Robert Wraight, “Commonwealth Art Today,” The Tattler, Novem-

37 As the critic Matko Meštrovic´ recalls, the idea for the inaugural Nove Tendencije exhibition,

ber 21, 1962), while contributions from Ceylon, Nigeria, and East Africa were dismissed as

in 1961, came about through a chance meeting between himself and Mavignier, who had

“semi folk paintings” or works that were “semi-lost” between this and the supposed “London

just visited the Venice Biennale. See Jerko Denegri, “The Condition and Circumstances That

art school” (“Other Exhibitions,” Apollo Magazine, November 1962).

Preceded the Mounting of the First Two New Tendencies Exhibitions in Zagreb 1961–1963,”

18 Mercer, “Black Atlantic Abstraction: Aubrey Williams and Frank Bowling,” in Mercer, ed.,

in Margit Rosen, ed., A Little Known Story about a Movement, a Magazine, and the Computer’s

Discrepant Abstraction (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2006), p. 186.

Arrival in Art: New Tendencies and Bit International, 1961–1973, exh. cat. (Karlsruhe: ZKM

19 See Courtney J. Martin, “Anwar Jalal Shemza’s Art World in London: 1956–60,” in Iftikhar

Center for Art and Media, and Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2011), pp. 19–26.

Dadi, “Calligraphic Abstraction: Anwar Jalal Shemza,” in Dadi, ed., Anwar Jalal Shemza, exh.

38 Manfredo Massironi, “Ricerche visuali,” in Situazioni dell’arte contemporanea. Testi della

cat. (London: Ridinghouse, 2015), p. 30; and Victor Musgrave, “Introduction,” in Gallery One—

conferenze tenute alle Galleria nazionale d’arte moderna di Roma (Rome: Edizioni Librarte,

Ten Years, exh. cat. (London: Gallery One, 1963), n.p.

1976), p. 56.

20 See Mercer, “Black Atlantic Abstraction,” p. 186.

39 See Ljiljana Kolesnik, “Zagreb as the Location of the ‘New Tendencies’ International Art

21 Herbert Read, “Introduction,” in Forty Years of Modern Art 1907–1947: A Selection from

Movement,” in Jérôme Bazin, Pascal Dubourg Glatigny, and Piotr Piotrowski, eds., Art Beyond

British Collections (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1948), p. 1.

Borders: Artistic Exchange in Communist Europe 1945–1989 (Budapest and New York: Cen-

22 See David Medalla, “Signals,” in Araeen, The Other Story, pp. 115–18.

tral European University Press, 2016), pp. 314–16.

23 On the idea of “first,” “second,” and “third” waves of biennials see Anthony Gardner and

40 For an admittedly biased account of the reasons behind Soviet-led exchanges see Karen

Charles Green, “Biennials of the South on the Edges of the Global,” Third Text 27, no. 4 (July

Dawisha, “Soviet Cultural Relations with Iraq, Syriah and Egypt 1955–70,” Soviet Studies, 27

2013): 442–55; Gardner and Green, “South as Method? Biennials Past and Present,” in

(3), July 1975, 418–42

Making Biennials in Contemporary Times: Essays from the World Biennial Forum no 2, São

41 See Frances Stoner Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War

Paulo, 2014, pp. 28–36, available online at http://icco.art.br/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/

(London: Granta Books, 1999), pp. 267–78.

Making-Biennials-in-Contemporary-Times_Home-Print.pdf?faa01f (accessed June 2016);

42 Partha Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism: India's Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1922–1947

and Gardner and Green, Biennials, Triennials and documenta. The Exhibitions that Created

(London: Reaktion Books, 2007), pp. 13–14.

Contemporary Art (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016).

43 See Ekaterina Andreeva, Yevgeny Mikhnov: Endless Multitudes, exh. cat. (Saint Peters-

24 See Nancy Jachec, Politics and Painting at the Venice Biennale 1948–64: Italy and the

burg: Novy Museum, 2010), pp. 24–25.

Idea of Europe (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 155–77.

44 See Yoshihara Jiro, “A Statement by Jiro Yoshihara: Leader of Gutai,” Martha Jackson Gal-

25 See Walter Grasskamp, “To Be Continued: Periodic Exhibitions (dOCUMENTA, for Ex-

lery press release, September 17, 1958. Quoted in Alexandra Munroe, “All the Landscapes: Gu-

ample,” Tate Papers no. 12 (October 2009), available online at www.tate.org.uk/research/

tai’s World,” in Ming Tiampo and Munroe, eds., Gutai: Splendid Playground, exh. cat. (New York:

publications/tate-papers/be-continued-periodic-exhibitions-documenta-example (accessed

Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2013), p. 21. For an extensive list of such texts see Tiampo,

June 2016); and Chin-Tao Wu, “Biennials without Borders?,” New Left Review 57 (May–June

Gutai: Decentering Modernism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011), pp. 184–85.

2009): 15.

45 Haga To¯ru, “The Japanese Point of View,” in Avant-Garde Art in Japan (New York: H. N.

26 Lourival Gomes Machado, “Introducão,” in I. Bienal do Museu de Arte Moderna de São

Abrams, 1962), n.p., quoted in ibid., p. 30.

Paulo: Catálogo, exh. cat. (São Paulo: Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, 1951), p. 14.

46 Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism, p. 14. See also Keith Moxey, “A “Virtual Cosmopolis’:

27 H E Vu˜-Va�n-Mâu et al., First International Exhibition of Fine Arts of Saigon, exh. cat. (Sai-

Partha Mitter in Conversation with Keith Moxey,” The Art Bulletin 95, no. 3 (September 2013):

gon: Tao-Đàn Garden, 1962), p. 6. Quoted here from Gardner and Green, “South as Method?

381–92.

Biennials Past and Present,” p. 31.

47 As Okeke-Agulu has observed, the development of a Pan-African artistic identity nec-

28 See Gardner and Green, “Biennials of the South,” p. 445.

essarily had to be developed in Europe, for, with the exception of Egypt and South Africa, “it

29 Ibid., p. 450.

would take the aftermath of World War II to set the stage for modern art” on the continent

30 In addition to Ljubljana, the inaugural Biennale der Ostseeländer (Biennial of Baltic states),

itself. Okeke-Agulu, “Modern African Art,” p. 30.

in the East German city of Rostock in 1965, allowed for creative exchange among artists

48 See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Its Double Consciousness (Cambridge,

across a wide spectrum of styles and ideologies. See Elke Neumann, “Kunst am Meer des

Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).

Friedens. Die Biennale der Ostseeländer, eine Ausstellung mit internationale Beteiligung in

49 See Bennetta Jules-Rosette, Black Paris: The African Writers’ Landscape (Urbana and

der DDR und ihr Einfluss auf die Kunsthalle Rostock,” in Jörg-Uwe Neumann, ed., 1965/2015.

Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998), pp. 49–78.

Die Biennale der Ostseeländer. Der Ursprung der Kunsthalle Rostock, exh. cat. (Rostock: Kun-

50 The transnational intention of the program was indicated from the outset, with the name

sthalle Rostock, 2015), pp. 8–31.

“Black Orpheus” coming from the title of Jean-Paul Sartre’s introductory essay to Léopold

31 See Matthew Cullerne Bown, Art under Stalin (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1991), pp.

Sédar Senghor’s collection of negritude poetry. The best analysis of the activities of the vari-

206–10.

ous Mbari clubs, and of the influence of Ulli Beier and Black Orpheus, is Okeke-Agulu's book

32 The art historian Martin Warnke has provocatively argued that whereas Western Euro-

Postcolonial Modernism. Art and Decolonialization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria (Durham and

pean artists were almost exclusively fixated on the art capitals of Paris, London, and New

London: Duke University Press, 2015), esp. pp. 131–81.

York, artists from socialist countries such as the GDR had a far broader artistic experience,

51 See Omidiji Aragbabalu (a pseudonym of Beier’s), “Souza,” Black Orpheus 7 (1960): 16–

traveling and working in countries such as Bulgaria, Cuba, India, Italy, Poland, and the USSR,

21, 49–52, and Beier, “Two American Negro Painters,” Black Orpheus 11 (1962): 25–27.

including the Soviet states of Central Asia. See Warnke, “Gibe s den DDR-Künstler?,“ in M.

52 Okeke-Agulu, Postcolonial Modernism, p. 152.

Flake, ed., Auf der Suche nach dem verlorenen Staat. Die Kunst der Parteien und Massenor-

53 Ibid., p. 154.

ganisationen der DDR (Berlin: Ars Nicolai, 1994), pp. 40–47.

54 Clifford, “Mixed Feelings,” in Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, eds., Cosmopolitics: Think-

33 See Sarah Wilson, Picasso/Marx and Socialist Realism in France (Liverpool: Liverpool

ing and Feeling Beyond the Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1998), p. 362.

Damian Lentini

587

COSMOPOLITAN MODERNISMS Plates

Affandi Fateh Al-Moudarres Siah Armajani Alexander “Skunder” Boghossian Frank Bowling Avinash Chandra

Uzo Egonu Ibrahim El Salahi Erol (Erol Akyavas¸) Eva Hesse Jacob Lawrence Evgeny Mikhnov-Voitenko

Uche Okeke Sadequain Jewad Selim Twins Seven Seven Anwar Jalal Shemza Ahmed Shibrain

Gazbia Sirry Francis Newton Souza Mark Tobey Susanne Wenger Ramsès Younan Charles Hossein Zenderoudi

242

Uche Okeke Ana Mmuo (Land of the Dead) 1961 oil on board National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

243

Francis Newton Souza Degenerates 1957 oil on board Aicon Gallery, New York

591

244

Twins Seven Seven Devil's Dog 1964 ink and gouache on paper Iwalewahaus, Universität Bayreuth

245

Alexander “Skunder” Boghossian Night Flight of Dread and Delight 1964 oil on canvas with collage North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh

593

Susanne Wenger Yemoja 1958 batik Neue Galerie Graz

246

595

247

Ibrahim El Salahi Vision of the Tomb 1965 oil on canvas The Africa Center, New York

248

Uzo Egonu Mask with Musical Instruments 1963 oil on canvas Egonu Estate c/o Grosvenor Gallery, London

597

249

Gazbia Sirry The Fortune Teller 1959 oil on canvas Collection of the Artist, Cairo

250 Fateh Al-Moudarres Icon of Moudarres 1962 oil and gold leaf on canvas Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah

599

251

Jewad Selim Baghdadiat 1956 mixed media on hardboard QM/QF - Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha

252

Affandi Mexico, Mother and Child 1962 oil on canvas Museum Lippo, Jakarta

601

Evgeny Mikhnov-Voitenko Composition (on a White Background) Late 1950s oil on canvas The State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg

253

603

254

Ibrahim El Salahi The Prayer 1960 oil on Masonite Iwalewahaus, Universität Bayreuth

255

Mark Tobey Verso i Bianchi (Towards the Whites) 1957 tempera on paper GAM - Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin

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Ahmed Shibrain Untitled 1963 ink on paper Iwalewahaus, Universität Bayreuth

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Erol (Erol Akyavas˛) The Glory of the Kings c. 1959 oil on canvas The Museum of Modern Art, New York

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Siah Armajani Shirt #1 1958 cloth, pencil, ink, wood The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

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Anwar Jalal Shemza The Fable 1962 oil on hand dyed cloth on mountboard The Estate of Anwar Jalal Schemza, London

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Charles Hossein Zenderoudi The Sun and the Lion 1960 ink, watercolor and gold paint on paper mounted on board Grey Art Gallery. New York

261 Ramsès Younan Arabesques 1961 oil on board May and Adel Youssry Khedr Collection, Cairo

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Sadequain Seascape with Three Boats 20th century oil on wood The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

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Sadequain Cactus 1960 oil on canvas Mr. Taimur Hassan c/o Grosvenor Gallery, London

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Frank Bowling Swan 1 1964 oil on canvas Private Collection

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Frank Bowling Swan II 1964 oil on canvas Collection of the Artist, London

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Eva Hesse Untitled (Study for or after "Legs of a Walking Ball") 1965 ink and gouache on paper Private Collection, Munich

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Eva Hesse Untitled 1965 ink and gouache on paper Museum Wiesbaden

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Gustav Metzger Drawings 1945–59/60 different materials on paper Collection of the Artist

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Avinash Chandra Early Figures 1961 oil on board Leicestershire County Council, Artworks Collection

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Jacob Lawrence Four Sheep 1964 gouache on paper Andrew and Ann Dintenfass

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Section Introduction Galia Bar Or Atreyee Gupta Chika Okeke-Agulu Plates

7 NATIONS SEEKING FORM

NATIONS SEEKING FORM

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ationalism” was a word in constant motion during the postwar period. Artists in the United States and Europe often declined to align themselves with their national governments, which had proven corrupt and militaristic. Nationalism had a different valence, though, for artists in countries that had newly struggled for and won independence—such as China, Cuba, India and Pakistan, Indonesia, Iraq, Israel, Nigeria, the Philippines, Senegal, South Africa, and Thailand—and these artists sought cultural forms to shape new national identities. Nigerian artists, for example, played institutional roles, acting on their commitment to the importance of culture in establishing identity. There was a struggle to define what was truly national in regional identities, apparent, for example, in the debate between advocates of discarding cultural tradition, in the effort to become both independent and modern, and artists who saw indigenous identity as central to a new nationhood. In many countries the choice would be described as one of East versus West, with “the West” representing Europe, the future, education, and technological progress and “the East” representing indigenous knowledge, non-Western identity, the past, and tradition. How, then, to support locally distinctive cultural self-confidence? Artists in the Progressive Artists’ Group that flourished in India in the years after independence in 1947 found different solutions, including international exhibitions and local institution-building. In the United States, on the other hand, artists involved with the civil rights movement challenged racially biased notions of American identity, although their work could also take on a nationalist coloration.

Introduction

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CHANNELS FOR DEMOCRATIC ITERATION Galia Bar Or

7. Nations Seeking Form

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t first glance Naftali Bezem’s drawing Untitled of 1952 (fig. 1) looks like a placard promoting the “New Man.” Its compositional structure recalls the Communist symbol, except that neither a hammer nor a sickle but a pickaxe is clasped like a vise by the figure’s hand, while his bare arm is tattooed with a number, sending us to a reversal of this compact drawing’s apparent gestalt and to a different context for its urgency. The worker’s pose frames a singular face, whose bushy eyebrows, wide-open, inward-gazing eyes, a long gash along the cheek at the corner of the

antinomy between the article’s title and its subject: “In the first place we don't like to be called ‘refugees.’” She added later, “The less we are free to decide who we are or to live as we like, the more we try to put up a front, to hide the facts, and to play roles.” 1 My choice of this drawing was determined by the gaze that it casts on the problematic present moment of 2016, in Israel, in the Middle East, and in the world as a whole. This picture of a past seems to gleam into the picture of the present, giving it a new context, at the center of which is the incompatibility that Arendt posited behind the charged connection between memory-building and society-building. The portrait, as noted, was drawn in 1952—four years after the creation of the State of Israel, established in part as a solution to the refugee

Fig. 1. Naftali Bezem. Untitled. 1952. Charcoal on paper, 40.5 × 56 cm. Collection of the Artist

mouth, and swollen under-eye bags signify a traumatic time concurrent with the time of the New Man. This is a refugee, a survivor—a multifaceted portrait in the role of a worker, strained, desperate, yet resolute and self-conscious. Bezem, born in 1924 in Essen, Germany, had arrived in Palestine at the age of fifteen. His parents and family had been murdered in Auschwitz. This essay thus opens with a first-person-plural statement of the political (“we refugees”), a move that Hannah Arendt followed precisely in her own seminal article “We Refugees,” written in 1943, and that she acutely problematized in her own opening sentence by emphasizing an

crisis created by World War II. A decade earlier, with the triad of state, territory, and nationality offering no solution to wartime refugees, most of the democratic countries had closed their gates, abandoning outsiders to concentration camps and to death—and signifying the collapse, at a time of urgent need, of the French Revolution’s legacy of human rights. In Bezem’s drawing, beneath his role as a worker in a new society, the refugee/survivor component asserts an inviolable ethical obligation that challenges the representational space of the sovereign state. The time period reflected in the drawing is that of the worldwide refugee experience following World War II, particularly the displaced-persons

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camps and population transfers in many of the countries of Europe. In the Middle East, too, the Arab–Israeli War of 1948 (actually November 1947–March 1949) and the establishment of the State of Israel had turned hundreds of thousands of Arabs into refugees who would become part of a distinct nation among the Arab nations; and 1.2 million Jewish refugees, half of them survivors of the Holocaust and half of them from Arab countries, were on their way to Israel, to become part of a separate nation among the Jewish dispersions. The presence of refugees on a large scale is a defining characteristic of the Israeli situation, over and above what is happening in Europe today. In the course of just a few years, refugees from Europe and the Arab countries tripled the Jewish population of the region, producing a profound demographic change. Against the threat of chaos, and with a statist melting-pot idea in mind, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, adopted a state-centered policy oriented to the West. Bezem’s drawing proposes a problematization of a sovereign national identity and represents the beginnings of an art critical of constitutive contradictions during the early years of the state. Does the drawing propose a class identity that takes precedence over a state-citizen identity? In the same year, Bezem completed a large painting that would become iconic: To the Aid of the Seamen, relating to the “Seamen’s Revolt” in the port of Haifa, a strike that received extensive support on the left and among kibbutzim in the area. The strike was directed against Mapai, the political party dominant in both the government and the Histadrut (the General Federation of Labour in Israel). In a role unusual for a trade union organization, the Histadrut owned major branches of the state’s economy, including the shipping company. Bezem’s complex image of a man who is both a worker and a refugee/survivor also problematizes statist national identity: refugees in a new country are expected to forget their former allegiance and to become patriots. As Arendt poignantly noted in 1943, writing as a refugee in the United States, no one wants to hear about refugees, concentration camps, and death.2 This was also the case in Israel, although the nation’s status as a “land of refuge” had been the principal rationale for its establishment. Almost all of its artists were refugees and new immigrants themselves, having arrived after the state’s establishment or not much earlier. At about the same time that Bezem drew this portrait, Yosef Zaritsky, leader of the New Horizons (Ofakim Hadashim) artists’ group, painted Yehiam (1952; plate 282). Most of the New Horizons painters barely engaged with the subjects of the refugees or the transit camps for immigrants, a subject identified instead with critical, social, figurative art. This may seem surprising, since the first New Horizons exhibition, held at the Tel Aviv Museum in 1948, was identified with the character of the state, being seen as the dominant representative of Israeli identity. Yet the New Horizons artists hardly related either to the refugee status, a major aspect of consciousness in the region at the time, or to the subjects of Judaism, war, bereavement, loss, national revival, pioneering, and so on. Zaritsky’s generation, which had arrived in Palestine in the 1920s (many of them refugees from the infamous pogroms carried out while

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Symon Petliura was a leader in Ukraine), had been exposed to the winds of the Russian Revolution, believed in universal values, and was largely opposed to the style and themes of the Bezalel Art School, the national art school established in Jerusalem in 1906. Bezalel art may be seen as serving a Zionist secularization of collective and religious patterns in Jewish thought—the idealization of ancient landscapes and heroes, the evocation of the cyclical mythic substructure of Jewish memory, the recurrent cycle of persecutions and divine redemptions. The figure of the eternal Jewish exile (which stems from and challenges an antiSemitic myth) found powerful expression in a large iconic painting of 1899 by Shmuel Hirschenberg that hung in the foyer of the Bezalel Museum.3 For the New Horizons artists, on the other hand, the dialogue with the “Jewish fate” and with exile was a matter of the past. They believed in a new society based on equality, and many were founders of kibbutzim, laying the social, cultural, and institutional foundations for a modern regional orientation. They strove for an art relating to intimate matters of humanity and society and conducting a dialogue with contemporary currents of the time. This local art would aspire “first and foremost to be ‘normal’; it seeks to stand in a sound relation to the art of the world.” 4 Zaritsky painted Yehiam on a large sheet of unsized rough burlap, leaving the margins bare and using rapid, drawinglike brushstrokes and a free, seemingly unmediated touch. It shows the Yehiam kibbutz, located near the Lebanon border and next to an Ottoman-era fort, as a force of life in the shadow of charged historical events. The pair of brown horses, the mother-and child-silhouette in the center, the red sign of the artist’s hand (above), and the expanse of green fuse the power of art with the vital momentum of life in the kibbutz and in nature. This nation-building landscape contains a veiled allusion to contemporary experience: Kibbutz Yehiam had become a symbol in the 1948 war, and most of its founders, its fighters, were Holocaust survivors from Hungary who had only recently arrived in Israel. But Zaritsky’s abstract art eschewed programmatic idealization, expressionism, dramatization, and messianic mythization. The New Horizons artists emphasized “modernism,” “universalism,” “local art,” and “national distinctiveness,” and sought inspiration not only from the West but also from the East (in color, scale, structure, and the distinctiveness of the local light). Concurrently with the abstractionists, political artists were also active in the 1950s, among them Ruth Schloss, who painted refugees in transit camps (plate 283) and whose subjects included social conflicts and the expropriation of Arab lands. For these socially directed figurative artists, confrontation with the refugee situation was inseparable from remaining open and critically alert to the local human and political spectrum. They believed in fraternity between Israelis and Arabs but seldom engaged with the Nakba, the Palestinian exodus during the 1948 war, or with Palestinian refugees, a constitutive subject in Israeli reality that found powerful expression in works by Palestinian artists such as Ismail Shammout (plates 286, 287).

7. Nations Seeking Form

Fig. 2. Yosl Bergner. Road Builders. 1952. Oil on board, 37 × 44 cm. Private Collection

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Paintings of refugees did emerge outside the canonical art scene, however, for example Yosl Bergner’s Road Builders (1952; fig. 2). While Schloss and Bezem were born in Germany and in their youths had studied at the Bezalel school under Mordecai Ardon, a student of the Bauhaus, Bergner had grown up in Jewish Warsaw, in a home suffused with Yiddish literature. He made this work—showing a group of refugees, from both Yemen and Europe, building a road—soon after his arrival in Israel. The subject was a legitimate one in left-wing circles, but the painting’s style was influenced by the Jewish artists of the School of Paris—expressionistic artists such as Emmanuel Mané-Katz and Chaim Soutine, for example—and, to insiders, echoed the unpopular national art of the

elsewhere during that decade, the dominant model of leading cultural figures underwent a change, with the gradual fading of the generation that had seen avant-garde art as an inseparable part of building a free and democratic society after the era of fascism. The New Horizons artists remained active during this period, joining up with a younger avant-garde generation and succeeding in maintaining their exposure and recognition. Toward the end of the century, however, the art discourse in Israel gradually changed, and New Horizons began to be criticized on the ground that its abstract modernism had seemingly veiled the conflictual reality of the Holocaust, social struggle, and Arab and Jewish refugees. Indeed, Israeli art underwent a Copernican revolution:

Fig. 3. Moshe Kupferman. Untitled. 1964. Oil on canvas, 130 × 95 cm. Collection of the Artist

Bezalel Academy. It therefore found no local interpretative context. In retrospect, the painting arouses interest in its representation of a Yemeni refugee as a road-building worker, a “Yemenite pioneer,” a depiction that challenges local memories of the road-building pioneers of the 1920s as primarily immigrants from Eastern Europe. During and after the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, interest revived in components of Jewish identity that had been suppressed in the nation-building “melting pot” project: Judaism, the Holocaust, the Diaspora. Israel’s Ministry of Education, for example, founded a Center for the Cultivation of Jewish Consciousness. Abstract and avant-garde artists now felt pressure from both above and below. In Israel and

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in the spirit of postmodern critical cultural discourse, modern art was now no longer seen as an alternative space emancipated from the grip of political state ideologism, but as an art that served and justified the nation state, its class and other demarcations, and its injustices. This period saw renewed discussion of the social art of the 1950s, most of whose artists had already dispersed by the end of the state’s first decade—some moved abroad, others gradually changed and were no longer active in the social field. Despite this turn in the discourse, young artists such as Igael Tumarkin and Moshe Kupferman who had been fostered by New Horizons, and who had joined with that group at its last exhibition (at the Ein Harod Museum in 1963), continued to inspire later generations in Israel.

7. Nations Seeking Form

Kupferman (born in 1926) had been among the founders of Kibbutz Lohamei HaGhettaot (Ghetto fighters kibbutz), which was established by survivors of the Holocaust and of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. He considered his encounter with Zaritsky (1891–1985) “a second birth,” 5 but developed a very different kind of art, replacing the idea of the painting as a window (a composition with illusionistic depth) with that of the painting as a wall or blocked panel (fig. 3). Kupferman described Zaritsky as an optimist, a pioneer continuing to paint beautiful paintings “as though he’d been charged with a different responsibility.” 6 His own responsibility, he said, was consciousness of loss, and the feeling that it is impossible to advance “without bumping into something.” 7 Kupferman’s is a performative painting that accumulates signs of time, sediment after sediment. It was not until 1999 that he produced paintings relating explicitly to the Holocaust, a series dedicated to the Museum of the Child in the Ghetto Fighters Museum in his kibbutz. In the present exhibition, the section “Nations Seeking Form,” in addition to its reference to colonialism, inversely echoes the stateless Arendt’s resolute refusal of a new national identity, an unpopular option for the refugee as a political subject. Kupferman, also skeptical, turned after the war to the kibbutz and to art. His work from 1964 onward was made after the end of a period when national vitality involved a project of solidarity, justice, and equality. Now a new phase was required, a transformation of nationalism. If there was ever a chance for that, it was blocked by the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967 and the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. From a current perspective, with the burgeoning of a mythic, indeed messianic discourse of victimhood that gives backing to the ongoing occupation and to the blocking of a political horizon, the nexus of Arendt, Bezem, and Kupferman is alive and kicking. For all its failings, it poses the challenge of a postnational option and the assimilation of a post-­ Zionist discourse among the Arab and Jewish communities (the call for which is growing nowadays)—a reinterpretation of collective memory and a reactivation of integrative deep structures that allow for the other. For all its blind spots, the art scene in Israel has always subverted nationalistic banalization via the complexity of memory, provoking alternative thinking. In this sense the community of artists, historians, sociologists, and others still presents, perhaps against the odds, significant channels for democratic iteration. Translated from Hebrew by Richard Flantz 1 Hanna Arendt, “We Refugees,” in Marc Robinson, ed., Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile (London and Boston: Faber & Faber, 1996), pp. 110, 115. 2 Ibid., p. 111. 3 The Bezalel generation had experienced harsh anti-Semitism following the Dreyfus Affair in France and the pogroms in Russia in the early twentieth century. 4 Eugen Kolb, “Where We Stand,” Itim, September 14, 1947 (in Hebrew). 5 See Benjamin Harshav, “Moshe Kupferman,” in Moshe Kupferman: The Rift in Time (Tel Aviv: Givon Art Gallery, 2000), p. 125. 6 Moshe Kupferman, “Homage to Stematsky,” Studio 15 (October 1990): 10 (in Hebrew). 7 Moshe Kupferman in a Conversation with Stuart Klawans,” 1995, in Kupferman, In Addition to the Expected, ed. Galia Bar Or (Ein Harod: Mishkan Museum of Art, 2012), p. 12 (in Hebrew).

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AFTER BANDUNG: TRANSACTING THE NATION IN A POSTCOLONIAL WORLD Atreyee Gupta

7. Nations Seeking Form

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was staring at a news item that baffled me,” wrote the African American author and mid-century civil-rights activist Richard Wright. “I bent forward and read the item a second time. Twenty-nine free and independent nations of Asia and Africa are meeting in Bandung, Indonesia, to discuss ‘racialism and colonialism’ … What was this? I scanned the list of nations involved … I began a rapid calculation of the population of the nations listed and, when my total topped the billion mark, I stopped, pulled off my glasses and tried to think.” 1 The meeting in question was a gathering of leaders and delegates of newly independent Asian and African nations in Bandung in the summer of 1955. Wright continues, “And what had these nations in common? Nothing, it seemed to me, but their past relationship to the Western world … This meeting of the rejected was in itself a kind of judgment upon that Western world!”2 Wright’s use of the word “judgment” in this instance was perhaps not entirely misplaced. Indeed, he may have intuitively understood the Bandung Conference as a soliloquy addressed to Western imperialism. The solidarities forged in Bandung eventually led to the formalization of the Non-Aligned Movement under the leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Sukarno of Indonesia, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia, and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana. The inclusion first of the former Yugoslavia in 1961 and subsequently of parts of Latin America significantly expanded the horizon of political affinities that had been imagined and instituted at the Bandung meeting. Wright, however, was quick to see beyond the immediate political implications of Bandung:

nationalisms and internationalisms, and the complexity of related postwar cultural configurations. What in fact transpires when the nation takes representational form? The nation—an imagined cultural artifact, of course—occupies a profoundly ambivalent place in relation to the nation-state, a sovereign geopolitical entity that is governed through jurisprudence in the name

I called my wife and when she came into the living room I said to her: “Look here, twenty-nine nations of Asia and Africa are meeting in a place called Bandung.” “Why are they meeting?” “Read this,” I said, giving her the newspaper. “Why, that’s the human race!” “Exactly. And that is why I want to go.”3 As an African American deeply invested in the postwar civil rights movement in the United States, Wright perceived the Bandung Conference as an event whose vectors exceeded the geopolitical borders of the twenty-nine participating nations. Indeed, Wright’s initial reflections were not far off the mark. Despite internal tensions, the political multilateralism inaugurated at Bandung rendered a deep fissure in the monopoly of Westernism, not just over the definition of internationalism but also in the discursive delineation of postwar humanism. As such, the intellectual and artistic vectors of this new humanism demand examination. But this, in itself, is not the central concern of this essay. Rather, for us, the Bandung moment opens up a portal, both within and outside of the nonaligned axis, to reflect on the interrelatedness of the nation and the world, their attendant forms of

Fig. 1. Maqbool Fida Husain. Between the Spider and the Lamp. 1956. Oil on board, 125 × 229 cm. Estate of M.F. Husain, London

of a community to ensure internal economic and political stability and a place in the international world order. The end of World War I ushered in the League of Nations, making the nation-state, rather than the imperial dynasty, the legitimate international norm. With the conclusion of World War II and the subsequent success of decolonization movements, “the nation-state tide reached full flood,” in the words of Benedict Anderson. 4 In the aftermath of the war, almost all nation-states—in both

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Fig. 2. Gazbia Sirry. A Black American. 1965. Oil on canvas, 100 × 73 cm. Gezira Center for Modern Art, Cairo

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the capitalist and the socialist blocs and across the nonaligned worlds— were responding to the demands of their own political constituencies for a more robust economy, social welfare, public infrastructure systems, and postwar reconstruction programs. This was the basis for the global rise of what has been described as developmental nationalism, a particular form of nationalism that internalized an ideology of modernization in order to attain developmental goals within a relatively short timeframe. As such, developmental nationalism assumed different shapes and proportions in dispersed parts of the world. In essence, however, it remained everywhere closely aligned with the operations of the state. Allied with the nation-state, developmental nationalism remained dialectically linked to the idea of the nation as well. But nowhere was it equivalent to the nation. The place of culture in relation to developmental nationalism and the nation-state remained equally nebulous.5 The United States, for instance, had already begun to assess its place in the postwar international world order even before the conclusion of World War II, and made internationalism a priority. Among other things, this included extending technological support and financial aid to developing countries in a bid to emerge as the most powerful nation-state in the new world order. By and large, the dominant history of the art of the United States corresponded to this larger political schema. Thus the discursive delineation of what we now recognize as American art shifted, first from nationalism to internationalism, and then from internationalism to universalism. Culturally, however, as Serge Guilbaut writes, “The situation was somewhat paradoxical. In order to be international and to distinguish their work from work done in the Parisian tradition, and forge a new aesthetic, the younger painters were forced to emphasize the specifically American character of their work.”6 Guilbaut’s reference here, of course, is to the first generation of Abstract Expressionists, such as Jackson Pollock, but the basic argument could be extended to Abstract Expressionism’s antithesis, Pop art, and to artists such as Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns. Yet here too was an uncertain traction between nationalism and internationalism, and between internationalism and universalism. “While in the early 1960s,” Katy Siegel writes, “Pop was taken as signifying both ‘America’ and ‘capitalism,’ articulating the peculiar affinity of the two, American art was subsequently described as increasingly ‘important,’ as if its Americanness was incidental both to its formation and importance.” 7 However, the dialogic tension between the nation, nationalism, and the nation-state discernible in the American context did not find conceptual correspondence in the newly independent countries of Asia and Africa, where artistic and intellectual impulses remained grounded not only in the materiality of practice and the language of form but also in the aspiration for political sovereignty. The nationalist political movement in India, for instance, became articulated as a demand for state power fairly early in the anticolonial struggle, under the rationale that India as a nation required a self-governing nation-state. That is, “The nation-state was immanent in the very hegemonic project of imagining

and normalizing a national community,” as Gyan Prakash puts it. 8 Thus the obdurate demand for sovereignty, here tantamount to the demand for a nation-state, was already constellated as a demand for a postcolonial modernity unique to both the cultural entity called the nation and the legislative entity called the nation-state. If the nation was primordial, the nation-state was but its modern manifestation. If the nation’s culture was primordial, then this primordial tradition too had to be melded with modern forms. Representational tactics then necessitated a funambulist negotiation of traditional forms with a modernist tenor. That Indian artists and intellectuals pursued this with much acumen and agility is demonstrated in Maqbool Fida Husain’s 1956 Between the Spider and the Lamp, a painting that has often been described as a “metaphor for modern India” (fig. 1).9 The canvas is divided into three broad chromatic sections upon which is placed a tightly composed figural tableau, each schematic figure distinctive yet situated squarely in a certain common geographic terrain. We may call this terrain the nation. The figures seem to be drawn from both fifth-century classical sculptural traditions and the playful forms internal to the contemporaneous vernacular cultures of urban and rural India. The chromatic division too is reminiscent of precolonial manuscript paintings. Husain, it would seem, has invented an iconography that recovers available cultural resources to activate a distinctively modernist impulse. The terse pull between the lamp in the upper register and the spider in the bottom thus cryptically alludes to two poles—the illumination of progress and the intractable pull of the past—that frame India’s coming into being as a sovereign modern nation-state. Yet even as the line of text in the top register of the painting appears to invaginate the artist’s virtuosity within a certain conception of ethnic origins, the juxtaposition of idiosyncratic symbols with a random selection of Devanagari alphabets creates an anagram that only the artist can decode. The Indian artist’s perceptual nativism, then, was neither a simple return to autochthonous roots nor purely a sign of recursive nationalism. What of the dark-skinned figure in starkly white attire, reminiscent as much of the premodern Indic sculpture that adorns the walls of temples as of Egyptian figural imagery of the pharaonic periods, which had captured the artist’s imagination during a 1953 trip to Egypt? How could art historians have missed such a deliberate incursion of the image of the other—an emblematic figure from a different ethnographic narrative of origins—in a now celebrated allegory of the modern nation? Husain said of his first experience of Egypt, “For the next few years, I consciously tried to incorporate the two-dimensional structure of Egyptian art in my paintings—the desensualized, primal feminine form.” 10 He was not the only artist to do so in the 1950s: an Indian artist “who had succeeded in that regard was Mohan Samant,” Husain notes.11 Does the intrusion of the figure of the other then open up the imagination of the sovereign nation to what lies outside its geopolitical borders? What transpires when the nation achieves representational form in a mode that is fundamentally transnational?

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Surely is it of some relevance to us that this imaginative transgresNasser’s military regime, however, quickly exhausted the initial eusion occurred, quietly but deliberately, in the immediate aftermath of phoria of nationhood. By the 1960s, Sirry’s oeuvre too changed: “It is that commanding gathering of the newly independent nations of Asia almost as if the celebratory form—despite the obvious willful deskilland Africa in Bandung? Wright said of that same gathering, “I felt I had ing in her drawing of human figures—earlier in the decade had turned 12 to go that meeting; I felt that I could understand it.” By this time Wright to a more sober, more meditative, and in some sense more labored had embraced voluntary exile in Paris, but he remained committed to paint application and more symbolic figural representation,” as Chika the African American struggle. To be sure, his passion for an emergent Okeke-Agulu writes .15 But now Sirry amplified the iconography of the disenfranchised transnational, antiimperialist, and antiracist struggle was not a supEgyptian citizen into a universal figure symbolizing the struggle for plement for his investment in the concomitant fight against racism in sovereignty as such. Take, for instance, the 1965 painting A Black Amerthe United States. Rather, he linked his global interests “with the black ican (fig. 2), which she completed during a visit to California in the midAmerican vernacular in a number of ways. This connection is established, 1960s. This was one of the first for example, in the humorous dispaintings in which the African cussion of the color of interplanAmerican body appeared in her etary travellers that appears at the work. Compositionally, though, beginning of The Outsider,” as Paul 13 she referred to an earlier work, Gilroy has pointed out. The Non-Aligned Movement the 1961 painting Martyr. Like the did not articulate a political idenAfrican American figure, the tity common to all participating martyr is placed on a ground unnations. Nor did it seek an ecomarked except for the presence of nomic and political philosophy a single tree, its branches magnifdistinct from that of capitalism or icently intertwined with a burnsocialism. Even as the participating sun. Unlike the 1965 painting, ing countries disagreed on sevMartyr referred to the suppression eral accounts, they concurred in of dissent under Nasser’s military their opposition to imperialism in rule. With A Black American, a naany form, in any part of the world. tional iconography of dissent was Consequently, despite whatever transposed onto a global canvas paucity the Bandung moment may to reference the African American have had as a political philosophy, struggle for civil rights. it nevertheless laid the ground In the United States, work for the global emergence of a the end of World War II had not critical, postcolonial, antiimperial, been accompanied by the deintellectual ethic. Wright’s interest mise of Jim Crow laws, as many in Bandung can be explicated withhad hoped. In the 1960s, several in this framework. In retrospect, it artists—including Jack Whitten, would appear that Husain too was whose work incorporated mateFig. 3. Jack Whitten. Hide and Seek. 1964. Acrylic on canvas, 71.5 × 60.7 cm. Courtesy Jack Whitten Studio responding to this imperative in Inrial composites of the civil rights dia, as was his contemporary Gazmovement—would address the bia Sirry in Egypt. nation-state’s selective endowment of civil liberties. Although articu Like Husain’s, Sirry’s early career coincided with the nation’s lated as a form of nationalism, the African American question nevercoming to sovereignty under a modernist political leader, in Egypt’s theless came under the purview of the House Un-American Activities case Nasser. Sirry was a member of the Group of Modern Art, which Committee, in part owing to perceived links with a range of transnasought to articulate a modernist form in dialogue with the priorities of tional arrangements.16 These included the Non-Aligned Movement, whose intellectual armature connected the African American movepostrevolutionary Egypt. Thus, in keeping with Nasser’s internationalment with analogous struggles in Asia and Africa. Yet the right to disist civilizational aspirations, her early works combined the visual lansent was under siege in several parts of the nonaligned world, including guage of the Paris avant-garde with Arabic forms and the art of ancient Egypt. Through iconography, the Egyptian artist then enunciated an Egypt, ciphering the nation’s pharaonic, Arabic, African, and colonial 14 explicitly transnational politics of equality against all odds. legacies into the nation-state’s present. The brutal machinations of

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We seem to have come full circle. The utopian political potential of Bandung disperses in the hands of governing nation-states. Yet the odd palimpsest of desires, objectives, and undertakings that we have tracked across discrete parts of the world circuitously returns us to the initial promise of the Bandung moment. We are perhaps all too accustomed to thinking in terms of national cultures: we script art histories that follow the demarcations of national cartographies, we speak in terms of postwar American art, Egyptian art, or Indian art. Against this grain, Bandung offers a passage, as it were, into a different ideation of the nation in representation, one that brings into sharp focus creative transactions in the political and cultural vocabulary of solidarities outside the nation-state. Often, such transactions precipitated an explicitly transnational politics, as in the case of Wright or of Sirry’s Black American. Equally often, such maneuvers pressed against the boundaries of the nation-state, as in Husain’s Between the Spider and the Lamp. Without doubt, such creative navigations are constitutive of what we conventionally mean when we invoke the figure of the nation in relation to representation. But they cannot be easily folded into art history’s established narratives of postwar art, as they fundamentally rupture the folds of national art histories. Thinking in terms of Bandung, then, demands a constant alertness to such ruptures so that the traces of the other—other ethnographic narratives, other solidarities, the other that lies outside narratives propelled by the nation-state—can be made present in the nation as it takes on conceptual form once again.

1 Richard Wright, The Color Curtain (Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Company, 1956), p. 11. 2 Ibid., p. 12. 3 Ibid., p. 14. 4 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), p. 113. 5 On developmental nationalism and its cultural effects in developing economies see Sumit Sarkar, “Nationalism and Poverty: Discourses of Development and Culture in 20th-century India,” Third World Quarterly 29, no. 3 (2008): 429–45. Eric Hobsbawm too argues for a distinction between civic and ethnic nationalisms in the European context; see Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 6 Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 175. 7 Katy Siegel, Since ’45: America and the Making of Contemporary Art (London: Reaktion Books, 2011), p. 12. 8 Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 202. 9 Yashodhara Dalmia, The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 105. 10 Maqbool Fida Husain, quoted in Ila Pal, Beyond the Canvas: An Unfinished Portrait of M.F. Husain (New Delhi: Indus, 1994), p. 92. 11 Ibid. 12 Wright, The Color Curtain, p. 14. 13 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 2012), p. 148. 14 See Liliane Karnouk, Modern Egyptian Art: 1910–2003 (Cairo: The American University of Cairo Press, 2005), pp. 85–88. 15 Chika Okeke-Agulu, “Politics by Other Means: Two Egyptian Artists, Gazbia Sirry and Ghada Amer,” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 6, no. 2 (2006): 117–49, 133. 16 See Brenda Gayle Plummer, In Search of Power: African Americans in the Era of Decolonization, 1956–1974 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 222.

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FANON, NATIONAL CULTURE, AND THE POLITICS OF FORM IN POSTWAR AFRICA Chika Okeke-Agulu

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t the Second Congress of Black Writers and Artists, in Rome in 1959, the Martinican philosopher and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon presented his most vehement critique of “Negritude,” the race-affirming literary movement founded by francophone writers based in Paris in the 1930s. Fanon’s speech, perhaps the most controversial at the event, was historic and timely, for it gave voice to a new generation of African and African-diasporic intellectuals that had begun to emerge out of the long shadows of Negritude’s racial discourse and aesthetics. Motivated by the gathering postwar movements for African political decolonization, Fanon declared, in one of his most memorable statements, that “each generation must out of relative obscurity discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.” 1 At the Rome congress and in his previous work he left no doubt of his conviction that the mission for the postwar generation of Africans was revolutionary decolonization, a process and task that the people of Algeria had begun and to which he committed his time as both a psychiatrist and a political theorist.2 Not only was Fanon convinced of the crucial role culture must play in national liberation, he saw political independence as incomplete if the battle for decolonization was not also won on the terrain of culture and cultural production. In other words, for Fanon, culture was both instrument and object of the struggle for independence. His critique of the literature and ideology of Negritude and his argument for a national culture resonated with postwar African artists whose work grappled both rigorously and passionately with problems of art and culture, the nation, and political sovereignty. Fanon’s national culture, I want to argue, in its broader sense encompassed the postcolonial modernism of postwar African artists. Fanon argued that the new African intellectual and cultural elite had to do three things: first, build on and transcend the important racebased ideological work of the Negritude and pan-Africanism of the previous generation; second, shift the terrain of critical engagement from the racial to the national, for “every culture is first and foremost national”; 3 and third, develop a truly national culture the legitimacy of which would depend on the extent to which it catalyzed and participated in the liberation struggle. What is clear from the work of young postwar African modernists is that while they were for the most part in agreement with Fanon’s first two propositions, they all but sidestepped his instrumentalist understanding of national culture, and this is primarily because, in various ways, they were simultaneously sympathetic to the legacies of the modernist avant-garde yet, because of their experiences of colonialism, engaged in the politics of form. As a result, my account of the work of exemplary artists of this period will both demonstrate the timeliness of Fanon’s intervention at the Rome congress and testify to the limitations of his understanding of progressive art’s formal, conceptual, and ideological possibilities in the era of African decolonization. While Fanon’s analysis of national culture focuses on literature, and while his familiarity with modern African art is suspect, his argument

about postcolonial literature’s critical relationship with both Western traditions and African cultures was aligned with the ideas and work of emerging artists in different parts of the continent—artists simultaneously inspired by the postwar rhetoric and practice of independence and national liberation and committed to the invention of new forms. Yet because his vision of revolutionary national culture in Africa only allowed for radical literature and art aimed at raising mass national consciousness, Fanon missed the ideological significance of the artistic and

Fig. 1. Cover of the first edition of Frantz Fanon's Les Damnés de la Terre (The Wretched of the Earth), 1961

literary modernists who were engaged in the politics of form.4 Moreover, his insistence on the instrumentality of national culture—that it must primarily serve as a catalyst for mass political action, utopian as such claims can be for the expressive arts—involved a misunderstanding of the significant work of writers and artists who, like him, were convinced of art and culture’s ideological imperative but unlike him knew that popular action is only a part of a broader process of demolishing the knowledge infrastructure upon which colonialism depended. That is, the politics of form in which postwar African artists were engaged extended the discursive horizon of Fanon’s theory of decolonized and decolonizing national culture, although in ways that he himself might not have appreciated at the time. I do not suggest that Fanon’s writing on national culture influenced the work of all of the young, ambitious African artists of the independence generation. Rather, these artists, like Fanon, contemporaneously recognized the momentousness of the national independence and liberation movements and thus sought to imagine the role of art and culture in the process of attaining political sovereignty—but also, and this is crucial, how political sovereignty could catalyze the development of artistic

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Fig. 2. Uche Okeke. Five Heads. 1962. Ink on paper, 19 × 14 cm. Newark Museum. The Simon Ottenberg Collection, gift to the Newark Museum, 2012. Acc. n. 2012.38.42.1-3

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7. Nations Seeking Form

forms expressive of the impending or newly attained postcolonial subjectivity. The case of the Nigerian artist Uche Okeke and of his fellow members of the Art Society at the Nigerian College of Art, Science and Technology, Zaria, is relevant here.5 Six months after Fanon delivered his speech at the Rome congress, Okeke, unaware of that event or of Fanon’s work and ideas, delivered the first of three anniversary speeches to the Art Society. 6 With political independence less than a year away, and inspired by the work of José Clemente Orozco and the Mexican modernists, Okeke warned against the danger of “glorifying the past to the detriment of the future,” emphasizing instead the artists’ responsibility to the urgent task of establishing what he called a national art school—by which he referred not so much to a collective style as to a decolonized Nigerian art world and its enabling institutions. The making of this national school, he argued, would require a paradoxical yet generative mix of the experimental rigor of the artistic avant-garde and the ideological fervor of the cultural nationalists; but it would also depend on the Nigerian artists’ readiness to draw “as much as possible from what we consider in our clear judgement to be the cream of these influences, and wedding them to our native art culture.” 7 One year later, on the eve of Nigeria’s political independence from Britain, Okeke elaborated on this question of the postcolonial modernist’s relationship with alien/European and native/Nigerian artistic traditions by introducing a concept he called “natural synthesis.” 8 Whereas in 1959 Okeke had invoked the revolutionary work of the Mexican muralists, in the October 1960 speech he laid out his vision of what he called a new art culture for independent Nigeria. That involved establishing an ideological link between this national school of art and the earlier work of the Negritude writers, along with the then popular notion of “African personality” advanced by Nigerian and African political nationalists of the postwar period. Between the texts of the two speeches can be found the core of Okeke’s theory of postcolonial modernism: commitment to the invention of new formal languages and simultaneously to participation in the production of and identification with a new, sovereign, postcolonial community. The formal and conceptual protocols of this modernism thus entailed a bifocal articulation of the artist’s claim to creative freedom and artistic experimentation and the deployment of the resulting work to fulfilling the equally important role of building new postcolonial cultures and nations.9 The translation of Okeke’s natural-synthesis theory to his studio practice, sometime in 1962, saw him transform his work through a rigorous experimentation with the linear lyricism of the Uli body drawing and mural art of the Igbo people of Nigeria (fig. 2). Within the span of one year, he moved from a fascination with the color and expressive sensibilities of fauvism and post-Cubist figural stylization to an emphasis on organic, gestural lines, abstract and symbolic forms, and negative/ positive space, and to the creation of compositions that might well be visual equivalences of the lyric dance movement of the Igbo. This radical shift testifies to the depth of his internalization of the Uli aesthetic, and indeed this new work was dominated by the polysemic agwo.lagwo.

spiral motif, or segments of it—an Uli sign for the sacred python, itself the messenger of Ana, the Igbo earth goddess and guardian of creativity. Here Okeke laid claims both to the modernist penchant for formal invention and vigorous experimentation and to his Igbo/Nigerian cultural heritage, without subordinating his artistic freedom to either one. The approach of mining specific forms associated with Nigerian cultures, and subjecting them to modernist formal protocols and rhetoric, is equally evident in the neo-archaic terra-cotta sculptures of Okeke’s Art Society colleague Demas Nwoko, who not only used ancient Nok and Ife terra-cotta as inspiration but also developed a firing technique based on methods used by traditional potters in northern Nigeria. The modernist vision expressed at Nigeria’s independence by Okeke, Nwoko, and the Art Society was a marked departure from the work of the preceding generation, especially Ben Enwonwu, Nigeria’s best-known artist of the

Fig. 3. Ibrahim El Salahi. They Always Appear #4. 1964–65. Oil on canvas, 45.7 × 30.5 cm. Newark Museum. Purchase 2014 Contemporary Art Society of Great Britain Fund. Acc. n. 2014.34

postwar period.10 Enwonwu was a graduate of the Slade School of Fine Art, at University College London, where he studied from 1944 to 1947. On his return to Nigeria in the late 1940s, despite his appointment as art adviser to the colonial government, he often criticized foreign influences on Nigerian art education and administration; in his own work,

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his attraction to the Negritude of Léopold Senghor led to paintings and sculptures of masks, masquerades, and dancing figures, an affirmation of Senghor’s claim that the dance, masked or otherwise, is second nature to black Africans. If Enwonwu gave visual form to the racial aesthetic of Negritude in ways unmatched by any Nigerian or African artist of his time, Okeke, Nwoko, and the Art Society, representative of the generation that came of age in the independence decade, vivified and extended Fanon’s notion of national culture as a form of political practice within the context of decolonization. Beyond Nigeria, Sudanese contemporaries of the Art Society at the Khartoum Technical Institute, among them Ibrahim El Salahi, Ahmed Shibrain, and other members of the so-called Khartoum School, asked similar questions to which they devised remarkably analogous formal and conceptual answers. Salahi, for instance, trained at the Slade like Enwonwu, though a decade later. There, following studies of Impressionism, he immersed himself in the prevailing progressive realism associated with the painter and Slade professor William Coldstream and, moreover, in the radical abstraction of Parisian modernists and their British counterparts such as David Bomberg. Back in the newly independent Sudan in 1957, and shaken by public rejection of his Sladeera pictures, he rethought his formal language, compelled by the desire to engage and communicate with his Sudanese audience. His next step was to take up Arabic calligraphy. Fully aware of its sacred and ritual significance—he was the son of a respected Islamic scholar and calligrapher—Salahi experimented with it initially as a communicative medium but soon and more significantly as a formal resource. Out of this raw calligraphic material he fashioned organic, abstract notations that when reconstituted on the picture surface yielded highly stylized compositions, with occasional passages of abstract patterns inspired by Nubian and other Sudanese craftwork (fig. 3). In Morocco, young artists led by Farid Belkahia trained in French art academies only to return home set on upending the orientalist curriculum of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Casablanca, which to them had become an anachronistic vestige of French cultural colonialism. Drawing on avant-garde sensibilities acquired in Europe, Belkahia, in his own work and in the curriculum he established as the new director of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, pressed for a new national art and expressive culture derived from imagery and techniques inspired by traditional Moroccan crafts, Amazigh tifinagh scripts and occult signs, and Arabic calligraphy. Similarly, Ahmed Cherkaoui, another leading modernist who died shortly after returning to Morocco from France, developed his own form of semantic abstraction that depended on his translation of Amazigh imagery through pictorial protocols he learned from studying the work of the European painters Paul Klee and Roger Bisière. I had suggested earlier an apparent disjunction between Fanon’s theory of national culture—that is, of culture as a weapon for revolutionary action in the context of decolonization—and the work of postwar artists who, like him, advocated a new national art and culture yet were unwilling to surrender their individual, ardently modernist artistic

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visions, as he might have wished. Moreover, their work, because it neither unmistakably declaimed the bare lives of the colonized masses nor is saturated with stridently anticolonial messages, might qualify as what Fanon called “inert dregs of gratuitous actions.” 11 To Fanon, postcolonial formal invention was justifiable only to the extent that it delivered

Fig. 4. Demas Nwoko. Nigeria in 1959: Colonial Officers. 1960. Oil on canvas. Collection of the Artist.

effective revolutionary content. The artists, on the other hand, believed that form itself—as language—was a legitimate site of a decolonizing politics, and a ground for postcolonial aesthetics and ethics without which it would be impossible to imagine or participate fully in the political and discursive reinvention of national cultures after empire. Nevertheless, in acknowledging what he described as scattered, “valiant attempts” to “reanimate the cultural dynamic, and to give fresh impulses to its themes, its forms, and its tonalities,” 12 Fanon came close to recognizing the significance of what was then a growing, continent-wide effort by postwar artists, motivated by the rhetoric and spirit of national independence, to decolonize the colonial cultural infrastructure and the imperial modernisms associated with it.

7. Nations Seeking Form

1 Frantz Fanon, “On National Culture,” Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1968), p. 206. 2 Apart from Wretched of the Earth, other works of Fanon’s based on the Algerian experience include Toward the African Revolution (New York: Grove Press, 1964) and A Dying Colonialism (New York: Grove Press, 1965). 3 Frantz Fanon, “On National Culture,” p. 216. 4 The Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe often told of a formative encounter with his English teacher at University College, Ibadan, who first asserted that Achebe’s writing lacked form, then later, without explanation, disavowed that assessment. This experience convinced Achebe that form and ideology are intimately connected. His first novel, Things Fall Apart, was his way of engaging in the politics of literary form. See Christa Clarke, “Uche Okeke and Chinua Achebe: Artist and Author in Conversation,” Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture 1 (July 2007): 147–58. 5 See Chika Okeke-Agulu, Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in TwentiethCentury Nigeria (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015), for a comprehensive account of the work and ideas associated with Okeke and the Art Society in the 1950s and ’60s. 6 For a fuller account of the Art Society see ibid., chapter 3. 7 Uche Okeke, “Growth of an Idea,” in Art in Development: A Nigerian Perspective (Nimo, Nigeria: Documentation Centre, Asele Institute, and Minneapolis: African American Cultural Center, 1982), p. 1. 8 Okeke, “Natural Synthesis,” in ibid., p. 2. 9 In his study of the work of the playwright Wole Soyinka, the literary scholar Biodun Jeyifo calls these two apparently contradictory aspects “freedom” (the writer’s identification with his postcolonial community) and “complexity” (the unflinching commitment to formal experimentation). See Jeyifo, “Introduction,” in Jeyifo, ed., Perspectives on Wole Soyinka: Freedom and Complexity (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), pp. 9–22. 10 See Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, Ben Enwonwu: The Making of an African Modernist (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2008). 11 Fanon, “On National Culture,” p. 233.12. Ibid., p. 237. 12 Ibid., p. 237.

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NATIONS SEEKING FORM Plates

Thomas Bayrle Melvin Edwards Inji Efflatoun Ben Enwonwu Raymond Hains Robert Indiana Jasper Johns

Daniel LaRue Johnson Krishen Khanna Norman Lewis Mawalan Marika Iba N'Diaye Malangatana Valente Ngwenya Uche Okeke

Larry Rivers Ruth Schloss Ismail Shammout Yohanan Simon Mitchell Siporin Sindoedarsono Sudjojono Emilio Vedova

Jacques (Mahé de la) Villeglé Andy Warhol Jack Whitten Yosef Zaritsky

271

Emilio Vedova Europa 1950 1949–50 oil on canvas Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, Galleria Internazionale d'Arte Moderna di Ca'Pesaro, Venice

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Jasper Johns Flags 1965 oil on canvas with raised canvas Collection of the Artist

647

273

Robert Indiana The Confederacy Alabama 1965 oil on canvas Miami University Art Museum, Oxford, Ohio

274 Larry Rivers The Last Civil War Veteran 1961 oil on canvas Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

649

275

Jack Whitten Birmingham 1964 aluminum foil, newsprint, stocking, and oil on plywood Collection of Joel Wachs, New York

276 Norman Lewis Bonfire 1962 oil on canvas The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York

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Andy Warhol Mustard Race Riot 1963 acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas Udo und Anette Brandhorst Collection, Munich

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653

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Daniel LaRue Johnson Freedom Now, Number 1 1963–64 pitch on canvas with “Freedom Now” button, broken doll, hacksaw, mousetrap, flexible tube, and wood The Museum of Modern Art, New York

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Melvin Edwards Mojo for 1404 1964 welded steel Collection of the Artist

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Melvin Edwards His and Hers 1964 welded steel Collection of the Artist

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Melvin Edwards Texcali 1965 welded steel Collection of the Artist

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Yosef Zaritsky Yehiam (Life on the Kibbutz) 1951 oil on burlap mounted on canvas Tel Aviv Museum of Art

282

659

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Ruth Schloss Ma’abarah (New Immigrants’ Camp) 1953 oil on canvas Mishkan Léomanut, Museum of Art, Ein-Harod

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Mitchell Siporin Endless Voyage 1946 oil on canvas University of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa City

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285

Yohanan Simon Shabbat on the Kibbutz 1947 oil on canvas Tel Aviv Museum of Art

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287

Ismail Shammout

Ismail Shammout

Beginning of the Tragedy 1953 oil on canvas Private Collection

A Sip of Water 1953 oil on canvas Private Collection

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Iba N’diaye Tabaski, Sacrifice du Mouton (Tabaski, Sacrifice of the Sheep) 1963 oil on canvas Collection – République du Sénégal

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665

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Ben Enwonwu Going 1961 oil on canvas University of Lagos

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Uche Okeke Aba Revolt (Women's War) 1965 oil on board Estate of the Artist, Nimo

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292

Inji Efflatoun

Inji Efflatoun

Trees Behind the Wall c. 1960 oil on canvas on wood Safarkhan Art Gallery, Cairo

The Queue 1960 oil on canvas Safarkhan Art Gallery, Cairo

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293 Malangatana Valente Ngwenya Untitled 1961 oil on canvas Iwalewahaus, Universität Bayreuth

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Krishen Khanna News of Gandhiji's Death 1948 oil on canvas Collection of Rathika Chopra & Rajan Anandan, New Delhi

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Sindoedarsono Sudjojono Pertemuan di Tjikampek yang Bersedjarah (Historic Meeting in Tjikampek) 1964 oil on canvas Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Nusantara (Museum MACAN), Jakarta

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296 Mawalan Marika Sydney from the Air 1963 natural pigments on bark The National Museum of Australia, Canberra

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Thomas Bayrle Kennedy in Berlin 1964 lithograph on cardboard Deutsche Bank Collection, Frankfurt am Main

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Raymond Hains Paix en Algérie (Peace in Algeria) 1956 decollaged posters on canvas Collection Ginette Dufrêne, Paris

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Jacques (Mahé de la) Villeglé “OUI” – Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs 1958 ripped posters mounted on canvas Private Collection

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Section Introduction Ješa Denegri Walter Grasskamp Anne Massey Pamela M. Lee and Fred Turner Plates

8 NETWORKS, MEDIA & COMMUNICATION

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t its conclusion, Postwar shifts the understanding of art engaged with mass culture away from consumer goods, and the signs, symbols, and logos that advertised them, and instead toward the circulation, distribution, and communication of those signs via technology and broadcast networks. Artists looked at represen­ tation, particularly as it manifested a new, global capitalism; they also took the airmail letter, radio, and television as subjects. The British artists in the Independent Group were oriented toward popular culture’s technological aspects, from transistors to robots. The artists of the Fluxus movement and others experimented with the new medium of broadcast television, hoping to reach an audience beyond the art gallery. Communication also underlay the systems theories of cybernetics, which appealed to an international ar­ ray of artists rooted in a variety of aesthetic and political orientations. It had particular appeal for artists seeking affinities across national boundaries. The 1961 Nove Tendencije (New tendencies) exhibition in Zagreb, for example, featured works by twenty-nine artists from Argentina, Austria, Brazil, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and Yugoslavia; this new optical and kinetic art sought to transmit information on a fundamental, physiological wavelength, transcending the cultural specifics of language. All of these artists sought an art adequate to a world conceived as a single entity: the paradigm that dawned in the exhibition’s introduction becomes conscious and fully developed in its conclusion. The final section of Postwar, with its focus on communication and circulation, conflict and control, serves as a bookend to the show’s beginning in the technical invention, epistemo­ logical shift, and political reordering emblematized by the atomic bomb. Introduction

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ART IN THE NETWORK OF TECHNOLOGICAL MEDIA AND MASS COMMUNICATION: NEW TENDENCIES Ješa Denegri

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etween 1961 and 1973, a series of five interna­ which, he said, the “line is more important than the painting.” 2 Manzoni tional exhibitions were held in Zagreb, in what also voiced apprehension about Mavignier as the creator of the exhibi­ was then Yugoslavia and is now Croatia, under tion concept—a well-founded worry since Mavignier, in charge of choos­ the title Nove Tendencije (New Tendencies). The ing the works for the 1961 show, accepted and exhibited only the paint­ idea was originally suggested by Almir Mavignier, ing. This history was long unknown in professional circles, but today it a German artist born in Brazil, and the shows is clear that this decision of Mavignier’s had a far-reaching influence not were organized by Zagreb’s contemporaryjust on the thematic physiognomy of the first Nove Tendencije exhibition art museum, the Galerija suvremene umjet­ but on the fundamental orientation of this international art movement nosti. With theoretical elaboration by the critics Matko Meštrović and in all its aspects. Radoslav Putar, the 1961 exhibition featured members of the international During both the first Nove Tendencije exhibition in 1961 and the artists’ groups ZERO, GRAV (Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel), Gruppo second in 1963, many personal and conceptual realignments occurred N, and Azimuth (Enrico Castellani and Piero Manzoni); a number of among the participating artists. Meštrović writes, “In quite a short time, individual artists from outside Yugoslavia; and two local artists, Julije the new movement showed an extraordinary speed in its formal execu­ 1 Knifer and Ivan Picelj. Nove tendencije 2 followed in 1963, Nova tendencija tion, but also a split in its ideology.” 3 On the Italian art scene one symp­ tom of this split was the exhibition Arte programmata (Programmed 3 in 1965, Tendencije 4 in 1968–69, and Tendencije 5 in 1973, with dozens of Art), organized in Milan in 1962 artists participating from Europe by Bruno Munari, under the pa­ and farther afield. tronage of the Olivetti company, Both artists and organizers and with a catalogue essay by felt the need for a wide international Umberto Eco. Displacing the ro­ network that would connect not mantic fervor of Manzoni’s “nuova only their artistic but their ideo­ concezione artistica” (new artistic logical positions. They were linked conception), these program-ori­ by their interest in experiment­ ented artists, such as Munari and ing with new technology and by a Enzo Mari, were often designers leftist orientation that positioned by trade. Mari would be invited to them against the domination of conceptualize the third exhibition the art market. It is important to in Zagreb, now with a title in the note that on the political stage singular, Nova Tendencija 3 (New the establishment of these exhibi­ Tendencies 3), in 1965. His concept tions—and especially of the first, revolved around the topic of the in 1961—coincided with the emer­ Fig. 1. Pierro Manzoni. Merda d’artista n. 68 (Artist's Shit no. 68). 1961. Tin can and printed paper, 4.8 × 6 × 6 cm. Fondazione Piero Manzoni, Milan “divulgation of research samples.” gence of the Non-Aligned Move­ At the same time, the Paris GRAV ment, a global group of developing group also changed its basic orientation, moving to advocate “art as nations with Yugoslavia as one of the founders. This is not to say that the spectacle, viewer engagement, instability, and programming.” 4 Nove Tendencije exhibitions fell under the patronage of any “official” state The absence of some participants in the first exhibition from the politics. On the contrary, the exhibitions’ artists and organizers shared show of 1965, and the large number of newcomers in that year, were signs a fundamental belief in international collaboration based on advanced of organizational, operative, and ideological crises within the movement political positions and the use of new technologies, at the same time that the exhibitions showcased. (These crises would be surmounted by respecting the ethical integrity of each participant. Indeed Nova the new thematic foci of Tendencije 4 and Tendencije 5.) In the same year Tendencija 3, in 1965, organized in Yugoslavia while the country was a as the third exhibition, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, organized member of the Non-Aligned Movement, included artists from both the an exhibition titled The Responsive Eye, curated by William Seitz, which Soviet Union (Moscow’s Dvizheniye group) and the United States (the received a mixed response from the participants in the Nove Tendencije Anonima group, from Cleveland)—the first time such artists exhibited shows. While Mavignier wrote that “during the opening and the grand together on the international art scene. exhibition in New York, which can be called historical,” he “thought with An article of Meštrović’s from 2010 unveils some previously un­ gratitude of Zagreb’s contribution to it,” 5 Manfredo Massironi, a mem­ known facts about the concept and organization of the Nove Tendencije ber of Gruppo N from Padua, saw in the show the unacceptable influence exhibition of 1961. In a letter to the author that year, Manzoni wrote that of the U.S.-dominated institutional and market system and pronounced he had sent three works to the exhibition: a tin can (Merda d’artista, 1961; it a “Pyrrhic victory” and a “first-class funeral procession.” 6 fig. 1), a scroll from the Linee (Lines) series, and an Achrome painting, of

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The staging of the Nove Tendencije exhibitions in Zagreb owes a debt to the activities of the EXAT-51 (Experimental Atelier 1951) group there a decade earlier. The group announced itself by issuing a manifesto in December of 1951; its members were Picelj, who would participate in a number of the Nove Tendencije exhibitions beginning in 1961, and Vlado Kristl, Vjenceslav Richter, and Aleksandar Srnec, who would variously participate beginning in 1963. The EXAT-51 manifesto argued for a synthe­ sis of visual art, architecture, and design; its members produced paintings in the manner of postwar geometric abstraction. Another antecedent to the Nove Tendencije movement was Zagreb’s Gorgona group (1959–66), whose members, including Knifer, Meštrović, Putar, and Josip Vaništa similarly featured among its exhibitors, organizers, and theoreticians.7

The Zagreb exhibitions integrated the city’s art scene firmly in related events abroad, while also contributing to the wider cultural mediation of the art scenes of West and East, as well as to those of the nonaligned nations. The Nove Tendencije movement was not strictly confined to a his­ torical period and has lately been gaining attention from younger art historians and curators. Recent exhibitions devoted to it include Die Neuen Tendenzen. Eine europäische Künstlerbewegung 1961–1973, at the Museum für Konkrete Kunst, Ingolstadt, (2006–7),8 Bit International— [Nove] tendencije. Computer und visuelle Forschung. Zagreb 1961–1973, at the Neue Galerie, Graz (2007), and the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe (2008–9). This latter show generated

Fig. 2. Josip Vaništa. Silver Line 1965 – III – 2. 1965. Oil on canvas, 140 × 180 cm. Marinko Sudac Collection, Zagreb

Earlier on, in the 1920s, Zagreb had been the city of the Zenitism movement and of Ljubomir Micić’s Zenit magazine, whose pages were graced by texts and reproductions of works by Vasily Kandinsky, Lajos Kassák, El Lissitsky, Kazimir Malevich, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Vladimir Tatlin, László Móholy-Nágy, and Karel Teige, as well as by local artists such as Josip Seissel/Jo Klek. There were also the magazines Dada Tank and Dada Jazz, published by Dragan Aleksić and featuring contributions by Richard Huelsenbeck, Kurt Schwitters, and Tristan Tzara. The exhibitions, then, were part of the very complex artistic at­ mosphere of postwar Yugoslavia, following the denunciation of the then-reigning ideology of Socialist Realism and paving the way for a unique form called “Socialist Modernism.” Working in the same vein as the EXAT-51 and Gorgona groups, the local Nove Tendencije artists created a complex of artistic phenomena whose radicalism makes it stand out strongly from the mostly moderate local version of Socialist Modernism.

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an extensive publication, A Little-Known Story about a Movement, a Magazine, and the Computer’s Arrival in Art: New Tendencies and Bit International, 1961–1973.9 Bit International was a magazine published by the Galerija su­ vremene umjetnosti between 1968 and 1972. It produced a number of topical issues: “Theory of Information and the New Aesthetics,” with texts by Max Bense and Abraham Moles; “Computers and Visual Research,” with texts by Herbert W. Franke, Karl Gerstner, Leslie Mezei, Frieder Nake, Georg Nees, Michael A. Noll, Jiří Valoch, and others; “Design,” with texts by Gui Bonsiepe, Tomas Maldonado, and others; “The Word Image: Poésie Concrète,” edited by Vera Horvat Pintarić and others; and “Television,” with texts by Eco, Renato Barilli, Gillo Dorfles, Martin Krampen, Pierre Schaeffer, and others. Especially significant were the magazine’s international colloquiums, seminars, symposiums, work meetings, and less formal gatherings, arranged to discuss current

8. Networks, Media & Communication

and professional problems but also establishing personal connections, successful collaborations, and close friendships. The legacy of the Zagreb exhibitions remains fully evident today. These five shows initiated many discussions on the problematics of contemporary art practices, ranging from postwar Concrete art and Neo-Constructivism through monochrome painting, kinetic art, and the use of computers in art-making to the emergence of Conceptual art. This wide conversation enveloped a great number of participants, involving international networking, artists' groups, collaborations, and interperson­ al communications that served as a platform for constructivist and activ­ ist thinking in a time of the unstoppable expansion of the mass media. In his essay “Die Utopie der Neuen Tendenzen” (The Utopia of the New Tendencies) Rasmus Kleine comes to this pertinent conclusion:

1 The Nove Tendencije exhibition, 1961, is listed as one of the significant exhibitions of that year in Jürgen Harten, Benjamin Buchloh, Rudi Fuchs, Konrad Fischer, John Matheson, and Hans Strelow, eds., Prospekt/Retrospect: Europa 1946–1976 (Cologne: Verlag der Bu-

The environment in which Nove Tendencije were created was, in essence, from the very beginning filled with optimism and hope. Although the consequences of World War II were still felt, young artists were looking ahead to what they thought would be a better future. … Advances in technology and science were no longer considered a threat. The declared goal of Nove Tendencije was to answer this development and reconcile art, science, and technology. … The works in Nove Tendencije aimed to make their viewers reflect on and understand the changed conditions of real life.10

chhandlung Walther König, 1976). The catalogue also lists Bewogen bewegung (Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam), À 40° au-dessus de Dada (Galerie J, Paris), Le Nouveau Réalisme à Paris et à New York (Galerie Rive Droite, Paris), Avantgarde 61 (Städtisches Museum, Trier) as notable shows of that year. Participating artists were Marc Adrian, Alberto Biasi, Enrico Castellani, Ennio Chiggio, Andreas Christen, Toni Costa, Piero Dorazio, Karl Gerstner, Gerard von Graevenitz, Rudolf Kämmer, Julije Knifer, Edoardo Landi, Julio Le Parc, Heinz Mack, Piero Manzoni, Manfredo Massironi, Almir Mavignier, François Morellet, Gotthart Müller, Herbert Oehm, Ivan Picelj, Otto Piene, Uli Pohl, Dieter Rot, Joël Stein, Paul Talman, Günther Uecker, Marcel Wyss, and Walter Zehringer. The participants in Nove Tendencije 2, in 1963, were Marc Adrian, Getulio Alviani, Giovanni Anceschi, Vojin Baki´c, Davide Boriani, Martha Boto, Enrico Castellani, Andreas Christen, Gianni Colombo, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Ugo Rodolfo Demarco, Gabriele De Vecchi, Piero Dorazio, Equipo 57, Héctor Garcia-Miranda, Karl Gerstner, Gruppo N, Dieter Hacker, Julije Knifer, Vlado Kristl, Enzo Mari, Julio Le Parc, Heinz Mack, Almir Mavignier,

The first of these exhibitions was not “a surprising case,” in Mavi­ gnier’s no doubt well-meant phrase. It could not have happened with­ out an existing artistic foundation in Zagreb, a foundation of which the EXAT-51 and Gorgona groups were a part. The artists and theoreti­ cians who initiated and participated in the Nove Tendencije exhibitions were aware that they were continuing a regional tradition in culture and art, a distinct “Other line” in ideological opposition to the pre­ vailing moderate modernism. That line ran from the historical avantgardes of the 1920s, including Zenitism and Dadaism, through EXAT-51 and Gorgona to Nove Tendencije. The fourth exhibition, in 1968–69, and the fifth, in 1973 opened up new topics, such as the use of com­ puters,11 visual and concrete poetry, and Conceptual art.12 In doing so they fulfilled a far-reaching vision of the creators of the first Nove Tendencije. (Someone particularly to be noted here is Božo Bek, the director of the Galerija suvremene umjetnosti at the time.) That vi­ sion was to build an organizational and presentational platform in plat­ form in the local context, although also international and with biennial continuity, and gathering innovative artists and directions from succes­ sive generations. Indeed these exhibitions became significant events in Europe, as were the retrospective shows examining them in Ingolstadt and Karlsruhe.

Francois Morellet, Gotthart Müller, Henk Peeters, Ivan Picelj, Uli Pohl, Karl Reinhartz, Vjenceslav Richter, Francisco Sobrino, Helge Sommerrock, Aleksandar Srnec, Klaus Staudt, Joël Stein, Miroslav Šutej, Paul Talman, Luis Tomasello, Günther Uecker, Grazia Varisco, Gerhard von Graevenitz, Ludwig Wilding, Jean-Pierre Yvaral, and Walter Zehringer. 2 See Matko Meštrovic, ´ “Nepoznate podrobnosti,” Fantom slobode 3 (2010): 207–15. 3 Meštrovic, ´ “Razlozi i mogu cnosti ´ povijesnog osvješcivanja,” ´ Nove Tendencije 3 (Zagreb: Galerija suvremene umjetnosti, 1965), pp. 13–15. 4 Luciano Caramel, GRAV: Groupe de recherche d’art visuel 1960–1968 (Milan: Electa Editrice, 1975), n.p. 5 Mavignier, “Nove tendencije 1—slucaj ˇ koji iznenaduje,” in Tendencije 4 (Zagreb: Galerija suvremene umjetnosti, 1968–69), n.p. 6 See Massironi, “Appunti critici sugli apporti teorici all’interno della Nuova tendenza dal 1959 al 1964,” Nova tendencija 3 (Zagreb: Galerija suvremene umjetnosti, 1965), pp. 23–31, and “Ricerche visuali,” Situazioni dell’arte contemporanea (Rome: Edizioni Librarte, 1976), pp. 50–63. 7 Meštrovic´ also wrote the key theoretical texts “Nove spoznaje u likovnoj umjetnosti” (1962), “Ideologija Novih tendencija” (1963), “Metodologija i utopija” (1963), “Scijentifikacija kao uvjet humanizacije” (1963), and “Razlozi i mogucnosti ´ povijesnog osvješcivanja” ´ (1965). Gorgona members also organized exhibitions by two participants in the first Nove Tendencije exhibition at Studio G in Zagreb: Morellet in 1962 and Dorazio in 1963. 8 See Die Neuen Tendenzen. Eine europäische Künstlerbewegung 1961–1973, ed. Tobias Hoffman and Rasmus Kleine (Ingolstadt: Museum für Konkrete Kunst, 2006) 9 A Little-Known Story about a Movement, a Magazine, and the Computer’s Arrival in Art: New Tendencies and Bit International, 1961–1973, ed. Margit Rosen in collaboration with Peter Weibel, Darko Fritz, and Marija Gattin (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2011). 10 Kleine, “Die Utopie der Neuen Tendenzen,” Die Neuen Tendenzen, ed. Hoffman and Kleine, pp. 38–46. 11 Tendencije 5 had a “Computers and Visual Research” section, including the artists Vladimir Bonaˇcic, ´ Waldemar Cordeiro, Herbert Franke, Miljenko Horvat, Auro Lecci, Manfred Mohr, Georg Nees, John Whitney, Edward Zajec, Vilko Žiljak, and others.

Translated from the Croatian by Dorotea Fotivec.

12 Tendencije 5’s “Conceptual Art” section included Giovanni Anselmo, John Baldessari, Daniel Buren, Radomir Damnjanovic-Damnjan, ´ Braco Dimitrijevi´c , Douglas Huebler, Jannis Kounellis, On Kawara, Sol LeWitt, Giulio Paolini, Giuseppe Penone, Bálint Szombathy, Ilija Šoški´c , Goran Trbuljak, and others.

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TRUE GRID Walter Grasskamp

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N

early all of the media we know today already Gerhard Rühm rendering a newspaper illegible or Dieter Roth putting a existed in the postwar period—posters and book through a meat grinder. advertising, daily newspapers and illustrated Other artists tried to turn their media adversaries into allies. Lucio magazines, books and the theater, records Fontana, for example, adopted neon, generating elegant installations out and the radio, movies and television, exhibi­ of this new, gaudily colored, hyperactive kind of light that had entered tions and catalogues, panel paintings and wall the outdoor advertising vocabulary of hotels, movie theaters, and de­ paintings, photography and collage, graffiti partment stores. Tanaka Atsuko tested a painterly combination of colors and comic strips. They existed, however, in a and light fixtures. Destruction or imitation: these appear to have been state that in retrospect seems to be one of underdevelopment. One can the first recipes of a postwar art using the urban street media of the post­ hardly imagine the international divide between the media technolo­ er, neon, and illuminated advertising. gies that prevailed at the time: while the United States possessed high­ The first pan-European postwar art movement developed not out ly advanced media such as television and could thus conduct intense of the examination of media, however, but out of the prewar traditions internal communications across an entire continent, other countries of Constructivism. The was the New Tendencies movement, whose remained in a kind of haze, for their audiovisual media were still un­ protagonists included Alvir Mavignier, the members of Paris’s influ­ derdeveloped and the radio and print media were the main sources of ential GRAV (Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel), and the ZERO artists, information. It was not until two decades after the war that the audio­ for instance with Heinz Mack’s gridded mirror foils and the nailheads visual and electronic media became sources of information with enor­ arranged into dot grids by Günther Uecker. The lingua franca of New mous scope and a major presence in the Tendencies was the abstract grid, its se­ everyday life of consumers in Europe and mantics was geometry, its syntax was Japan as well as in North America. They repetition, and its pragmatics was the now provided the matrix of self-percep­ inclusion of the audience in the pictori­ tion for modern societies increasingly al narrative, which came alive through organized around them politically and movements of the viewer’s eyes and shifts economically. Meanwhile, literature and of the viewer’s position. The great utopi­ the theater, the classic media of social an promise of New Tendencies lay in this self-perception, began to become less im­ inclusion of the viewer, which, however, portant—and even art began to fear for hardly got beyond a motor-sensual prop­ itself. osition, although some artists aimed for Thus it is not surprising how harm­ more extensive political demands.1 New Tendencies first manifested less and antiquated some of the media with the Nove Tendencije exhibition in 1961 that artists examined aggressively at the in Zagreb. This Croatian capital was locat­ time appear today. Hindsight allows the Fig. 1. Karl Otto Götz. Density 10:3:2:1. 1962–63. Felt-pen on cardboard on canvas, 200 × 260 cm. Private Collection ed in a territory of the Warsaw Pact, where impression that the artists overestimated Moscow’s aesthetic restrictions against their adversaries. This applies above all to “formalist” modernism were generally obeyed—except in Marshal Tito’s the posters that Raymond Hains, Mimmo Rotella, Jacques (Mahé de la) Yugoslavia, in which Croatia then lay. Accordingly, in the early 1960s, Villeglé and Wolf Vostell tore in such a way as to produce shredded pal­ Zagreb was able to provide postwar European modernism with a forum impsests of advertising’s unfulfilled promises. The artists had evidently for constructivist and kinetic artists. realized that the utopian perspectives of art had dwindled in the face With its grids and patterns, its use of light and electrical impulses, of the rewards of the consumer world. Yet it was art itself that had once New Tendencies attracted leading theorists of the time, from Abraham advanced the prospects of the poster, since one can see the lithographs Moles to Max Bense. The possibilities of the computer were addressed as of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec as the very first examples of modern art early as the fourth exhibition in the Zagreb series, Tendencije 4, in 1968.2 designed for public space. The billboard, though, was now an adversary In postwar European modernism, then, Zagreb constituted a kind that the affichistes pulled out of public space into art galleries and mu­ of antithesis of Paris, which had embraced art informel. Here techno-­ seums, as if it was only in their own traditional territory that they could constructivist and gestural-abstract traditions confronted one another, conquer it. Instead of appropriating images from the new media world each attempting to take up and continue classic modernist positions from and assembling them into new contexts as collages, as the Dadaists had before the war. Surprisingly, there were also positions in between. Among done, the affichistes added their own destructions to the ones that they the most spirited art informel painters, for example, was K. O. Götz, who, found, until the billboards looked like scores for an urban image war. The inspired by his wartime experiences as an intelligence officer in front newspaper and the book also had to put up with unfriendly acts, be it

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of a radar screen, made grid paintings through “statistical-­metrical The colored dots of industrial offset printing—a kind of technolog­ 3 trials,” and filmed their development, in 1959–62 (fig. 1; plates 328, 346). ical Impressionism—also engaged artists such as Richard Hamilton and Götz was also important as a teacher: with Joseph Beuys and Gerhard Sigmar Polke. As the smallest component of both the print media and Hoehme, he influenced the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf during the Pop art, the dot aimed not at the “responsive eye” but at “responsive de­ period when Gerhard Richter was studying there, and Sigmar Polke, who sire,” the viewer’s Pavlovian dependence on the stimuli of consumer and would take up very different grids. media society. Hence the attempt to define the grid as a purely formal The cut-out and horizontally arranged airmail stickers in the panel element of postwar art, as Rosalind E. Krauss did in 1978, falls short, for pictures of Yayoi Kusama also come across as grids, but can be read pri­ the Op art grid that developed out of Constructivism has a different root marily as representatives of what was a widespread approach at the time from the grid isolated from mass media. 4 One important medium in this context was the magazine, a leading but is marginalized today: mail art. Through letters and other pieces of media genre in the first postwar decades, mail fashioned out of paper, its representa­ providing consumers with a weekly update tives established international networks out­ of their world view. At first these magazines side of the trade channels and hierarchies of were entirely in black-and-white; in 1954, the art market. In the age of email, this seems the availability of color, even just for a part rather touching, but many artists made of it of each issue, was enough of a novelty that it an opportunity to establish associations be­ provided the name for the magazine Bunte yond commercial or political control. If noth­ Illustrierte (colored magazine), which has ing else, the predigital mail art community been produced by the German publishing was important for communication across house Burda ever since. As it had been for the Cold War Iron Curtain, which, after the Dada, the magazine was the main source beginning of the construction of the Berlin of early Pop art’s motifs and images. For Wall on August 13, 1961, would divide the de­ two British artists—Hamilton and Eduardo velopment of postwar European art for nearly Paolozzi—who invented Pop art well before three decades. it received its name, and before it was even In 1965, when the transatlantic triumph something whose development they want­ of New Tendencies, Op art, and kinetic art ap­ ed to determine, the magazines that served peared to have arrived with the exhibition The as sources were specifically American. Responsive Eye at The Museum of Modern Art in Years before New York–based artists such as New York, the competition was already stand­ Lichtenstein and Warhol became interested ing by: Pop art. In Axle (plate 304) of the previous in the comic strip or the soup can, Paoloz­ year, one of his unmistakable syntheses of silk Fig. 2. John-Paul Stonard. Copy of Richard Hamilton's collage Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? zi and Hamilton had taken up the interest screen printing, panel painting, and newsprint, (1956), using original source material. 2014. Mixed media and collage on paper, 24.5 × 34 cm. Courtesy John-Paul Stonard that the spokesman of the Independent Robert Rauschenberg had already completed Group at London’s ICA, Lawrence Alloway, a pictorial ramble through the media, against had shown in the early 1950s for a Pop art that he understood popular which, however, he did not seem to be waging war, as the affichistes were consumer culture to be. Magazines gave them photo spreads and adver­ against the poster. His mixtures opened up a wide media panorama in tisements that made visible the sophisticated consumer culture of the which other colleagues of his generation were also establishing themselves. United States, a culture that could only be dreamed of in Europe’s period Andy Warhol too seized on the cheap industrial technique of the silkscreen, of postwar shortage. Paolozzi and Hamilton got their motifs from these and on the possibilities it opened for celebrating the brands and celebrities magazines and processed them into collages.5 of popular culture. Like Rauschenberg, Warhol saw the mass media less as This cannot be better illustrated than by the collage Just what is it competitors than as a new visual world that could inspire and actually in­ that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?, which Hamilton, to­ tervene in art. New York Pop now reflected the alliance between the mass gether with assistants, produced in 1956, using clippings from magazines media and American industrialized consumer culture. For these artists, sent to London from the United States by John McHale. In this collage, the grid of the silkscreen became a legitimate pictorial language, one that Hamilton took stock of a historical moment in which the television set they no more tried to denounce than did Roy Lichtenstein, who ironically penetrates the brightly lit consumer cave of a modern urban couple, who monumentalized it as a structural element of his paintings. Like the Swed­ already own a tape recorder and whose window looks out on the neon ish artist Öyvind Fahlström and Hervé Télémaque (born in Haiti, active of a movie-theater marquee. The collage was not conceived as an au­ in France), Lichtenstein drew on the comic strip, enlarging its coarse rep­ tonomous artwork, incidentally, but as a motif for the poster for the ICA resentational techniques and motifs, as if fighting a duel in the museum.

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exhibition This is Tomorrow. In 2007, together with Hamilton, the British art historian John-Paul Stonard meticulously reconstructed the collage’s visual sources, then put together a new version, using archival copies of the magazines that had retained their original color (fig. 2). 6 This recon­ struction can be retrieved from the Internet worldwide; sixty years ago, when This is Tomorrow opened, one could not in one’s wildest dreams have imagined an approaching media society in which one’s percep­ tion of art and media would be influenced not by the grids of offset dots but by pixels. In retrospect, for many people television—its visual illusion creat­ ed no longer from static grids, not yet from pixels, but from electronic scan lines—may have been the decisive new medium of the postwar period. In Europe, television first became generally relevant in the early 1960s, when black-and-white television sets became affordable while American living rooms were already dominated by color sets. The ar­ tistic examination of the new mass medium began hesitantly, at least in Europe. While Francis Bacon seems to have placed his Man in Blue I in the cold, blue, flickering light with which black-and-white television sets used to color the rooms they were watched in as early as the year of the painting, 1954, it was not until ten years later that Uecker covered this piece of media furniture with one of his grids of nails, while Vostell added the television image to the billboard as his new visual adversary. Television played a greater role in American Pop art. When Warhol began painting the icons of commercial art and American consumer socie­ ty, he had a television constantly turned on; he did not transfer tele­ vision images directly into his paintings at the time, but he lived (and painted) in a culture already permeated by television. One has to agree with Helmut Schanze’s observation that Pop art and television “do not bear the arbitrary relation to one another of mere contemporaneity. … Rather, they are intimately related to one another. The connecting element is ‘popularity.’” 7 Yet television did not become an art form in itself until Nam June Paik began outwitting the cathode ray tube. Having metamorphosed from composer to visual artist in the German network of Fluxus artists, Paik chose to use the new visual technology not only for electronically disrupting the transmitter but also for taking possession of its means of production. 8 This became possible in New York in 1965, when he was able to acquire the first portable video recorder, the analog Portapak by Sony, and became a pioneer of an entirely new art genre: video art. This move signaled the end of a type of modern postwar art that had attempted to tie in with classic modernism and the art of the prewar period. A new story began—one about the artistic examination of “new media.”

1 See Hans Dieter Huber, “The Dream of an Interactive Artwork,” in Die Neuen Tendenzen/ The New Tendencies/Nove Tendenzije: Eine europäische Künstlerbewegung, 1961–1973, ed. Tobias Hoffmann and Rasmus Kleine, exh. cat. for Museum für Konkrete Kunst Ingolstadt (Heidelberg: Edition Braus, 2006), pp. 291–96. 2 See Herbert W. Franke, “The ‘New Tendencies’ in Zagreb—Computer Art,” in ibid., pp. 303–6. 3 See K. O. Götz, ed. Joachim Jäger, Udo Kittelman, Walter Smerling, and Alexander Klar, exh. cat. for Neue Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen Berlin, et al. (Cologne: Wienand, 2013), pp. 156–57. 4 Rosalind E. Krauss, “Grids,” 1978, in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1985), pp. 8–22. The differences in the grid were explored in the exhibition Rasterfahndung (Tracing the grid) at the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart in 2012; see Simone Schimpf, “Tracing the Grid: The Grid in Art after 1945,” Rasterfahndung: Das Raster in der Kunst nach 1945, ed. Ulrike Groos and Schimpf, exh. cat. (Cologne: Wienand, 2012), pp. 274–77, esp. p. 276. 5 See Walter Grasskamp, “The Phantom of the Media—What We Talk about When We Talk about Pop“, in Ludwig Goes Pop, exh. cat. for Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna, and Museum Ludwig, Cologne (Cologne: Walther König, 2014), pp. 127–58. 6 See John-Paul Stonard, “Pop in the Age of Boom: Richard Hamilton’s ‘Just what is it that

Translated from German by Rebecca van Dyck

makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?,’” The Burlington Magazine no. 1254 (September 2007): 607–20. 7 Helmut Schanze, “‘The Most Popular Art’: Popkultur, Fernsehen und die Anfänge der Medienwissenschaft,” in Stefan Greif et al., eds., Popkultur und Fernsehen. Historische und ästhetische Berührungspunkte (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2015), pp. 27–38. See also Horace Newcomb, TV: The Most Popular Art (New York: Anchor, 1974). 8 Nam June Paik stated that he came to video art by way by K. O. Götz. See Schimpf, “Tracing the Grid,” p. 276.

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REFRAMING THE INDEPENDENT GROUP Anne Massey

8. Networks, Media & Communication

T

he Independent Group, which met at the Insti­ Such a singular configuration of European and South American influ­ tute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London, from ences fed into the Independent Group’s broad cultural understanding 1952 to 1955, is important to rethinking the post­ and its purchase on the life and languages of nation states beyond the war cultural map, not least because it comprised shores of England. creative practitioners from a broad range of disci­ This unique array of origins and backgrounds was augmented by plines. The architects Alison and Peter Smithson, wartime experiences. The trauma of war, combat, and internment was James Stirling, Colin St John Wilson, and John a significant shared experience for the members of the Independent Voelcker contributed to the vibrant debates, as Group. Most directly, Henderson and Turnbull had seen active service did the critics and writers Lawrence Alloway, Reyner Banham, and in the Royal Air Force (RAF) as pilots. As Turnbull recalled, “It was a new Toni del Renzio. They combined forces with England’s leading youngerkind of way of seeing the world. It certainly made me have a totally differ­ generation artists of the day—Magda Cordell, Richard Hamilton, Nigel ent attitude as to what was visually the reality.”3 Henderson flew for three years before, suffering from nervous exhaustion, he was given the lighter Henderson, John McHale, Eduardo Paolozzi, and William Turnbull— duty of delivering gliders. He would recall, “My nerves felt like stripped plus the popular-music producer Frank Cordell and the graphic designer wires and I now think of one of those ancient electrical systems—Ley­ Edward Wright. den Jars—with a stale tartar of corrosion on the glass, around the brass The ICA instigated the formation of the Independent Group and of­ 1 terminals and the wires, untaut, fly-encrusted and looped irrelevantly fered support throughout its existence. The group ran a series of closed seminars covering an expansive range of topics and also fed into the around.”4 Since Paolozzi’s parents were Italian émigrés, he had been clas­ sified as an enemy alien and was interned for three months in Saught­ ICA’s public program, generating cutting-edge exhibitions and talks. on Prison, Edinburgh; his father, grandfather, and uncle were drowned It has conventionally been art-historically classified under the heading when their ship was torpedoed en route to Canada. Some Independent “Fathers of Pop,” a seductive narrative that continues to dominate ac­ Group members had even been brought together by war: after joining the counts of its significance. But there is far more to the Independent Group RAF, Frank Cordell had done intel­ than this linear, diachronic read­ ligence work in Palestine, where ing. As Henderson commented, he met his future wife, Magda, “I suspect that the open and inde­ who was working there for the terminate aspect of the group’s en­ British forces, intercepting wire­ quiry is rapidly being overthrown less signals. (or lost, rather) in the simplistic These wartime experiences interpretation that it existed to give gave the Independent Group not birth to Pop Art. ‘Post hoc ergo only a shared sense of trauma but propter hoc.’”2 A networks-based reading is more closely aligned to also a familiarity with technolo­ the approach of the group, which gy that distinguished them from explored the new technological earlier British-based creative col­ era of the 1950s from a cross-dis­ lectives. Hamilton had been too ciplinary perspective. The coming young to join the war effort direct­ together of creative practitioners ly and used his drawing skills train­ Fig. 1. Installation view of the exhibition 3 Collagists: New Work by E.L.T. Mesens, John McHale, Gwyther Irwin at Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 1958 from varied national backgrounds, ing and working as an engineering the trauma of war, and the dawn­ draughtsman for the Design Unit ing of the media age are the themes explored in this essay. Group, an engineering design office, and then for EMI (Electric & Musi­ The diaspora experienced by individual Independent Group mem­ cal Industries, formerly His Master’s Voice) at a time when the company bers contributed to its unique world view. Because the group has been was helping the war effort with the development of radar and microwave hitched to the U.K./U.S. trajectory of Pop art, other global points of devices. Banham served an apprenticeship as an engine fitter at the Bris­ reference have been underplayed. It is highly significant, however, that tol Aeroplane Company, working long and demanding shifts there dur­ Paolozzi was the son of Italian immigrants, and that Wright’s mother ing the war before changing careers to study art history. Technology was was Chilean and his father Ecuadorian. When he was born his father a shared enthusiasm for the Independent Group and provided the foun­ was vice-consul of Ecuador and based in Liverpool. Del Renzio was dation for a rich network of relationships, ideas, and practices. Moreover, born in Tsarskoe Selo (now Pushkin), Russia, of Russian and Italian par­ Independent Group experiences during and after World War II provided ents, and Magda Cordell, née Lustigova, was born in Hungary but fled specialist, hands-on knowledge of networks, media, and communica­ to escape the Nazis, first to Egypt, then to Palestine as a Jewish refugee. tion for its members.

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The Independent Group came together in the early 1950s and the group members both encouraged and chided one another, working to challenge the status quo of the London cultural scene by discussing and exhibiting subjects beyond the accepted limits of fine art. This included material drawn from popular culture and the burgeoning world of tech­ nology. Indeed, science and technology lay at the heart of Independent Group closed meetings throughout its existence. The first full session, organized by Banham, included talks by the De Havilland helicopter designer J. S. Shapiro on “The Helicopter as an Example of Technical Development” and by Norman Pirie, a leading microbiologist, on the

organized by Alloway and designed by McHale and also included McHale’s important “Transistor” collages (plate 335), which drew directly from early communication theory with diagrammatic representations of signal, encoder, and decoder. This show is also a key example of the way in which the Independent Group’s activities fed into the ICA’s public program. As an important conduit for the exhibition and discussion of global avant-garde practices, the ICA, founded in 1946, broadened the Inde­ pendent Group’s horizons. In 1950, for example, it hosted the group show Paintings from Haiti; the Cuban artist Wifredo Lam exhibited there in 1952; the international CoBrA group gained British exposure through the

Fig. 2. Installation view of the exhibition Parallel of Life and Art at Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 1953

topic “Are Proteins Unique?” At group meetings during the second, full session of 1955, guest speakers challenged the members with glimpses into the futuristic world of communication theory. McHale, who coorganized this series with Alloway, invited the cybernetic expert E. W. Meyer to speak on “Probability and Information Theory” with accom­ panying Shannon diagrams and examples of coding. McHale had already explored the significance of new technology with his collage books Palimpcestuous and Secret Life of a Talisman, which had been shown in the 1954 ICA group exhibition Collages and Objects. The exhibition had been

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ICA, with Karel Appel and Wols (Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze) enjoying separate shows there in 1957 and Asger Jorn the following year; and in 1957 the ICA showed Guy Debord’s film Hurlements en faveur de Sade (Howl­ ings for Sade, 1952; plate 347). Debord was then a member of the Letterist International, and his offer of this controversial screening was snapped up by Alloway, then the ICA’s assistant director.5 The Independent Group benefited from what was on offer at the ICA and contributed extensively to the institution’s public program throughout the 1950s, organizing talks and pushing the boundaries of

8. Networks, Media & Communication

exhibition practice. Henderson, the Smithsons, Paolozzi, and Ronald Jenkins, for example, were the self-appointed editors of the images and layout that constituted the seminal show Parallel of Life and Art at the ICA in 1953 (fig. 2).6 The exhibition comprised 122 images printed on dif­ ferent-sized panels that were hung from the ceiling, placed on the walls, and even casually propped against the wall at floor level. The images were appropriated from the mass media and from the realm of science, particularly the specialist diagrams and photographs used in biology and geology, and were messed with—blown up, stressed, stretched—so that the exhibition explored a darker side of human existence as well as the inner workings of nature and technology. These images were entirely in black and white, not the glossy Technicolor celebrated in the main­ stream Pop art of the future. The show was divided into fourteen catego­ ries, of which the first was “Anatomy”—a dissection of a frog, sections of a tree, but also technical images. Perhaps the most striking was a picture of a dismembered typewriter, but there was also a diagram of two radio valves and a view of a television chassis from beneath. Building on raw wartime experiences, a gritty physicality, and a fascination with technology, the Independent Group looked outward and assimilated into its practice new theories and approaches taken from the nascent study of communication theory. Understandably, the trauma of the past recurred in the present, but the group’s shared aim was to supersede these difficult memories through the dreams embod­ ied in titles such as This is Tomorrow, The House of the Future, and The Future of the Future.7 This is Tomorrow was an exhibition held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in the autumn of 1956. The participants were divided into twelve groups, and it is the Group 2 exhibit, created by Hamilton, McHale, and Voelcker, that usually attracts the most attention owing to its proto-Pop credentials. Group 12, however, is of the most interest from the network perspective. Created by Alloway, del Renzio, and the architect Geoffrey Holroyd, the exhibit consisted of an interactive tack board holding a changing display of newspaper cuttings.8 The Group 12 section of the exhibition catalogue included Shannon-like diagrams and two charts that include the terms “punched tape cards” and “magnetic surfaces wire tape discs,” perhaps the first mention of the computer in a British exhibition catalogue. The en­ try analyzes the challenge of incorporating art and architecture: “Seeing art and architecture in the general framework of communications … can reduce these difficulties by a new sense of what is important.”9 Learning from the approach of the Independent Group, we may benefit by looking beyond narrow disciplinary constraints and forg­ ing new articulations with media and communication. Only then can a fuller view of the networks in place be identified and explored. That this approach resonates with the group’s expansive approach points to its perennial significance. Looking at the Independent Group, and reframing it using the criteria of media and communication, opens up a fresh understanding that sheds light on the group beyond the usual Pop art tradition and links it with a broader and more meaning­ ful narrative.

1 See Anne Massey, “The Mother of Pop? Dorothy Morland and the Independent Group,” Journal of Visual Culture 12, no. 2 (2013): 262–78. 2 Nigel Henderson, comments on Peter Karpinski’s essay “The Independent Group, 1952–55, and the relationship of the Independent Group’s discussion to the works of Hamilton, Paolozzi and Turnbull, 1952–1957,” unpublished manuscript, May 1977, p. 1. Courtesy Peter Karpinski. 3 William Turnbull, interviewed in Beyond Time: William Turnbull, produced by Alex Turnbull and Peter Stern, 2011. 4 Henderson, unpublished ms prepared for Nigel Henderson: Photographs of Bethnal Green (Nottingham: Midland Group, 1977). Quoted in Henderson and Christopher Mullen, Nigel Henderson (Norwich: Norwich School of Art Gallery, 1982), p. 26. 5 See Gregor Muir and Massey, ICA 1946–68 (London: ICA, 2015), p. 115. 6 Private view card, Parallel of Life and Art: An Exhibition of Documents through the Medium of Photography, ed. Eduardo Paolozzi, Henderson, Alison and Peter Smithson, and Ronald Jenkins, September 10, 1953. 7 This Is Tomorrow was the title of a 1956 exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery to which former members of the Independent Group contributed. The House of the Future was a project designed by the Smithsons for the 1956 Ideal Home Exhibition, Olympia, London. The Future of the Future was a book published by fomer Independent Group member McHale (New York: Braziller, 1969). 8 Geoffrey Holroyd has recently donated the exhibition materials to the AD&A Museum, University of California, Santa Barbara. See www.museum.ucsb.edu/news/feature/313 (accessed March 14, 2016). 9 This is Tomorrow (London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1956), n.p.

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THE CYBERNETIC VISION IN POSTWAR ART Pamela M. Lee and Fred Turner

8. Networks, ChapterMedia 2 · Form & Communication Matters

I

n 1948, the American mathematician Norbert Wiener an­ nounced the creation of a new and universal science: cybernet­ ics, or the study of control through communication. At one level Wiener was simply heralding the arrival of digital com­ puters. Such machines sought feedback from the information systems around them and so made fitting modes for the ways that people navigated the world, he explained. Soon he and a wide array of scientists and popular writers would be compar­ ing computers to the human brain. At the same time, Wiener was also introducing a new way of thinking about the organization of the natural and social worlds. All systems, he later explained, could be thought of as communication systems. As such, they could be regulated through the “exchange of messages”—between people, between societies, between machines of all kinds.1 “To live effectively,” he wrote, “is to live with adequate information. Thus, communication and control belong to the essence of man’s inner life, even as they belong to his life in society.”2 This cybernetic vision set the terms for any number of fields in the postwar era: international diplomacy, management science, psychology, biology, computer science—and, far more than many remember today, art. Though it arose alongside digital computing, cybernetics quickly became a “universal discipline.”3 It was as much an aesthetic project as an intellectual one, and its preoccupation with messages and with systems shaped artistic production across multiple media. Its trust in communication—rather than force—as a means of social control opened a bridge between the worlds of art and international relations. Its vision of the world as a system of information networks helped to legiti­ mize global networks of artistic production and circulation. The faith that pattern and order were one, across all systems, also allowed artists, scientists, and politicians to imagine themselves engaged in a single collective project. Alongside the rise of information theory and the global diffusion of television, cybernetics shaped the aesthetics and circulation of Abstract Expressionism, drove a global fas­ cination with multimedia, and, by the 1960s, even drew artists toward the neoliberal networks of communication and circulation that we inhabit today.

I

THE HUMANISM OF FORM WITHOUT CONTENT

n the 1940s, cybernetics appealed in large part because it seemed to embody democratic ideals. As World War II developed, many Americans ascribed the rise of Adolf Hitler to the power of the mass media. Radio, newspapers, and movies all seemed to require audiences to enter into something like the top-down, oneto-many authority structure of fascism. Married to Nazi propa­ ganda, such systems were thought to turn ordinary Germans into unthinking monsters. 4

Cybernetics and its cognate discipline, information theory, of­ fered an egalitarian alternative. In cybernetics, every person could be imagined as an information system equal to every other; every society could be thought of as in principle equal to every other as well. From our own time, imagining human beings as mirrors of machines might sound somehow dehumanizing, but in the 1940s the reverse was true. In the fascist theories of race promoted by Japan and Germany, properties of the human body such as skin tone and head shape had been the basis of discrimination. By dematerializing that body, by arguing that it was sim­ ply a pattern of information like any other, cybernetics offered a glimpse of a world of universal equality, a world without race. Claude Shannon’s information theory performed a similar trick, emphasizing the vehicle bearing the message rather than the message itself. According to Shannon, a message was nothing more than a pat­

Fig. 1. Portrait of Norbert Wiener in a classroom at MIT, Cambridge, Massachusets, May 1949

tern discerned amid chaos. To communicate was to see patterns; form was both aesthetic and social order. In that sense, messages mattered less than communication as such. In the “The Mathematical Theory of Communication” (1948), later published as a book with Warren Weaver, Shannon carefully distinguished between form and content in his defi­ nition of information. In fact, for Shannon, content as we might under­ stand it colloquially meant little. He observed, “Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic as­ pects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem.”5 What does it mean to eschew “semantics” in the communication of a message? Heralding the inception of the digital age, Shannon’s highly technical reading was preoccupied with “the engineering problem” of the

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potential for messages to be quantified as data, and thus easily transmis­ sible as mathematical pattern. The media of such communications, there­ fore, would assume primary importance over what those messages might actually mean. “Information,” as Weaver put it, “must not be confused with meaning.”6 Even as Weaver and Shannon were redefining information, artists, art historians, and critics were elaborating a similar approach to ques­ tions of form and medium. This was a time, after all, in which the meth­ odological investments of formalism, and the nascent art-historical interests of semiotics, were debated by the most advanced thinkers and critics on art. The language of Abstract Expressionism, famously linked to Jackson Pollock’s innovations of 1947, could wordlessly telegraph the tragic and the sublime without being reduced to stable narrative or lit­ eral content. Pollock’s skeins and drips of poured paint might well index the artist’s desire to communicate, but they could simultaneously be interpreted as a comment on the medium of painting itself as a field of gestural inscription. The language of medium specificity, bedrock to postwar art criti­ cism, would increasingly converge with other questions of communi­ cation in the ensuing decades. In “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” the critic Clement Greenberg could write, “Content is to be dissolved so com­ pletely into form that the work of art or literature cannot be reduced in whole or in part to anything not itself.”7 Written in 1939, the statement bears decisively on the politics of aesthetic autonomy and stakes a claim for modernism’s resistance to both commodification and the recruit­ ment of art as propaganda. But by the 1950s and ’60s, a particular notion of Greenbergian formalism, and abstract art by extension, had hardened into a period style. In the language of information theory, we could call it a code that was itself a message. In the 1950s, Abstract Expressionism would indeed assume a con­ troversial ambassadorial function as a “weapon of the cold war.” 8 Its power in that role depended less on any literal messages about the Unit­ ed States the work seemed to send than on the power of American artists to express themselves, coded in the terms of communication. By 1952, when New York’s Museum of Modern Art established its Internation­ al Program of Circulating Exhibitions, for example, many agreed with Weaver that the pictorial arts belonged alongside written and oral speech as humane modes of communication. The Museum’s program made visible the notion that art could transparently communicate in ever wid­ ening spheres of transnational influence: art itself became a node ani­ mating a network. Its express purpose was to circulate modern art as a new kind of communications medium, however opaque the language of its inaugural idiom, Abstract Expressionism, might be.

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THE ART OF THINKING TOGETHER In the early 1950s, policy-makers and artists alike turned to commu­ nication as a way to model and manage the tensions that seemed to threaten the globe. At the United Nations, at UNESCO, and perhaps, most famously, at the Bandung Conference of nonaligned nations in 1955, diplomats gathered in the hope that conversation itself might dif­ fuse potential international conflicts. Military and political leaders in the West turned to operations research, a new science of decision-making, first associated with the British war effort, that brought together ex­ perts from diverse disciplines to address increasingly complex military questions unanswerable by any one specialization.9 During the Cold War, such interdisciplinary initiatives found a new home in the institutions that would come to be known as “think tanks.” Although today principally associated with public policy and market issues, the think tank was his­ torically grounded in Cold War defense questions, ranging from the en­ gineering of spacecraft to second-strike capability, from game theory to the early Internet.10 Its various members, hailing from mathematics, logic, engineering, anthropology, psychology, and history, spoke the language of operations research, cybernetics, and information and systems theory. This language enabled Cold War think tanks to pioneer the devel­ opment of interdisciplinary platforms and collaborative forms of knowl­ edge production, and to become the home of what historian of science Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi has called “the cold war avant-garde.”11 Think tanks such as the RAND Corporation and the Hudson Institute occa­ sionally partnered with artists in exploring issues around communica­ tion, media technology, and control.12 Artists themselves generalized the rhetoric of such institutions in the coming decades, redirecting their ideological interests to more progressive, sometimes radical ends, and continuing to mine the humanizing dimensions of cybernetics, as for­ mulated in the previous decade.13 As if miming the logic of think tanks, many artists’ groups confronted questions of media, technology, inter­ action, and spectacle as a collective and interdisciplinary enterprise. In keeping with the expansive nature of such pursuits, these networks were often transnational in their reach. The Signals Group, a loose-knit move­ ment founded in 1964 by David Medalla, Paul Keeler, and Guy Brett, would include artists and critics from Brazil, the Philippines, Venezue­ la, Greece, England, and Colombia. Based in London, they were known for their postwar experiments in kinetic art, as well as for a newsletter broadcasting their engagement with new developments in science and technology. The name of the group itself flagged an abiding interest in communication over time and space.14 In this regard, Signals followed on the example of Britain’s Inde­ pendent Group, which some at the time actually called a “think tank.” Founded in 1952, the group coalesced around London’s Institute of Contemporary Art.15 Its members met to analyze, study, and debate questions of technology, mass media, communications, and the built environment in the wake of Britain’s postwar reconstruction and the Marshall Plan. They mounted a host of experimental exhibitions drawing

8. Networks, Media & Communication

Fig. 2. Claude Shannon at the Bell Telephone Laboratories with an electric mouse that can learn its way round a maze after a single training run, May 1952

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Fig. 3. Léon Ferrari. Carta a un general (Letter to a General). 1963. Pen and ink on paper, 48.1 × 31.1 cm. Courtesy Fundación Augusto y Léon Ferrari

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on the visual languages of media and advanced design culture. Con­ sisting of critics (Alloway, Reyner Banham), architects (Alison and Pe­ ter Smithson), and artists (Eduardo Paolozzi, Richard Hamilton), this loose-knit organization also produced works of art based on the raw material they studied. They coined the notion of Pop art well before their American colleagues. And they took an approach to the technologies and media of popular culture that echoed the humanism of Wiener’s cybernetics. As the artist John McHale put it, “If on the surface we were concerned with technology in many senses, our preoccupations were with the social implications of that technology … we saw that technology expanded the human range.”16 McHale’s collage work is exemplary in this regard. In 1956 he would leave London to study art at Yale University with Josef Albers. Histories of the Independent Group narrate this transatlantic sojourn as one in which McHale immersed himself in American media culture in all its postwar excess. Like an ethnographer collecting field samples, he returned to London with a trunk overflowing with glossy magazines, newspapers, and advertisements, the material of which would find its way into his later collages. But even before this trip, McHale was making work that attend­ ed to the most fundamental conditions of media communication. In his “Transistor” series (1954; plate 335) he attempted to visualize the logic of this new invention by pasting geometric scraps of newsprint or maga­ zines in stuttering, broken lines, recalling both avant-garde collage and informatics diagrams like Shannon’s. Transistor technology, introduced in 1948, ushered in new possibilities for quicker, more portable and expe­ dient communication across different media platforms: television, radio, and—most critically—computers. McHale’s series gave abstract form to these modes of communication, suggesting how “raw data might be organized by a human or mechanical brain into discrete messages.” 17

THE COMMUNICATION OF POLITICS IN THE 1960S—OR NOT

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y the early 1960s the Independent Group had disbanded, with Alloway and McHale departing for the United States. Artistic engagement with their critical preoccupations, however, was only intensifying. Performance, painting, sculpture, and multimedia construction all internalized new cultures of management and organization and spoke to a new range of geopolit­ ical circumstances. In the United States, the cybernetic logic of com­ munication, in which form was content, helped give rise to Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum “The medium is the message.” Along the way, and particularly in the United States, the political ambitions of the 1940s often melted away. In the global south, however, the reverse was often true. There, artists such as the Argentine León Ferrari en­ twined a celebration of communication networks with a sharp critique of American foreign policy.

The notion that the world itself might be a medium of commu­ nication arrived on the New York art scene in 1957 with the musician John Cage. Since World War II, Cage had worked to dismantle the hi­ erarchies of sound that he believed characterized mainstream Europe­ an music and to replace them with events that could reveal the sounds made by the world itself to attentive listeners. Most famously, he had staged 4’33”—a performance in which a person sat at a piano for four minutes and thirty-three seconds while the audience listened to what­ ever sounds the room around them might generate. In 1957 and 1958, Cage taught courses in experimental music composition at the New School to figures such as Allan Kaprow and Dick Higgins. Cage’s stu­ dents built on his aesthetic to create what came to be called “Happen­ ings” around the city. In 1959, for instance, Kaprow staged a series of six events, separated by the ringing of a bell, at the Reuben Gallery. The action took place in three rooms simultaneously and featured patterns of movement, sound, and silence occurring seemingly at random. As a mode of performance, Happenings broke down the tradi­ tional divisions between theater and stage, audience and actor, in ways that many at the time read as radical. Their formal preoccupations also echoed Cage’s and Wiener’s fascination with patterns of communi­ cation. Much as Cage encouraged his listeners to hear every sound as beautiful, Kaprow urged his audiences to see every movement around them as art. At a Happening as in Wiener’s cybernetics, everything belonged to a system of overlapping patterns of signification. 18 Yet for all their formal innovation, Happenings in fact discarded the political ambitions of earlier decades. In the 1940s, to imagine the world as a system of interlocking information patterns was to imagine global equality and an America without prejudice. In the Happen­ ings of the 1960s, that political vision melted away and old patterns of misogyny and racism reappeared. Except for figures like Carolee Schneeman, most all of the leading protagonists in the Happenings were young white men. At the same time, naked or near-naked women became a standard feature in them. Despite the rise of the civil rights movement, Happenings rarely dealt with race. On the contrary, as a wave of countercultural rebellion began to rise across America in the late 1960s, Kaprow asserted that “local causes, such as civil rights and peace movements and things like that … are not essential philosophical problems.”19 Such a view would likely have revolted Wiener. And it may well have angered artists in other countries at the same time—particularly those outside the European and American centers of political and military power. Consider the work of Ferrari, who lived and worked under dicta­ torships in both Argentina and Brazil.20 Ferrari’s practice engaged art as a form of revolutionary communication but implicitly asked: to what end? In the early 1960s, he produced a series of remarkable ink drawings— sometimes in collaboration with writers—exploring the relationship be­ tween word and image. Fields of densely written script, both calligraphic and abstract, could take on the force of a singular image, if withholding anything like content or meaning. In the series Carta a un general (Letter

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to a General, 1963), for example, we encounter a field of graphic inscrip­ tion, at once elegant and obscure, that demands to be “read” (fig. 3). However, as Andrea Giunta notes in speaking to the works’ oscillations between legibility and abstraction, “Although we cannot read what the letters say, they refer to a complex social and individual impossibility.”21 That Ferrari’s drawings are addressed to an imaginary general prompts questions about the military, censorship, and the transparency of communication in the context of postwar Latin America; for his part he referred to the work as a “hidden letter” (my emphasis).22 In his best-known piece, however, the artist was plainspoken about his polit­ ical engagements. In 1965, invited to produce an installation for one of Buenos Aires’s most vanguard arts institutions, the Instituto di Tella, he created La civilización occidental y cristiana (The Western Christian Civilization; plate 322), a store-bought figurine of the crucified Jesus, mounted on a model of a U.S. fighter jet. One of several works in the show blasting the imperial ambitions of the United States in Vietnam, this grotesque crucifix, updated for the Vietnam era, was taken down before it even had its official public airing. Ferrari’s gesture was a blocked message, serving notice to the dream of communication that systems discourse had envisioned in the immediate postwar era.

aesthetic possibilities. Can we turn away from our embrace of com­ munication systems? From the engineering sensibility of Shannon and Weaver that underlies them? And what will we make when we do? Perhaps Ferrari’s work offers us one way out. As it suggests, we might still be able to turn away from the fantasy of easy global intercon­ nection, a fantasy born and promoted in the United States across the Cold War and a fantasy that now travels on the back of American com­ munication technologies that first sprang into being within the Cold War defense establishment. Perhaps now more than ever, we might be able to remember that fighter-bombers are more than patterns of information. And their victims are too.

IF THE SYSTEM ISN’T THE MESSAGE, WHAT THEN?

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n the contrast between Kaprow’s attitudes towards “civil rights and peace movements” and the Vietnam-driven work of figures such as Ferrari's we can glimpse a tension in the relationship between art and communication that continues to haunt us today. On one hand, the form of the Happenings reflected the legacy of Wiener’s egal­ itarianism. There as in Wiener’s cybernetics, hierarchies crumbled and everything seemed to mean. On the other, their embrace of patterned action as the source of meaning also marked the end of the political ambitions of the 1940s and the emergence of a new mode of social con­ trol. Audiences at Happenings may have believed that they could pay attention to whatever they liked, and so could imagine themselves as free individuals, but the scenes that surrounded them had been care­ fully choreographed and the actions selected for them. In the decades since, as computer networks have made real the vi­ sion of a single communication system that can interlink the globe, we have come to inhabit ever more numerous and more carefully curated semiotic environments. Like viewers at a Happening, we may imagine that we are newly free to participate in events around us. Yet the terms of our participation have been carefully set, and not by us alone. From personal branding of social media to the networked interactions of relational aesthetics, artists and audiences alike live and work within systems of communication designed and built by invisible others. In such a world, we need to ask how art can communicate new social or

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1 Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (New York: Da Capo Press, 1988), p. 16. 2 Ibid., p. 18. 3 Geoffrey C. Bowker, “How to Be Universal: Some Cybernetic Strategies, 1943–1970,” Social Studies of Science 23 (1993): 108. 4 See Fred Turner, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia & American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2013), pp. 15–16. 5 Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1949), p. 31. 6 Weaver, “Recent Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Communication,” in The Mathematical Theory of Communication, p. 8 7 Clement Greenberg, “Avant-garde and Kitsch,” 1939, repr. in Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), p. 6. 8 See Eva Cockcroft, “Abstract Expressionism: Weapon of the Cold War,” in Francis Frascina, ed., Pollock and After: The Critical Debate (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 147–55. See also the other essays in “Part 2” of this book, on revisionist approaches to Abstract Expressionism and the Cold War. 9 On operations research see Paul Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1997). 10 The most famous think tank was the RAND Corporation, first conceived in 1945 as Project RAND. Project RAND was a collaboration forged between Douglas Aircraft and the U.S. Army Air Forces under General Henry (“Hap”) H. Arnold, who, near the end of the war, recognized the need for the military to partner with industry. By 1949, however, the think tank was an independent, incorporated research center that could bring together prominent scholars from across the sciences, social sciences and even humanistic disciplines. General histories of RAND include Alex Abella, Soldiers of Reason (New York: Harcourt, 2008). For specific histories of the think tank and art, see Pamela M. Lee, “Aesthetic Strategist: Albert Wohlstetter, the Cold War and a Theory of Mid-Century Modernism,” October 138 (Fall 2011): 15–36. 11 Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi, The Worlds of Herman Kahn: The Intuitive Science of Thermonuclear War (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2005). 12 On the infamous partnership between RAND and the Art and Technology Program at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, see Lee, “Eros and Technics and Civilization” in Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2000), pp. 5–34. Also see Ghamari-Tabrizi on the “Cold War Avant-Garde at RAND,” pp. 40–61. 13 In the 1960s, both Fluxus and the Raindance Corporation would poach the language of the think tank in terms of their collaborative and media-centric dimensions (Raindance was a pun on RAND). 14 On the Signals Group see Lee, “Study for an End of the World,” in Chronophobia, pp. 125–28. 15 On the Independent Group as a cultural think tank see John Walker and Sarah Chaplin, Visual Culture: An Introduction (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), p. 45. See also William Wilson, “The Young Boy Network that Went ‘Pop’: ‘Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty,’ at the Temporary Contemporary profiles Pop Beginnings,” November 6, 1990, Los Angeles Times, available online at http://articles.latimes.com/1990-11-06/entertainment/ca-4108_1_fine-arts (accessed June 2016). 16 John McHale, quoted in David Robbins, ed., The Independent Group: Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty, exh. cat. (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1980), p. 87. 17 Robbins, “John McHale,” in ibid., p. 87. 18 See Richard Kostelanetz, The Theatre of Mixed Means: An Introduction to Happenings, Kinetic Environments, and Other Mixed-Means Performances (New York: Dial Press, 1968); Mariellen R. Sandford, Happenings and Other Acts (London and New York: Routledge, 1995); and Judith F. Rodenbeck, Radical Prototypes: Allan Kaprow and the Invention of Happenings (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2011). 19 Allan Kaprow, quoted in Kostelanetz, The Theatre of Mixed Means, pp. 130–31. 20 Léon Ferrari was forced into exile from Argentina in 1976; his son Ariel, who remained behind in Buenos Aires, was “disappeared” in 1977. See Andrea Giunta, “Leon Ferrari: A Language Rhapsody,” in Luis Pérez-Oramas, Tangled Alphabets: León Ferrari and Mira Schendel, exh. cat. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2009), pp. 46–57. 21 Ibid., p. 50. 22 Ferrari, quoted in ibid., p. 50.

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NETWORKS, MEDIA & COMMUNICATION Plates

Thomas Bayrle Romare Bearden Joseph Beuys Derek Boshier Bruce Conner Guy Debord Charles and Ray Eames Uzo Egonu Öyvind Fahlström León Ferrari

Karl Otto Götz Richard Hamilton Lynn Hershman Leeson - oJikken Kob Tadeusz Kantor Gyula Kosice Almir Mavignier Mohammed Melehi Francois Morellet On Kawara

Yoko Ono Nam June Paik Eduardo Paolozzi Sigmar Polke Robert Rauschenberg Joaquim Rodrigo Dieter Roth Gerhard Rühm Ed Ruscha Jesús Rafael Soto

Takamatsu JiroTanaka Atsuko Hervé Télémaque Günther Uecker Stan VanDerBeek Jacques (Mahé de la) Villeglé Wolf Vostell Andy Warhol Yuri Zlotnikov

300

Gyula Kosice Estructura lumínica Madí 6 (Luminescent Madí Structure No.6) 1946 neon gas, Plexiglas, and wood box The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

301

On Kawara LAT.31°25´N, LONG. 8°41´E 1965 acrylic on canvas Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven

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Joaquim Rodrigo Kultur 1962 1962 tempera on canvas Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea – Museu do Chiado, Lisboa

302

709

Takamatsu Jiro¯ Strings in Bottles 1963 (reproduction 1985) mixed media The Estate of Jiro Takamatsu

303

711

304

Robert Rauschenberg Axle 1964 oil and screen print on canvas Museum Ludwig, Cologne

713

305

Sigmar Polke Rasterzeichnung (Porträt Lee Harvey Oswald) (Raster Drawing [Portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald]) 1963 posterpaint and pencil on paper Private Collection

306

Andy Warhol Thirty-Five Jackies (Multiplied Jackies) 1964 silkscreen and acrylic on canvas MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main

715

Hervé Télémaque My Darling Clementine 1963 oil on canvas, collages, painted wooden box, rubber doll, Plexiglas Centre Pompidou, Paris, Musée national d'art moderne – Centre de création industrielle

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308 Derek Boshier Man Playing Snooker and Thinking of Other Things 1961 oil on canvas Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon

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Uzo Egonu Man Stealing a Shoe for His Wife 1965 collage, cuttings from magazines, and guoache on paper Egonu Estate c/o Grosvenor Gallery, London

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311 Eduardo Paolozzi

Eduardo Paolozzi

Lessons of Last Time 1947 printed papers on card TATE, London

It's a Psychological Fact Pleasure Helps your Disposition 1948 printed papers on card TATE, London

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312

314 Eduardo Paolozzi

Eduardo Paolozzi

Eduardo Paolozzi

I was a Rich Man's Plaything 1947 printed papers on card TATE, London

Windtunnel Test 1950 printed papers on card TATE, London

Yours Till the Boys Come Home 1951 printed papers on card TATE, London

721

315 Romare Bearden Conjur Woman 1964 photo projection on paper The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York

316

Romare Bearden Evening 9:10, 461 Lenox Avenue 1964 collage Van Every/Smith Galleries, Davidson College, Davidson

723

317 Jacques (Mahé de la) Villeglé Rue Jacob, 5 décembre 1961 1961 ripped posters mounted on canvas Private Collection

725

318 Dieter Roth Literaturwurst (Martin Walser: Halbzeit) (Literature Sausage[Martin Walser: Halftime]) 1967 chopped book, pressed into sausage form, dissected and framed by the Artist Dieter Roth Foundation, Hamburg

319

320

Dieter Roth Daily Mirror Book 1961 150 pages cut-out of newspapers, adhesive binding Dieter Roth Foundation, Hamburg

Dieter Roth Kölner Divisionen (Cologne Divisions) 1965 150 pages cut out of the “Kölner Tageszeitung”, adhesive binding, cardboard cover Dieter Roth Foundation, Hamburg

727

321

Joseph Beuys Fluxusobjekt 1962 mixed media Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Loan of Lothar Schirmer, Munich

León Ferrari La civilización occidental y cristiana (The Western Christian Civilization) 1965 plaster, wood, and oil Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari. Arte y Acervo, Buenos Aires

322 729

323

Lynn Hershman Leeson Breathing Machine 1965 Plexiglas on wood, sound, sensors, wax, cast face, wig, make-up Collection of the Artist

324

Lynn Hershman Leeson Caged Woman 1965 cage, make-up, wax, wig, wire and tape recorder, Plexiglas, wood, sensor and sound Collection of the Artist, New York

731

325 Eduardo Paolozzi Robot c. 1956 bronze Grosvenor Gallery, London

Eduardo Paolozzi Standing Figure 1958 bronze Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon

326

327

Richard Hamilton Respective 1951 oil on canvas on board Pallant House Gallery, Chichester

328

Karl Otto Götz Statistisch-Metrische Modulation 20:10:4:2 (Statistical-Metric Modulation 20:10:4:2) 1961 felt pen on paper Private Collection

735

329

Jesús Rafael Soto Sin título (Estructura cinética de elementos geométricos) (Untitled [Kinetic Structure of Geometric Elements]) 1956 paint on Plexiglas and wood with screws The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

330 Almir Mavignier Konvex-Konkav II (Convex-Concave II) 1962 oil on canvas Collection of the Artist, Hamburg

737

331 Mohammed Melehi Quadrettini 1963 acrylic on canvas Loft Art Gallery, Casablanca

332

François Morellet 4 Double Grids 0°, 22°5, 45°, 67°5 1960-61 oil on wood Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb

739

Yuri Zlotnikov Signal Systems 1957-62 tempera and watercolors on paper Collection of the Artist, Moscow

333

741

334 Ed Ruscha Hurting the Word Radio #1 1964 oil on canvas The Menil Collection, Houston

335

336

Gerhard Rühm John McHale Transistor 1954 paper collage Yale Center for British Art, New Haven

L'Essentiel de la grammaire (The Essence of Grammar) 1962 German grammar in 6 plates, painted over with India ink, foldable Generali Foundation Collection – Permanent loan to the Museum der Moderne Salzburg

743

337

Charles Eames and Ray Eames A Communications Primer 1953 16mm color film, 21’ 30” Eames Office LLC, Los Angeles

Tanaka Atsuko > Electric Dress 1956 (reproduced in 1986) synthetic paint on incandescent lightbulbs electric cords and control Takamatsu Art Museum

338

339

Günther Uecker TV 1963 TV, table, nails Private Collection

340

Nam June Paik Zen for TV 1963/90 TV, wooden case, magnet Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie

747

341

342

Wolf Vostell Sun in Your Head 1963 16 mm black-and-white film, transferred to video (U-Matic) in 1967; restored and digitalized on DVD in 2006, 5' 30'' The Wolf Vostell Estate, Bad Nauheim

Bruce Conner A MOVIE 1958 (digitally restored 2016) 16mm black-and-white film, 12' Conner Family Trust and Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles

343

Jikken Ko-boGinrin (Silver Wheel) 1955 35mm film transferred to DVD, 11' 57'' Tokuma Shoten Publishing Co., Ltd, Tokyo

749

344

345

Yoko Ono Stan VanDerBeek Breathdeath 1964 16mm black-and-white film, 15' The Estate of Stan VanDerBeek

Cut Piece 1965 black-and-white film at Carnegie Recital Hall in New York City in March 1965 8” Collection of Yoko Ono © Yoko Ono

346

347

Karl Otto Götz

Guy Debord

Density 10:2:2:1 1962-63 8mm black-and-white film, 5' 54''

Hurlements en faveur de Sade (Howling for Sade) 1952 35mm black-and-white film, 64'

751

348

Wolf Vostell You are Leaving the American Sector 1964-65 Spray paint on silk, screen print on canvas Museum Folkwang, Essen

753

349

350

< Thomas Bayrle Mao und die Gymnasiasten (Mao and the Schoolboys) 1965 plywood, particle board, oil paint, electric motor Museum Wiesbaden

Tadeusz Kantor “Signez s’il vous plait!” (“Sign, Please!”) 1965 mixed media Moderna Museet, Stockholm

755

351 Öyvind Fahlström Dr. Schweitzer’s Last Mission 1964–66 variable polyptych, tempera on panel, metal, plastic Moderna Museet, Stockholm

757

SELECTED DOCUMENTS Compiled by Daniel Milnes and Megan Hines

1 Arturo [journal] no.1, Summer 1944, Buenos Aires, Argentina

2 Angry Penguins [journal] Max Harris and John Reed (eds.). December 1945, Melbourne, Australia

3 1945: Revista mensual hecha por pintores, grabadores, escritores, dibujantes, fotografos en defensa del progreso social de México (1945: Monthly review for Painters, Engravers, Writers, Drawers, Photographers in defense of social progress in Mexico) [journal] no. 2, December 1945, Mexico City, Mexico

4 Allgemeine Deutsche Kunstausstellung (General German Art Show) [invitation card] Stadthalle Nordplatz, Dresden, August 25-October 31, 1946, Germany

5 Mundo Literário (Literary World) [journal] no. 24, October 19, 1946, Lisbon, Portugal

6 Fourteen Americans [exhibition catalogue] Museum of Modern Art, New York, September 11-December 8, 1946, USA

8 Luciano Fontana Manifesto Blanco. 1946, Buenos Aires, Argentina

7 Arte Concreto Invención [journal] no. 1, August 1946, Buenos Aires, Argentina

9 La Part du Sable [journal] ed. Georges Henein, Ramsès Younan. No. 1, February 1947, Cairo: Édition La Part du Sable, Egypt

11 Présence Africaine [journal] no.1, November-December 1947, Paris/Dakar, France/Senegal

10 Willi Baumeister Das Unbekannte in der Kunst (The Unknown in Art). 1947, Stuttgart: Curt E. Schwab Verlagsgesellschaft, Germany 761

12 Tiger’s Eye [journal] no. 1, October 1947, Westport, CT, USA

14 New Horizons [exhibition poster] Museum Tel Aviv, 1948, Israel

13 Arte Madí universal [journal] no. 0, 1947, Buenos Aires, Argentina

15 Zone 5 [exhibition poster] Galerie Franz, Berlin, September 4-October 20, 1948, Germany 17 The First National Art Exhibition [exhibition catalogue] National Beiping Arts College, Beijing, July 2-16, 1949, China

16 XXIV Esposizione internazionale d’arte: Biennale de Venezia (24th Venice Biennial) [exhibition poster] The Giardini, Venice, May 29-September 30, 1948, Italy

18 Progressive Art Group [revised manifesto and brochure for first group exhibition] Baroda/Mumbai, 1949, India

19 Al-Fikr al-Hadith: Majalla Shahriya lil Fan wa al-Thaqafah al-Hura (Monthly Journal for the Free Arts and Culture) [journal] Jameel Hamoudi (ed.). no. 4, c. 1949, Baghdad, Iraq

21 Renmin meishu (People’s Art) [journal] No. 1, February 1, 1950, Beijing, China 20 Cobra. Bulletin pour la coordination des investigations artistiques lien souple des groupes expérimentaux Danois (Høst), Belge (Surrealiste-révolutionnaire) et Hollandais (Reflex) [journal] no. 1, March, 1949, Copenhagen, Denmark

22 VOKS Bulletin [journal] no. 65, 1950, Moscow: USSR Society for Cultural Relations, Soviet Union

23 Das Menschenbild in unserer Zeit (The Image of Man in our Time) [exhibition catalogue] Mathildenhöhe, Darmstadt, July 15-September 3, 1950, Federal Republic of Germany

763

24 Hushang Irani The Nightingale’s Butcher Manifesto in: Khorous Jangi (Fighting Cock) [journal]. Tehran, May 6, 1951, Iran

25 Iskusstvo (Art) [journal] January-February, 1951, Moscow, Soviet Union

27 Fourth Experimental Workshop Presentation - o- event] [program for Jikken Kob Joshi Gakuin Auditorium, Ichigaya, Tokyo, August 9, 1952, Japan

28 Prima Esposizione del Movimento Nucleare (First Exhibition of the Nuclear Art Movement) [exhibition poster] Amici della Francia, Milan, March 16-24, 1952, Italy 26 I Bienal do Museu de arte moderna de São Paulo (First São Paulo Biennial) [exhibition catalogue] Museu de arte moderna de São Paulo, São Paulo, October-December 1951, Brazil

29 Vértice [journal] no. 7, July 1952, Coimbra, Portugal

30 Michel Tapié. Un art autre (Art of Another Kind) 1952, Paris: Gabriel-Giraud et fils, France

31 Realismo [journal] No.1, June 1952, Milan, Italy

32 Noticias de Arte (Art News) [journal] no.1, September 1952, Havana, Cuba

33 Lothar Charoux, Waldemar Cordeiro, Geraldo de Barros, Kazmer Féjer, Leopoldo Haar, Luiz Sacilotto, Anatol Wladyslaw Manifesto ruptura. 1952, São Paulo, Brazil 765

35 Marg [journal] vol. 8, no.1, 1954, Mumbai, India

36 Aimé Azar Les inquiets [publication]. 1954, Cairo: Imprimerie Française, Egypt

34 Second Annual Exhibition of Painting and Sculpturel [exhibition poster] Stable Gallery, New York, January 11-February 7, 1953, USA

38 1st Gutai Art Exhibition [invitation card] Ohara Kaikan, Tokyo, October 19-28, 1955, Japan

37 Gutai [journal] Yoshihara Jiro� and Sho�zo� Shimamoto (eds.). no. 1, January 1955. Nishinomiya, Japan

39 Lahore Art Circle Group Exhibition [exhibition catalogue] Lahore, 1955, Pakistan

40 Première Biennale de la Méditerranée (First Biennial for the Arts of Mediterranean Countries) [exhibition catalogue] Alexandria Museum of Fine Arts, Alexandria, July 26-September 15, 1955, Egypt

41 documenta I [exhibition poster] Fridericianum, Kassel, July 16-September 18, 1955, Federal Republic of Germany

42 Yoshihara Jiro¯ Gutai Manifesto in: Geijutsu Shincho¯ . vol. 7, no. 12 (December 1956), Japan

43 Quadrum [journal] no. 1, May 1956, Brussels, Belgium 44 The Baghdad Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture [exhibition catalogue] Al-Mansur Club, Baghdad, February, 1957, Iraq

45 Semina [journal] no. 2, December 1957, San Francisco, CA, USA 767

46 a. no. 2, March 1957, Buenos Aires, Argentina

47 The First Tehran Biennial [exhibition catalogue] Abyaz Palace Building within the Golestan Palace Complex, Tehran, April 1958, Iran

48 Guy Debord, Asger Jorn Mémoires: structures portantes d’Asger Jorn 1958. France: L'Internationale situationniste.

49 Noigandres no. 4, 1958, São Paulo, Brazil

49 Noigandres [journal] no. 4, 1958, São Paulo, Brazil

50 Black Orpheus: A Journal of African and Afro-American Literature [journal] No. 6, November 1959, Ibadan: Ministry of Education, Nigeria

51 Allan Kaprow: 18 Happenings in 6 Parts [cast and instructions] Reuben Gallery, New York, October 4, 6-10, 1959, USA

52 Ferreira Gullar, Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, Amílcar de Castro, Cláudio Mello e Souza, Frank Weissmann, Reynaldo Jardim, Theon Spanúdis Manifesto neoconcreto (Neo-concrete manifesto) in: Jornal do Brasil [journal]. Rio de Janeiro, March 22 1959, Brazil

53 60 Fine Art Exhibition [leaflet] Deoksugung Palace, Seoul, October 5-14, 1960, Korea

55 Ulli Beier Art in Nigeria. 1960, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, United Kingdom

54 Wall Art Exhibition [leaflet] The exterior walls of the Deoksugung Palace, Seoul, October 1-15, 1960, Korea 769

57 Nove tendencije (New Tendencies) [exhibition poster] Galerija suvremene umjetnosti, Zagreb, August 3-September 14, 1961, Yugoslavia

56 Arte Normativo Español [exhibition poster] Ateneo de Valencia, Valencia, March 12-26, 1960, Spain

59 Bewogen Beweging (Moved Movement) [exhibition poster] Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, March 10-April 17 1961, Netherlands

58 Gorgona [anti-magazine] no.1, 1961, Zagreb, Yugoslavia

60 Zero [journal] no. 3, July 1961, Düsseldorf, Federal Republic of Germany

61 Otra figuración (Another Figuration) [exhibition catalogue] Galeria Peuser, Buenos Aires, August 23-September 6, 1961, Argentina

62 Exhibitions to be held on the occasion of the First International Congress of African Culture [exhibition catalogue] ed. Frank McEwen. National Gallery, Salisbury, August 1-September 30, 1962, Southern Rhodesia

63 Georg Baselitz, Eugen Schönebeck. 2. Pandämonium (Second Pandemonium) [poster] Berlin, Spring, 1962, Federal Republic of Germany

64 Festival of Misfits [invitation card] Gallery One, London, October 23 1962, United Kingdom

65 Group 1890 [exhibition catalogue] Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, October 20–29, 1963, India 771

66 Lantern. Journal of Knowledge and Culture [journal] vol. 12, no. 3, March 1963, Pretoria: Association for the Advancement of Knowledge and Culture, South Africa

67 Leben mit Pop – Eine Demonstration für den kapitalistischen Realismus (Living with Pop – A Demonstration for Capitalist Realism) [invitation card, recto and verso] Bergeshaus, Düsseldorf, October 11-October 25, 1963, Federal Republic of Germany

68 XII Convegno internazionale artisti, critici e studiosi d’arte (12th Convention of Artists, Critics and Scholars of Art) [poster] Rimini, September 28-30, 1963, Italy

69 George Maciunas. Fluxus Manifesto 1963

71 Yoko Ono Grapefruit. 1964, Tokyo: Wunternaum Press, Japan

70 Petition of the Aboriginal people of Yirrkala August 14, 1963, Australia

73 Nassir Chora, Mahmoud Hammad, Fateh Al-Moudarres, Elias Zaiat [exhibition catalogue] Gallery Siwann, Damascus, June 1965, Syria

72 Carolee Schneemann, Meat Joy [poster] Judson Memorial Church, New York, November 16-18, 1964, USA 773

74 Erste Bienniale der Ostseeländer (First Biennial of the Baltic Sea Countries) [exhibition catalogue] Museum der Stadt Rostock, Rostock, July 4-August 8, 1965, German Democratic Republic

75 Stano Filko, Alex Mlynarcik. Invitation to Happsoc [invitation sheet] Bratislava, May 2-8, 1965, Czechoslovakia

76 David Medalla mmmmm…. Manifesto in: Signals Newsbulletin, vol.1, no.8, June-July, 1965, United Kingdom

77 Spiral [exhibition catalogue] One Forty-Seven Christopher Street, New York, May 15-June 5, 1965, USA

78 Sho�mei To�matsu 11:02 Nagasaki. 1966, Tokyo: Shashindojin-sha, Japan

ARTISTS’ BIOGRAPHIES

776

A Shafic Abboud Born 1926 in Bikfaya, Lebanon Died 2004 in Paris, France Shafic Abboud studied at the Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts (ALBA) (Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts) under César Gemayel (1898–1958) before he went to Paris in 1947. There he studied at the École nationale supérieure des BeauxArts (National School of Fine Arts) and frequented the studios of Jean Metzinger (1883–1956), Fernand Léger (1881–1955), and André Lhote (1885–1962). He returned to Lebanon in 1949 and held his first solo show of figurative paintings in Beirut in 1950. The following year he resettled in Paris. During the first half of the 1950s Abboud developed an admiration for the art of Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947), Roger Bissière (1886–1964), and Nicolas de Staël (1914–1955). With the support of the art critic Roger van Gindertael (1899–1982), Abboud had his first Parisian exhibition of abstract works in 1955. He was invited to the Salon des réalités nouvelles (Salon of New Realities) in Paris and was the only Arab artist included in the first Paris Biennale in 1959. As a painter Abboud is renowned for the subtle incorporation of his Lebanese roots, namely his childhood memories and the landscape of Mount Lebanon, into his masterfully balanced compositions, as well as for his balanced use of color. He traveled often and consistently returned to his homeland, where he played a major role in Beirut’s cultural and artistic life. Affandi Born 1907 in Cirebon, Java Died 1990 in Yogyakarta, Indonesia Affandi was a self-taught artist who is regarded as a leading figure within the modern art movement in Indonesia. He is known for his expressionistic painting style from the 1950s, with colorful swirling lines of thick impasto directly applied on the canvas with the tube or his fingers. However, his early works from the 1930s and ’40s drew on a more impressionistic style. Affandi’s subjects were always grounded in reality. In his early years he depicted his family and surroundings at home, while he focused on his journeys throughout Indonesia and around the world. In the 1930s Affandi was involved in the Lima Bandung artist group. At the time of Indonesia’s independent movement in the 1940s Affandi took part in several artists’ associations, including the Pelukis Rakyat (People’s Painters) and Asosiasi Pelukis Indonesia (Indonesian Painters Association), and encouraged the fight against the Dutch occupation. Affandi gained international recognition when he represented Indonesia at the Venice Biennale in 1954 (where he won a prize) and the Bienal de São Paulo in 1956. Later he was honored with notable prizes and teaching appointments in the United States and Indonesia.

Erol Akyavas¸ Born 1932 in Istanbul, Turkey Died 1999 in Istanbul, Turkey

Carl Andre Born 1935 in Quincy, MA, USA Lives and works in New York, NY, USA

Erol Akyavas¸ began his painting career in the early 1950s when he studied under Bedri Rahmi Eyübog�lu (1911–1975) at the Güzel Sanatlar Akademisi (Academy of Fine Arts), Istanbul. He then studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze (Academy of Fine Arts in Florence) and at the studios of André Lhote (1885–1962) and Fernand Léger (1881–1955) in Paris. From 1954 to 1960 Akyavas studied architecture with Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969) at the Illi­ nois Institute of Technology, Chicago, before moving to New York in 1967. Akyavas¸’s paintings during nearly fifty years reflect his shifts in approach and emphasis. He was particularly interested in the cultural heri­ tage and traditions of his homeland, which he expressed through modern Western styles. His large-scale paintings addressed such universal issues as space, time, and causation, often expressed in dualities. Akyavas¸ experimented with geometrical abstraction, employed the Arabic letterform as calligraphic abstraction, and included iconic Ottoman symbols or motifs, along with such visual elements as walls, architectural forms, and even human imprints. In 1961 he became the first Turkish artist to be represented in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, with his work The Glory of the Kings (1959).

Carl Andre studied at the Phillips Academy boarding school in Andover, Massachusetts, from 1951 to 1953 and afterward traveled to France and England, returning deeply impressed by the site of Stonehenge. In 1956 he moved to New York, where he lived and worked closely with his former classmates Frank Stella (b. 1936) and Hollis Frampton (1936–1984). During this time Andre was introduced to the writing of Ezra Pound and developed an increasing interest in the work of Constantin Brâncus¸i (1876–1957). Andre is mostly known for his early assembled wood sculptures and his “Equivalents” series—flat, rug-like arrangements of gridded metal elements first displayed at his one-man show in 1965 at Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York. Aside from sculpting Andre wrote more than 1000 poems, which follow the construction principles of serialism. From 1960 to 1964 he worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad, which later influenced his art and personal comportment. In 1969 Andre joined the Art Workers Coalition, a group of artists pushing for political and museum reform. He was included in the Minimalist group exhibition Primary Structures at New York’s Jewish Museum in 1966 and received a 1970 retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, also in New York.

Fateh Al-Moudarres Born 1922 in Aleppo, Syria Died 1999 in Aleppo, Syria

Karel Appel Born 1921 in Amsterdam, Netherlands Died 2006 in Zurich, Switzerland

Fateh Al-Moudarres is recognized as a leading figure in the development of modernism in Syria. His early, realist painting drew inspiration from sources within Syria, such as Christian and Muslim iconography and Assyrian antiquities. During his studies at the Accademia di Belle Arti (Academy of Fine Arts) in Rome, from 1954 to 1960, Moudarres was influenced by modern art movements, particularly Surrealism. He began to incorporate abstraction into his painting at this time, blending the traditions of Syrian art with Western techniques and stylistic developments. When he returned to Syria, Moudarres’s painting became increasingly political. From 1967 he turned from non-objective painting to social themes, critiquing the upheaval to Syrian families and social relationships wrought by modern life. He was acutely concerned about the damage to Syria’s rural population due to the agricultural crisis—a situation which forced the artist himself to move to Damascus in the 1960s. He continued his studies at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts (National School of Fine Arts) in Paris for three years in the 1970s. Moudarres subsequently became an influDimashq (Univerential teacher at Jami‘atu sity of Damascus). Through his use of rich color coupled with thick, roughened paint, Moudarres depicted everyday people and their ordinary problems with an air of loss and mourning.

Karel Appel studied at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten (State Academy of Fine Arts) in Amsterdam during the early 1940s. He co-founded the Nederlandse Experimentele Groep (Dutch Experimental Group) in 1948, which merged later that year with artists in Copenhagen and Brussels to form the avant-garde collective CoBrA. Influenced by folk, children’s, and modern art, Appel created a controversial mural called Vragende Kinderen (Questioning Children) in 1949 for Amsterdam’s city hall; it was covered up for ten years. Appel settled in Paris in 1950, and after two years detached himself from CoBrA. He then became part of an artistic movement centered around the critic Michel Tapié (1909–1987) known as art informel (or art autre). Appel is best known for his expressive and colorful paintings depicting fabulous creatures and masks, but he also experimented fruitfully in other mediums and artistic fields. He was awarded solo shows at the Palais des Beaux-Arts (Palace of Fine Arts), Brussels, in 1953 and at Martha Jackson Gallery, New York, in 1954. He received the UNESCO Prize at the 1954 Venice Biennale and the Guggenheim International Award in 1960. His later work included a collaboration with Beat poet Allen Ginsberg (1926– 1997) in the 1980s. Rasheed Araeen Born 1935 in Karachi, Pakistan Lives and works in London, UK Rasheed Araeen left his homeland of Pakis­ tan in 1964 and moved to the United Kingdom. Before this decisive step he underwent

no artistic education, but was trained and worked as a civil engineer in Karachi. Before his migration he had already produced works of art such as ink paintings, sketches, photographs, and Minimalist-inspired sculptures. In those early works, like his “Hula Hoop” series (1959–61), he showed an interest in wavelike movement and curved forms. Soon after his arrival in London he started to produce his well-known geometric sculptures. These modular units consisted of open display structures created from colored wood in which vertical and horizontal lines are held together by a network of diagonals. Since the 1970s Araeen’s work has become politically engaged with the recognition of black and Asian artists within the British postwar art scene. He joined the British Black Panther movement in 1972 and founded three art journals: Black Phoenix (1978), Third Text (1987), and Third Text Asia (2008). He also curated two famous exhibitions: The Essential Black Art in 1988 at the Chisenhale Gallery and The Other Story at the Hayward Gallery in 1989. Wifredo Arcay Born 1925 in Havana, Cuba Died 1997 in Paris, France Wifredo Arcay studied at the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro (National Academy of Fine Arts of Saint Alexander) in Havana, then moved to Paris on a grant in 1949. There he studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière from 1949 to 1950 and frequented the Atelier d’Art Abstrait, becoming a part of the post-Cubist geometric abstraction movement. Arcay set up his first studio at the villa of André Bloc (1896–1966) in Meudon in 1951, where he met artists like Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931) and Fernand Léger (1881–1955). In 1953 he introduced serigraphy to France and realized Maîtres d’Aujourd’hui (Today’s Masters), an edition of twelve silkscreen prints honoring the prewar aesthetics of abstraction, followed by a second edition (Jeunes Peintres d’Aujourd’hui [Today’s Young Painters], 1954) dedicated to a younger generation of abstract artists. In the late 1950s and early 1960s Arcay’s practice evolved from easel painting into reliefs designed for architectural space. He joined the Constructivist Groupe Espace in 1953, and from 1959 to 1961 he was a member of the Cuban group Los Diez Pintores Concretos (Ten Concrete Painters). Although Arcay spent two-thirds of his life in France he regularly sent works to Cuba and represented his home country in exhibitions abroad, such as the 1955 Bienal de São Paulo. Siah Armajani Born 1939 in Tehran, Iran Lives and works in Minneapolis, MN, USA Siah Armajani migrated to the United States in 1960. He studied philosophy and mathematics at Macalester College in Minneapolis; at the same time he started making artworks. He had early success with his painting Prayer (1962), which was exhibited and purchased by the Walker Art Center. This piece, like his other works of that time, shows a dense, abstract structure composed of excerpts of poems from the

777

thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (including the Sufi writers Rumi and Hafez), which Armajani transcribed by hand onto the canvas using black ink. From the late 1960s Armajani developed an interest in American vernacular building techniques, which led to the creation of his first model bridges. Those early attempts were followed by freestanding sculptures and bigger architectural efforts such as reading rooms, bridges and poetry gardens. His focus on public art was inspired by his belief in democratic ideals put forward by thinkers like Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882). His early exhibitions included Art by Telephone at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in 1969, Information at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1970, and Documenta, Kassel (1972; 1982; 1987). Frank Auerbach Born 1931 in Berlin, Germany Lives and works in London, UK Frank Auerbach was sent to England by his parents in 1939 to escape Nazi persecution of Jewish people in Germany. His parents died in a concentration camp. From 1947 to 1953 he attended the evening painting class of David Bomberg (1890–1957) at Borough Polytechnic in London, where he met Leon Kossoff (b. 1926). He first studied at London’s St Martin’s School of Art from 1948 to 1952, and afterward at the Royal College of Art until 1955. Auerbach taught at several institutions, including secondary schools and the Slade School of Fine Art in London. He lived and worked most of his life in Camden Town, London, and repeatedly returned to the people and urban landscapes near his studio. Auerbach’s paintings were never entirely abstract but were always grounded in his close reality. He is known for his thick impasto technique, as well as for his painstaking attempts to achieve the image he wants. He sometimes scraped his canvases dozens of times before realizing a finished work. Auerbach is considered a central figure of the so-called School of London alongside artists such as Francis Bacon (1909–1992) and Lucian Freud (1922–2011). In 1986 he represented Britain at the Venice Biennale and was awarded, with Sigmar Polke (1941–2010), the Golden Lion prize.

B Francis Bacon Born 1909 in Dublin, Ireland Died 1992 in Madrid, Spain Francis Bacon, a self-taught artist, became a leading figurative painter of the postwar era. In 1927 he visited Berlin and Paris, where he was inspired by the work of Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665) and Pablo Picasso (1881–1973). He created his first artworks that year, attending the free European Academies in Paris. Late in 1928 or early in 1929 Bacon settled in London and started a short career as an interior decorator and furniture designer. Nearly a decade later he was included in the 1937 exhibition Young British Painters at Thomas Agnew & Sons,

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along with artists such as Graham Sutherland (1903–1980). His breakthrough came in 1944 with the triptych Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, widely considered his first mature work. Bacon would go on to paint distorted human fi­gures and scenes that evoke alienation, violence, and suffering. Throughout his career Bacon worked in sequences and created variations on motifs. He drew on both Christian and mythological themes and found inspiration in the works of other artists, such as Diego Velázquez (1599–1660) and photographer Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904). His first major retrospective was held at Tate Gallery, London, in 1962. Enrico Baj Born 1924 in Milan, Italy Died 2003 in Vergiate, Italy Enrico Baj was a central figure of the Italian neo-avant-garde. He was associated with Dada, Surrealism, art informel, CoBrA, and Arte Nucleare—a movement he co-founded with Sergio Dangelo (b. 1932). Baj was a critic of Italian fascism, fleeing to Geneva in 1944 to avoid conscription in the Italian army under Mussolini. After World War II, Baj returned to Milan, studying at both the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera (Brera Academy of Fine Arts), where he had begun his studies in 1938), and the law department at the Università degli Studi di Milano (University of Milan). At Brera, Baj was exposed to Abstract Expressionism. By 1955 Baj had begun to create collages, using ribbons, patterned fabrics and wallpapers, army decorations, and furniture scraps to create kitsch satire. His best-known found-object series was his sharply critical “Generals.” In 1960 Baj’s work had its New York debut in the exhibition Surrealist Intrusion in the Enchanters’ Domain at D’Arcy Galleries, curated by Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) and André Breton (1896–1966). Baj again collaborated with Duchamp on Homage to Marcel Duchamp, a reimagining of the Mona Lisa with the ar­tist’s face, in 1965. In 1961 Baj was inclu­ded in The Art of Assemblage at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and in 1964, he was featured in the Venice Biennale. Georg Baselitz (born Hans-Georg Kern) Born 1938 in Deutschbaselitz, Germany Lives and works in Munich, Germany Georg Baselitz began his artistic training in 1956 at the Hochschule für bildende und angewandte Kunst (College of Fine and Applied Arts) in East Berlin. After he was expelled in 1957 he continued his studies at the Hochschule für bildende Künste (College of Fine Arts) in West Berlin, from which he graduated in 1962. From 1960 onward he created challenging, often provocative works in a figura­ tive style later categorized as Neoexpressionism. His crude, emotionally charged painting style reflected his interest in reviving the tradition and sources of German Expressionist painting, such as non-Western art and art brut, for the postwar era. His first solo exhibition in 1963 at Galerie Werner & Katz in West Berlin caused a scandal, when his works Die große Nacht im Eimer (The Big Night in the Bucket; 1962/63) and Der nackte Mann (The Naked Man; 1962)

were confiscated by the public prosecutor for “infringement of public morality.” In 1969 Baselitz created his first upside-down painting (Der Wald auf dem Kopf [The Forest on Its Head]); in the 1970s, he developed his finger-painting technique. Besides painting he also worked in sculpture and printmaking. Baselitz taught at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste (State Academy of Fine Arts) Karlsruhe and at the Universität der Künste (University of the Arts) Berlin. He was included in Documenta, Kassel (1972) and showed at Galerie Heiner Friedrich in Munich, Cologne, and New York throughout the 1970s. Thomas Bayrle Born 1937 in Berlin, Germany Lives and works in Frankfurt am Main, Germany Thomas Bayrle was a weaver’s apprentice from 1957 to 1959, and afterward studied at the Werkkunstschule (Art College) in Offenbach until 1961. While he first concentrated on commercial art his focus soon shifted toward different printing techniques, such as lithography and etching. With Bernhard Jäger (b. 1937) he founded Gulliver-Presse in 1962 and quickly acquired renown as a printer and publisher of artist’s books. In Bayrle’s artistic practice his preference for graphics and printing merged with his fascination for machines and a critical approach toward mecha­nization and mass culture. Serial repetition within grid structures became the guiding principle of his works, which were related to American Pop art. He created images (Superform) out of repeated small logos, figures, or pictograms, evoking the mechanics of global capitalist production. Bayrle sometimes also included controversial political personages in his works and “real” machines like engines (e.g , Kennedy in Berlin and Mao und die Gymnasiasten [Mao and the Athletes]; both 1964). From the late 1970s he worked with film and later became a pioneer of computer-generated and animated art. He taught at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main from 1975 to 2007 and was repeatedly featured in the Venice Biennale (2003; 2009) and Documenta, Kassel (1964; 1977; 2012). Romare Bearden Born 1911 in Charlotte, NC, USA Died 1988 in New York, NY, USA Influenced by his New York upbringing during the 1920s Harlem Renaissance, Romare Bearden’s art reflects the diverse cultural heritage of African American life. Bearden originally studied education and held positions as a social worker. During the mid-1930s, Bearden worked a cartoonist for the Baltimore Afro-American and took evening classes at the Art Students League with German Dada artist George Grosz (1893–1959). While his earliest works recalled the social realism of Mexican mural painting, Bearden soon incorporated references to Abstract Expressionism, Japanese woodcarving and African tribal cultures. After serving in the U.S. Army from 1942 to 1945, Bearden studied in 1950 at the Sorbonne in Paris. Upon his return to New York, he became more involved in social activism. In 1963 Bearden co-founded Spiral, a group of African American artists who discussed the ci­v­il rights struggle. He was also instrumen-

tal in establishing the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1968 and Cinque Gallery in 1969. During the 1960s Bearden came to favor collage as a technique for political art. He exhibited “Prevalence of Ritual,” one of his best-known collage series, in a 1971 solo show at the Museum of Modern Art. He received many honors, including the National Medal of Arts in 1987. Mieczysław Berman Born 1903 in Warsaw, Poland Died 1975 in Warsaw, Poland While studying graphic design and ty­ pography at the Szkoły sztuki dekoracyjnej w Warszawie (School of Decorative Arts) in Warsaw, Mieczysław Berman became interested in Russian Constructivism. Berman’s Constructivist collages, begun in 1927, also show the influence of Dadaists such as László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946), Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948), and Hannah Höch (1889–1978). Berman often initiated his photomontages, which would become his primary medium, from personal experience. In 1930 Berman discovered the overtly political photomontages by John Heartfield (1891–1968) in the magazine Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (Workers’ Illustrated Newspaper). As a result of Heartfield’s influence, Berman moved away from Constructivism to use the medium of photomontage poli­ tically. With Franciszek Bartosek Berman co-founded the Warsaw Artists Group (also known as Phrygian Cap)—an organization, active from 1934 to 1938, that was affiliated with the Polish Communist Party. The group organized two exhibitions in Warsaw (1936) and Krakow (1937). Berman received the gold medal for poster design at the 1937 Exposition internationale des Arts et des Techniques appliqués à la Vie moderne (International Exposition of Art and Technology in Modern Life) in Paris. He spent World War II in the Soviet Union, where he contributed to the Polish-language Soviet occupation newspaper Red Banner. After the war he published satirical drawings and photomontages in magazines like Szpilki (Pins) and illustrated writings by Stanisław Jerzy Lec (1909–1966). Antonio Berni Born 1905 in Rosario, Argentina Died 1981 in Buenos Aires, Argentina Antonio Berni received a scholarship to study in Europe in 1925. He first trav­eled to Spain and afterward settled in Pa­­ r­ is, where he attended the workshops of André Lhote (1885–1962) and Othon Friesz (1879–1949) at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. After a brief return to Argentina, Berni lived in Paris again from 1927 to 1930. During this time he created Surrealist works and stu­ died Marxist politics. Back in Argentina in the early 1930s, the dire political and social si­ tuation caused a significant shift in Berni’s artistic approach. He established the Nuevo Realismo group in 1933 and began his lifelong involvement with political art, questioning social injustice and inequity. That same year Berni collaborated with David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896–1974) on a mural (Plastic Exercise). Berni’s social rea­list style was characterized by its large scale, narrative qualities and realistic rendering.

In the mid-1950s Berni turned to assemblage, using found trash materials and industrial waste. Beginning in 1958 Berni embarked on a series of prints and assemblages detailing the plights of fictional stock characters of Juanito Laguna (a disadvantaged youngster) and Ramona Montiel (a prostitute). Berni represented Argentina at the 1962 Venice Biennale, where he received the Grand Prix for printmaking. Joseph Beuys Born 1921 in Krefeld, Germany Died 1986 in Düsseldorf, Federal Republic of Germany Joseph Beuys was one of the most influential and controversial artists of postwar Germany. He began his artistic training in 1947 at the Kunstakademie (Art Academy) Düsseldorf. In 1953, the year of his graduation, he held his first solo exhibitions in Kraneburg and at the Von der Heydt Museum in Wuppertal. In 1958 he used the materials fat and felt for the first time. Beuys, who had been a Luftwaffe volunteer during World War II, built his artistic practice around the myth of him being rescued by nomadic Tartar tribesmen, who wrapped his cold and injured body in animal fat and felt, after his plane crash in 1944. In his actions and installations, such as Wie man dem toten Hasen die Bilder erklärt (How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare; 1965) he often included evocative objects and materials associated with his rescue and drew upon elements of shamanism. As a professor at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1961 to 1972, Beuys fought for free admission to art education for everyone and pursued his holistic approach to art in society and politics. He participated in every Documenta from 1964 to 1989. The Moderna Museet in Stockholm organized his first international exhibition in 1971. His first retrospective was held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1979. John Biggers Born 1924 in Gastonia, NC, USA Died 2001 in Houston, TX, USA John Biggers began his studies in 1941 at Hampton Institute in Virginia, where he met his early mentor Viktor Lowenfeld (1903– 1869) and studied with artists Charles White (1918–1979) and Elizabeth Catlett (1915–2012). After serving in the navy he followed Lowenfeld to Pennsylvania State University in 1946, where he received his doctorate in art education in 1954. Biggers is best known for his murals on the human condition. An early one (Dying Soldier, 1943) was shown at the Young Negro Art exhibition organized by Lowenfeld in 1943 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Biggers moved to Houston in 1949, where he established the art department at Texas Southern University. He taught at this institution for more than thirty years. In 1957 Biggers received a UNESCO grant, which enabled him to become one of the first African American artists to travel to Africa. He visited Ghana, Togo, Benin, and Nigeria. After his sojourn Biggers created the richly illustrated book Ananse: The Web of Life in Africa, published in 1961, and developed a system of visual icons inspired by African motifs and symbolism. His later work

became concerned with depicting matriarchal systems (opposed to European patriarchy) and quilt-like geometry. Max Bill Born 1908 in Winterthur, Switzerland Died 1994 in Berlin, Germany Max Bill was one of the most avid proponents of the “principle of order” and sought to align almost all of his designs within what he termed “mathematical thinking,” which he considered the basis of human experience. He first trained as a silversmith in Switzerland before studying at the Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany (1927–29). In the 1930s he was influenced by the ideas of De Stijl movement (1917–31; also known as Neoplasticism), especially as put forth in its manifesto, The Basis of Concrete Art (1930), by the Dutch artist Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931). Using this essay as a basis for his own investigations into concrete forms, Bill later organized the seminal exhibition Konkrete Kunst (Concrete Art) at the Kunsthalle Basel in 1944. In 1953 Bill co-founded the Hochschule für Gestaltung (College of Design) in Ulm, where he both designed the building and developed its Bauhaus-based curriculum, which later integrated science and art. Bill exhibited extensively in the postwar period. His sculpture Dreiteilige Einheit (Tripartite Unity; 1950), which won first prize at the Bienal de São Paulo in 1951, influenced the emergence of Concrete art in Latin America. Bill’s work has been exhibited extensively, including the first three Documenta, Kassel (1955; 1959; 1964); and retrospectives at the Kunsthaus Zürich (1968–69); the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1974); and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City (1988). Alexander Boghossian Born 1937 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia Died 2003 in Washington, DC, USA The Armenian-Ethiopian artist Alexander Boghossian (also known as Skunder) first studied art formally in Europe after he was awarded a scholarship by the Ethiopian government in 1955. He studied for two years in London at St Martin’s School, Central School, and the Slade School of Fine Art. He then spent nine years in Paris, where he studied and taught at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. He returned to Ethiopia from 1966 to 1969 and then emigrated to the United States in 1970, where he taught at the historically black Howard University from 1972 to 2001. Boghossian was involved in the Négritude movement (an extension of Pan-Africanism), and his art brought together European techniques with materials like bark and animal skins. His colorful paintings were inspired by Surrealism, as well as Coptic and West African art. Boghossian depicted prismatic abstract color compositions or dreamlike worlds, often including mythical creatures. He became the first contemporary African artist whose work was purchased by the Musée d'art moderne de la ville de Paris (in 1963) and the Muse­um of Modern Art, New York (in 1965).

Lee Bontecou Born 1931 in Providence, RI, USA Lives and works in Orbisonia, PA, USA Lee Bontecou trained at the Art Students League in New York from 1952 to 1955. In 1954 she attended the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture in Maine and learned to weld. During her stay in Italy from 1957 to 1958 on a Fulbright scholarship she used soot in her drawings for the first time. Upon her return to New York in 1958 she started to experiment with small-scale wall-mounted sculptural assemblages, soon developing her signature style and technique. These constructions, made by fastening fabric to steel fragments that are arranged in swirling forms with dark cen­ tral voids, evoke technological, mechanical, geological, and biological motifs. Bontecou had her first solo show in 1960 at Castelli Gallery in New York. The following year she was included in The Art of Assemblage at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Her early success led to her withdrawal from the public art sphere in the 1970s. She taught at Brooklyn College from 1971 to 1991 and worked on a new series of artworks—large mobile-like sculptures hanging from the ceiling. Together with earlier vacuum-formed plastic sculptures of plants and marine organisms, these “galaxies” made of wire and ceramics mark a completely new approach within her oeuvre. Derek Boshier Born 1937 in Portsmouth, UK Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, USA Derek Boshier gained attention for his paintings while studying at the Royal College of Art in London from 1959 to 1962. With fellow students like David Hockney (b. 1937) and Allen Jones (b. 1937), he was one of the pioneers of British Pop art. Influ­enced by the writings of Marshall McLuhan, Vance Packard, and John Kenneth Galbraith, Boshier drew on the iconography of British and American mass culture and made references to current political events and issues during the early 1960s, with a critical rather than celebratory attitude. Boshier was included in Ken Russell’s 1962 documentary Pop Goes the Easel. Later that year, Boshier went to India on a one-year scholarship and experimented with the narrative strategies of Hindu symbolism. Back in England he changed his style repeatedly: he turned to hardedge and geometric abstraction, produced politically radical Conceptual art, created elemental shaped sculptures in a Minimalist manner, and returned to painting with comical figures. Boshier took up different mediums like drawing, printmaking, collage, film, books, sculpture, installation and photography. His collaboration with music groups like The Clash, and David Bowie (1947–2016) introduced his work to a broader audience. He represented Britain in the 1963 Paris Biennale and held teaching positions in London and Texas. Vladimír Boudník Born 1924 in Prague, Czechoslovak Republic Died 1968 in Prague, Czechoslovakia Vladimír Boudník was sent to a forced labor camp in Germany during World War II. After

the war he studied printmaking in Prague from 1945 to 1949 and subsequently evolved into an influential figure in Czech postwar art. From the late 1940s to the late 1950s he became a pioneer of happenings, and in the 1960s he created work that involved the participation of psychiatric patients. He became the founder and major representative of Explosionism and formulated the movement’s principles in a number of manifestos. During the 1950s and ’60s he invented experimental printing techniques inspired by his experiences working in different factories during and after the war. For his “active prints,” which he began in 1954, he treated Duralumin sheets with industrial tools and materials (such as nails, pieces of metal, or blades of lathes), or burned them with oxyacetylene. His “structural prints” (begun in 1959) were created through the fixation of materials like sand, pieces of fabric, and emery paper to the plate. With these innovations Boudník realized powerful compositions that he produced in different colors and limited numbers. He befriended the author Bohumil Hrabal (1914–1997) while they worked together at an ironworks and appears as a character in several of Hrabal’s novels. Frank Bowling Born 1936 in Bartica, British Guyana Lives in New York, NY, USA, and London, UK Frank Bowling migrated to London in 1950. In 1959 he received a scholarship to the Royal College of Art and graduated three years later with the silver medal in painting (David Hockney [b. 1937] won the gold). Associated at the time with Pop art, Bowling mounted his first solo show—Image in Revolt—at London’s Grabowski Gallery in 1962. A travel scholarship then enabled him to visit South America and the Caribbean. Bowling quickly abandoned figurative, postcolonial art for abstraction. In 1966 he moved to New York, where, bolstered by the African American community, he developed his “Map Paintings” (combining Color Field techniques and stenciled images of South America, Australia, and Africa). Bowling received Guggenheim fellowships in 1967 and 1973 and was a contributing editor to Arts Magazine from 1969 to 1972. In 1971 he received a solo show at the Whitney Museum and befriended critic Clement Greenberg (1909–1994), who encouraged his abstract direction. Bowling’s later series include his “Poured Paintings” and reliefs built up with Styrofoam. Bowling splits his time between studios in London and New York. In 2005 Bowling became the first black artist to be elected a member of En­ gland’s Royal Academy of Art. Alberto Burri Born 1915 in Città di Castello, Italy Died 1995 in Nice, France Trained as a physician, Alberto Burri began to paint while he was a prisoner of war in Hereford, Texas, during World War II. Upon his release and return to Rome in 1946 he quit his former career and set up a studio. Burri had his first solo exhibition in 1947 at the Galleria La Margherita in Rome, showing paintings of landscapes and still lifes. He traveled to Paris shortly thereafter,

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where he was influenced by the work of Joan Miró (1893–1983) and Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985). Burri started to experiment with unusual pigments and resins in the early 1950s, creating sculptural canvases and assemblages blurring the line between painting and relief sculpture, such as his “Gobbi” (hunchbanks). Burri mostly utilized materials which were associated with his experience at the camp in Texas, like burlap, wood, tar, and sheet metal. His most famous series are his “Sacchi” (sacks)—cut, torn and stitched burlap pieces in monochrome colors. Burri was the subject of a midcareer retrospective in 1957 at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. He was awarded the UNESCO Prize at the 1959 Bienal de São Paulo and the Critic’s Prize for his solo show at the 1960 Venice Biennale.

C Anthony Caro Born 1924 in New Malden, UK Died 2013 in London, UK Anthony Caro studied engineering at Christ’s College in Cambridge. During vacations he took art classes and worked in sculptor Charles Wheeler’s (1892–1974) studio. After serving in the Royal Navy from 1944 to 1946, Caro pursued sculpture in London at Regent Street Polytechnic and the Royal Academy. In the early 1950s Caro assisted Henry Moore (1898–1986) and began teaching at St Martin’s School of Art. Caro’s early sculptures were expressive and figurative. In 1959 he met the critic Clement Greenberg (1909–1994), who encouraged his use of industrial materials. On Caro’s first trip to the United States in 1959 he met sculptor David Smith (1906–1965), as well as several Color Field painters. The following year he made his first abstract steel sculptures, and in 1961 he created his first polychrome work. Caro’s breakthrough came in 1963 with a solo exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery in London. His brightly painted, sprawling abstract sculptures were displayed without pedestals, prompting a new relationship between art and spectator. He was included in Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum in New York in 1966 and the 1969 Bienal de São Paulo. Caro also worked with bronze, silver, lead, stone, wood, and paper. In the 1970s he abandoned color in his work, and later returned to figuration.

Rhythm, 1958); and “Cromáticas” (Chromatic; 1957–60), a series of paintings without frames. In 1959, Carvão signed the Neoconcrete Manifesto, along with such artists as Lygia Clark (1920–1988) and Lygia Pape (1927–2004). In his neo-concrete period, Carvão explored color as matter. During this period he participated in the group shows Ausstellung Brasilianischer Künstler (Exhibition of Brasilian Artists) at Haus der Kunst, Munich, in 1959, and Konkrete Kunst (Concrete Art) in Zurich, in 1960, and was a visiting professor at the Hochschule für Gestaltung (College of Design) in Ülm, Germany. After returning to Brazil in 1963, he was active as a teacher and graphic designer. During the 1960s and ’70s he produced kinetic works incorporating everyday materials, such as bottle caps, nails, and string. He returned to canvas painting in the late 1970s; his pictures of the 1990s reference the “pure geometry” of graffiti and other objects. Enrico Castellani Born 1930 in Castelmassa, Italy Lives and works in Celleno, Italy Enrico Castellani received his diploma from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera (Brera Art Academy) in Milan in 1952. Afterward he studied both art (at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts [Royal Academy of Fine Arts] and architecture (at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuels de La Cambre [National School of Visual Arts of the Cambre] in Brussels. Castellani resettled in Milan in 1956, where he met contemporary artists such as Piero Manzoni (1933–1963) and Lucio Fontana (1899–1968). In 1959 Castellani and Manzoni founded the critical journal Azimuth and the Galleria Azimut, where Castellani held his first solo show in 1960. Castellani’s non-referential, self-reflexive art practice treated the canvas as an object. He showed his first relief monochromes, “Superficie nera” (Black Surface in Relief), in 1959, for which he created depressions on the canvas with a nail gun. He would continue to use methods like puncturing and embossing to create rhythmic spatial reliefs. Castellani further explored perceptual effects in his “Angolare” (Angular) series (1960–65), comprised of corner-shaped canvases deformed by concave and convex shapes. In 1967 he produced Ambiente bianco (White Environment), his first room-sized installation. In the early 1960s he became associated with the German artist group ZERO and was included in several ZERO exhibitions. He represented Italy in the Venice Biennale in 1964, 1966, 1984 and 2003.

Aluísio Carvão Born 1920 in, Belém, Pará, Brazil Died 2001 in Poços de Caldas, Minas Gerais, Brazil

John Chamberlain Born 1927 in Rochester, IN, USA Died 2011 in New York, NY, USA

Brazilian artist Aluísio Carvão began his career as an illustrator and figurative painter. After receiving a government scholarship for art teachers, he moved to Rio de Janeiro in 1949. There he attended free classes with the geometric abstractionist Ivan Serpa at the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro. Under Serpa’s influence, Carvão joined the avant-garde Grupo Frente in the 1950s, producing rigorous works such as the black-and-white linear spiral Ritmo Centrípeto-Centrifugal (Centripetal-Centrifugal

John Chamberlain is renowned for assembling automobile parts into abstract constructions of vivid shapes and color. Although this makes him an acclaimed representative of Junk Art, his spontaneous, gestural work with industrially fabricated material has earned him associations with Abstract Expressionism, Pop art, and Minimalism. Chamberlain began what would become his distinctive body of work in the late 1950s, when he moved to New York upon completing his studies at the Art Institute

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of Chicago and Black Mountain College in North Carolina. In 1961, Chamberlain’s unique approach led to his inclusion in The Art of Assemblage at the Museum of Modern Art. During the late 1960s, Chamberlain expanded his sculptural vocabulary to urethane foam, galvanized steel, aluminum foil, and brown paper bags. Even his photographic experiments, which he began in 1977, retained his instinctive, motion-driven approach. Moving the camera in sharp gestures across the room, Chamberlain generated the illusion of “bending space,” cross-referencing his sculptural achievements. Since his inclusion in the biennials of São Paulo (1961) and Venice (1964), Chamberlain has received major solo exhibitions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (1971 and 2012), the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (1986) and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1996). Avinash Chandra Born 1931 in Simla, British India Died 1991 in London, UK Avinash Chandra graduated from Delhi Poly­technic Art School in 1952 and taught at the institution from 1953 to 1956. In 1954, he was awarded first prize in the First National Exhibition of Art, New Delhi, and his painting Trees (1954) was acquired by the city’s newly founded National Gallery of Modern Art. During the early 1950s he was also a member of the progressive artists’ movement Delhi Silpi Chakra. In 1956 Chandra moved with his artist wife, Prem Lata, to London, where he had his first British solo show in 1957 at the Imperial Institute. Chandra’s art reached other parts of Europe in the early 1960s, and he received the 1962 Prix Européen (European Prize). He was the first Indian artist to be exhibited both in Documenta, Kassel (1964) and at Tate Britain (1965). While his early paintings were townscapes and landscapes rendered in mostly intense colors, often accompanied by swirling suns and moons, he slowly moved toward a more sexually explicit style with layered, rounded forms and bodies in the 1960s and ’70s. After receiving a John D. Rockefeller scholarship in 1965, Chandra moved to New York in 1966. He returned to London in 1973. Ahmed Cherkaoui Born 1934 in Boujad, Morocco Died 1967 in Casablanca, Morocco Ahmed Cherkaoui trained under a calligrapher in Casablanca before he moved to Paris in 1956, shortly following Morocco’s independence. There he studied at the École des Métiers d’Art (School of Art Trades) until 1959, then continued his studies at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts (National School of Fine Arts) for another year. In 1961 Cherkaoui spent a year at the Akademia Sztuk Pie˛knych (Academy of Fine Arts) in Warsaw, where he increasingly experimented with burlap (collages) and mixed media. Upon his return to Morocco and later that year to France, his interest in Moroccan forms (Amazighi symbols, Islamic calligraphy, tattoos, and handicrafts like pottery and jewelry) grew along with his European influences (Roger Bissière [1886–1964], Paul Klee [1879–1940], and Surrealism).

During the early 1960s he abandoned figurative painting and realized his distinct artistic language, painting large canvases with abstract yet symbolically rich forms in vibrant colors and with highly textured surfaces. Throughout his career Cherkaoui traveled frequently between Europe and North Africa and participated in exhibitions such as the 1962 Salon de Mai and 20 Peintres étrangers (20 Foreign Painters) at the Musée d’Art Moderne (Modern Art Museum) Paris in 1963. Following his death in 1967 an exhibition titled Hommage à Cherkaoui (Homage to Cherakoui) was mounted at the Paris Biennale and the Salon of Sacred Arts at the Musée d’Art Moderne. Saloua Raouda Choucair Born 1916 in Beirut, Lebanon Lives and works in Beirut, Lebanon Saloua Raouda Choucair began her art studies in Beirut in the mid-1930s, frequenting the studio of Moustafa Farroukh (1901–1975). Later she trained under Omar Onsi (1901–1969) and developed an enthusiasm for Islamic art and architecture while traveling in Egypt in 1943. Her 1947 show at the Arab Cultural Gallery in Beirut was one of the first abstract exhibitions in the region. In 1948 she moved to Paris, where she took life drawing classes at the École des Beaux-Arts (School of Fine Arts) and trained in the studio of Fernand Léger (1881–1955). In 1950 her inclination toward geometric shapes and Arabic letters led her to organize L’Atelier de l’Art Abstrait (Studio of Abstract Art) with other avant-garde artists. During this time Choucair created her first non-objective works, showing early experimentation with repeated forms. She returned to Beirut in 1951. Choucair worked in different mediums and materials but became especially noted for her wood and stone sculptures, such as her “Poems” series, realized as modular systems or forms comprised of similar units. Despite her early success in Paris, where in the early 1950s she showed in the Salon des réalités nouvelles and had a solo exhibition at Galerie Colette Allendy, Choucair’s work was not widely recognized outside Lebanon until her 2013 retrospective at Tate Modern in London. Lygia Clark Born 1920 in Belo Horizonte, Brazil Died 1988 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Lygia Clark began studying art in 1947 with architect Roberto Burle Marx. Her early paintings are aligned with the mid century Brazilian Constructivist tendencies. Clark’s understanding of form and its sensuous qualities intensified when she studied with Fernand Léger (1881–1955) in Paris from 1950 to 1952. Upon her return to Brazil, she became part of Rio’s avant-garde Concretist Grupo Frente in 1954. She co-founded the Neoconcrete movement in 1959, becoming a leading figure with Hélio Oiticica. At that time she shifted her focus from the art object toward art as a participatory process. With her aluminum hinged “Critters” (1960) series, which won the sculpture prize at the 1961 Bienal de São Paulo, she began to invite the spectator to actively engage with her work. In 1968 she conceived her penetrable installation The House Is the Body for the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio

de Janeiro (Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro). That same year she moved to Paris, where from 1972, she spent several years teaching at the Sorbonne and developing therapeutic methods of engagement with objects. In 1976, Clark retuned to Brazil. For about a decade she abandoned art completely for therapeutic techniques. Clark’s greatest legacy lies in stretching the potential of art toward a bodily and mindful experience. Bruce Conner Born 1933 in McPherson, KS, USA Died 2008 in San Francisco, CA, USA Bruce Conner studied art at Wichita University and the University of Nebraska, receiving a BFA in 1956. He also attended the Brooklyn Museum Art School and the University of Colorado on a scholarship. From 1957 onward he lived and worked in San Francisco, where he quickly became affiliated with the countercultural Beat Generation. Conner is known for his use of found-object assemblage in collage, sculpture, painting, photography, printmaking, performance, and film. A pioneer of American experimental cinema and rhythmic edi­ ting, Conner wove together decontextualized fragments of found footage and cinematic marginalia, such as newsreels, B-movies, stock footage, educational and industrial films. A Movie (1958) was his breakthrough work in this genre. He was also noted for his innovative structural employment of music (Cosmic Ray, 1961) and his critical approach to mainstream media and various themes of postwar American society, like the assassination of John F. Kennedy (Report, 1967) or the threat of nuclear war (Crossroads, 1976). The renowned Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles gave Conner a solo show in 1962. Conner was also included in the 1967 exhibition Funk Art, featuring figurative work from the Bay Area, at the University Art Museum in Berkeley, California.

Soon after, he began the “Popcretos” series together with Augusto de Campos (b. 1931). In 1968 Cordeiro began to explore compu­ter art and in 1971 he organized Arteônica in Brazil—a pioneering exhibition and conference on art and technology. Magda Cordell Born 1921 in Hungary Died 2008 in Sloan, NY, USA Hungarian artist Magda Cordell (later McHale) fled to Egypt and Palestine as a refugee during World War II. There she worked as a translator and met her first husband, the composer Frank Cordell (1918–1980), with whom she settled in London in the early 1950s. The couple shared their studio with Magda’s later husband, the artist John McHale (1922–1978). They contributed to foun­ding the Independent Group (IG), a British art collective that anticipated Pop art, in 1952. Cordell was heavily involved in organi­ zing the IG exhibition This Is Tomorrow at London’s Whitechapel Gallery in 1956. All her life Cordell considered herself a pain­ ter above all, although her most productive phase as an artist was during the 1950s. Cordell’s paintings show distorted female figures and were often compared to works of Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985) and art brut. Lawrence Alloway (1926–1990) also read atomic influences and a relationship to Abs­ tract Expressionism in her work. When she and McHale moved to the United States in 1961, he worked with Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) at Southern Illinois University. The McHales started to pursue an academic career in futurology, and established the Center for Integrative Studies at the State University of New York Binghamton in 1968. Later she taught futurology and art in Houston, Texas, and Buffalo, New York.

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Waldemar Cordeiro Born 1925 in Rome, Italy Died 1973 in São Paulo, Brazil

Sandú Darié Born 1908 in Roman, Romania Died1991 in Havana, Cuba

A leading digital artist in Brazil, Waldemar Cordeiro spent the first twenty years of his life in Italy, where he studied art in Rome and started to work as a newspaper caricaturist in 1943. Living in Brazil from 1946 to 1948, he painted in a figurative, Expressionist style and worked as a journalist and art critic for the newspaper Folha da Manhã. He returned to Italy in 1948, finally settling in São Paulo the following year. Cordeiro created his first abstract paintings in 1948 and took part in the inaugural exhibition Do Figurativismo ao Abstracionismo (From Figurative Art to Abstraction; 1949) at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (São Paulo Modern Art Museum; MAM/SP). He founded the Ruptura Group in 1952 and emerged as its leader, writing a Concrete art manifesto and mounting the group’s first exhibition that year at MAM/SP. From 1951 he participated in several editions of the Bienal de São Paulo. In 1953 Cordeiro established Jardins de Vanguarda, a landscape design company. He traveled to Europe in 1964 and was introduced to American Pop art at the Venice Biennale.

Sandú Darié first encountered Surrealist artists and writers while studying law in Paris from 1926 to 1932. During the 1930s he worked as an art critic and caricaturist for Romanian and French publications. In 1941 he migrated to Cuba where, in the late 1940s, he committed himself to art. His early lyrical abstractions, called “Composiciones” (Compositions) were exhibited in solo shows in 1949 at the Lyceum in Havana and Carlebach Gallery in New York. That same year Darié began a nine-year correspondence with the Buenos Aires-based artist Gyula Kosice (b. 1924), which led to Darié’s participation in Madí exhibitions and his contribution to the magazine Arte Madí. From 1950 onward Darié became a leading representative and promoter of abstract art and Concretism in Cuba. He co-founded the magazine Noticias de Arte (Art News) in 1952 and became a member of the group Diez Pintores Concretos (Ten Concrete Painters) from 1958 to 1961. Darié exhibited in the 1952 Venice Biennale and three editions of the Bienal de São Paulo (1953; 1955; 1957). His interest in movement and spectator involvement

became evident in his kinetic sculpture series “Estructuras transformables” (Changeable Structures), first exhibited in 1956. La­ ter he explored movement, light, and sound in films and theater. Guy Debord Born 1931 in Paris, France Died 1994 near Bellevue-la-Montagne, France Guy Debord, a French Marxist intellectual, was a co-founder of the revolutionary Situationist International (SI), in 1957, in Alba, Italy. The other founders were his wife, the novelist and critic Michèle Bernstein (b. 1932) and the author and artist Asger Jorn (1914–1973). Because SI condemned the theory of “industrial,” mass-produced art and the related obsession with commodities, the art of SI sympathizers was redirected from the creation of specific objects and instead toward a general critique of capitalist culture. Debord’s book La Société du spectacle (The Society of the Spectacle) (1967) detailed how the consumption of images had replaced authentic human interaction, arguing that the resulting “spectacle culture” was the hallmark of late capitalism. Many consider this book to be a key manifesto of the Paris Uprisings that took place in May 1968 because many of the protesters used slogans from this text. After SI was dissolved in 1972, Debord focused on filmmaking (including a film version of La Société du spectacle, 1973) and writing, including the sequel Comments on the Society of the Spectacle in 1988. Suffering from the effects of a lifetime of excessive drinking, Debord committed suicide at his property in Champot, near Bellevue-la-Montagne, on November 30, 1994. Willem de Kooning Born 1904 in Rotterdam, the Netherlands Died 1997 in East Hampton, NY, USA Willem de Kooning attended night classes at the Academie voor Schone Kunsten en technieken (Academy of Fine Arts and Techniques) in Rotterdam while he worked as an apprentice at a design and decoration firm from the age of twelve. He migrated to the United States in 1926, arriving in New York City the following year. De Kooning soon befriended modernists such as Arshile Gorky (1904–1948) and Stuart Davis (1892–1964). During the Great Depression he joined the artists Artists Union (1934) and designed murals for the Federal Art Project (1935). In the late 1940s and early 1950s, he became a leading artist of the highly influential movement alternately labeled as action painting, Abstract Expressionism, or the New York School. This new mode of entirely abstract painting was based on emotion, bodily involvement, and gesture. His first solo exhibition was held at Charles Egan Gallery in New York in 1948. The critically acclaimed show included his now-famous black-and-white paintings. Despite his early success with abstraction, de Kooning continued to explore new styles, methods and mediums, such as drawing, sculpture and lithography. Inspired by gestural abstraction and Cubism yet attracted by figurative painting, de Kooning embarked on his groundbreaking Woman series in 1950. His 1968 retrospective, organized

by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, traveled to five cities. Pedro de Oraá Born 1931 in Havana, Cuba Lives and works in Havana, Cuba Pedro de Oraá created his own visual vocabulary that combines elements of hard-edge and organic abstraction in a limited palette, primarily black, white, red, and purple. He briefly trained at the Academia de Bellas Artes San Alejandro (Academy of Fine Arts Saint Alexander) in his youth but had to quit for financial reasons. During the 1950s, when he worked in abstraction, he published El Instante Cernido (Sifting Instantly; 1952– 53), his first book of poems. After de Oraá met Loló Soldevilla (1901–1971), they traveled to Venezuela for his first solo exhibition at Galería-Librería Sardio, Caracas (1957). That same year, the couple founded Galería de Arte Color-Luz in Havana, which became a meeting place for Diez Pintores Concretos (Ten Concrete Painters), a group of artists working in geometric abstraction (1958–61). De Oraá became the group’s archivist and documented the Cuban local art scene. He represented Cuba in various exhibitions abroad, and from 1961 onward played a vital role in national cultural organizations, including the Unión Nacional de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba (National Union of Writers and Artists) and the Consejo Nacional de Cultura (National Council of Culture). De Oraá received the National Designer Award from the Cuban Book Institute (2011) and the Cuban National Visual Arts Award (2015). Niki de Saint Phalle Born 1930 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France Died 2002 in San Diego, CA, USA Niki de Saint Phalle was a self-taught artist who spent most of her childhood in New York. In 1950 she made her first paintings and two years later moved to Paris, where she studied acting. After an emotional collapse in 1953 she turned to art, which had a therapeutic effect. In 1955 Saint Phalle moved to Spain where she was inspired by Antonio Gaudí’s work, especially his Park Güell in Barcelona. Back in Paris she met her future husband, Jean Tinguely (1925–1991), with whom she shared an artistic and emotional relationship from 1960 onward. She first attracted attention as an artist in the early 1960s with her “shooting paintings”—relief-like assemblages of plaster and concealed paint containers, which she shot from a distance. Those pieces introduced elements of chance, spectacle, and performance. Subsequently Saint Phalle made women and eros her primary subject matter. In 1965 she created her first “Nanas”—rounded, colorfully patterned archetypal female figures. Saint Phalle’s notable commissions include Hon (1966), a building-sized reclining Nana for the Moderna Museet Stockholm. She also collaborated on large-scale projects with Tinguely, like the Stravinsky Fountain (1982) in Paris. Her ambitious Tarot Garden in Tuscany, a twenty-year effort, was unveiled in 1998.

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Beauford Delaney Born 1901 in Knoxville, TN, USA Died 1979 in Paris, France A key figure of the Harlem Renaissance, Beauford Delaney apprenticed with painter Lloyd Branson (1853–1925) in Knoxville before beginning his art studies in Boston in 1924. He moved to New York in 1929. He participated in the “306” group of African American painters led by Charles Alston (1907–1977) in Harlem, but as a gay artist, he also maintained a studio and bohemian circle on Greene Street in Greenwich Village. He depicted the neighborhood in many paintings in the late 1940s. Delaney gained recognition for his portraits of prominent African Americans, such as Duke Ellington. In 1930 some of these portraits were shown at the Whitney Museum Studio Galleries in New York. During his time in New York Delaney established lifelong friendships with the novelists Henry Miller (1891–1980) and James Baldwin (1924–1987). In 1953 he followed Baldwin to Paris, where he lived for the rest of his life. Delaney suffered mental illness in France but continued to work and exhibit. His art moved from representational pastel portraits and street scenes to completely abstract paintings of an Expressionist manner. Always using thickly applied paint and bright colors, Delaney’s painting style recalled the techniques of the French Fauves and van Gogh. Shortly before his death, the Studio Museum in Harlem organized his first retrospective. Alén Diviš Born 1900 in Blato u Pode�brady, Bohemia, Austrian Empire Died 1956 in Prague, Czechoslovakia After decades as a forgotten outsider artist embracing moody, symbolic content, pain­ter Alén Diviš has received sustained critical attention since his death. Born in Bohemia, he moved to Paris in 1926 to focus on his work, where he experimented with Cubism and Expressionism. With other expatriates, he formed the House of Czechoslovak Culture in 1939 to protest the German occupation. When France entered World War II, the group’s members were arrested for espionage. Diviš spent six months at the brutal La Santé Prison, and an additional few years in concentration and internment camps. The harsh treatment he endured and the graffiti he witnessed in his solitary-confinement cell at La Santé deeply influenced his work. After his release in 1942, he moved to New York City. In this period he created landscapes and work later termed art brut, based on the images scrawled on the walls of his former prison cell. Diviš returned to Prague in 1947 and enjoyed brief success with a memoir of his time in La Santé. Following the Communist coup d’état in 1948, however, he had limited opportunities and turned to spiritual themes, such as “Christ of the Blacks.” His work was finally rediscovered after the Communists were ousted in 1989.

E Charles & Ray Eames Born 1907 in Saint Louis, MO, USA / Born 1912 in Sacramento, CA, USA Died 1978 in Saint Louis, MO, USA / Died 1988 in Saint Louis, MO, USA Charles Eames briefly studied architecture at Washington University in St. Louis, establishing an architecture practice in 1930. Ray Eames (born Bernice Alexandra Kaiser) came to New York in 1933, where she trained at the Hans Hofmann School and was among the first generation of Abs­ tract Expressionist painters. The couple met at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan in 1940, where Charles headed the industrial design department. After their marriage in 1941 they moved to Los Angeles. After Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen’s (1910–1961) first experiments with molded plywood in 1940—winning the Museum of Modern Art’s 1940 Organic Design in Home Furnishings competition—they received a U.S. Navy commission for plywood stretchers and leg splints during World War II. With access to new techniques they developed a design vocabulary that was essential for their innovative postwar approach. Focusing on a sculptural aesthetic, functionality, affordability, and cutting-edge materials like plywood and plastic, the Eameses made significant contributions to modern design and architecture. They constructed their famous avant-garde house in 1949 in Los Angeles’s Pacific Palisades, as part of Arts & Architecture magazine’s Case Study House program. From the mid 1950s onwards the Eameses also worked as photographers and filmmakers. Melvin Edwards Born 1937 in Houston, TX Lives and works in New York, NY, USA Melvin Edwards is best known for his sculpture series “Lynch Fragments,” based on the civil rights movement, and for his large-scale public art projects. He once commented that after he had watched steel being welded as a child, he knew he wanted to be a sculptor. After graduating from the University of Southern California in 1965, he had his first solo exhibition at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. He soon began his teaching career, which parallels his career as a sculptor. In 1967 Edwards moved to New York, where he became the first African American sculptor honored with a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, in 1970. His “Lynch Fragments” series comprises small reliefs composed of sharp-edged forms and such objects as chains, locks, and tools—all charged with meaning. The series was born out of his experience of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, but a second phase dealt with the Vietnam War and later works explore African American identity and his travels in Africa. Inji Efflatoun Born 1924 in Cairo, Egypt Died 1989 in Cairo, Egypt Inji Efflatoun was a Marxist and feminist painter. After her parents’ divorce when

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Efflatoun was a young child, she was raised by her mother, whose determination as a single working woman proved inspirational. Efflatoun was introduced to Marxism during her studies at the Lycée Français du Caire, joining a Communist youth party in 1942. Her art tutor, Kamel al-Tilmisani (1915–1972), introduced her to the Surrealist group Art and Liberty. As a feminist activist, Efflatoun co-founded the Rabitat Fatayat at jami’a wa al ma’ ahid (League of University and Institutes’ Young Women) in 1945, and in the late 1940s, she wrote political pamphlets linking class and gender oppression with imperialism. She stopped painting from 1946 to 1948. After visiting Luxor, Nubia, and the Egyptian oases Efflatoun began to portray the Egyptian working class, particularly women’s struggles. She exhibited in the 1952 Venice Biennale and 1953 Bienal de São Paulo. In 1956, Efflatoun befriended the influential Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896–1974). Efflatoun was imprisoned for her Communist activities in 1959 under the rule of president Gamal Abdel Nasser. She began painting again in prison, depicting the difficult reality of prison life. After her release in 1963 Efflatoun’s pain­ting style moved from social realism to lighter, more textured scenes of the working class. Uzo Egonu Born 1931 in Onitsha, Nigeria Died 1996 in London, UK Uzo Egonu studied painting and won first prize in a school art competition before he migrated to England at the age of thirteen. There he studied painting and typography under L. J. Daniels and Gilbert Spencer at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts, London (1949–52). He then traveled to study the European masters and classical African art. In 1953 he settled in Paris, eventually visiting Denmark, Finland, and Italy. Upon returning to England, Egonu set up a studio in London, and during the 1960s he developed his unique synthesis of modern art (especially Cubism and Pop art) and African visual languages (Nigerian ornamentation, circular composition, and bird’s-eye views), blurring the lines between figuration and abstraction. Although Egonu briefly visited his homeland only once, his compositions in painting, collage, and printmaking reveal a lasting bond with African issues, especially the 1966 anti-Igbo pogrom and the Nigerian Civil War. In 1964 Egonu had a solo show at the Woodstock Gallery, London, and he also gained attention in Nigeria for his art. His work has been exhibited in Europe and Africa and he was honored with several medals and prizes. In 1989 his work was included in the landmark exhibition The Other Story at Hayward Gallery, London. Ibrahim El Salahi Born 1930 in Omdurman, Sudan Lives and works in Oxford, UK Ibrahim El Salahi developed a profound interest in Arabic calligraphy, both as a means of communication and as purely aesthetic form, and engaged with the natural colors, symbolism, and decorative traditions of his homeland. He studied at the School of Design at Gordon Memorial College in Khartoum (1949–52) and in 1954 received a

scholarship to study at the Slade School of Fine Art, London. After he returned to Khartoum in 1957, following Sudan’s liberation from British colonial rule, he began to teach at Khartoum Technical Institute. For the next three years (1958–61) he struggled to discover his own style within the many aesthetic and cultural influences to which he was exposed (Islamic, African, Arab, and Western). He emerged as a leading artist of the Khartoum School and associated with the Mbari Club in Ibadan, Nigeria. After his release from a sudden imprisonment without trial in Sudan (1975) he moved to Doha, Qatar, and later settled in Oxford, England, in 1998. Based on his experiences in prison, El Salahi adopted a graphic blackand-white style between the late 1970s and mid-1990s. In 2013 he became the first African artist to be honored with a retrospective at Tate Modern, London. Erhabor Emokpae Born 1934 in Benin City, Nigeria Died 1984 in Lagos State, Nigeria Erhabor Emokpae began working in a romantic and ethnographic figurative style, and later in abstraction. He is known for his paintings featuring legendary individuals in African history and for his lifelong artistic focus on the theme of dualism. His earliest artistic influences date back to his childhood, especially the Benin guild of carvers. In 1951 he moved to Lagos and attended the Yaba Technical Institute. He also studied privately with a graphic artist and became a commercial artist for the Federal Ministry of Information in 1953. Following Nigeria’s independence (1960), Emokpae gained recognition in the emerging modern Nigerian art scene. His contributions to cultural policy and his efforts to redefine public perception of contemporary modern Nigerian art began when he helped organize the Eastern Nigeria Festival of Arts (1956– 59). During the 1960s and ’70s, Emokpae served as secretary for the newly founded Society of Nigerian Artists and the Lagos Arts Council. After working as a graphic artist for the advertising agency Lintas, he finally decided to become a professional painter and muralist. Some of his most acclaimed works are for the 1977 Second World Festival of Black Arts (FESTAC) and the National Arts Theatre building, Lagos. Ben Enwonwu Born 1917 in Onitsha, Nigeria Died 1994 in Lagos, Nigeria Ben Enwonwu studied at Government College in Ibadan and Umuahia from 1934 to 1939. From 1941 to 1944 he taught at Edo College in Benin City and trained as an apprentice in the guild of Benin bronze casters. His early artistic success earned him a study abroad scholarship in 1944. Within the year he moved to London, where he received a fine arts diploma from the Slade School in 1947 and a master’s degree in anthropology from University College London in 1948. Enwonwu emerged as a successful figurative painter and sculptor in wood and bronze, representing an African modernist style which combined traditional elements with a classical Western training. In 1946 Enwonwu participated in the Exposition Internationale (International Exhibition)

at the Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris. In 1954 he became the youngest member of the Order of the British Empire in the Commonwealth. He was Cultural Advisor to the Federal Government of Nigeria from 1968 to 1971. In 1971 he became the first professor of fine art in Nigeria at the University of IfeIfe (retiring in 1975) and a visiting artist at Howard University, Washington, DC.

F Öyvind Fahlström Born 1928 in São Paulo, Brazil Died 1976 in Stockholm, Sweden The work of Öyvind Axel Christian Fahlström drew on Pop art, mass media, and underground culture. His parents sent him to live with relatives in Sweden in 1939, where he remained during World War II. In 1948 he became a Swedish citizen and soon began to study art history and classical studies at the University of Stockholm. Fahlström supported himself with journalism, poetry, theater, translations, and criticism in the 1950s and ’60s. At a solo show at Gallery Numero in Florence (1953), he exhibited his drawing Opera, and his Manifesto for Concrete Poetry was published in 1954. He received scholarships to study in Italy (1958) and France (1960). In 1961, on a grant from the Sweden-America Foundation, he moved to New York, where he rented the studio once occupied by Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008); Jasper Johns ((b. 1930) was his neighbor. Fahlström is known for his early attempt to create artworks that were variable (using magnets) and therefore interactive. He was concerned with the mechanisms of economics and politics, including the manipulation of information and data. His art includes Pop imagery and comic strips, and besides visual, theatrical, and literary works, he produced films and radio plays. Fahlström represented Sweden at the 33rd Venice Biennale (1966) with his installation Dr. Schweitzer’s Last Mission. Wojciech Fangor Born 1922 in Warsaw, Poland Died 2015 in Warsaw, Poland Wojciech Fangor was a painter, sculptor, and graphic artist. During World War II he studied with Tadeusz Pruszkowski (1888–1942) and Felicjan Szcze˛sny Kowarski (1880– 1948), and in 1946 he graduated from the Akademia Sztuk Pie˛knych (Academy of Fine Arts), Warsaw, where he later taught (1953–61). His early paintings showed his interest in Impressionism, Expressionism, and Cubism, but he gained wider recognition after he adopted Socialist Realism. His most famous paintings of that time are Dane liczbowe (Figures; 1950) and Matka korean´ ski (Korean Mother; 1951). From 1953 to 1961 Fangor worked as a newspaper illustrator and poster artist, and co-founded the Polska Szkoła plakatu (Polish School of Poster Art). In the late 1950s he created his first optical paintings—abstractions of blurred, vibrantly colored circles and amoeba-like forms, calling his discovery Pozytywne miejsca iluzoryczne (Positive Illusory

Space). He also worked as a set designer and architect. In 1958 Fangor and Stanisław Zamecznik (1909–1971) installed their innovative “environment” Badania w przestrzeni (A Study in Space) at the New Culture Salon, Warsaw. Fangor moved to the United States in 1966 and became the first Polish artist to have a solo show at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1970. He later returned to figurative painting, creating his “television” paintings, which reflect the visual effects of this medium. Ismail Fattah Born 1934 in Basra, Iraq Died 2004 in Baghdad, Iraq Ismail Fattah studied at the Baghdad Institute of Fine Arts, receiving his degree in painting in 1956 and sculpture in 1958. Fattah’s early sculpture was traditional and figurative. But under the tutelage of Jewad Selim (1919–1961)—a founder of the Iraqi modern art movement—Fattah experimented with form and media, including plaster. Following his studies Fattah moved to Italy, where in 1962 he won first prize in sculpture in a competition for Arab artists. Fattah earned further degrees in sculpture from the Accademia di Belle Arti (Academy of Fine Arts) and ceramics at the Accademia di San Giacomo (San Giacomo Academy), both in Rome. In 1965, an exhibition of Fattah’s painting and sculpture at Baghdad’s National Museum of Modern Art transformed contemporary Iraqi art. Fattah’s work, completed in Rome, moved away from regional subjects, representing universal, existential themes. That same year, Fattah joined the faculty of the Baghdad Institute of Fine Arts, initially teaching ceramics and, from 1969, sculpture. Fattah was a member in two influential groups: the Baghdad Modern Art Group and the New Vision collective. Fattah is known for his public sculpture in Baghdad, the most famous of which is the Nusb Al-Shahid (Martyr’s Monument). Fattah’s design was chosen through a competition in 1981 and completed in 1983. Jean Fautrier Born 1898 in Paris, France Died 1964 in Châtenay-Malabry, France Jean Fautrier was a painter, printmaker, and sculptor who is best remembered for his work in tachisme, a non-geometric abstract style that emphasizes spontaneous brushwork, drips, and scribble-like marks. His father and grandmother raised Fautrier in Paris until 1908, when he moved to London with his mother. He began his artistic training at London’s Royal Academy of Arts in 1912, briefly transferring to the Slade School of Fine Art in search of a less conventional, more experimental practice. He then began to paint independently in the galleries and museums of London, particularly from the work of the romantic landscapist J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851). He returned to France in 1917 to serve in the French Army. Fautrier struggled as an artist in the 1930s, working as a ski instructor and running a jazz club in the French Alps between 1934 and 1939, during which time he painted very little. During and after World War II, Fautrier illustrated books by Georges Bataille (1897–1962) and Paul Éluard (1895–1952). The Gestapo briefly detained Fautrier in 1943; later,

while in hiding, he completed his “Otages” (Hostages) series, which attracted critical attention. Musée d'art moderne de la ville de Paris hosted a retrospective of Fautrier’s work in 1989. León Ferrari Born 1920 in Buenos Aires, Argentina Died 2013 in Buenos Aires, Argentina León Ferrari was a self-taught artist who worked in a wide range of mediums. He began his artistic career in Italy, working as a sculptor, in the 1950s. By 1955 he had his first solo show in Milan, and that same year he returned to Argentina. He soon expanded his artistic production to ceramics, collage, painting, and drawing, working in plaster, cement, wood, and stainless steel wire. Beginning in the early 1960s he adopted conceptual strategies and his first “Written Paintings” and “Written Drawings” emerged. With these nearly calligraphic pieces he explored the boundaries between lines and words. Ferrari is mostly known for his social and political concerns, which are reflected in his art. His famous La Civilización Occidental y Cristiana (Western Civilization and Christianity, 1965) was among his first artworks protesting the United States’ military intervention in Vietnam. In 1976 he left Argentina for political reasons and exiled himself in Brazil. There he applied the technique of heliography to create series of “plans,” mapping sections of labyrinthine worlds with sarcastic notes. Ferrari also wrote critical essays and invented new musical instruments. He was honored with many awards and prizes and returned to Argentina in 1991. Lucio Fontana Born 1899 in Rosario di Santa Fé, Argentina Died 1968 in Comabbio, Varese, Italy Lucio Fontana is known as the founder of spatialism and for his association with arte povera. His family moved to Italy in 1905, but he returned to Argentina in 1922 to help in his father’s sculpture studio. After setting up his own studio in 1924 he received several important public commissions. Fontana studied at the Accademia di belle arti Brera in 1928; participated in the Venice Biennale (1930); and had his first solo show at the Galleria del Milione, Milan (1931). During the 1930s he experimented with abstracted figures, geometrical forms, and ceramic sculpture at Albisola (1935–39). In 1940 Fontana moved again to Argentina, and taught at several institutions. His contact with young artists inspired him to write the Manifesto bianco (White Manifesto, 1946) and he began to use the phrase concetto spaziale (conceptual space) as titles for some works. Back in Milan in 1947 Fontana joined the spazialismo movement and signed the Manifesto dello Spazialismo (Spatialist Manifesto). Fontana combined sculpture, fluorescent paint, and black lights for his Ambiente spaziale a luce nera (Spatial Ambience in Black Light; 1948–49), to be viewed in a darkened room. Fontana visited New York in 1961 for a show of his work at the Martha Jackson Gallery; he also designed sets and costumes for La Scala, Milan, in 1966.

Helen Frankenthaler Born 1928 in New York, NY, USA Died 2011 in Darien, CT, USA Helen Frankenthaler was an Abstract Expressionist painter whose career spanned six decades. After graduating from Bennington College in Vermont (1949), she studied at the Art Students League in New York, took art history courses at Columbia University, and studied painting with the Abs­ tract Expressionist Hans Hofmann (1880–1966). Her first solo show was held at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, in 1951. Through her friendship with art cri­ tic Clement Greenberg (1909–1994) she met many leading artists of the New York School. Frankenthaler achieved her breakthrough with her painting Mountains and Sea (1952), which featured her new soakstain technique, using thinned oil paint on untreated canvas. While the canvas and the paint became one, the color functioned as both coloring and drawing, resulting in abstract, colorful, calligraphic, large-scale paintings. Her painting style proved highly influential in the upcoming Color Field painting of the 1960s. Frankenthaler was also active in sculpting, ceramics, set design, and printmaking (especially woodcuts). In 1958 she married artist Robert Motherwell (1915–1991). Her first retrospective was held at the Jewish Museum in New York (1960). She taught at several renowned universities and earned many prizes and awards, including the National Medal of Arts in 2001.

G Ivo Gattin Born 1926 in Split, Yugoslavia Died 1978 in Zagreb, Yugoslavia Ivo Gattin was one of Croatia’s foremost practitioners of art informel. He gradua­ ted from the Akademija likovnih umjetnosti (Academy of Fine Arts) in Zagreb in 1953. Gattin’s approach to painting was antiexpressive, directly addressing materiality. He used such substances as resin, wax, and cement on the surfaces of his early pictorial works of 1956–57, later turning to burning his canvases and incorporating burlap to create reliefs in irregular shapes. Working in Milan from 1963 to 1967, Gattin created encyclopedia drawings and a manifesto, among other works. Gattin was associated with the radical Conceptual art collective Gorgona Group, which included Julije Knifer (1924–2004) and Dimitrije Bašicevi � c´ (also known as Mangelos) (1921–1987). The group produced exhibitions, a magazine of artist projects, and events in Zagreb from 1959 to 1966. The artists’ “tendency toward nihilism and metaphysical irony,” according to art historian and curator Nena Dimitrijevic,´ sharply contrasted with the Yugoslavian state-approved social realism at the time. Gego (Gertrud Louise Goldschmidt) Born 1912 in Hamburg, Germany Died 1994 in Caracas, Venezuela Gego was an artist and sculptor whose work peaked in the 1960s with geometric

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abstraction and kinetic art. After studying engineering and architecture at the Hochschule für Technik (University of Applied Sciences) Stuttgart (1932–38), she fled Germany in 1939 and moved to Venezuela, where she worked as an architect and furniture designer during the 1940s. In 1956, in Caracas, she created her first three-dimensional works. Between 1959 and 1967 she visited the United States to participate in various workshops (Treitel-Gratz metal fabricators, New York) and to experiment in lithography and other mediums. Her watercolors, spatial installations, engravings, and paper weavings—which use line as the fundamental element—reveal her investigations into structure, space, transparency, and viewer interaction. While her works made between 1957 and 1969 were based on equidistant, parallel lines, her “Reticuláreas” (Networks), “Troncos” (Trunks), and “Esferas” (Spheres) consist of crossed lines creating net-like structures. From 1976 onward she abandoned preconceived concepts in her series “Dibujos sin Papel” (Drawings without Paper) and “Bichitos” (Small Bugs). From 1958 to 1977 Gego committed herself to teaching. In 1979 she received the Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas de Venezuela. Alberto Giacometti Born 1901 in Borgonovo, Switzerland Died 1966 in Chur, Switzerland The sculptor Alberto Giacometti began his formal training in 1919 at the École des Beaux-Arts (School of Fine Arts) and the École des Arts Industriels (School of Industrial Arts), both in Geneva. During the early 1920s he traveled in Italy and afterward moved to Paris, where from 1922 onward, he studied sculpture at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. He established his first studio in Paris in 1925 and showed an early interest in the traditional arts of Africa and Oceania. In the 1930s Giacometti joined the Surrealist movement and created his “Objects” series, tactile sculptures charged with energy and symbolism. Giacometti’s enduring involvement with the human figure eventually led to his dissociation from the Surrealists in 1935. He attained his mature style in the late 1940s, characterized by slim, elongated figures, captured in seemingly banal upright postures (standing, walking, sitting). In those sculptures he expressed his distinct perspective on spatial relations by isolating the figures from the spectators’ space, by means of pedestals or cages. Giacometti’s works have been presented in countless exhibitions and he is one of the best-known sculptors of the twentieth century. His many honors include the Grand Prize for Sculpture at the Venice Biennale (1962) and the Guggenheim International Award for Painting (1964). Mathias Goeritz Born 1915 in Danzig, Germany Died 1990 in Mexico City, Mexico German-born architect, artist, and writer Mathias Goeritz studied drawing at the Ku­ nstgewerbe- und Handwerkerschule (Arts and Crafts and Artisan School) Berlin-Charlottenberg while studying philosophy and art history at the Friedrich-Wilhelms University in Berlin (PhD, 1940). During World War II he migrated to Spanish Morocco, where he lived and taught from 1941 to 1944. After the war,

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Goeritz settled in Spain, where he began to paint. In 1948 co-founded the free-minded artists association, Escuela de Altamira (Altamira School). The following year he moved to Mexico, where Ignacio Díaz Morales invited him to teach at the Escuela de Arquitectura of the Universidad de Guadalajara (School of Architecture, University of Guadalajara; until 1954). In 1953, in his seminal architectural project Museo Experimental El Eco (Eco Experimental Museum), Goeritz presented his Manifiesto de la Arquitectura Emocional (Emotional Architecture Manifesto) and La serpiente de El Eco (The Serpent of El Eco, 1953), one of his first large-scale sculptures. After moving to Mexico City in 1954 he concentrated on public abstract sculptures, which he often executed with other artists and architects, such as Luis Ramiro Barragán Morfín Torres de Satélite (Towers of Satélite; 1957). In the late 1950s Goeritz initiated his “Mensajes dorado” (Golden Messages) series of spiritually motivated mono­ chrmatic, abstract images, in gold leaf on wood. From 1961 onward Goeritz returned to his former large-scale, collaborative practice and also worked in Jerusalem. Leon Golub Born 1922 in Chicago, IL, USA Died 2004 in New York, NY, USA American painter Leon Golub first studied art history at the University of Chicago and earned an MFA degree from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1950. During World War II he served as a cartographer in the U.S. Army, mostly stationed in Europe. After the war he worked as a teacher and received some attention for his early artistic work. From 1959 to 1964 he lived in Paris and later moved to New York. In 1959 his work was featured in the New Images of Man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, among such artists as Willem de Kooning (1904–1997), Francis Bacon (1909–1992), and Jackson Pollock (1912– 1956). In response to the Vietnam-era peace movement, Golub’s paintings were always engaged with themes of war, human brutality, and power. His large-scale paintings depict human figures and their brutal actions in an expressionistic style. He would scrape paint from the canvas to create a rough, blistered surface. Golub is also known for his portraits, based on photographs of powerful public figures. In 2000 the Dublin Museum of Modern Art honored him with a major retrospective. Karl Otto Götz Born 1914 in Aachen, Germany Lives and works in NiederbreitbachWolfenacker, Germany Karl Otto (K.O.) Götz studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule (Arts and Crafts School), Aachen, from 1932 to 1933. Around that time he created his first abstract paintings, along with Surrealist works. Despite his painting and exhibition ban from 1935 to 1945 imposed by the National Socialists, his conscription in the German army from 1936 to 1938, and the destruction of most of his early works during the Dresden bombing of 1945, Götz never stopped producing art. During the 1930s and ’40s he executed splatter pain­ tings and experimented with collage and photography techniques like

solarization and photograms. Götz held his first solo show in 1946 at the studio Rasch, Wuppertal. The following year his monotypes were exhibited in Paris, catching the attention of CoBrA artists. In 1949 Götz became the group’s first German member, turning entirely to abstraction. He co-founded the Frankfurt Quadriga group three years later and developed his signature squeegee technique (Rakeltechnik), emerging as a leading German art informel representa­ tive. His grid paintings (Rasterbilder) of the early 1960s, as well as his television art experi­ ments from World War II onward, proved pio­ neering. Götz was an editor of Meta maga­ zine from 1948 to 1953 and an influential professor at the Kunstakademie (Art Academy), Düsseldorf, from 1959 to 1979. He participated in Documenta, Kassel (1959) and in the Venice Biennale (1958; 1968). Marcos Grigorian Born 1925 in Kropotkin, Russia Died 2007 in Yerevan, Armenia Marcos Grigorian and his Armenian family immigrated to Iran from Russia in 1930. He studied at the Kam al-al-Molk Art School in Tehran from 1948 to 1950. After gradua­ ting he moved to Rome, where he received a degree from the Accademia di Belle Arti (Academy of Fine Arts). Upon his return to Tehran in 1954 he opened the modern art gallery Esthétique and initiated a collection of Iranian coffeehouse paintings—a folk genre. In 1956 he participated in the Venice Biennale for the first time, and two years later returned as an Iranian delegate and an International Jury member. In 1958 he organized the first Tehran Biennial. With his late 1950s mural series “The Gates of Auschwitz” Gregorian became one of the first artists to commemorate the Holocaust. Around the same time he initiated his acclaimed “Earthworks” series, in which he created textured surfaces by fixing materi­ als like sand, earth, and ashes to canvas. He lived in the United States from 1962 to 1970 before returning to Iran. In the 1970s he joined the Fa­culty of Fine Arts at Tehran University and founded the Independent Artists Group. Gregorian established the Arshile Gorky Gallery, New York, in 1980 and the Near East Museum of Yerevan in 1993. Philip Guston (born Phillip Goldstein) Born 1913 in Montreal, Canada Died 1980 in Woodstock, NY, USA Philip Guston was an artist of the first-gener­ ation New York School whose later pain­tings led the transition to Neoexpressionism. He moved with his family from Montreal to Los Angeles at age six. Beginning in 1927 he attended the Manual Arts High School, where he met his fellow student Jackson Pollock (1912–1956). In 1930 Guston attended the Otis Art Institute on a scholarship but left after three months. He was already politically aware by age eighteen, and when his mural depicting racial injustice for the Marxist-leaning John Reed Club in Los Angeles (1931) was defaced by police, the incident only escalated his ideolo­gical bent. In the mid-1930s Guston painted murals for the U.S. Works Progress Administration, as well as in Mexico (The Struggle Against War and Terror, 1935).

He began to work in abstraction in the late 1940s and became part of the first generation New York School after settling in New York in 1950. In the late 1960s Guston returned to a less abstract, more figurative style, in which he addressed many of the political themes from his earlier work. Renato Guttuso Born 1911 in Bagheria, Italy Died 1987 in Rome, Italy Renato Guttuso, who painted monumental paintings of historic and current subjects, became a leading figure in Italian Socialist Realism. He was also an illustrator, scenic designer, critic, writer, and politician. He abandoned his law studies in the early 1930s to become an artist in Rome. Because of military service (1935–1937) he temporarily relocated to Milan, where he came in contact with such artists and intellectuals as Renato Birolli (1905–1959), Giacomo Manzù (1908–1991), and Lucio Fontana (1899–1968), who shaped his artistic and political attitude. In 1937 Guttuso finally settled in Rome, where he execu­ ted his first large-scale realist composition commenting on contemporary Italian life, Volo da Etna (Flight from Etna; 1937–38), which won the Bergamo award in 1938. That year he also had his first solo show at the Galleria Cometa. Guttuso joined the Italian Communist Party in 1940 and completed his masterpiece, Crocifissione (Crucifixion), in the following year. When he was forced to leave Rome during World War II in 1943, he committed himself to the antifascist resistance movement. After the war he co-founded the Fronte Nuevo delle Arti (New Arts Front). In the second half of the 1940s Guttuso traveled to Paris and met Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), with whom he shared a lifelong friendship.

H Hans Haacke Born 1936 in Cologne, Germany Lives and works in New York, NY, USA Hans Haacke is a conceptual artist whose works often carry distinct political overtones. Haacke studied at the Public Works Aca­ demy (Staatliche Werkakademie), Kassel, from 1956 to 1960 and then worked at Atelier 17 in Paris. In 1961 he earned a scholarship to attend the Tyler School of Art, Temple University, in Philadelphia, and in 1963 he moved to New York. He has spent most of his career teaching art at a number of American institutions, except from 1963 to 1965 and other brief periods when he taught in Germany. For his public projects he has applied investigative and demonstrative methods in order to uncover financial and institutional interrelations and interferences within the art market. He has also shown an interest in physics, for example in his Condensation Cube (1963). In 1971 his planned solo show at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York was canceled by museum director Thomas Messer because several works in the exhibition raised critical questions about the business and perso­nal connections of the

museum’s trustees. Haacke received an award from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1978 as well as other notable prizes. In 1993, for example, he represented Germany at the Venice Biennale and won the Golden Lion award, together with Nam June Paik.

Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Central National Art Museum of Queen Sofia), Madrid (2014).

Raymond Hains Born 1926 in Saint-Brieuc, France Died 2005 in Paris, France

Harold Frederick Weaver Hawkins had studied to become an art teacher before enlisting in World War I. After sustaining serious injuries to his right arm during the Battle of the Somme in 1916, he learned to paint and draw with his left hand. To avoid the stigmatized label of “wounded artist,” he briefly created art under the pseudonym Raokin in 1927, but later became known as Weaver Hawkins. After traveling widely, he and his family settled in Australia in 1935. Hawkins’s work explored the consequences of the modern age, from drawings of wor­ kers to moralistic works about atomic war to spiritual paintings. His style exhibits influences from such movements as Vorticism, Surrealism, and Social Realism. He was a founding member of both the Contemporary Art Society of New South Wales, of which he was president in 1952 and again from 1954 to 1963, and the Sydney Printmakers group. He had his first retrospective at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1976.

The art of Raymond Hains reflected his interest in language, the play of words, and verbal associations. His artistic practice was not confined to one style, technique, or medium but spanned an unpredictable range, from photography to found-object installations, sculptures, and Web-based collages. He had enrolled in a sculpture workshop in Rennes at the École régionale des beauxarts (Regional School of Fine Arts) in 1945 but soon abandoned his studies and moved to Paris, where he became an apprentice to photographer Emmanuel Sougez (1889–1972). Hains began to create his abstract Hypnagogic Photographs through the use of mirrors and by experimenting with different photographic techniques. In 1949 Hains reconnected with his former classmate at Rennes, the mixed media artist Jacques Villeglé (b. 1926). For the next twelve years the two collaborated to create décollages of torn posters from the street’s billboards and became known as affichistes, forming an opposition to Ameri­ can Abstract Expressionism and French art informel with their “ready-made paintings.” In 1960 Hains co-founded the Nouveaux Réalistes (New Realists) and participated in the group’s first exhibition. Among his many international exhibitions, Hains’s work was included in The Art of Assemblage (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1961), the Venice Biennale (1964) and Documenta, Kassel (1968; 1997). Richard Hamilton Born 1922 in London, UK Died 2011 in North End, UK Richard Hamilton was a painter and collagist whose early works are considered the first examples of Pop art. Hamilton first studied at Saint Martin’s School of Art before World War II, and later at the Royal Academy and the Slade School of Fine Art. In the early 1950s he began exhibiting at London’s new Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), where he also took part in the inaugural meeting of the Independent Group. After seeing the proto-Pop art “Bunk” collage series (1947–52) by Eduardo Paolozzi, Hamilton began to produce promotional pieces for the Group; none more influential than Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? (1956), a poster he designed for the exhibition This Is Tomorrow at the Whitechapel Gallery (1956). This collage is widely considered as the beginning of the Pop art movement. Hamilton’s work was featured in major exhibitions at the Tate Gallery, London (1970; 1992); Documenta, Kassel (1968); the Solo­ m on R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1973); and the Bienal de São Paulo (1989). A major posthumous retro­ spective was organized by the Tate Modern, London, in collaboration with the

Weaver Hawkins Born 1893 in London, UK Died 1977 in Willoughby, Australia

Carmen Herrera Born 1915 in Havana, Cuba Lives in New York, NY, USA Cuban-born painter Carmen Herrera took private drawing lessons as a child, and as a teenager in the 1930s she was sent to Paris for further studies. After returning to Havana around 1935 she studied architecture at the Universidad de La Habana (Univeristy of Havana) for about two years. After marrying English teacher Jesse Loewenthal in 1939, the couple moved to New York, where she studied at the Art Students League. There she met fellow artists Wifredo Lam (1902–1982) and Barnett Newman (1905–1970). In the late 1940s Herrera relocated to Paris, where she participated four times in the annual Salon des réalités nouvelles at the Musée d'art moderne de la ville de Paris. During those years Herrera encountered many other artists and began to simplify her compositions. First she painted compositions of contrasting optical forms by arranging small, geometric forms in three or more bold colors. She then began to explore the infinite possibilities of formal simplicity. She also experimented with symmetry and asymmetry in sharp-edged chromatic planes and with shaped canvases and monochrome sculpture-paintings. In 1954 Herrera finally settled in New York and continued painting. In 2016 the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York organized her first retrospective. Lynn Hershman Leeson Born 1941 in Cleveland, OH, USA Lives and works in San Francisco, CA, and New York, NY, USA Artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson studied at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and at San Francisco State University, where she earned her MFA degree. She works cross-media, often

creating interactive works in photography, video, film, installation, performance, and Internet-based media. Her work integrates art with social commentary and technology. Hershman is also regarded as a strong voice within the feminist movement. Questions of (constructed) identity, privacy, surveillance, and the relationship between real and virtual worlds as well as between humans and machines are constantly addressed in her body of work. She is probably best known for her series centered on the fictional character Roberta Breitmore (1973–78). In her later work she continued to pioneer new media art: her video Lorna (1979–1983) was the first interactive videodisc and she was the first to use touch-activated screens for Deep Contact: The Sexual Fantasy Videodisk (1984–86). Eva Hesse Born 1936 in Hamburg, Germany Died 1970 in New York, NY, USA Eva Hesse is best known for using synthetic materials such as latex, fiberglass, and plastics in her post-Minimalist sculptures. In 1939 she and her family fled Nazi Germany and moved to New York. She first studi­ ed art in 1952 at the School of Industrial Art, then at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute. She subsequently studied drawing at the Art Students League of New York in 1953 and enrolled at Cooper Union the following year. After that, she attended the School of Art at Yale University, graduating in 1959, then worked as a textile designer in New York. In the early 1960s she mostly produced drawings, which were first exhibited in 1961, and had her first solo show, at the Allan Stone Gallery, New York, in 1963. Hesse lived in Germany in 1964, working for the textile manufacturer Friedrich Arnhard Scheidt. During this time she traveled in Europe, experimented with materials, and began to work in relief and sculpture. Returning to New York, Hesse produced her first freestanding sculptures in synthetic materials. In 1968 she gained wider recognition thanks to her show Chain Polymers at Fisch­bach Gallery in New York. The following year she was also included in the exhibition Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form at Kunsthalle Bern. Maqbool Fida Husain Born 1915 in Pandharpur, India Died 2011 in London, UK One of the best-known Indian modernists, Maqbool Fida (“M.F.”) Husain drew from different Indian cultural sources to create his narrative paintings. His inspirations include Hindu and other religious figures, the vibrant color and action of festivals, historical events, dance, and the daily lives of contemporary Indians. Husain studied calligraphy in Baroda, but was primarily self-taught. In 1935 he began painting billboard advertisements for Bollywood movies. Husain mounted his first exhibition in 1947 at the Bombay Art Society. After the Partition of India and Pakistan later that year, Husain co-founded the Progressive Artists Group. In the early 1950s Husain traveled to Europe, where he had a solo show in Zurich in 1952 and was deeply influenced by meeting Paul Klee (1879–1940) and other Cubist masters. Husain’s short film Through the Eyes of a Painter

won a Golden Bear in the 1967 Berlin International Film Festival. In 1971 he was a special invitee (along with Pablo Picasso {1881–1973}) to the Bienal de São Paulo. Husain won the national awards Padma Shri (1966), Padma Bhushan (1973), and Padma Vibhushan (1991). However, the artist was criticized in India for his satirical representation of religious figures. Death threats and lawsuits by Hindu extremists led to Husain’s permanent departure from India in 2006.

I Robert Indiana (born Robert Clark) Born 1928 in New Castle, IN, USA Lives and works in Vinalhaven, ME, USA Robert Indiana is a pivotal figure in the development of assemblage art, hard-edge painting, and Pop art. He attended Arsenal Technical High School in Indianapolis, known for its strong arts curriculum. After graduation in 1946 he joined the U.S. Army Air Corps (later U.S. Air Force) and in 1949 began his studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Before graduating in 1954, Indiana spent time in France and Italy and enrolled at the University of Edinburgh, where he wrote poems that he illustrated, typeset, and printed at Edinburgh College of Art. Later that year he moved to New York. In 1956 he met Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015), who helped him establish a studio in an abandoned warehouse at 31 Coenties Slip. From 1960 onward Indiana produced wall-hung assemblages and freestanding sculptures that he called “herms.” By 1961 he had begun his series focused on the illusory American dream—the first of these paintings, The American Dream I, was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art. In 1962 he had his first New York solo exhibition at the Stable Gallery. He probably is most famous for incorporating stenciled lettering in his work. Among his most famous works is LOVE (1966).

J Jess (Burgess Franklin Collins) Born 1923 in Long Beach, CA, USA Died 2004 in San Francisco, CA, USA In his paintings and collages, which often incorporate images from mythology, fables, symbols, chemistry, or alchemy, Jess created absurd and complex pictorial worlds. He took the name “Jess” after sepa­rating from his family in the late 1940s. While studying chemistry at the California Institute of Technology, he was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1943 and was assigned to the Army Corps of Engineers and worked at the Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, on the production of plutonium for the atomic bomb, until 1946. After completing his degree in radiochemistry he began to study painting and to question his involvement with nuclear energy. He enrolled at the California School of Fine Arts (now San Francisco Art Institute) in 1949, where he studied with Abstract Expressionist

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Clyfford Still (1904–1980) and figurative painter Elmer Bischoff (1916–1991), among others, and had his first solo show at the Helvie Makela Gallery, San Francisco, in 1950. Throughout the 1950s he experimented with narrative and technique in still lifes, portraits, and landscapes, some of which he likened to creation myths. During this period he also began making collages, which he called “paste-ups”; works from his “Translation” series (begun in 1959) incorporated literary texts. Jia Youfu Born 1942 in Suning, Hebei province, China Lives and works in Beijing, China In his paintings, Jia Youfu often combines the monumental landscape tradition of the Northern Song period (960–1127 AD) with dramatic composition and light and dark contrast. In 1960, Jia Youfu began his studies at the Central Academy of Fine - Meishù Arts (CAFA, or Zhongy ang � Xuéyuà) in Beijing. He later studied under the noted landscape painter Li Keran (1907–1989), at the School of Chinese Painting, where he learned the Western technique of contrast. As a student, Jia Youfu often traveled to paint the Taihang Mountains in his home province of Hebei, a site that remains a source of artistic inspiration. His monumental ink paintings of the mountains combined traditional Chinese landscape painting with contemporary innovations, both in his brushstrokes and in his subjects. Jia Youfu graduated from CAFA in 1965. From 1967 to 1977, during the Cultural Revolution, he taught theater design at the Zhongy ang Xìjù Xuéyuàn (Central Academy of Drama) in Beijing, and in 1977 he began to teach traditional landscape painting at CAFA, where he remains on the faculty. Jikken Ko¯bo¯ Active 1951–58 in Tokyo, Japan Jikken Ko¯bo¯ (Experimental Workshop), founded in Tokyo in 1951, was a multimedia arts collective whose members included composers, visual artists, set and lighting designers, engineers, and musicians. By combining various art forms, their goal, in the words of their founder Shu¯zo¯ Takiguchi (1903–1979), was to achieve “an organic combination that could not be realized within the conventions of a gallery exhibition, and to create a new style of art with social relevance, closely related to everyday life.” Partly inspired by the Bauhaus and the Surrealists—and contemporary to the creative experiments at Black Mountain College in North Carolina— Jikken Ko¯bo¯ created performances as complex, multi-layered installations, with the artists participating in the creation of the entire mise-en-scène. Jikken Ko¯bo¯ also pioneered experiments with new media, entering into creative partnerships with Sony, for example, and creating collaborative works that combined techno­logies, such as cassette recorders and slide projectors, with traditional Japanese forms. Although they predate other groups, such as Gutai, the work of Jikken Ko¯bo¯ is only recently being celebrated outside of Japan, thanks to their inclusion in important exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2012), and Tate Modern, London (2013).

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Jasper Johns Born 1930 in Augusta, GA, USA Lives and works in Sharon, CT, USA, and Saint Martin Rendering symbols of identity and everyday imagery (such as the American flag, body parts, and sequences of letters and numbers) with brushy strokes and collaged elements, Jasper Johns’s approach bridges the traditions of appropriation and Expressionist art. Johns studied at the University of South Carolina in 1947 and 1948. He moved to New York City later that year, where in 1949 he briefly attended Parsons School of Design. In 1952, Johns was drafted into the army and stationed in Sendai, Japan. Upon his return to New York in 1953, he became acquainted with his future romantic partner Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008), as well as John Cage (1912–1992) and Merce Cunningham (1919–2009). They embarked on multidisciplinary collaborations that resis­ ted the prevalent tendencies of Abstract Expressionism. Considered a Neo-Dadaist, Johns began re-creating imagery such as flags, maps and targets. He later worked with stenciled numbers and letters, relocating attention from the unique to the standardized. Johns received his first gallery solo show at New York’s Leo Castelli Gallery in 1958, from which the Museum of Modern Art purchased four paintings, including Flag (1954–55) and Target with Four Faces (1955). Johns was awarded the Grand Prize for Painting at the Venice Biennale in 1988 and showed at every Documenta between 1964 and 1977. Asger Jorn (born Asger Oluf Jørgensen) Born 1914 in Vejrum, Jutland, Denmark Died 1973 in Århus, Denmark Asger Jorn, along with Guy Debord (1931– 1994) and Michèle Bernstein (b. 1932), was a co-founder of the revolutionary avant-garde Situationist International movement. Jorn first studied teaching at the Vinthers Seminarium, Silkeborg, before moving to Paris in 1936 to study painting; first with Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) and later with Fernand Léger (1881–1955) at the Académie Contemporaine (Contemporary Art Academy). Jorn returned to Denmark in 1937, studying at the Kongelige Danske Kunstakademi (Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts), Copenhagen, before the German occupation of Denmark in 1942, after which he joined the city’s Communist resistance. The postwar period was Jorn’s most productive. He was a co-founder of the avant-garde CoBrA group in Paris in 1948 and was a key figure in the “International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus,” a CoBrA offshoot. With the French lettrist Guy Debord, he helped form the Situationist International in 1957. Jorn’s work was exhibited widely in the 1950s and ’60s, including major exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Basel; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and the Louisiana Museum, Denmark. Most famously, he refused the 1964 Guggenheim Prize, responding to the announcement with a scathing telegram that accused the museum of trying to promote itself by including an artist “against his will.”

K Tadeusz Kantor Born 1915 in Wielopole Skrzy n´ skie, Austria-Hungary Died 1990 in Kraków, Poland Tadeusz Kantor is best known for his achievements as a theater director and for his groundbreaking plays for Teatr Cricot 2, but he also worked as a stage director, pain­ ter, set designer, actor, writer, art theoretician, and teacher at the Akademia Sztuk Pie˛knych (Academy of Fine Arts) in Kraków. While studying painting there from 1934 to 1939, Kantor staged his first plays. During World War II he remained committed to theater and founded his own Teatr niepodległo´sci (Theatre of Independence) in 1942. After the war he co-founded the Group of Young Artists, helped to mount the first exhibition of modern art at Kraków’s Art Palace in 1948, and began working as a stage designer at the Stary Teatr (Old Theatre) in Kraków. Kantor became a leading figure in the postwar modern art scene in Poland, seizing Western artistic developments, including art informel, conceptualism, and happenings. From 1948 onward he painted distorted figures and forms in a post-Cubist style. In 1955, after visiting Paris, he executed more abstract and improvisatory works. He later began to create his “emballages”—compositions of discarded objects, such as umbrellas, bags, and envelopes. Marwan Kassab-Bachi Born 1934 in Damascus, Syria Lives in Berlin, Germany Kassab-Bachi moved to Berlin in 1957, where he studied at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste (College of Fine Arts) with Hann Trier (1915–1999). He began painting portraits while working at a fur factory from 1962 to 1970. In 1963 he began associating with future Neue Wilden artists Georg Baselitz (b. 1938) and Eugen Schönebeck (b. 1936). Kassab-Bachi describes the 1970s as a tur­ning point in his art, when he had a vision of a face that morphs into a landscape. He returned to the motif throughout his career. Kassab-Bachi’s knowledge of Abstract Expressionism and tachisme can begin to be seen in the same decade. His portraits are archetypes, individual yet universal. Kassab-Bachi uses color judiciously— sometimes using only four or five hues— creating his faces through a fluid blending of paint, emphasizing the painting’s flat surface. The flattened figures are situated within unidentifiable settings, isolating them and emphasizing the painting’s surface. Kassab-Bachi was a visiting professor in painting from 1977 to 1979 at the Hochschule für Bildende Kunst (College of Fine Arts), where he was appointed full professor in 1980. He taught at the school until 2002. He became the first Arab member of Germany’s Akademie der Künste (Art Academy) in 1994.

Ellsworth Kelly Born 1923 in Newburgh, NY, USA Died 2015 in Spencertown, NY, USA Ellsworth Kelly studied art in Brooklyn, Boston, and Paris from 1941 to 1949, with an interruption because of military service during World War II from 1943 to 1945. After completing his studies, he traveled in France, where he met many noted ar­ tists such as the sculptor, painter, and poet Jean Arp (1886–1966) and the sculptor, pain­ ter, and photographer Constantin Brâncus�i (1896–1957). Kelly had his first solo show at the Galerie Arnaud Lefebvre, Paris, in 1951; his first solo exhibition in New York was at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1956. He is famous for his geometrical abstract paintings—arrangements of carefully composed rectangles of mostly intense colors. Kelly produced multi-panel paintings and monochrome canvases of unusual shapes that intersect both painting and sculpture. He also made freestanding sculptures from the late 1950s onward. He was commissioned to create a number of notable public artworks, and beginning with his first retro­ spective in 1973, his work has been acknowledged in numerous retrospective exhibitions. Krishen Khanna Born 1925 in Lyallpur, British India Lives and works in Gurgaon, India Krishen Khanna was a largely self-taught artist who attended Imperial Service College in Windsor, England, from 1938 to 1942 and the Government College in Lahore from 1942 to 1944. He started his career as a banker, relocating to Shimla after the Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. He eventually moved to Bombay, where he associated with the members of the Progressive Artists’ Group. He was invited to join them in 1949. His first solo exhibition in 1955 was held at USIS, Chennai. Khanna became internationally known for his Expressionist brushwork, exuberant lines and energetic colors within figurative paintings. His recurrent themes include biblical subjects, the portrayal of musicians, as well as the direct and symbolical depiction of India’s ordinary life and its important moments in history. Khanna took part in the biennials of Tokyo (1957; 1961), São Paulo (1960), Venice (1962), and Havana (1991). In 1962, Khanna became the first Indian artist to receive a Rockefeller Grant. He traveled to Japan that year, then spent the years of 1963 and 1964 in the United States (Washington, D.C., and New York). He received the Padma Shri in 1990. Kim Kulim Born 1936 in Sangju, North Gyeongsang Province, Korea Lives and works in Seoul, South Korea Kim Kulim, known as Korea’s first avantgarde artist, has worked in film, light, performance, and land art, often stretching the limits of a given medium. Primarily self-taught, he moved to New York after he dropped out of college and became involved with the Art Students League of New York, participating in a number of group exhibitions. Back in Korea, he held his first solo exhibition in 1958 at Daegu

Information Center, and soon expanded his artistic practice beyond painting. In the 1960s Kim began to emphasize the materiality of painting in a radical way. For his artistic “deconstructions” he often used burned plastics, vinyl, and metal bits alongside oil paint. He incorporated ready-made objects in his painted canvases, created installation art, and staged performances. He played a leading part in several artist collectives (Painting 68, A.G. Group, The Fourth Group) and brought many firsts to the Korean art world. He filmed Korea’s first experimental movies, Munmyeong, Yeoja, Don (Civilization, Woman, Money; 1969); and 1/24 (Cho) ui Uimi (The Meaning of 1/24 Second; 1969), staged the nation’s first body painting performance, initiated the first Korean mail art Maeseu Midieo ui Yumul (The Relics of Mass Media, 1969); and was responsible for Korea’s first examples of land art Chujeog e Hyeonsang Eseo (From Phenomenon to Traces; 1970). Julije Knifer Born 1924 in Osijek, Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes Died 2004 in Paris, France Julije Knifer began his career with a series of sketched self-portraits in ink and mixed-media, making them into a kind of diary from 1949 to 1952, during his stu­ dies at the Akademija likovnih umjetnosti (Academy of Fine Arts), Zagreb (1951–57). While developing his own style, he experi­ mented with abstraction, gradually abandoning recognizable imagery. Within two years of completing his studies he defined the basic elements of his lifelong artistic approach. He radically reduced his formal repertoire to the meander in ever-changing variations through the opposition of black and white, horizontal and vertical. In 1959 he co-founded the Gorgona Group, and between 1961 and 1973 he participated in four New Tendencies exhibitions at the Gallery of Contemporary Art, Zagreb. Knifer explored the meander in different genres, including geometric abstraction, neo-Cons­ tructivism, anti-art, and neo-avant-garde, but his work consistently focused on the element of time. Although Knifer mostly exhibited in Croatia, Germany, Italy, and France, his works are included in important international collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. He repre­ sented Croatia at the Venice Biennale in 2001, and a major retrospective was presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, in 2014. Ji r�í Kolá�r Born 1914 in Protivín, Austro-Hungarian Empire Died 2002 in Prague, Czech Republic A self-taught artist, Ji�rí Kolá�r began creating collages using text and images collected from magazines at age twenty. Collage expressed Kolá�r ’s feelings of a divided Europe before and during World War II. After the war, it provided an outlet for Kolá�r ’s critique of the Czech Republic’s Soviet-controlled Communist government. Kolá�r innovated new techniques within the medium, including confrontage, froissage, and rollage. Kolá�r is perhaps better known

as a writer. Echoing the fractures of his collage, Kolá�r ’s poetry explores themes of destruction. He published his first collection, Rodný list (Birth Certificate), in 1941. He was a member of Group 42 during World War II. In 1945, he moved to Prague to work as an editor. That same year he joined and withdrew from the Communist Party. Kolá�r was imprisoned by the Communist government in the 1950s, and his writings were blacklisted in 1949 and during the 1960s. He first exhibited abroad in 1963, in London. Kolá�r won first prize at the 1969 Bienal de São Paulo, and had a retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1975. After signing the protest docu­ ment Charter 77, Kolá�r was banned from the Czech Republic. He moved to Paris in 1980, returning to Prague after the Velvet Revolution of 1989. Geliy Korzhev Born 1925 in Moscow, USSR Died 2012 in Moscow, Russia Geliy Korzhev was one of the leading proponents of the chiseled “severe” style of pain­ ting, which emerged during a period of Soviet ideological reorientation following the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953. Between 1939 and 1944 Korzhev studied at the Moscow State Art School, continuing his training at the Surikov Institute until 1950. His first exhibitions took place in 1954 at the beginning of the so-called Khrushchev Thaw. Korzhev’s early work was dominated by history paintings, referencing both World War II and the 1917 Russian Revolution. Although never an official Communist Party member, Korzhev served as chairman of the Union of Soviet Artists’ Moscow branch. He later distanced himself from political topics and entered into dialogue with art-historical themes. The “Mutants” series from the 1980s, which depicted grotesque scenes inhabited by men and monsters, combined references to Renaissance painting with elements of contemporary Western and Soviet culture. Following the death of his parents in 1986, Korzhev—himself an atheist—began work on a series of somber biblical scenes. Korzhev’s work received official state endorsement, and in 1972 he was awarded the title of People’s Artist of the Soviet Union. Gyula Kosice Born 1924 in Košice, Czechoslovakia Died 2016 in Buenos Aires, Argentina Gyula Kosice (Fernando Fallik) was in the vanguard of kine­ tic and luminal art. His family moved to Argentina when he was age four. Although he studied art at the Academias Libres (Free Schools), he considered himself mostly self-taught. He co-founded the magazine Arturo (1944), took part in the first Arte Concreto Invención (Concrete Art Invention) exhibition (1945), and initiated the avant-garde Madí movement in 1946, writing the Madí manifesto and editing eight issues of its journal, Arte Madí Universal (Universal Madi Art). In 1944 Kosice created Röyi (Roy), his first abstract wood sculpture with flexible joints, followed by other articulated metal sculptures (Escultura articulada [Articula­ted Sculpture], 1946; Metro, 1950), whose form could be manipulated by spectators. He pioneered the use of Plexiglas

and neon for his “Estructuras lumínicasi” series from 1946 onward and was the first to introduce water as key element in his “Hydrosculptures,” which he began in 1948. During the later 1960s Kosice’s utopian project Ciudad hidroespacial (Hydrospatial City) presented models for “town-planning for space.” He also created monumental sculptures, including Victoria (1988) for the Olympic Games in Seoul, Korea, and Monument to Democracy (2000) in Buenos Aires. He represented Argentina in the Venice Biennale (1964), exhibited his works in nearly 200 shows; and was honored with numerous awards. Leon Kossoff Born 1926 in London, UK Lives and works in London, UK Leon Kossoff, an Expressionist painter of the so-called School of London, is most noted for portraits, life drawings, and cityscapes around London. Before serving in Italy, Belgium, Holland, and Germany during his military service from 1945 to 1948, he took commercial art and drawing classes. After the war, he studied at the St Martin’s School of Art and the Borough Polytechnic (1949 to 1953). His instructor was the painter David Bomberg (1890–1957) and a fellow student was the painter Frank Auerbach (b. 1931). Kossoff studied at the Royal College of Art until 1956 then joined Helen Lessore’s Beaux Arts Gallery in London, where his work was featured in six exhibitions. A major solo show was held at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1972. Kossoff’s paintings are built of thick layers of paint applied with distinct and broad brushstrokes. His favorite subjects are the areas where he has lived as well as the people he sees on the streets. He has often painted the booking hall at Kilburn Underground. Along with his career as an artist, Kossoff held teaching positions at the Regent Street Polytechnic, Chelsea School of Art, and St. Martin’s School of Art. In 1995 he represented Britain at the Venice Biennale. Ivan Kožaricˇ Born 1921 in Petrinja, Yugoslavia Lives and works in Zagreb, Croatia Ivan Kožaric� , is a leading conceptual artist of his generation. He creates humorous work in a variety of media, from sculpture to textual propositions, often rearranging previous works or returning to earlier ideas. After completing his studies at the Akademija likovnih umjetnosti (Academy of Fine Arts) in Zagreb in 1947, Kožaric� focused on the human figure. Osjecaj ´ cjeline (A Feeling of Wholeness; 1953–54), marked a turn to the abstract. In 1960, following a short stint in Paris, he joined Gorgona, a loosely orga­ nized group with such artists as Dimitrije Baši c� evi c´ (Mangelos, 1921–1987) and Josip Vaništa (b. 1924). Gorgona’s acti­ vities included ephemeral actions such as completing absurd questionnaires, taking group walks, and creating an “anti-magazine” of artist projects. During the 1960s, Kožaric� created sculptures of negative volumes. For the Venice Biennale in 1976, Kožaric� created Hrpa (Heaps), piling his previous objects carelessly. For Documenta 11 in 2002, he exhibited the entire contents of his studio. In 2007, the Museum of Con-

temporary Art Zagreb acquired his studio collection—more than 6,000 works—which he has reinstalled multiple times. In 2013, Haus der Kunst mounted Freedom Is a Rare Bird, Kožaric� ’s most comprehensive survey exhibition to date outside of Croatia. Lee Krasner Born 1908 in Brooklyn, NY, USA Died 1984 in New York, NY, USA Lee (Leonore) Krasner, a noted Abstract Expressionist painter, is among the few female artists to have received a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1984). She first studied at the Women’s Art School of The Cooper Union, and then the National Academy of Design (1928–32). Beginning in 1934, during the Great Depression, she worked for the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project and later entered Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts in 1937. While her early paintings reflected European modernism, Krasner soon became involved with the American Abstract Expressionists. In 1942 she participated in the exhibition American and French Painting at McMillen, Inc., in New York. She met fellow artist Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) there, and they married in 1945. The two proved to be highly influential for one another’s art. Her “Little Images” series (1946–50), in a controlled dripping technique, resulted in thirty-one small-scale abstractions reminiscent of calligraphy and hieroglyphics. For her collages in the 1950s, Krasner “recycled” earlier works, but after Pollock’s death in 1956 she began to create large-scale abstractions using broad brushstrokes that required intensive physical gestures. She had her first solo show in 1955 and had a retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, in 1965. Tetsumi Kudo Born 1935 in Osaka, Japan Died 1990 in Tokyo, Japan Eschewing formal categorization and exis­ ting artistic concepts, Tetsumi Kudo created biomorphic sculptures and assemblages that often incorporated grotesque renderings of the human body in combination with manmade items. He first enrolled at the Ato no Asagaya kenkyujo (Asagaya Institute of Art) in 1953 and continued his studies at - o- bijutsu kunitachidaigaku (Tothe Toky kyo National University of Fine Arts) from 1954 to 1958. Praised by the French art critic Michel Tapié (10th Yomiuri Independent Exhibition, 1958) and labeled “anti-art junk” by art critic Yoshiaki Tono (referring to Kudo’s Proliferating Chain Reaction, 1959), Kudo’s production performances and visual works regularly invited controversy. His artistic involvement with such themes as radiation, reproduction, and impotence already defined his early works. When he moved to Paris on a scholarship in 1963 he gained instant recognition with his legendary performance Philosophy of Impotence. Throughout his career he held exhibitions in Japan and Europe, including the Venice Biennale (1976) and the Bienal de São Paulo (1977). A major retrospective at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2008–9), introduced Kudo’s art to a wide American audience.

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Yayoi Kusama Born 1929 in Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture, Japan Lives and works in Tokyo, Japan Yayoi Kusama, known for her happenings and the use of dotted patterns, is one of the foremost contemporary artists of Japan. She first studied traditional nihonga painting in Japan, where she had her first solo show in 1952. After immigrating to the United States in 1957, she worked as an avant-garde painter and sculptor. Her large-scale “Net” painting series presented a system of small, thickly painted loops covering the entire surface in rhythmic undulations. Her “Accumulation” sculptures of that time are monochrome everyday objects (e.g., furniture, boats) covered with soft, phallic forms of different sizes. Yayoi Kusama covered the surfaces of her paintings, sculptures, and even entire rooms with sprawling, brightly colored patterns (her signature feature being the dot pattern) and often positioned herself in the center of them, wearing similarly patterned clothes to blend in with the art. From the late 1960s onward she staged a variety of provocative happenings (body-painting events, antiwar demonstrations) and further expanded her repertoire to include film and fashion design. After Yayoi Kusama returned to Japan in 1973, she began to write novels and poems. Late in the 1980s her work gained international recognition. In 1993 she represented Japan at the Venice Biennale.

L Wifredo Lam Born 1902 in Sagua La Grande, Cuba Died 1982 in Paris, France Through his work, Wifredo Lam sought to revive the Afro-Cuban culture. Lam’s father was Chinese and his mother was Cuban of African descent. After briefly studying law, he began to study painting at the Escuela de Bellas Artes (School of Fine Arts) in 1918, and in 1923 he traveled to Madrid, Spain, to study under Fernando Álvarez de Sotomayor y Zaragoza (1875–1960), who also taught Salvador Dalí (1904–1989). In 1936 he revolutionized his practice after seeing an exhibition of work by Pablo Picasso (1881–1973). He moved to Paris in 1938, where Picasso encouraged Lam to seek his own modernism, and the two exhibited their work at the Perls Galleries, New York, in 1939. Lam’s graphic works illustrated many poems, including André Breton’s “Fata Morgana” (1940). In 1941, after being imprisoned in France by the Nazis, Lam returned to Cuba, where his work was reinvigorated by his African heritage. After World War II, Lam traveled abroad, associating with the Italian avant-garde and the CoBrA group. In 1964, Lam received the Guggenheim International Award. His work has been widely exhibited, including at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 2015.

Daniel LaRue Johnson Born 1938 in Los Angeles, CA, USA Lives and works in New York, NY, USA Daniel LaRue Johnson was already active in the Los Angeles art scene before he studied at the Chouinard Art Institute in the first half of the 1960s. Even as a student he received noteworthy awards (Whitney Fellowship, 1963) and had a solo exhibition at the Rolf Nelson Gallery in Los Angeles (1964). Johnson’s art changed in response to the violence of the civil rights movement, and he began to create confrontational assemblages, such as Freedom Now, Number 1 (1963). He often combined found objects, such as fragments of broken dolls, hacksaws, and mousetraps, which he arranged in wooden boxes and then painted (or tarred) entirely black. In 1965 he received a Guggenheim fellowship, enabling him to study in Paris with sculptor Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966). After returning to the United States (New York City) in 1966, Johnson abandoned his “black boxes” and instead began painting hard-edge abstractions with vibrant colors, glossy surfaces, and precisely painted contours. Johnson has also made a number of large-scale commemorative sculptures, in abstract, Minimalist forms. His work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art, all in New York. Maria Lassnig Born 1919 in Kappel am Krappfeld (Carinthia), Austria Died 2014 in Vienna, Austria Maria Lassnig was the first woman to win the Grand Austrian State Prize in 1988. She began to study art at the Akademie der Schönen Künste (Academy of Fine Arts) in Vienna in 1941, first under Wilhelm Dachauer (1881–1951), who allegedly declared her art “degenerate,” then studied under Ferdinand Andri (1871–1956) and Herbert Boeckl (1894–1966). Late in the 1950s, Lassnig described her primarily artistic concern as “body awareness.” Freed from the constraints of realistic rendering, she considered her inner sensations and needs of her body as the most urgent reality, which she depicted through paintings of deformed bodies in meaningful colors. After living in Paris from 1961 to 1968, Lassnig moved to New York. She attended an animated film course at the School of Visual Arts, which led to several noted films, including Selbstportrait (Self-portrait; 1971). In 1980 she was appointed professor at the Hochschule für Angewandte Kunst (Academy of Applied Arts), Vienna, and later established an animated film studio in her master class. Lassnig represented Austria at the Venice Biennale in 1980 and took part in Documenta, Kassel (1982). At the Venice Biennale in 2013 she received the Golden Lion award for lifetime achievement in the arts. John Latham Born 1921 in Livingstone, Northern Rhodesia Died 2006 in London, UK The British conceptual artist John Latham studied at the Chelsea School of Art in London during the second half of the 1940s.

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He emerged as a conceptual artist while experimenting in sculpture, painting (with spray paint), video, and film. Latham was concerned with his own philosophy of time and the critical examination of religious and scientific systems of knowledge. In 1958 he began to make assemblages and sculptures using books that had been torn, partially burnt, painted over, or otherwise demolished. Latham became famous for his seminal action in 1966, when he produced the first of his so-called skoob works (“books” spelled backward). While teaching at St Martins School of Art, he invited his students to a quasi-ritualistic ceremony in which they chewed and spit out pages of art critic Clement Greenberg’s book Art and Culture. Equating destruction and creation, he then decanted the vestiges of the book into a vial and returned it to the school’s library. Latham and his wife, Barbara Stevini, founded the Artist Placement Group in 1966. Jacob Lawrence Born 1917 in Atlantic City, NJ, USA Died 2000 in Seattle, WA, USA Jacob Lawrence is known for his vivid scenes of everyday life among blacks. When he was thirteen his family moved to Harlem, where he attended an after-school art program. He quit school at age sixteen, but continued his interest in art. He frequently visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art, took classes at the Harlem Art Workshop and the Harlem Community Art Center, and later studied at the American Artists School. Lawrence was inspired by the Harlem community and made its people and life his subject matter. He composed his pictures of plain, often monochrome shapes painted in bold colors. He first received recognition for his paintings with a solo exhibition in 1938 at the Harlem YMCA. Early in the 1940s he created his famous sixty-panel series, “The Migration of the Negro” (now the “Migration” series). In 1946 he received a Guggenheim fellowship, enabling him to accomplish his “War” series, based on the experiences of his tour of duty during World War II, and took a teaching position at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Lawrence received numerous awards, including the National Medal of Arts and held more than two dozen honorary degrees. His work is included in collections all over the world. Lee Seung-taek Born 1932 in Kowon, Korea Lives and works in Seoul, South Korea A noted artist in sculpture and installation as well as environmental and performance art, Lee Seung-taek fled to South Korea during the Korean War (1950–53). He began drawing portraits of American soldiers at this time and continued after the conflict. In the mid-1950s, he began working with nonmaterial substances such as smoke, wind, and fire after seeing a spindly figurative sculpture by Alberto Giacometti (1901– 1966) and a Saudi Arabian oil-burning furnace on television. Lee Seung-taek received an art degree from Hongik University, Seoul, in 1959. As a student he created his first works with Godret stones, traditionally used for tying off strands of weaving, suspended on cords from a horizontal bar. For

his graduate exhibition in 1958 he showed Yeogsawa Sigan (History and Time), a plaster object wrapped in barbed wire and spattered with red and blue—the colors of both communism and democracy. Other early works include Glass (1969), a type of inoculation for a tree, and Jong-i Namu (Paper Tree; 1970), an installation of shredded paper hanging from branches. His works have addressed the human body, sexuality, and political strife. Early in his career he showed in the 1969 Paris Biennale and the 1970 Bienal de São Paulo. Lee Ufan Born 1936 in Haman County, Korea Lives and works in Kamakura, Japan and Paris, France Lee Ufan is a multimedia artist who emerged as the leader of the Mono-ha (School of Things) movement. He is also consider­ ed a key figure in the so-called Korean mono­ chrome painting movement. He ini­tially interrupted his studies at the Seoul Daehaggyo (Seoul National University) in 1956 to study philosophy at Nihon daigaku (Nihon University) in Tokyo, Japan, graduating in 1961. His most representative works are series of Minimalist abstractions produced by making repetitive gestural marks on the canvas. His “Relatum” sculpture series combines large stones with industrial materials, such as glass and iron or steel plates. In addition to his artworks, he has produced a remarkable amount of critical and philosophical writing, including The Search for Encounter (1971) and The Art of Encounter (2004). Lee Ufan’s first solo show was held in 1967 at the Sato Gallery in Tokyo, and his work was first shown in Europe at the Paris Biennale (1971), where he represented Korea. Norman Lewis Born 1909 in New York, NY, USA Died 1979 in New York, NY, USA Norman (Wilfred) Lewis developed his own style within the Abstract Expressionist movement. After studying commercial design in high school he spent several years as a seaman in South America and the Caribbean. He began his painting career as a social realist in the 1930s, when he studied at Columbia University, trained in the studio of Augusta Savage (1892–1962), and joined the Harlem “306” Group. He emerged as a politically conscious artist, worked for the Works Progress Administration, and became deeply involved in the Harlem art community. In the 1940s Lewis created gestural, jazz-inspired works with atmospheric effects in a bright, expressive palette, with calligraphic lines arranged in dynamic, swarm-like formations. He had a series of solo shows at the Willard Gallery in New York beginning in 1949 and was included in the exhibition Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1951. In response to the civil rights movement he co-founded the SPIRAL artist group in 1963 and helped establish New York’s Cinque Gallery for minority artists in 1969. Lewis received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1975 and had a major retrospective at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2015.

Li Xiushi Born 1933 in Jinzhou, Liaoning, China Lives and works in Beijing, China Li Xiushi is a Chinese landscape painter who has managed to integrate oil painting, a traditionally Western medium, with traditional Chinese ink painting in the painterly mogu (boneless) style and contemporary Chinese social realism. He first studied oil painting at the Zhongy ang Meishù � Xuéyuà (Central Academy of Fine Art [CAFA]) in Beijing, under the tutelage of the famous social realist painter Dong Xiwen (1914– 1973). Li’s painting Cross the Yangtze River (1959), which he completed while still a CAFA student, achieved critical acclaim, both in China and internationally. Li has held positions in many national art institutions of China, including founder and vice president of the Chinese Research Institute of Fine Arts (1988) and director of the China Oil Painting Society. He has also worked with the Heilongjiang Artists Association. Li has been featured in Fine Arts, a CAFA publication, and his work has been included in the National Fine Arts Exhibition, organized by the China Artists’ Association, since 1962. In 1981, Li curated an exhibition of contemporary Chinese painters from CAFA, Tsinghua University, and Beijing Fine Art Academy. Roy Lichtenstein Born 1923 in New York, NY, USA Died 1997 in New York, NY, USA Roy (Fox) Lichtenstein was one of the first and most widely recognized Pop artists. He studied at the Art Students League of New York in 1940. His college career was interrupted by military service during World War II, but he returned to Ohio State University in 1945 to complete his BFA and earn a master’s degree (1949). He later held teaching positions there and at other colleges. After his graduation he began to work in series and to adopt iconographies from printed images, and he had his first solo show at the Carlebach Gallery, New York, in 1951. In 1960 he began to incorporate themes and images from mass media and deve­loped a unique style by mimicking a basic newspaper reproduction process (using Ben-Day dots), thus blending mechanical reproduction and hand drawing techniques. He was part of the first group of Pop ar­tists, owing to a much-noticed exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, in 1962. His first retrospectives, in the late 1960s, were held at the Pasadena Art Museum; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Lichtenstein’s body of work includes more than 5,000 paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, and murals.

M Morris Louis Born 1912 in Baltimore, MD, USA Died 1962 in Washington, DC, USA Morris Louis was one of the foremost proponents of Color Field abstraction, a style more focused on color than gesture.

He received a scholarship to study at the Maryland Institute of Fine and Applied Arts in 1929, graduating in 1932. In 1936 he moved to New York, where he attended a workshop by the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896–1974). During the Great Depression he worked in the Easel Division of the Federal Art Project (1939–40) then returned to Baltimore in 1940. Although Louis first painted in a figurative, social realist style, after World War II he began to move toward abstraction. In 1948, he began to work with Magna, an acrylic resin paint that he used for the rest of his life. In 1952, Louis moved to Washington, D.C., where he befriended the artist Kenneth Noland (1924–2010). In 1953 Louis had his first solo show and visited the New York studio of Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011). He was deeply impressed by her soak-stain technique, and his own experiments with paint application resulted in three series of colorful, large-scale paintings: “Veils,” “Unfurled,” and “Stripes.” Louis destroyed most of his Abstract Expressionist paintings from 1955 to 1957. Tomás Maldonado Born 1922 in Buenos Aires, Argentina Lives and works in Milan, Italy Artist, industrial designer, and semiologist Tomás Maldonado attended the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes (National Academy of Fine Arts) in Buenos Aires. In 1944 he co-founded the Asociación Arte ConcretoInvención. The group’s Manifesto Invencionista (1946), co-written by Maldonado, elaborates his theory supporting rationality and objectivity over expressionism. Maldonado’s early paintings were characterized by geometric abstraction that played with visual perception. On the invitation of Swiss Concrete artist Max Bill, in 1954 Maldonado accepted a teaching position at the Hochschule für Gestaltung (College of Design) in Ulm, Germany, where he remained until 1967, eventually becoming its director. Maldonado moved the legendary institution away from its Bauhaus principles, pioneering a streamlined approach for mass-production design that is echoed in today’s technological products. Maldonado moved to Italy in 1967, where he achieved renown for his collaborations with Ettore Sottsass for Olivetti and for his corporate design work for the Gruppo Rinascente. His landmark text, written in 1970, La speranza progettuale, was translated into English in 1972 as Design, Nature, and Revolution: Toward a Critical Ecology. Maldonado urged designers to think about the problems of environmental destruction and social transformation in their work. He is emeritus professor of environmental design at the Polytechnic University of Milan. Ernest Mancoba Born 1904 in Johannesburg, South Africa Died 2002 in Paris, France Ernest (Methuen) Mancoba was one of the first successful black modern artists in South Africa. He began woodcarving in 1925 while studying at Grace Dieu, an Anglican teachers college, and produced a moder­ nist relief, African Madonna, in 1929. In 1935 Mancoba moved to Cape

Town, where he joined a group of Trotskyite artists. With the encouragement of artist Gerard Sekoto, he completed his art studies at the University of Fort Hare. Mancoba received a scholarship to study at the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (National School of Decorative Arts) in Paris in 1938. There he met Danish artist Sonja Ferlov, whom he married in 1942. During the German occupation of France in World War II, Mancoba was sent to an internment camp in St. Denis in 1940. The couple moved to Denmark in 1947 and became involved with the artist collective CoBrA (1948–51), of which Mancoba was a founding member. The avant-garde group, which inclu­ ded Karel Appel (1921–2006) and Asger Jorn (1914–1973), embraced Marxism and tachism. Mancoba abandoned sculpture in the 1950s and turned to painting, creating loose, abstract forms related to West African Kota reliquary figures. After CoBrA stopped exhibiting, Mancoba and his family resettled in Paris; he became a French citizen in 1961. Piero Manzoni Born 1933 in Soncino, Italy Died 1963 in Milan, Italy Piero Manzoni, a largely self-taught artist, made his earliest paintings at age seven­ teen. By the time he first exhibited his work—in a group show in his hometown in 1956—he had already begun to experi­ ment with anthropomorphic silhouettes, multiple imprints of everyday objects, and the use of tar instead of paint. In 1957 he took part in the exhibition Movimento Arte Nucleare (Nuclear Art Movement) in Milan. Inspired by a series of monochrome blue works by the new realist artist Yves Klein (1928–1962), Manzoni created his first “Achromes” (1957)—colorless canvases with dimensional layers of gesso, clay, or kaolin. For later “Achromes” works he used cotton wadding, fiberglass, plush, and even bread rolls. In 1958 he began his collaboration with Enrico Castellani and Agostino Bonalumi, co-founding an art gallery, Azimuth. From the late 1950s onward, Manzoni’s art became more conceptual. In works like Artist’s Breath, Artist’s Shit, Sculpture Eggs, Magic Bases, and Living Sculptures (all from 1960–61), he explored the ironic and critical role of the artist and questioned the dynamics of the art market and its object-bound mechanisms. Mawalan Marika Born c. 1908 in Yirrkala, Northeast Arnhem Land, Northern Territory, Australia Died 1967 in Yirrkala, Australia Mawalan Marika was the senior ceremonial leader of the Rirratjingu clan in Northeast Arnhem Land and an important indigenous Australian artist of the Yolngu people. The head of a veritable artistic dynasty, he transgressed traditional gender divisions by teaching his daughters as well as his sons how to paint. Many of his family members—including his brother Mathaman, son Wandjuk, and daughters Banduk and Dhuwarrwarr—are well-known artists. He considered art an important tool in disseminating Yolngu culture and helped to pioneer the marketing of cross-hatched bark pain­ ting in the 1950s. His compositions include

both traditional geometric elements and totemic figuration, depicting spiritual and everyday narratives. In the late 1950s and early 1960s he created legendary illustrations of the ancestral Djang’kawu song cycle on bark and in carved objects adorned with feathers and ceremonial body designs. Beyond his artistic success, Marika passionately advocated for indigenous rights. He presided over the Rirratjingu during the establishment of a Methodist mission in Yirrkala in 1935 and was an informant to anthropologists Catherine and Roland Berndt. In 1963 Marika was instrumental in sending a petition on bark to the Australian House of Representatives protesting the mining of Yolngu land. Maruki Iri & Maruki Toshi Born 1901 in Hiroshima, Japan / Born 1912 in Hokkaido, Japan Died 1995 in Tokyo, Japan / Died 2000 in Tokyo, Japan Maruki Iri and Maruki Toshi, who married in 1941, were professional artists with different backgrounds. While Maruki Iri studied traditional nihonga painting (ink painting), Maruki Toshi studied Western art at the Joshibijutsudaigaku no joshi-k o(Joshibi University’s Women’s School of Art and Design). He preferred large-scale paintings, while she favored drawing and illustrations. In 1948 the couple began their lifelong artistic collaboration on the subject of war and human tragedies, such as the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. Maruki Iri, who was from Hiroshima and lost family members in the bombing, arrived on the site only three days after the bombing. His wife followed a few days later. The urge to respond artistically to what they had seen emerged from their inability to forget the haunting memories, and during the next thirty years they created fifteen large folding-screen panels with complex and densely layered images. The Marukis also produced collaborative works on other atrocities of war, such as the Auschwitz concentration camp and the Nanking massacre. Since the 1950s, their “Hiroshima Panels” have been exhibited worldwide and both artists have received honors and prizes, including a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995 for their commitment to nuclear disarmament and world peace. Almir Mavignier Born 1925 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Lives and works in Hamburg, Germany Brazilian artist Almir da Silva Mavignier has pursued geometric abstraction, Op art, and graphic design. After studying with the Hungarian-born painter Árpád Szenès (1897–1985) in 1946, Mavignier created his first abstract paintings in 1949. After his work was featured in a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, São Paulo, in 1951, he devoted himself to Concrete art. From 1953 to 1958 Mavignier studied at the Hochschule für Gestaltung (College of Design) in Ulm, Germany, with Josef Albers, Max Bense, and Max Bill. In 1954 he created his breakthrough color-point grid series that causes optical vibrations. While living in Paris in 1958, Mavignier joined the radical ZERO group, whose artists rejected color and expression for ephemeral events

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and nontraditional materials. In 1961 he co-organized Nove Tendencije (New Tendencies), the first Yugoslavian exhibition devoted to post-informel art, with the art historian Marko Mestrovich and Bozo Bek, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb. Mavignier’s work was included in the Venice Biennale (1964), Documenta (1964; 1968), and the kinetic and Op art exhibition The Responsive Eye at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1965). He taught at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste (College of Fine Arts) in Hamburg from 1965 to 1990. John McHale Born 1922 in Glasgow, UK Died 1978 in Houston, TX, USA John McHale co-founded the Independent Group, a British Pop art movement that grew out of a shared fascination with American mass culture and postwar technologies, in 1952. He had worked as a technician and volunteered for military service in the Royal Marines during World War II, but his relatively brief artistic career began after the war. Though his first works were based on the Constructivist style, he later transitioned to Pop art and proto-Op art, establishing his first London studio early in the 1950s. In 1954 McHale co-curated the exhibition Collages and Objects at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (which he also co-founded), displaying collages from his “Transistor” series along with his interactive gaming collage, Why I Took to the Washers in Luxury Flats (1954). In 1955 he received a fellowship to study color theory and industrial design under Josef Albers (1888–1976) at Yale University. He returned to England with collected ephemera of American popular culture, especially colorful magazines, which he used as raw material for his art from 1956 to 1958. After he moved to America early in the 1960s, he earned a PhD in sociology and published extensively on the impact of technology and mass communications. David Medalla Born 1942 in Manila, Philippines Lives and works in London, UK David Medalla was a pioneer of land art, kinetic art, and performance art. He was only twelve years old when the poet Mark van Doren (1894–1972), a professor of English at New York’s Columbia University, recommended him for admission. There he studied ancient and modern literature, drama, and philosophy, and met the Filipino poet José Garcia Villa (1908–1997), who encouraged Medalla’s interest in painting. In the late 1950s, when he returned to Manila, the Catalan poet Jaime Gil de Biedma (1929–1990) and the painter Fernando M. Zóbel (1924–1984) became patrons of his art. From the 1960s onward, however, he lived and worked in Europe, where he was encouraged by the philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) and the artist Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968). Medalla often combined bubbles, sand, or neon with glass or plastic structures. Medalla’s Cloud Canyons (Cloud Gates) (1963), his first bubble machine, was followed by many others during the next thirty years. He was a founder and director of Signals Gallery (1964), the

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Exploding Galaxy collaborative (1967), and Artists for Democracy (1974–77). Medalla has taught in Europe and the United States his work has been included in many important exhibitions, including Documenta (1972), Kassel. Mohammed Melehi Born 1936 in Asilah, Morocco Lives and works in Marrakesh and Tangier, Morocco Mohammed Melehi is a significant figure in Moroccan modernism. From 1953 to 1955, he studied at the École des BeauxArts (School of Fine Arts) in Tétouan, Morocco. Melehi subsequently spent six years studying in Seville, Madrid, Rome, and Paris. He received a Rockefeller Foundation scholarship to study at Columbia University in New York from 1962 to 1964. Melehi has used the motif of the wave in his painting since the 1960s in various ways, typically with a bold color pal­ ette and hard-edge lines. On his return to Morocco, Melehi became a professor of painting, sculpture, and photography at the École des Beaux-Arts (School of Fine Arts) of Casablanca. At this time Melehi co-founded the Casablanca Group, who believed in exploring the tenets of modernism through local Moroccan visual language and traditions. Melehi was involved with the lef­ tist journal Souffles from 1966 to 1969 and was founding director of the cultural publication Intégral from 1972 to 1977. He orga­ nized the first Moroccan open-air exhibition in 1969 in Marrakesh. In 1978 he founded an annual arts festival in his hometown, Asilah. Melehi was the arts director at the Ministry of Culture from 1985 to 1992 and Cultural Consultant to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation from 1999 to 2002. Gustav Metzger Born 1926 in Nuremberg, Germany Lives and works in London, UK The son of Jewish-Polish parents, Gustav Metzger came to London in 1939 under the auspices of the Kindertransport (Refu­ gee Children’s Movement). He attended the Cambridge School of Art in London and the Koninklijke Academie voor Schone Kunsten van Antwerpen (Royal Academy of Fine Arts), Antwerp (1948–49), on a scholarship from the United Kingdom’s Jewish community. During the 1950s he took on various jobs and was politically active, protesting rocket bases in the UK and promoting nuclear disarmament. In 1959 he developed the concept of “auto-destructive” art and began to publish and write on the subject. Based on the destructive potential of his time, his work combined destruction and construction, using bags of garbage, exhaust fumes, acid, and liquid crystals in his work. In 1966 he organized the international Destruction in Art Symposium (DIAS) in London with members of the Vienna Actionist and Fluxus movements as well as psychologists, poets, and musicians such as John Lennon. From the 1970s onward, he created participatory art, with new technologies, and dealt with his personal history and the theme of extinction.

Evgeny Mikhnov-Voitenko Born 1932 in Kherson, UDSSR Died 1988 in Leningrad, UDSSR

Joan Mitchell Born 1925 in Chicago, IL, USA Died 1992 in Paris, France

Evgeny Mikhnov is a painter, graphic artist, and theater designer. He first moved to Leningrad with his mother in 1939. From 1941 to 1944 he was an evacuee in Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan, and from 1944 to 1946 in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine. He returned to Leningrad in 1946, but was sent to an artillery academy in 1947. He attended night school while working as an apprentice at the Sverdlov Factory in 1949. In 1951 he studied in the Scandinavian department of the First Leningrad Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages, and transferred to the Theater Institute in 1954. There he studied under the theater director and designer Nikolai Akimov (1901–1969), who introduced him to European modernism. Mikhnov became one of the first abstract artists in Russia. He was influenced by the Arefiev Circle (the first nonconformist group in Leningrad) and Abstract Expressionism, especially the art of Jackson Pollock (1912–1956). A prolific abstract artist, Mikhnov experimented with a variety of techniques but also invented a new style of painting with his “Tube” series (1956–59). In 1959 Mikhnov accepted a job at the Zhivopis’ i dizayn kombinata (Painting and Design Combine), the state organization of freelance designers. He represented Russia in the 1977 Venice Biennale.

Joan Mitchell is known for her Abstract Expressionist paintings in intense compositions of distinct brushstrokes and bold colors on pale backgrounds. She attended Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts (1942–44) and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, earning BFA (1947) and MFA (1950) degrees. She lived briefly in New York, but in 1948 moved to Paris on a fellowship and traveled to Spain and Czechoslovakia. During this time Mitchell mainly painted Expressionist landscapes, evolving toward abstraction. She returned to New York in 1949 and quickly became part of the downtown avant-garde art scene, associating with such prominent New York School artists as Franz Kline (1910–1962) and Willem de Kooning (1904–1997). In 1951 she became one of the few female members of the Eighth Street Club and was included in the groundbreaking Ninth Street Show. The next year Mitchell had her first New York solo show and met the poet Frank O’Hara (1926–1966), whose poems (among others) inspired her work. From 1955 onward, she lived alternately in New York and France until she settled in Vétheuil, a village in the northwestern suburbs of Paris, in 1968. One of her associates in France was the artist Cy Twombly (1928–2011).

Marta Minujín Born 1943 in Buenos Aires, Argentina Lives and works in Buenos Aires, Argentina

Henry Moore Born 1898 in Castleford, UK Died 1986 in Much Hadham, UK

Marta Minujín is an acclaimed pioneer of happenings, performance art, soft sculpture, and media arts. She initially studied at the Instituto Universitario Nacional del Arte (now Universidad Nacional de las Artes, or National University of the Arts) until 1960. She then received a scholarship to travel to Paris, where her work was featured in the exhibition Pablo Curatella Manes y 30 artistas argentinos de Nueva Generación (Pablo Manes and Thirty Argentines from the New Generation) at the Galérie Creuze in 1960. During her three years in Paris, she explored the local avant-garde art scene, created her first participatory works, and experimented with transforming hand-painted mattresses into interactive soft sculptures. Her lifelong aesthetic concerns—audience involvement and protesting the concept of the artwork as a permanent material object—reached their first significant manifestation in 1963 with La Destrucción (The Destruction). For this happening, Minujín invited other artists to help destroy and burn some of her own works. In 1966 she won a Guggenheim Fellowship—escaping Argentina just as a repressive regime assumed power—and moved to New York. There she created her psychedelic “Minuphone,” a telephone booth wherein visitors who dialed a number would suddenly hear sounds and see colors on the glass panels and watch themselves on a TV screen in the floor. She returned to Buenos Aires in 1976.

The British sculptor Henry Moore expressed an interest in sculpture at an early age. After serving in the army in World War I (1917–1919), he studied at the Leeds School of Art. In 1925 he toured France and Italy on a scholarship. He then taught at the Royal College of Art, London, until 1932, when he became head of the sculpture department at the Chelsea School of Art (until 1939). Moore’s first one-man show was at London’s Warren Gallery in 1928, followed by other exhibitions and public commissions. Influenced by primitive art and Surrealism, his work became more abstract, and in the 1930s he associated with several artist groups, including the Seven and Five Society (later the Seven and Five Abstract Group) and Unit One. During World War II he was commissioned to do a series of drawings depicting people seeking shelter in the London Underground. At first Moore mostly worked in wood and stone, while his later sculptures were often in cast metal. His subjects included reclining figures, family groups, and abstract, organic forms. In 1977 he established the Henry Moore Foundation, which encourages public appreciation of the visual arts. Throughout his career Moore earned many important prizes and retrospective exhibitions. François Morellet Born 1926 in Cholet, France Died 2016 in Cholet, France François Morellet produced drawings, pain­ tings, objects, and installations. In 1960 he co-founded GRAV (Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel, or Visual Arts Research Group),

in Paris, a group of Op art and kinetic artists who created works with light, motors, and sculptural materials and encouraged visitor participation. Though Morellet was mostly self-taught, he took some painting lessons from a professional artist. From 1948 to 1975 he led his father’s toy car factory, which allowed him the financial indepen­ dence to work as an artist, in both Cholet and Paris. In 1950 Morellet turned to abs­ traction and had his first solo show at the Galérie Creuze in Paris. His paintings, which depict infinite structures of geometric or stylized elements, reflect his application of predefined rules that were also determined by chance. In 1963 he began to use neon tubes that rhythmically switch on and off, which became his favored material for objects and installations. Morellet took part in Documenta, Kassel (1964; 1968; 1977), and in the Venice Biennale (1970), and in 1970 he contributed to the French pavilion at Expo ’70 in Osaka, Japan. Morellet’s first retrospective was held in 1977 at the National Gallery in Berlin; his last was in 2011 at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Robert Morris Born 1931 in Kansas City, MO, USA Lives and works New York, NY, USA Robert Morris is a central figure of Minimalism, process art, and performance. Prior to moving to New York in 1960, where he received an art, history degree from Hunter College in 1966, Morris studied engineering, art and philosophy in Kansas City, San Francisco, and Portland. He was drafted into the U.S. Army from 1951 to 1952. Although he first practiced painting, Morris’s thenwife, Simone Forti (b. 1935), introduced him to dance and performance in California in the 1950s. Morris’s subsequent work consi­ dered sculpture in the context of space and time. Morris and Forti collaborated with the postmodern Judson Dance Theater in the early 1960s. In 1963 Morris mounted his first solo exhibition of Minimalist sculpture— reviewed by Donald Judd (1928–1994)— at New York’s Green Gallery. The following year, Morris showed gray-painted polyhedron sculptures at the same space, focusing on the spatial relations between the objects and the viewer. In 1966 he published his “Notes on Sculpture” in Artforum and participated in the exhibition Primary Structures at New York’s Jewish Museum. Later in the decade he introduced more flexible materials like felt into his work. In 1969 he produced an ephemeral installation for Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials at the Whitney Museum. Eventually, Morris became a pioneer of Land Art and Conceptualism.

(Nishinomiya Art School). After a short figur­ative phase (adopting the croquis drawing technique and elements of Fauvism), he turned to abstraction in 1953. At the invitation of Yoshihara Jiro- (1905–1972), Sadamasa Motonaga became a member of the Gutai Art Association. From 1955 to 1971 he created experimental and sitespecific works (installations) using natural and industrial materials. His Work (Water) (1956) for the second Gutai outdoor exhibition is consider­ed a seminal work with its innovative concept of combining stable materials (plastic) with ephemeral, fluid elements (water, color, and light). After living in New York from 1966 to 1967, he began to use airbrush and acrylic paint, changing his visual language to hard-edge yet round shapes of bright, saturated colors. Motonaga received many important prizes, inclu­ding the Japanese Art Grand Prix in 1983.

Institute (known as the Villa Massimo), and in 1937, through a grant given by Edvard Munch (1863–1944), he studied in Norway. That same year, Nay’s paintings were included in the infamous Nazi-organized exhibition Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) in Germany. His ability to paint and exhibit was severely curtailed at that time. Nay was conscripted in 1940 and went with the German infantry to France, where he painted in secret in a French artist’s studio. From 1945 to 1948 Nay’s work explored myth and poetry, grappling with the trauma of World War II. In 1950, Kestner-Gesellschaft Hannover organized Nay’s first retrospective. Nay work became completely non-representational after he moved to Cologne in 1951. His work was shown in the Venice Biennale (1956) and Documenta, Kassel (1955; 1959; 1964).

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Iba N’Diaye Born 1928 in Saint-Louis, French West Africa Died 2008 in Paris, France

Movimento Nucleare (Enrico Baj, Sergio Dangelo, and Joe C. Colombo) Active 1950–c. 1960 in Milan, Italy

Iba N’Diaye has been called the father of Senegalese modern art. As a young artist working for the cinema in his home town, N’Diaye developed a style that would influence his life’s work. He first trained as an architect in Senegal, then in France: at the École des Beaux-Arts (School of Fine Arts), Montpellier; the École des BeauxArts (School of Fine Arts), Paris (Atelier Pingusson); and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière (1949–58). N’Diaye returned to Senegal when his country won independence in 1959. There, at the request of President Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906–2001), he founded the Departement des Arts Plastiques (Department of Plastic Arts) at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Dakar (National School of Fine Arts of Dakar), heading this department until 1967. N’Diaye participated in many exhibitions, including the Salon d’Automne (Autumn Salon), Paris (1962); the Bienal de São Paulo (1963, where he won the bronze medal); and the seminal exhibition Contemporary African Art at the Camden Arts Centre, London (1969). In the 1970s he divided his time between his “Atelier la Ruche,” Paris, and his home in the Dordogne, in southwestern France, where he painted some of his best-known works, including a series on the theme of the biblical ritual slaughter of a lamb (the “Tabaski” series).

The atomic bombings of Japan during World War II by the United States and the subsequent Cold War nuclear arms race between the US and the USSR strongly influenced the development of the Movimento Nucleare (Nuclear Movement). The movement began in Milan in 1950 when Italian artists Enrico Baj (1924–2003) and Sergio Dangelo (b. 1932) curated an exhibition at Galleria San Fedele titled Pittura nucleare (Nuclear Painting). Baj began to use the mushroom cloud in his works of the 1950s, while Dangelo had been influenced by the free-ranging artistic expression and folkloric elements of the CoBrA group. Joe Colombo (1930–1971), an Abstract Expressionist–influenced artist later known as an industrial designer, joined the group in 1951. “Manifesto tecnico della Pittura nucleare” (Technical Manifesto), published in 1952 to accompany an exhibition in Brussels, concretized the group’s theories. In this screed the artists sought to reinvent painting for the atomic age, warn about the dangers of nuclear technology, and criticize the uniformity of contemporary painting. Dangelo spearheaded Il Gesto (1955–1959), a journal affiliated with the Movimento Nucleare. The movement is historically associated with Eaismo (“Atomic Era-ism”), founded by Voltolino Fontani in 1948 in Italy, and Salvador Dali’s (1904–1989) “Mystical Manifesto” from 1951. Movimento Nucleare influenced artists internationally, including Yves Klein (1928–1962) and Asger Jorn (1914–1973).

Sadamasa Motonaga Born 1922 in Iga Ueno, Mie Prefecture, Japan Died 2011 in Takarazuka, Japan

Ernst Wilhelm Nay Born 1902 in Berlin, Germany Died 1968 in Cologne, Germany

Sadamasa Motonaga initially became famous for his drip paintings (using enamel paint from 1957 onward), which were inspired by the traditional Japanese technique of tarashikomi, but he also made silkscreen prints and picture books. He began his artistic training in 1944 under the painter Hamabe Mankichi (1902–1998) and moved to Kobe, Japan, in 1952 to study at the nearby Nishinomiya geijutsu gakko-

From 1925 to 1928 Ernst Wilhelm Nay stu­ died painting at the Hochschule der Künste (College of Arte) Berlin under the tutelage of the German Expressionist painter Karl Hofer (1878–1955). Nay was particularly interested in the paintings of Henri Matisse (1869– 1954), Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938), Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) and Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665). Nay traveled to Rome in 1931 to study at the German Art

Alice Neel Born 1900 in Merion Square, PA, USA Died 1984 in New York, NY, USA Alice Neel is best known for her straightforward, often confrontational, portraits. After working as a secretary (1918–1921) while attending evening classes at the School of Industrial Art in Philadelphia, she enrolled at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women (now Moore College of Art and Design). She and her husband, Cuban artist Carlos Enríquez Gómez (1900–1957), traveled to Cuba in 1926 but moved to New York City the following year. When she moved to Spanish Harlem in 1938, she began to paint incisive portraits of family and friends, her Puerto Rican neighbors, and people she met on the street. She continued working in a figurative style,

ignoring the rising abstract movement of the postwar era. With her move to the Upper West Side in the 1960s, she made her way back into the current artistic circles and portrayed important artists, curators, and gallery owners, such as the poet and wri­ ter Frank O’Hara (1926–1966), Pop artist Andy Warhol (1928–1997), and land artist Robert Smithson (1938–1973). In 1974 she was honored with a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Albert Newall Born 1920 in Manchester, UK Died 1989 in Cape Town, South Africa Albert Newall was a British-born painter and photographer who settled in South Africa in 1947. He worked as an aerial photographer before and during World War II, and later commented that his work as an artist was inspired by that mode of viewing the world, as well as by his cave explorations. After early painting experiments with Cubist and Surrealist styles, he turned to hard-edge abstraction in the late 1950s. Newall was included in the exhibition South African Non-figurative Art at the Bienal de São Paulo in 1959. His photographs, like his paintings, reflect his interests in geometry, patterning, and shadow, recalling the compositional strategies of the so-called New Objectivity photographers of the early twentieth century. Newall’s work left a legacy to the people of South Africa: The photography collection at Iziko Museums of South Africa, Cape Town, was established in 1965, based on the gift of 135 prints by Newall from the Cape Tercentenary Foundation. Since Newall’s death, his work has been shown in three historical surveys of South African abstract painting mounted at Stellenbosch Modern and Contemporary (SMAC) Gallery, located in Stellenbosch and Cape Town. Barnett Newman Born 1905 in New York, NY, USA Died 1970 in New York, NY, USA Barnett Newman, who was part of the New York School of Abstract Expressionists, is distinguished by his extreme formal reduction and his challenging purism. He first attended classes at the Art Students League during his teenage years. It was there that he met fellow abstract artist Adolph Gottlieb (1903–1974). Newman worked for his father’s clothing company from 1927 until he became a part-time art teacher in 1932. Early in the 1940s, he abandoned art and destroyed his Expressionist works. In 1944 he began to paint again, reaching a breakthrough with Onement, I (1948), his first monochrome work divided by a vertical stripe, called a “zip,” which became a signature feature of his work. His first solo show, at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1950, was harshly criticized, but by the 1960s critics began to warm to his work. His “The Stations of the Cross” series (1958–66) was shown at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1966. Although Newman produced a relatively small body of work, he had a notable influence both on his contemporaries and on future generations of artists. Newman was also a prolific writer of reviews, magazine articles, and essays on art and music.

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Malangatana Valente Ngwenya Born 1936 in Matalana, Mozambique Died 2011 in Matosinhos, Portugal

Luis Felipe Noé Born 1933 in Buenos Aires, Argentina Lives and works in Buenos Aires, Argentina

In his work, Mozambican painter and poet Malangatana Valente Ngwenya, known as Malangatana, combined fantastical imagery with political themes. Trained as a traditional healer, he moved to Lourenço Marques (now Maputo) at the age of twelve to find work. After he discovered an interest in art, he began taking classes at the college Núcleo de Arte in the late 1950s. Malangatana achieved success in his twenties with vibrant paintings that spoke to the country’s oppression under colonial rule, such as the hellfire scene Juízo Final (Final Judgment). In 1963 his poetry was published in Black Orpheus magazine and in the Penguin Books anthology Modern Poetry from Africa. Malangatana joined the guerrilla group FREMILO (Front for the Liberation of Mozambique) in 1964 and was later imprisoned for eighteen months. After receiving a grant from the Gulbenkian Foundation in 1971, he studied ceramics and painting in Portugal. Following the Mozambican revolution in 1974, he rejoined FREMILO, which became the ruling Communist Party. During the Mozambican Civil War, his work entered a “blue period.” Malangatana co-founded the Mozambican Peace Movement and helped to establish many cultural organizations, including the National Museum of Art in Maputo. UNESCO named him an Artist for Peace in 1997.

Argentinian artist and writer Luis Felipe Noé studied painting and law before co-founding the artist group Otra Figuración (Another Figuration) in 1961. Associated with the neofiguration movement, the collective’s process-oriented, experimental work reflected the turbulent social and political situation in Argentina in the 1960s. “I believe in chaos as a value,” said Noé. His Introducción a la esperanza (Introduction to Hope; 1963), a nine-panel work combining chaotic images of incited crowds with protest-like placards extending from it, won the Premio Palanza (Palanza Prize) from the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella (Torcuato Di Tella Institute). Although Otra Figuración officially disbanded in 1963, the group did participate in the Guggenheim International Award exhibition in 1964. A year later, Noé received a Guggenheim fellowship and moved to New York. There he created ephemeral, sculptural installations and published the antiaesthetic pamphlet Antiestética. He returned to Buenos Aires in 1967, where he opened a bar and created spatially complex installations with mirrors, inspiring the absurdist elements in his 1974 novel Recontrapoder. After a violent coup ousted Isabel Perón from power, Noé moved to Paris in 1976. In 1975 he returned to pain­ ting, producing expressive landscapes and innovating a crumpled technique on canvas. He returned to Argentina in 1987.

Hélio Oiticica Born 1937 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Died 1980 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Isamu Noguchi Born 1904 in Los Angeles, CA, USA Died 1988 in New York, NY, USA

Uche Okeke Born 1933 in Nimo, Nigeria Died 2016 in Nimo, Nigeria

Isamu Noguchi worked in a variety of media, including sculpture, ceramics, architecture, garden and theater design, lighting, and furniture-making. He found inspiration in both Japanese techniques and American modernity, and collaborated with many ar­ tists, including choreographer Martha Graham (1894–1991) and composer John Cage (1912–1992). As the son of Japanese writer Yonejiro- Noguchi (1875–1947) and American writer Léonie Gilmour (1873–1933), Noguchi often traveled be­ tween Japan and the United States. He worked as an intern for the monumental sculptor Gutzon Borglum (1867–1941) in 1922, and after taking sculpture classes he abandoned his premedical studies at Columbia University in 1924 to pursue art. Noguchi received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1927 and assisted in the studio of Constantin Brâncus�i (1876–1957) in Paris for two years. His own first sculpture commission was News (1938), symbolizing freedom of the press for the Associated Press building at New York’s Rockefeller Center. After the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the backlash against Japanese Americans caused his work to become more politicized and he requested placement in an internment camp in Arizona. Noguchi received many important prizes for his work; he represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1986.

Born in northern Nigeria to an Igbo family, Uche Okeke (Christopher Uchefuna) co-founded the Zaria Art Society while studying at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science, and Technology (now Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria) in 1958. The group’s focus on indigenous art and culture countered Zaria’s Western-orien­ ted colonial curriculum. In 1960, the year that Nigeria achieved independence from Britain, the Zaria Art Society published a manifesto written by Okeke. The screed advocated “natural synthesis,” a method of artistic creation bringing together elements of European and African traditions to forge individual expressions of a modern Nigerian art. Okeke created his “Oja” series—inspired by Igbo uli drawings, a swirling, linear tradition of wall decoration and body pain­ ting—in 1962, during time he spent in Lagos and Munich. In 1963 Okeke co-founded the Mbari Cultural Center Enugu in Nigeria’s eastern region, serving as director from 1964 to 1967. During the 1960s, Okeke produced expressive paintings examining Igbo myths, Christian themes, and alienation. After the Biafran War (1967–70), Okeke was appointed head of the art department at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where he institutionalized “natural synthesis,” creating courses in Igbo uli techniques. His students included the artist El Anatsui (b. 1944).

Hermann Nitsch Born 1938 in Vienna, Austria Lives and works in Austria Hermann Nitsch is known for his experimental and multimedia art. He graduated from the Graphische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt (Experimental Graphic Institute of Vienna), but turned to painting in the 1950s. He was a member of the Wiener Aktionismus (Viennese actionist movement) with Otto Muehl (1925–2013), Günter Brus (b. 1938), and Rudolf Schwarzkogler (1940–1969). In 1957 Nitsch invented the Orgien Mysterien Theater (Orgiastic Mystery Theater), based on the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or comprehensive artwork. The Orgien Mysterien Theater is a six-day festival featuring a variety of art forms and rituals, both religious and pagan. The staging aims at liberating the spectator’s religious, moral, and sexual inhibitions by engaging all senses. Nitsch’s controversial performance pieces have involved blood, dead animals, and passive human actors. His splatter paintings (Schüttbilder) mingle paint and blood on rough burlap canvases. In 1971 Nitsch acquired a castle in Prinzendorf, near Vienna, as the main venue for his Orgien Mysterien Theater. In 1974 he met the gallery owner and pu­bli­sher Peppe Morra, who became his agent, arranging his performances and publishing his theoretical works. In 2007, Nitsch open­ed the Hermann Nitsch Museum in Mistelbach, Austria. His work has been exhibited widely in the U.S. and Europe.

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Hélio Oiticica’s investigations into the essence of art led him to challenge the boun­ daries between art, life, and the viewer. He began his artistic career in 1954, studying painting under Ivan Serpa (1923–1973) at the Museu de Arte Moderna (Modern Art Museum) in Rio de Janeiro. In 1955 he became a member of Grupo Frente and started to participate in numerous Concrete and Neoconcrete art exhibitions, then joined the Neoconcrete movement in 1959. In 1970 he received a Guggenheim fellowship, which enabled him to move to New York, where he lived from 1970 to 1978. Throughout his career he questioned the twodimensional picture plane (“Metaesquemas” [Metaschemes], 1957–58) and explored viewer participation (“Bilaterais” [Bilateral], 1959), ephemeral materials, the dimensions of color (“Invenções” [Inventions], 1959–62), and multisensory art (“Bólides,” or exploding meteors). Important among his series are the “Parangolés” (mobile sculptures, costumes) and “Penetrables” (walkable color installations), both of which were part of his seminal work Tropicália (1967), an immersive installation that gave its name to the Tropicalismo movement. Besides being a visual artist, Oiti­ cica was also a prolific writer on art theory.

Colette Oluwabamise Omogbai Born 1942 in Zaria, Nigeria Lives and works in Edo State, Nigeria Colette Omogbai is a pioneering Nigerian painter who identified as a Surrealist. She received a degree in painting from the Nigerian College of Arts, Science, and Technology (now Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria) in 1964, where she met artists of the Zaria Art Society such as co-founder Uche Okeke (1923–2016). During her first solo exhibition, at Mbari Ibadan in 1963, her works rejected academic realism for an expressionism verging on pure abstraction, with anguished figures and areas of bright color. When she moved to Lagos after graduating in 1965, her bold, formal experimentation provoked critics to find her works “unfeminine.” She retaliated in a promodernist manifesto, “Man Loves What Is ‘Sweet’ and Obvious,” published in Nigeria magazine in 1965. Omogbai later studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, and received a PhD in art education from New York University. On Kawara Born 1932 in Kariya, Aichi Prefecture, Japan Died 2014 in New York, NY, USA On Kawara was a conceptual artist whose paintings, drawings, postcards, books, and recordings were driven by his preoccupation with time as a measurement of human existence. His early paintings were shown at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum in 1953. His first trip outside Japan in 1959 initiated his lifelong penchant for traveling. On January 4, 1966, shortly after settling in New York, On Kawara began his famous “Today” series consisting of hundreds of “Date Paintings.” On a black or colored background he would paint only the date when the work was made, in white lettering, using the language of his location for that day. These visual records carry information about Kawara’s life and activities. One Million Years (1969), his multivolume work about the passage and marking of time, has been performed as a reading and also recorded. It lists each year, in the million-year periods, before and after the work’s conception. On Kawara participated in many biennials, including those in Tokyo (1970), Venice, and Kyoto (1976), and Documenta, Kassel (1972; 1982; 2002). The first major retrospective of his work was at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, in 2015. Yoko Ono Born 1933 in Tokyo, Japan Lives and works in New York, NY, USA Yoko Ono is considered a daring innovator in performance and Conceptual art. She was born into an upper-class Tokyo family, but because her father, a banker, was transferred to San Francisco shortly before her birth, she only came to the U.S. with her mother two years later, in 1935. The family returned to Japan in 1937, but in 1940 they left for New York City, staying only until 1941, after the Pearl Harbor bombing. Ono lived in Japan during World War II, a formative experience. In 1951 she became the first woman to be accepted into the

philosophy department of Tokyo’s exclusive Gakush-uin University, but she left after just two semesters. After World War II she returned with her family to the U.S. and enrolled in Sarah Lawrence College. There she first learned about the work of artist and composer John Cage (1912–1992), who was later an influential mentor and collaborator. Ono met British singer-songwriter John Lennon (1940-1980) at an exhibition of her work in London (1966), and they were married from 1969 until his death in 1980. Ono’s work has been widely exhibited internationally. In 2009 she was awarded the Golden Lion Award for lifetime achievement at the Venice Biennale. Alfonso Ossorio Born 1916 in Manila, Philippines Died 1990 in New York, NY, USA Alfonso Ossorio combined Abstract Expressionism, art brut, and assemblage, using nontraditional materials. In his youth he was educated in England but in 1930 he moved to the United States, becoming a naturalized citizen in 1933. From 1934 to 1938 he studied fine art at Harvard University, then at the Rhode Island School of Design (1938–39). After he met Betty Parsons in 1941, she presented his work at her gallery in New York. During World War II he worked as a medical illustrator for the U.S. Army in Illinois, painting in his spare time. Ossorio’s first published work was the book Poems and Wood Engravings (1936). He is best known for his “Congregations”—assemblages of shells, pearls, glass eyes, animal bones, and driftwood— which he began in the late 1950s. He also produced pain­tings and works on paper. In 1950 he returned to the Philippines to paint The Angry Christ, a mural for the Chapel of St. Joseph the Worker. Ossorio was a friend of artists Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985) and Jackson Pollock (1912–1956). On Pollock’s advice, in 1951, he acquired “The Creeks,” an estate in East Hampton, where he housed Dubuffet’s collection of art brut (1951–61). Hamed Owais Born 1919 in Beni Suef, Egypt Died 2011 in Cairo, Egypt Dissatisfied with his job as a metalworker, Hamed Owais enrolled in the School of Fine Arts in Cairo, graduating in 1944. Afterward he studied at the Institute of Art Education in Cairo under Youssef el-Afifi. In 1947, Owais co-founded the Group of Modern Art with artists including Gamal el-Sigini (1917–1977), Gazbia Sirry (b. 1925), Zeinab Abdel Hamid (1919–2002), and Youssef Sida (1922–1994), which looked to the lives of everyday Egyptians and viewed art as a revolutionary agent of social change. Owais painted the struggles of the Egyptian working class using a color palette inspired by the city of Cairo. A turning point for Owais’s practice was a trip to the 1952 Venice Biennale (his work was shown in the 1952, 1954, and 1956 editions), where he encountered Italian social realism. He would later find strong affinities with the Mexican muralists, such as Diego Rivera (1886– 1957). In 1956 he won the Guggenheim International Prize. Owais was appointed a professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts in

Alexandria in 1958, serving as its head from 1977 to 1979. From 1967 to 1969, Owais studied in Madrid at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando (Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando).

P Nam June Paik Born 1932 in Seoul, South Korea Died 2006 in Miami, FL, USA Nam June Paik is considered a leading pioneer in video art. During the Korean War (1950–53), his family immigrated to Japan, where Paik studied at the University of Tokyo. His dissertation focused on the German Expressionist composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951), an influential composer and music theorist. Paik then studied at Munich University, where he met artist-composer John Cage (1912–1992), Fluxus co-founder George Maciunas (1931– 1978), and performance artist Joseph Beuys (1921–1986). Paik participated in the Fluxus group, performing in “Fluxfests” in September 1962. The following year, his landmark exhibition Exposition of Music-Electronic Television was held at the Galerie Parnass, Wuppertal, Germany. In 1964 Paik moved to New York City, where he focused on the use of television and video. At this time, Paik also collaborated with cellist Charlotte Moorman (1933–1991), blending classical music with contemporary art. Paik taught at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (Dusseldorf Art Academy) from 1979 to 1996; his work is in important collections worldwide and has been exhibited internationally since 1962, including the Whitney Biennial (1977; 1981; 1983; 1987; 1989); Documenta, Kassel (1977; 1987); and the Venice Biennale (1984; 1993). South Korea awarded him the Gold Crown, Order of Cultural Merit in 2007. Eduardo Paolozzi Born 1924 in Edinburgh, UK Died 2005 in London, UK Eduardo Paolozzi—sculptor, collagist, printmaker, and filmmaker—is associated with the development of British Pop art; his early collages from the late 1940s and early 1950s incorporated American magazine advertisements, paperback book covers, and scientific illustrations. The son of Italian immigrants, Paolozzi was interned for three months after Italy declared war on Britain in June of 1940. During that time his father and grandfather were also detained, then drowned when their ship to Canada was attacked by a German U-boat. Paolozzi studied at the Edinburgh College of Art (1943) and the Slade School of Fine Arts (1944–47), where he met his future Independent Group collaborators. Afterward, he worked in Paris for two years and got to know sculptors Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) and Constantin Brancusi (1876–1957), who influenced his later work. His relationship to Surrealist artists and his rough-and-ready aesthetic vision merged with his interest in modern machinery and mass media. In the early 1960s, for example, Paolozzi expanded his sculptural techniques through his collaboration with industrial engineering firms,

eventually using aluminum. Paolozzi taught at a number of art and design schools in Britain and Germany from 1949 until his retirement in 1994, the last one being the Akademie der Schönen Künste (Academy of Fine Arts) in Munich. Lygia Pape Born 1927 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Died 2004 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Lygia Pape relentlessly experimented with form, sculpture, printmaking, installation, and film. By age twenty, she was a member of the Rio de Janeiro–based Grupo Frente wing of Concrete art, a movement of selfreflexive geometric abstraction. In 1959, she signed the Neoconcrete manifesto with Lygia Clark (1920–1988) and Hélio Oiticica (1937–1980). The Neoconcretists broke with the prevailing Concretist ethos, believing that art should require active participation from its viewers. Her early work alluded to handicraft, such as the “Tecelares” (Weaving) series of geometric woodcut prints shown in the third Bienal de São Paulo (1955). Her Livro da Criacao (Book of Creation), 1959, asked the viewer to assemble a book. In the 1960s, she became involved with the cinema marginal and cinema novo movements, combining documentary and satire. Pape co-organized New Brazilian Objectivity, a groundbreaking exhibition at the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro), in 1967. That same year she created Roda Dos Prazeres (Wheel of Delights), in which viewers taste colored waters with flavors that do not necessarily align with their hues. Pape taught semiotics at the Universidade Santa Úrsula (Saint Ursula University) from 1972 to 1985 and became a professor of fine art at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro) in 1983. Jeram Patel Born 1930 in Sojitra, British India Died 2016 in Vadodara, India Jeram Patel was among several artists who transformed Indian art in the late 1950s and 1960s by developing a new visual identity and method of abstraction. Patel first studied drawing and painting at the Sir J. J. School of Art in Mumbai (1950–55), then commercial design at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, London (1957–59). A trip to Japan in the late 1950s inspired him to explore new media and techniques. Back in India he co-founded the short-lived but seminal Group 1890 in 1962 and took part in their sole exhibition at the Lalit Kala Akademi Gallery in New Delhi. During the 1960s he pioneered a new medium, bur­ ning wood with a blowtorch and engraving amorphous shapes on it, often against a monochrome background of bold colors. His other innovative styles included abs­ traction—using saturated, almost floating shapes of black ink on paper—or his distinctive and textured use of paint, especially bold strokes of black. His delicate and evocative “Hospital” series (1966) is probably his best known. Patel received several national awards and was a professor (and later dean) at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda.

A. R. Penck (born Ralf Winkler) Born 1939 in Dresden, Germany Lives and works in Berlin and Düsseldorf, Germany; Dublin, Ireland; and New York, NY, USA A. R. Penck’s schematic yet complex ima­ gery was influenced by his interest in mathematics, cybernetics, and information theory. He used archaic signs and symbols to ensure universal comprehension and to convey political meaning. His spare artistic training included evening classes at the Kunsthochschule (Art University) Dresden (1953–54) and a draughtsman apprenticeship, which he began in 1955. Despite rejections of his applications to various art academies in Dresden and East Berlin during the mid-1950s, Penck rigidly pursued his artistic career and searched for means of artistic expression beyond traditional styles. In 1961 he created his first System- and Weltbilder deploying a visual language that straddled figuration and abstraction. Highly abstracted, two-dimensional stick-figures inhabited Penck’s pictorial worlds and led to the development of his Standart, a strongly simplified pictorial language that has become the artist’s signature. In 1970 Penck became a member of the artist group Lücke, and from 1977 onward he rendered his signature figures and signs as wood sculptures. In 1980 Penck—whose maverick approach to art in East Germany had always been troublesome—moved to West Germany, where he was appointed professor at the Kunstakademie (Art Academy) Düsseldorf in 1988. Penck participated in the 1984 Venice Biennale and Documenta, Kassel, from 1972 onward. Pablo Picasso Born 1881 in Málaga, Spain Died 1973 in Mougins, France Pablo Picasso, considered one of the most important artists of his time, worked in many different styles, from figuration and Neoclassicism to Surrealism and abstraction. Together with his fellow artist Georges Braque (1882–1963), Picasso is credited with developing Cubism. Picasso first studi­ ed art with his father, then enrolled in the Llotja School in Barcelona in 1895, and later studied briefly at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando (Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando), Madrid. After his return to Barcelona in 1899 he often traveled to Paris, settling there in 1904. In Paris his style and choice of subject changed: he abandoned his so-called Blue Period (1901–4) and drew inspiration from the circus during his Rose Period (1905). From 1907 to 1909, inspired by the works of Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) and African masks, Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), which presaged his next two stylistic periods, Analytic Cubism (c. 1908–11) and Synthetic Cubism (c. 1912–14). In 1916 Picasso began to collaborate on ballet and theater productions. In 1936, deeply affected by the Spanish Civil War, he painted his powerful Guernica (1937). During his long career Picasso mastered a broad spectrum of media, including painting, drawing, sculpture, collage, lithography, and engraving.

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Ivan Picelj Born 1924 in Okucani, � Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes Died 2001 in Zagreb, Croatia After studying at the Akademija likovnih umjetnosti (Academy of Fine Arts) in Zagreb from 1943 to 1946, Ivan Picelj co-founded EXAT 51 (short for Experimental Atelier), a Croatian avant-garde group that operated from 1950 to 1956. Influenced by Russian Constructivism and the Bauhaus, the collective advocated geometric abstraction, spatial innovation, and synthesis of all visual art forms. Picelj developed a clean, modular style that translated from gridded painting and sculpture to graphic design. EXAT 51’s first painting show was held in Picelj’s apartment in 1952. That same year, Picelj was among the EXAT 51 members who showed at the seventh Salon des réali­tés nouvelles in Paris. With EXAT 51, Picelj helped organize the first Zagreb trijenale (Zagreb Triennial) in 1955 and establish the Studio industrijskog oblikovanja (Studio for Industrial Design) in 1956. From 1961 to 1967 Picelj was a member of the art movement New Tendencies, the first group in Yugoslavia to survey cutting-edge international contemporary practices such as conceptual, kinetic, environmental, and computer art. A successful designer of graphics and international pavilions for Yugoslavian artists, Picelj founded the publication Edition a in 1962. In 1965 Picelj’s work was included in the so-called Op art exhibition The Responsive Eye at the Museum of Mo­dern Art, New York. Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio Born 1902 in Alba, Italy Died 1964 in Alba, Italy Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio originally trained as a chemist in Alba before turning to art in 1953. In 1955 he met Asger Jorn (1914–1973), and together they co-founded the Experimental Laboratory of the Imaginist Bauhaus in Pinot-Gallizio’s studio in Alba, which attracted such artists as Enrico Baj, Ettore Sottsass, Elena Verrone, and Piero Simondo. The following year he and Jorn organized the First World Congress of Free Artists, a precursor to the founding of the Situationist International in 1957. During this time he also produced his most famous series of works, the so-called pittura industriale (Industrial Painting), created on huge rolls of canvas that were spread across drafting tables; paint was applied by means of a series of mechanized rollers, along with the help of multiple artists, and even children. The longest of these, the Caverna di Antimateria (Cavern of Antimatter), was 145 meters long (476 feet). It was first displayed at the Galerie René Drouin, Paris, in 1959, where it was draped around the gallery and sold by the meter. During this period Pinot-Gallizio’s work was also shown in important exhibitions in Copenhagen and Munich. He was honoured with a solo exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, in 1960.

style, yet irony and contradiction remain its constants. Polke first trained as a glass painter in Düsseldorf from 1959 to 1961, then studied under Karl Otto Götz (b. 1914) and Gerhard Höhme (1920–1989) at the Staatliche Kunstakademie (State Aca­demy of Fine Arts) Düsseldorf until 1967. In 1963 he co-founded the Pop-inspired artist movement Kapitalistischer Realismus (Capitalist Realism) with Gerhard Richter (1937–2007), Konrad Lueg (1939–1996, a.k.a. Konrad Fischer), and Manfred Kuttner (b. 1937). In his paintings, Polke imitated the Ben-Day dots of earlier print technology, rendering images derived from photography or advertising as blurred and semiabstract. He also preferred experimental techniques and unusual combinations of materials, for example in his “Fabric Pictures,” in which he used commercially printed fabrics as background patterns for gestures and motifs taken from earlier or contemporary art. He layered images, experimented with embossing, and created highly tactile surfaces. Polke taught at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste (University of Fine Arts) in Hamburg for several years and recei­ ved many prizes, including the Golden Lion for Painting at the 1986 Venice Biennale and the Japan Art Association’s Praemium Imperiale in 2002. Jackson Pollock Born 1912, in Cody, WY, USA Died 1956 in Springs (East Hampton), NY, USA Best known for his “drip paintings,” Jackson Pollock is a leading figure of Abstract Expressionism. Although his gesture-driven splattering and pouring technique marks the height of his artistic achievement, he searched throughout his career to express rather than illustrate emotions. Pollock’s early work shows traces of ethnographic influences, deriving from early encounters with indigenous relics in the western U.S. At Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles he encountered theosophy, later evoked in his work’s unconscious imagery. Yet when Pollock arrived in New York in 1930, he followed a traditional education in composition at the Art Students League under regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975). From 1938 to 1942, Pollock was employed by the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project, where he discovered the work of Mexican muralists Diego Rivera (1886–1957), José Clemente Orozco (1883–1949), and David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896–1974). Their method liberated Pollock’s approach to scale and paved the way for his first monumental painting entitled Mural—commissioned by Peggy Guggenheim in 1943. In the late 1940s Pollock came to develop and establish “action painting” as an artistic expression of postwar existentialist mentality. Pollock reached international acclaim during his lifetime and was included in the 1950 Venice Biennale.

Sigmar Polke Born 1941 in Oels, Germany Died 2010 in Cologne, Germany

Júlio Pomar Born 1926 in Lisbon, Portugal Lives and works in Paris, France, and Lisbon, Portugal

Sigmar Polke’s Pop art–inspired body of work eschews categorization and a signature

Júlio Pomar has explored both painting and writing to express his ideas. He enrolled at

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the Escola de Belas Artes Lisboa (Lisbon School of Fine Arts) in 1942 and transferred to the Porto Escola de Belas Artes (Porto School of Fine Arts) in 1944. Inspired by the Brazilian painter Cândido Portinari (1903–1962) and the Mexican muralists Diego Rivera (1886–1957), David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896–1964), and José Clemente Orozco (1883–1949), Pomar adopted neorealism to express his antifascist beliefs. His activism against the Salazar regime resulted in his expulsion from art school in 1946. After that, Pomar began to write for art and literature magazines and in 1947 held his first solo show at the Galeria Portugália in Porto. In 1950 Pomar studied the work of Francisco de Goya in Spain, which greatly influenced his later works, such as Maria da Fonte (1947). In Portugal during the early 1950s he experimented with watercolor, gouache, ceramics, and printmaking, and painted portraits of many intellectuals. In 1956 he founded the cooperative Gravura. After moving to Paris in 1963, Pomar began to use acrylics for his colorful Neoexpressionist paintings and collages, with gestural brushstrokes, dynamic compositions, and saturated colors. He created his first found-object assemblages in 1967. Viktor Popkov Born 1932 in Moscow, USSR Died 1974 in Moscow, USSR Viktor Popkov is a leading protagonist of the “severe” or “austere” style of Soviet art—a paradigm shift from romanticism to social realism manifested in the years immediately following Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953. In 1948 Popkov was accepted to study draftsmanship at the Moskovskiy pedagogicheskiy institut iskusstv (Moscow Pedagogical Institute of Art), where he trained in both fine arts and applied arts until 1952. He continued his studies until 1958 at the capital’s Surikov Insitute under the tutelage of Evgeny Kibrik (1906–1978). In the 1950s Popkov began to conduct field work at construction sites across the Soviet Union, including the hydroelectric power station at Bratsk. The Bratsk power station became the subject of Popkov’s iconic painting from 1960. In the mid-1960s Popkov distanced himself from industrial scenes and began to explore the grief-stricken facets of human psychology brought about by the “Great Patriotic War” (the term used by Russians to refer to the German-Soviet War). In 1967 the ar­tist won a Diploma of Honor at the Paris Biennale. In 1975 he was posthumously awarded the State Prize of the USSR, one year after being tragically shot dead during a misunderstanding with a cash-in-transit guard in Moscow.

R Carol Rama (born Olga Carolina Rama) Born 1918 in Turin, Italy Died 2015 in Turin, Italy Carol Rama was a self-taught Italian artist who is best recognized for her watercolors depicting often bold and provocative expressions of sexuality and sexual actions.

Rama’s first solo show at the Gallery Faber in Turin, in 1945, was shut down by the fascist government and many of her works were seized by the Turin police. Only in 1980, following an exhibition at the Palazzo Reale (Royal Palace) in Milan, did her early works become known to a larger audience. After that, her erotic drawing again became her primary theme. During the 1950s Rama’s paintings moved toward abstraction and during the 1960s she started to create multimedia works by incorporating found objects and everyday materials. In the 1970s among paint and text, syringes, cannulae, glass beads, and fingernails, her preferred material became rubber from tires. In the late 1960s and early 1970s Rama was in contact with such notable artists as Man Ray (1890–1976), Andy Warhol (1928–1987), and Orson Welles (1915–1985). In 2003 she was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale. Robert Rauschenberg Born 1925 in Port Arthur, TX, USA Died 2008 in Captiva Island, FL, USA Before he became an artist, Robert Rauschenberg served in the U.S. Navy Hospital Corps in San Diego during World War II. In 1947 he began his art career by studying fashion design at the Kansas City Art Institute in Kansas City, Missouri, followed by a stay in Paris. In 1948 he enrolled at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where he studied under Joseph Albers (1888–1976) and met John Cage (1912–1992), among others. In the 1950s, after traveling Europe and North Africa with Cy Twombly (1928–2011), Rauschenberg befriended Jasper Johns (b. 1930) during his early years in New York. He soon became famous for his series of “Black Paintings” and “White Paintings,” which commented on Abstract Expressionism. Although Rau­schenberg is often associated with Pop art, his work cannot be linked to one style or movement. His notable “Combined Pain­ tings” series of sculptural collages reflect his lifelong practice of using various mediums, techniques, and materials, as well as his belief in the relationship between art and life. In 1963 Rauschenberg earned an early retrospective at the Jewish Museum in New York; the following year he was awarded the grand prize for painting at the Venice Biennale (1964). Ad Reinhardt Born 1913 in Buffalo, NY, USA Died 1967 in New York, NY, USA Ad Reinhardt (Adolph Dietrich Friedrich Reinhardt), the son of Russian and German immigrants, moved to New York in 1931. He studied art history on a full scho­larship at Columbia University (1931–35), then attended both the American Artists School and the National Academy of Design. From 1936 to 1940 he worked for the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project, and from 1937 to 1947 he was a member of the American Abstract Artists group (AAA). Suspending his work and studies during U.S. involvement in World War II, he attended New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts after the war. Besides painting, Reinhardt also became an influential art critic and theorist and a talented caricaturist, producing

many provocative cartoons and illustrations. From the late 1940s onward he taught at several Ameri­c an colleges and universities. Reinhardt became famous for his “black paintings,” which he first exhibited in 1955. After experimenting with abstraction during the 1930s and 1940s, Reinhardt began to reduce his paintings more and more in respect to form, color, gesture, and expression. His monochrome color-field paintings in blue and red eventually culminated in black paintings divided into linear fields of subtly graduated black hues with green, red, or blue undertones.

Jane Freilicher (1924–2014) and poet Frank O’Hara (1926–1966). He famously depicted O’Hara wearing only his boots in 1954, and in 1957 he was one of twelve U.S. artists in the 4th Bienal de São Paulo. A retrospective of his work toured five American museums in 1965; that same year he created his 76-panel multimedia work The History of the Russian Revolution. His docu­mentary Africa and I, filmed with Pierre Dominique Gaisseau, was aired on the NBC television network in 1968. Ever seeking new media, Rivers later worked with video and neon.

Gerhard Richter Born 1932 in Dresden, Germany Lives and works in Cologne, Germany

Joaquim Rodrigo Born 1912 in Lisbon, Portugal Died 1997 in Lisbon, Portugal

Gerhard Richter’s vast oeuvre, spanning realism and abstraction, reflects personal and collective experiences of rebuilding German cultural identity in the aftermath of World War II. Having studied painting at the Kunstakademie (Art Academy) Dresden from 1951 to 1956, Richter began his artistic career as a muralist in the former German Democratic Republic. Upon encountering Abstract Expressionism at Documenta, Kassel in 1959, Richter decided to flee to West Germany to pursue his own painterly style. From 1961 to 1964 he studied at the Kunstakademie (Art Aca­ demy) Düsseldorf. The decade marked an important period for Richter’s stylistic development, along with his Kunstakademie peers like Sigmar Polke (1941–2010) and Konrad Lueg (1939–1996). The three artists, with Manfred Kuttner (1937–2007), staged the landmark installation Living with Pop: A Demonstration for Capitalist Realism in a Düsseldorf storefront in 1963. The next year, Richter held his first solo exhibition at Düsseldorf’s Galerie Schmela. In the 1960s and ’70s he began depicting blurred ima­ gery, taking inspiration from photographs and media. Since the 1970s, Richter has divided his attention between figuration and abstraction, leading to his squeegee paintings, glass images, vanitas motifs of the 1980s, and recent works utilizing digital printing techniques. Richter’s has received multiple retrospectives, and since 1972, he has participated in five editions each of the Venice Biennale and Documenta, Kassel.

Self-taught Portuguese painter Joaquim Rodrigo began his career as a professor of agronomy in 1938. In 1951, he started showing his work in exhibitions of the collective Sociedade Nacional de Belas Artes (National Fine Arts Society). During the 1950s, after seeing work by Victor Vasarely (1906–1997) and Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) during a visit to Galerie Denise René in Paris, he quickly abandoned figuration for an abstract style. He exhibited in the Primeiro Salão de Arte abstrata (First Salon for Abstract Art) at Galeria de Março in Lisbon in 1954, the 4th Bienal de São Paulo in 1957, and the Brussels World’s Fair (also known as Expo ’58). Rodrigo changed course in the 1960s as Pop art took off in Europe and the United States, by developing a non-naturalistic, symbolic style that blended figuration and abstraction. Various critics have asserted the influence of aboriginal and other indigenous practices on Rodrigo’s works. His paintings from this time contain sharp criticisms of colonialist politics. M.L. (1961), for example, with its red-soaked palette and African-inspired forms, references the murder of Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba. In 1972 Rodrigo received his first solo show—a retro­spective at the SNBA.

Larry Rivers (born Yitzroch Loiza Grossberg) Born 1923 in the Bronx, New York, USA Died 2002 in Southampton, New York, USA Artist, saxophonist, and bohemian Larry Rivers was born in the Bronx, a borough of New York City. He met his lifelong friend, jazz trumpeter Miles Davis, while the two studied music at the Juilliard School in 1945–46. After studying painting with the Abstract Expressionist Hans Hoffman (1880–1966) in 1947–48, he earned a degree in art education from New York University in 1951. Rivers started showing lusty, figurative work in 1948. His brushy version of American history pain­ ting Washington Crossing the Delaware (1953) anticipated Pop artists’ appropriation of familiar imagery in the 1960s. As part of the New York School, Rivers knew many notables, including landscape pain­ter

Dieter Roth (born Karl-Dietrich Roth; also known as Diter Rot) Born 1930 in Hanover, Germany Died 1998 in Basel, Switzerland Dieter Roth was an exceptionally versatile artist, working in drawing, painting, printma­ king, sculpture, assemblage, installation, and artist books. He was also a musician, poet, and author. Four years after moving to Zurich in 1943, he apprenticed in graphic design under Friedrich Wüthrich (1905 –1980) in Bern, and later designed textiles in Copenhagen from 1955 to 1957. After moving to Reykjavik, he married Sigridur Björnsdóttir. Throughout his life Roth constantly changed his location, with Reykjavik and Basel being his primarily bases of activity. Roth produced art works in almost any medium, often using everyday materials,” including food and other perishables. Among his lifelong artistic concerns were books, prints, and multiples. Roth briefly held a number of teaching positions at art schools in the United States, the United Kingdom, and in Düsseldorf, Germany. In 1982 he represented Switzerland at the Venice Biennale.

Rhod Rothfuss (born Carlos María Rothfuss) Born 1920 in Montevideo, Uruguay Died 1969 in Montevideo, Uruguay The theorist of the “irregular frame,” Rhod Rothfuss pushed the boundaries of Cons­ tructivism in his mature style by incorporating geometric and irregular shapes in his brightly colored artworks. Born Carlos María Rothfuss, he studied art in Montevideo before moving to Buenos Aires in 1942. There he joined the group that published the single-issue magazine Arturo, including Argentinian designer Tomás Maldonado (b. 1922), Uruguayan artist Carmelo Arden Quin (1913–2010), and Slovak-born painter Gyula Kosice (1924–2016). The magazine published artworks and manifestos by artists who favored geometric abstraction over traditional figurative and symbolic painting. In an article published in Arturo, Rothfuss argued that shaped frames were necessary for self-reflexivity in painting. In 1945 he participated in the first exhibition of the Asociación Arte-Concreto-Invención (Association of Concrete Art-Invention). With Quin and Kosice he formed Madí, a splinter group that advocated for a universal Concrete art incorporating music and other forms. The group published a journal from 1947 to 1954. Rothfuss participated in the most important exhibitions of Madí art locally and internationally beginning in 1947. His work represented Argentina in the first Salon des réalités nouvelles (Exhibition of New Realities) at the Musée d'art moderne de la ville de Paris (Modern Art Museum of the City of Paris) in 1948.

Ed Ruscha Born 1937 in Omaha, NE, USA Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, USA Ed Ruscha began his art studies at the Chouinard Art Institute (now California Institute of the Arts) after moving to Los Angeles in 1956. He co-edited and co-produced the journal Orb in his final year, and after graduation (1960) he worked as a layout artist for an advertising agency in Los Angeles. He had early success with his pain­ tings and collages, which were consider­ed part of the Pop art movement and were compared to the works of Jasper Johns (b. 1930) and Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008). While traveling in Europe during the summer of 1961, Ruscha made his first “word paintings.” Since then his interest in words and typography became integral to his body of work, including paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, books, and films. His images of words and phrases often contain comic or satirical connotations, alluding to popular culture and life in Los Angeles. Between 1963 and 1978 he worked on sixteen small folded artist’s books that feature photographs of his southern California surroundings. During the late 1960s and 1970s Ruscha was also noted for his use of unconventional materials (gunpowder and organic substances, such as food and blood). Since 1982 his work has been the focus of numerous retrospectives.

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Gerhard Rühm Born 1930 in Vienna, Austria Lives and works in Cologne, Germany

Sadequain Born 1930 in Amroha, British India Died 1987 in Karachi, Pakistan

Gerhard Rühm is noted for his work in acoustic art, including sound poetry and spoken word. He studied at the Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien (University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna) and later took private lessons with the composer Josef Matthias Hauer (1883–1959). In the early 1950s he deve­loped an outstanding body of work, cros­sing the boundaries between many different mediums. He also experimented in drawing, visual poetry, and photomontage, using such diverse techniques as overpainting (l’essentiel de la grammaire [The Essentials of Grammar], 1962) and collage (Typocollagen [Type Collage], 1955–63). He was one of Vienna’s first Concrete poets and was a co-founder of the Wiener Gruppe (c. 1954), which staged the first happenings in Austria in 1958. His interest in language and the ambiguity between meaning and form is manifest in his poetry, music, and both visual and acoustic arts. Along with his investigations into modes of expression through language, he also strove to unveil its potential for social implications. In 1964 Rühm moved to Germany, where he taught at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste (University of Fine Arts), Hamburg, from 1972 to 1995. His work was presented in numerous exhibitions, including Documenta, Kassel (1977; 1987). Rühm has received many important prizes, including the Austrian State Prize for Literature in 1991.

Born into a family of Islamic calligraphers, Sadequain (Syed Sadequain Ahmed Naqvi) drew on this aesthetic tradition throughout his painting career. In 1944, Sadequain moved to New Delhi and worked as a calligrapher for All India Radio. From 1946 to 1948 he studied at the University of Agra. In 1947, after the partition of the British Indian Empire, Sadequain identified as Pakistani and joined the Progressive Artists’ Group and the Progressive Writers’ Movement. Sadequain’s work was exhibited at the residence of Pakistani Prime Minister Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy (1892–1963) in 1955. Subsequently, he received a number of public commissions for large-scale murals. Notable examples include Treasures of Time (1961) for the State Bank of soon-to-be Pakistan, Karachi; Saga of Labor (1967) for the Mangla Dam Power House, Azad Kashmir; and Evolution of Mankind (1973) in the entrance hall of the Lahore Museum. Sadequain’s art heroicized the working class and included symbols of struggle, such as cacti. In 1960 Sadequain won Pakistan’s national prize for painting and left for Paris later that year. In 1961 he won the laureate for artists under thirty-five at the Paris Biennale. He returned to Pakistan in 1967. Sadequain’s influence resulted in the use of calligraphy becoming widespread within Pakistani contemporary art.

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Mohan Samant Born 1924 in Bombay, British India Died 2004 in New York, NY, USA In his paintings, Mohan Samant linked his native Indian culture with his experience of immigration to New York City, where he lived for almost forty years. In 1952, Samant graduated from the Sir J.J. School of Art—where he studied under Basholi miniature painter S.B. Palsikar (1917–1984) —and joined the Progressive Artists’ Group. He won the gold medal from both the Academy of Fine Arts of Calcutta and the Bombay Art Society in 1956. That year, he also showed in the Eight Painters exhibition curated by patron Thomas Keehn and the 1956 Venice Biennale. Samant began his travels abroad in 1957 and 1958, with a scholarship to Rome and Egypt. From 1959 to 1964 he came to New York on a Rockefeller grant, permanently relocating to the city in 1968. Samant’s process involved making forms with wire and combining them on canvas, creating primarily abstract works with some narrative elements. He added materials to his paint, such as sand and glue, and experimented with paper and wire collage. He was included in shows of the Progressive Artists’ Group in New York during the early 1960s as well as the important 1963 traveling exhibition Dunn International. Mira Schendel (born Myrrha Dagmar Dub) Born 1919 in Zürich, Switzerland Died 1988 in São Paulo, Brazil Mira Schendel, best known for her drawings on rice paper, is considered one of the most influential Latin American artists of her time. In 1922, after her parents’ divorce, her mother moved to Milan, where Schendel later studied philosophy. Because of her Jewish ancestry she was forced to abandon her studies, and during World War II she fled Italy and moved to Sarajevo. After the war she lived in Rome until 1949, when she received permission to settle in Porto Alegre. There she studied life drawing and sculpture and made paintings and ceramics. Her first solo exhibition, in 1950, included portraits, landscapes, and still lifes. In 1953 she moved to São Paulo, where she met many other émigré intellectuals. From the 1960s onward Schendel developed a spare artistic language of geometric forms and linguistic elements. She preferred ephemeral, translucent materials as well as paint, talc, brick dust, ink, and watercolors. In 1964 she began her famous monotype drawings on Japanese rice paper: she first inked a sheet of glass, traced free-floa­ ting lines into it with her finger, and then pulled a rice paper “print.” She also created three-dimensional objects (Droguinhas) with knotted and intertwined rice paper. Ruth Schloss Born 1922 in Nuremburg, Germany Died 2013 in Kfar Shmaryahu, Israel Ruth Schloss immigrated to Israel in 1937, attending the New Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts in Jerusalem from 1938 to 1942. After graduation, Schloss illustrated adult and children’s books at the Sifriat

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Poalim publishing house. Throughout her career, Schloss worked outside of schools or movements, though she is most frequently identified as a social realist. Unlike many Social Realists, however, she was concerned with the fragility and loneliness of individuals. Later her work would be analyzed from a feminist perspective. Despite her isolation from other contemporary artists and little public exposure, Schloss practiced rigid discipline in her painting, producing a large body of work over the course of seven decades. After studying at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris from 1949 to 1951, Schloss spent time on a kibbutz, but was asked to leave because of her socialist beliefs. Schloss returned to her parents’ home in Kfar Shmaryahu in 1953, where she remained for the rest of her life. She worked in a studio in Jaffa from the 1960s to the 1980s. Schloss was included in group shows at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. In 1991, the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art held her first retrospective. Carolee Schneemann Born 1939 in Philadelphia, PA, USA Lives and works in New York, NY, USA Carolee Schneemann was just sixteen years old when she received a scholarship to study at Bard College in New York. When she was expelled for her nude self-portraits, she enrolled at the School of Painting and Sculpture at Columbia University. She returned to Bard and later earned her BA in 1960, and earned an MFA from the University of Illinois. As a student, Schneemann exper­ ienced first-hand male dominance in the field of professional art, which led to her lifelong occupation with feminist themes and the exploration of the female body in historic and social settings. Although Schnee­ mann considers herself a painter, she aims to extend visual principles beyond the canvas, experimenting with collage, sculp­ ture, photography, film, and performance. In the early 1960s she used paintings, photographs, and everyday objects to create assemblages, either inspired by a historic personage (Sir Henry Francis Taylor, 1961) or a familiar place (Colorado House, 1962). She explored the destructive-constructive potential of fire in her “Controlled Bur­ning” series, experimented with film (Fuses, 1965), and broke taboos on the notion of female sexuality (Meat Joy, 1964). Her provocative, radical performances peaked in 1975 with her now-legendary performance Internal Scroll. She has taught and published widely; in 2000 she received the College Art Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Gerard Sekoto Born 1913 in Botshabelo, Eastern Transvaal Died 1993 in Nogent-sur-Marne, France Gerard Sekoto is considered one of the most important figures in the development of South African contemporary art. A selftaught artist and musician, he gave up his teaching career and moved to Sophiatown in 1938 to become a full-time professional artist. His paintings and drawings are unobstructed records of the people, streets, and

scenes he encountered in Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Pretoria. From 1939 onward, he participated in group exhibitions and annual exhibitions of the South African Acade­ my. In 1940 his painting Yellow Houses: A Street in Sophiatown became the first work of a black artist to be purchased by the Johannesburg Art Gallery. Once he became one of South Africa’s leading artists, two financially successful solo exhibitions in Pretoria galleries enabled his self-imposed exile to Paris in 1947. Although he managed to establish himself as a painter and was regu­ larly represented in Parisian galleries and international exhibitions, Sekoto never lost ties to his homeland. As a reaction to conflict in his native country during the 1960s, his works became more political. In 1989 a retrospective of his work was held at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, and he received an honorary doctorate from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Jewad Selim Born 1919 in Ankara, Ottoman Empire Died 1961 in Baghdad, Iraq Jewad Selim is recognized as the father of modern Iraqi art, whose teachings at the Maehad Alfunun Aljamila (Institute of Fine Arts), Baghdad, influenced a generation of artists. From 1938 to 1940, Selim studied art in Paris and Rome on scholarships. He returned to Baghdad during World War II and founded the sculpture department at the Institute of Fine Arts, eventually becoming the head of the department. After the war, Selim attended the Slade School of Fine Art, London. Selim formed the Baghdad Modern Art Group in 1951. In developing a contemporary Iraqi visual language, Selim combined traditional Iraqi iconography—such as ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian sculpture, Babylonian and Assyrian reliefs, and miniature painting— with innovations by contemporary Western artists, like Aristide Maillol (1861–1944) and Henry Moore (1898–1986). During the 1950s he primarily painted, creating a notable series called “Baghdadiat” in homage to traditional Abbasid painting traditions. His practice increasingly focused on sculpture. An important public work is Nasb alHurriya (Monument for Freedom, 1960–61), a bronze relief mural in central Baghdad commemorating Iraq’s 1958 revolution. During the completion of this work, Selim had a heart attack and died at forty-one. Prince Twins Seven Seven (born Prince Taiwo Olaniyi Oyewale-Toyeje Oyelale Osuntoki) Born 1944 in Ogidi, Nigeria Died 2011 in Ibadan, Nigeria Prince Twins Seven Seven started his artistic career as a dancer and musician in Nigeria. While traveling with a medicine show in 1964 he came to Oshogbo and spontaneously danced at an event of the Mbari Mbayo Club, a group supporting African arts. The German linguist and author Ulli Beier (1922–2011), a promoter of Nigerian art and culture, recognized Prince’s talent and outstanding personality and convinced him to remain with the group. That year Prince attended a workshop by Beier’s wife, Georgina Beier, and created his first

pen-and-ink drawing, Devil’s Dog (1964). From the beginning his works stood out, due to their colorful palette and imaginative, tightly woven imagery, mostly inspired by the Yoruba folklore, religion, and everyday life. His spontaneous compositions—which ignored rules of form, perspective, and proportion—feature patterns based on traditional textiles. Prince became a leading representative of the Oshogbo School and a widely recognized, influential artist. His work was exhibited in Oshogbo, Lagos, Europe, and the United States, where he settled in the late 1980s. In 1989 his work was shown in the exhibition Magiciens de la Terre (Magicians of the Earth) at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and in 2005 he was designated UNESCO Artist for Peace. Ismail Shammout Born 1930 in Lydda, Mandatory Palestine Died 2006 in Amman, Jordan Ismail Shammout was a Palestinian artist and art historian. He and his family were expelled from his hometown on July 12, 1948, by Israeli forces. His family settled in a refugee camp in Gaza. Shammout enrolled in the College of Fine Arts Cairo in 1950, returning to Gaza in 1953. That year Shammout, with his brother Jamil, held the first exhibition by a contemporary Palestinian artist in Palestine. The exhibition included Where to? (1953), a sobering oil-on-canvas depiction of a family in exodus. A year later, Shammout was part of the Palestine Exhibition of 1954 in Cairo, inaugurated by president Gamal Abdel Nasser. Shammout incorporated Palestinian traditions in his realist painting, which commented on the plight of Palestinians since 1948. In 1954, he enrolled at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome. He moved to Beirut in 1956, where he married fellow artist Tamam al-Alkal. Shammout became the Director of Arts and National Culture for the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1965. In 1983, following the Israeli attack against the PLO in Lebanon, Shammout moved from Beirut to Kuwait, then Germany, and finally to Jordan. Anwar Jalal Shemza (born Anwar Jalal Butt) Born 1928 in Shimla, British India Died 1985 in Stafford, UK Anwar Jalal Shemza studied Persian, Ara­ bic, and philosophy at Punjab University in 1943, but then transferred to the Mayo School of Arts in Lahore, graduating in 1947. He worked as a graphic designer; edited the literary journal Ehsas (1950– 1953); wrote plays for Radio Pakistan; published several novels; and was represented in individual and group exhibitions in Pakis­ tan. In his art, Shemza combined principles of Western modernism and abstraction with traditional calligraphy and Islamic themes. In 1952 he co-founded the Lahore Art Circle, a group of young Pakistani artists and writers interested in modernism and abstraction. He moved to London in 1956 and attended the Slade School of Fine Art, receiving his diploma in 1959. He later took an advanced course in printmaking from Anthony Gross (1905–1984) and co-foun­ ded the Pakistan Group. In London, Shemza exhibited alongside such artists as F. N. Souza (1924–2002) and Avinash Chandra

(1931–1991), with solo shows at the New Vision Centre (1959) and Gallery One (1960). He briefly returned to Pakistan in 1960, but moved back to the UK that same year. His work was included in the landmark exhibition The Other Story: Afro-Asian Ar­tists in Post-War Britain in 1989. Ahmed Shibrain Born 1931 in Berber, Sudan Lives and works in Khartoum, Sudan Ahmed Shibrain is a Sudanese painter and educator. Shibrain studied in the Department of Arts and Craft at the Khartoum Technical Institute (KTI). At the time Shibrain attended KTI, the institution, it was the hub of contemporary African art of the region. He also studied abroad at the Central School of Art and Design in London. Shibrain co-founded the influential Khartoum School with Kamala Ishag (b. 1939) and Ibrahim  El-Salahi (b. 1930) in 1960. The group disbanded in 1975. The Khartoum artists depicted primitive and Islamic ima­ gery using abstracted Arabic calligraphy. Shibrain wanted to define the contemporary Sudanese identity—a blend of Arabic, African, and Islamic cultures—after the country gained independence in 1956. He became dean of the renamed department—the College of Fine and Applied Arts—in 1975. Under Shibrain’s direction, it continues to be a crucial institution for the contemporary art of sub-Saharan Africa. Shibrain was an officer for the Sudanese Ministry of Youth and culture secretary for the Ministry of Culture. His work was included in the 1967 Bienal de São Paulo and in Contemporary African Art at the Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C., in 1974. - o- Shimamoto Shoz Born 1928 in Osaka, Japan Died 2013 in Osaka, Japan - o- Shimamoto began his artistic trainShoz ing in 1947 in the painting studio of JiroYoshihara (1905–1972) at Kanseigakuindaigaku (Kwansei Gakuin University). Even before graduating in 1950, he took part in exhibitions (Seven Avant-garde Artists, Kintetsu Department Store, Osaka, 1948) and created his first revolutionary series, “Ana” (Holes). Emphasizing materiality rather than pictorial space, he created fissured and pierced surfaces in newspaper layered with industrial paint. He became a founding member of the influential Gutai Art Association in 1954, and participated in many of the group’s exhibitions. In the later 1950s - o- Shimamoto focused on action-based Shoz art. His paintings became testimonies of his performance works, where he shot bags of paint, crashed bottles of paint through stones, or hurled them onto the canvas from a helicopter, a crane, and a hot-air balloon. Shimamoto was a founder of the mail art movement in the 1960s. He was nomi­ nated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1996, participated in the Venice Biennale (1999; 2003; 2007), and in the exhibition Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949–1979 (1998) organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Kazuo Shiraga - Prefecture, Japan 1924 Amagasaki, Hy ogo - Prefecture, Japan 2008 Amagasaki, Hyogo

Mitchell Siporin Born 1910 in New York, NY, USA Died 1976 in Newton, MA, USA

Kazuo Shiraga became interested in oil painting when he was only fourteen years Tachi old. He studied at Kaiga no Kyotofu - Prefectural School of Pain­ gakko- (Kyoto ting) from 1942 to 1948, majoring in traditional nihonga painting. Possibly inspired by the works of Jackson Pollock (1912– 1956) (at Yomiuri dokuritsu-ten [Yomiuri Independent Exhibition], Tokyo, 1951), he began his unique approach of action painting: In 1953 he abandoned the brush in favor of painting directly with his hands. He co-founded the Zero-kai (Zero Society) in 1952, and in 1955 joined the avant-garde Gutai Art Association and performed Challenging Mud at the group’s first exhibition. Here, Kazuo Shiraga used his whole body to sculpt a pile of mud. His rebellious, direct approach resulted in his famous practice of painting with his feet. To do so, he dripped paint onto the canvas and, using his feet while swinging from a rope, painted multi-textured layers in broad strokes. Through his association with Gutai (1955– 1972), his work was shown across Japan. In 1957 the French curator and collector Michel Tapié (1909–1987) noticed Kazuo Shiraga’s work and introduced it to the European art market. His first solo show in Europe was at the Musée National d’Art Moderne (National Museum of Modern Art), Paris (1986), and he received the Osaka Art Prize in 2002.

Mitchell Siporin was a social realist artist who focused on labor issues. After his fami­ ly moved to Chicago, he studied at the Art Institute of Chicago (Crane College), and in the early 1930s he worked as an illustrator for Esquire, The New Masses, and Ringmaster. Siporin gained early attention for his Haymarket series of drawings illustrating a notorious labor riot in Chicago in 1886 (1932–35). From 1937 to 1942 he painted public murals for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), including a mural for in a St. Louis post office that was the largest single government commission. It is among the few WPA projects to show social conflict. Siporin was represented in the Century of Progress exhibition at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1933, and after the U.S. entered the conflict of World War II he joined the army, serving in North Africa and Italy. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship (1945) and the Prix de Rome for painting (1949). Siporin began teaching as director of the summer school program at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1948. In 1951 he founded the Department of Fine Arts at Brandeis University, where he taught until shortly before his death.

Fyodor Shurpin Born 1904 in Kiryakinka (Smolensk Province), Russian Empire Died 1972 in Moscow, USSR

Yohanan Simon was an artist who lived and worked internationally. He began his stu­ dies in medicine at Universität Berlin (Berlin University) in 1924 before switching to the fine arts department, first studying sculpture and then painting. He continued his studies at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main in 1926, under Expressionist artist Max Beckmann (1884–1950). In 1928 Simon moved to Toulon, France, where he studied with the Fauvist artist André Derain (1880–1954) and held his first solo exhibition in 1931. From 1931 to 1934 he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts (School of Fine Arts), Paris, and worked as a graphic designer for the journals Vu and Les Annales. He moved to New York City in 1934 to work for Vogue, where he discovered the murals of Diego Rivera (1886–1957). He immigrated to Mandatory Palestine in 1936 and was a kibbutz member until 1953, creating posters and illustrations for the kibbutz movement. He produced a number of public murals throughout Israel, painting daily life on the kibbutz in the style of social realism. Simon participated in the first Zionist-modernist New Horizons Group exhibition in 1948. He exhibited at the Venice Biennale (1948; 1958) and the Bienal de São Paulo (1953).

Like several artists of his generation, Fyodor Shurpin came from a rural background and produced a body of work that took country life and landscape as its subject. His studies transported him from his humble hometown in Smolensk Province to Moscow, where he studied at the avant-garde academy Vkhutemas (later Vkhutein) be­ tween approximately 1922 and 1930. Shurpin regularly participated in official state exhibitions throughout the period of Stalinist Socialist Realism and was also invited to exhibit internationally. In 1948 he tried his hand at official portraiture and created his masterpiece Utro nashei rodiny (The Morning of our Motherland), which depicts Joseph Stalin in his resplendent white uniform before the backdrop of a rural landscape. The painting—commonly acknowledged as the most famous portrait of the leader—was met with critical and popular acclaim and earned Shurpin the Stalin Prize in 1949. In 1954 the work was shown in China as part of the influential exhibition of economic and cultural achievements of the USSR that took place at the Sulián zhanl� � an guan � (Soviet Union Exhibition Hall) in Beijing. In 1969 Shurpin initiated the founding of the Picture Gallery in the provincial town of Shumyachi (Smolensk Province), to which he donated fifty of his works.

Yohanan Simon (born Hans Yohanan) Born 1905 in Berlin, Germany Died 1976 in Tel Aviv, Israel

David Alfaro Siqueiros Born 1896 in Chihuahua, Mexico Died 1974 in Cuernavaca, Mexico David Alfaro Siqueiros constantly sought to express his revolutionary Marxist ideas using equally revolutionary means (airbrush, photographic projection) and new materials (nitrocellulose pigments, plywood). In his dynamic, figurative paintings and murals, he developed a pictorial vocabulary and a

sculptural treatment of form, working with a limited palette and dramatic light and shadow. Siqueiros began his studies at the Academia de San Carlos (Academy of San Carlos) in Mexico City beginning in 1911. A staunch Communist and radical antifascist, Siqueiros interrupted his studies in 1914 to join the Mexican Revolutionary Army. While traveling in Europe from 1919 to 1922, he met his fellow countryman, the artist Diego Rivera (1886–1957). Back in Mexico City the two artists, together with José Cle­mente Orozco (1883–1949) founded the Mexican mural movement. A successful painter of monumental, political mural frescos, Siqueiros received public commissions in Mexico and executed mural projects in Los Angeles, New York, and South America during the 1930s. While in New York in the mid-1930s, he founded the Experimental Workshop for young artists, promoting collective practice and new techniques. One of the students was the young Jackson Pollock (1912-1956). In 1950 Siqueiros was one of the first Mexican artists to participate in the Venice Biennale. Gazbia Sirry Born 1925 in Cairo, Egypt Lives and works in Cairo, Egypt Over a wide-ranging and prolific career, Gazbia Sirry has painted strong Egyptian women. She graduated from Cairo’s Higher Institute for Arts Education for Women in 1949 and completed further studies in Rome, Paris, and London. In her painting she sought to blend the traditions of Egypt with European modernism. Politically, she was influenced by the socialist politics of President Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Egyptian Revolution of 1952. Sirry continuously innovated and experimented in her artistic style. Her early work resembled naïve illustration, evolving into Expressionism with thick, forceful applications of paint, and in the aftermath of the Six-Day War of 1967, Sirry’s former realism became abstraction. Also in 1967, Sirry’s work was exhibited at the Brenken Gallery in Stockholm, leading to international recognition. She was an active contributor to Cairo’s Contemporary Art Group. Sirry was a professor in the painting department of Jamieat Hulwan (Helwan University) and the American University in Cairo. She received the Prix de Rome for painting in 1952. Among other exhibitions, Sirry has shown in four editions of the Venice Biennale (1952; 1956; 1958; 1984), two editions of the Bienal de São Paulo (1952; 1963) and three Alexandria Biennials (1959; 1961; 1963). Lucas Sithole Born 1931 in Springs, South Africa Died 1994 in Pongola, South Africa Lucas Sithole was a South African sculptor, known primarily for his work with indigenous woods. From age six he lived with his Swazi grandmother, a famous potter, who greatly influenced his career as an artist, teaching him about African myths and tales and encouraging him to make small figures of ani­ mals and people in clay. At age seventeen he received a Springs Rotary Club scholarship, which allowed him to enter Vlakfontein Technical College. He intended to study sculpture, but because there were no sculptors on the faculty, he had to study crafts like carpentry and welding instead. These

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skills later proved valuable for his work as a sculptor. In the late 1950s Sithole stu­ died at the Polly Street Art Center, where he met the South African artist Cecil Skotnes (1926–2009). For his sculptures, Sithole preferred to use the trunks of indigenous trees, but he also worked in stone, bronze, and sandstone. Many of his sculptures are thin, elongated figures with either highly polished or pitted and rough surfaces. Although he never traveled outside South Africa (except for Swaziland and Lesotho), his work was exhibited internationally. Willi Sitte Born 1921 in Chrastava, Czechoslovakia Died 2013 in Halle, Germany Willi Sitte worked in a Socialist Realist style with clear compositions and themes of the working class. In his work he always aimed to be understood by a wide audience. Sitte first studied art at the Kunstschule des nordböhmischen Gewer­ bemuseums (North-Bohemian Museum of Applied Arts) in Reichenberg (Liverec), from 1936 to 1939. He then transferred to the HermannGöring-Meisterschule (Hermann-Göring Master School) in Kroneburg (Eifel), until he was expelled and sent to mili­t ary service in the Soviet Union and Italy in the early 1940s. In 1944 Sitte managed to contact the Italian resistance and deserted. In Italy he traveled to Vicenza, Venice, and Milan, attending classes at the Accademia di Brera (Academy of Brera). His first solo show was at the Gallery Dedalo in Milan in 1946. After a short trip to his hometown, Chrastava, he moved to Halle in 1947 and became a member of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, SED). There, he exhibited his work with the artists’ association Die Fähre (The Ferry) and in the Zweite Deutsche Kunstausstellung (Se­ cond German Art Exhibition) in Dresden. His life in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was marked by several prizes and honors as well as nominations to important committees and functions. David Smith Born 1906 in Decatur, IN, USA Died 1965 in Shaftsbury, VT, USA David Smith was an Abstract Expressionist best remembered for his large steel sculptures. After moving to New York in 1927, he studied painting at the Art Students League. Smith often supported himself by welding and riveting, skills that later figured in his work. In 1929 he learned about Picasso’s Project for Monument (1928) and met the painter John Graham (1886–1961), who introduced him to several avant-garde painters and to the work of metal sculptor Julio González (1886–1942). Smith made his first welded metal sculptures in 1933 and committed himself to sculpture from 1935 onward. His “Medals of Dishonor” series (1937–40) was inspired by his travels in Europe and Russia. In 1938 he had his first solo show and his sculpture Head (1938) was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art, New York. After he received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1950, his works expanded in scale and became more abstract; he later added color to some works. In 1962 the Italian government invited him to create 27 sculptures for the Festival dei Due

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Mondi (Festival of Two Worlds) in Spoleto. A retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum traveled to the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and Tate Modern, London (2006–7). Loló Soldevilla Born 1901 in Pinar del Río, Cuba Died 1971 in Havana, Cuba Loló Soldevilla (Dolores Soldevilla Nieto) traveled to Paris in 1949, working as a cultural attaché in the Cuban Embassy and studying sculpture at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. In 1950 she returned briefly to Cuba, presenting sculptures and paintings in her first two solo exhibitions. Back in Paris in 1951 she took part in the Atelier d’art abstrait (Studio of abstract art) and turned to geometric abstraction. Her works of the 1950s, which mostly feature geometric forms, include slender metal sculptures (Stables), pain­tings reminiscent of celestial alignments, and luminous reliefs inspired by her colla­boration with the Spanish kinetic artist Eusebio Sempere (1923–1985). From 1951 to 1955 she participated in the Salon des realités nouvelles (Exhibition of New Realities), and in 1956 she permanently returned to Havana. There she organized the exhibition Pintura de hoy. Vanguardia de la Escuela de Paris (Painting Today: Vanguard School of Paris; Palacio de Bellas Artes, 1956) and opened the Galería de Arte Color-Luz (Color-Light Art Gallery) with Pedro de Oraá (b. 1931) in 1957. The gallery became central to the group Diez Pintores Concretos (Ten Concrete Painters), which Soldevilla co-founded in 1958. Following the Cuban Revolution, Soldevilla’s artistic output decreased, although she taught at the Escuela de Arquitectura (School of Architecture) in Havana (1960– 61), edited the Communist newspaper Granma (1965–71), and founded the group Espacio (1965) to mentor young artists. Jesús Rafael Soto Born 1923 in Ciudad Bolívar, Venezuela Died 2005 in Paris, France The body of work by Jesús Rafael Soto synthesized abstraction, visual perception, and participation. He first studied art in Caracas but moved to Paris in 1950, where he met op artist Victor Vasarely (1906–1997) and kinetic sculptor Jean Tinguely (1925– 1991). Soto first showed at the Galerie De­ nise René in the 1955 exhibition Le Mouvement (The Movement), which also included work by the Dadaist artist Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968). Soto’s Espiral con Red (Spiral with Red) comprised a solid and transparent sculptural layer painted with concentric forms that seemed to vibrate before one’s eyes—a reference to Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs (1935). From 1951 to 1968, Soto participated in the Salon des réalités nouvelles, a yearly survey in Paris focusing on abstract art. In 1958 his work was featured in the Venezuelan pavilions at both the Brussels World’s Fair (Expo ’58) and the Venice Biennale. In 1964 Soto was included in Documenta Kassel and again in the Venice Biennale. His breakthrough sculpture series, the “Pénétrables” (The Penetrables; 1967–97) consists of vinyl or metal tubes, hung from a gridwork, which viewers can pass through. His hometown of Ciudad

Bolívar opened a museum dedicated to his work in 1973. Francis Newton Souza Born 1924 in Saligão, British India Died 2002 in Mumbai, India Francis Newton Souza, often called F. N. Souza, was one of the first painters to achieve international renown in newly independent India. He initially attended the Sir J. J. School of Art in Mumbai but was expelled for participating in the Quit India Movement in 1945. Two years later he co-founded the Progressive Artists’ Group in Bombay and soon became its intellectual leader. Souza left for London in 1949 and in 1955 he gained sweeping recognition for his first solo show at the Gallery One in London as well as for his autobiographi­ cal essay Nirvana of a Maggot, which was first published in Encounter magazine. In 1967 Souza received the Guggenheim International Award and moved to New York, where he remained until shortly before his death. Souza’s images often show distorted human figures and heads drawn or painted in a graphic style with distinct lines, brushstrokes, and contours. His subjects range from still lifes and landscapes to Christian themes and the negotiation of human sexuality. Since the late 1980s he has been honored with several retrospectives in India. Aleksandar Srnec Born 1924 in Zagreb, Kingdom of Yugoslavia Died 2010 in Zagreb, Croatia Aleksandar Srnec worked in a variety of media, including painting and kinetic sculpture. He first studied at the Akademija likovnih umjetnosti (Academy of Fine Arts) at the University of Zagreb from 1943 to 1949. After graduation, he worked with the architect Vjenceslav Richter (1917–2002) and fellow artist Ivan Picelj (1924–2011) to curate and design exhibitions of contempor­ ary Yugoslavian art. In 1951, the three men, along with other architects and the painter and filmmaker Vladimir Kristl (1923–2004), founded the Experimental Atelier, or EXAT 51. Their manifesto protested the Communist preference for social realist art, arguing for abstraction as an instrument of social change. EXAT 51 sought to bring together art, architecture, and design to improve daily life. Out of EXAT 51 developed the Nove tendencije (New Tendencies) movement, which focused on kinetic and optical art. Srnec began to make kinetic sculptures in the 1950s, later adding light and highly polished metals into his work during the 1960s and ’70s. In 1999, he was awarded the Vladimir Nazor Award for Lifetime Achievement, and in 2008 he received an award from the Croatian Association of Artists. A retrospective of Srnec’s work was presented at the Muzej Suvremene Umjetnosti (Museum of Contemporary Art), Zagreb, in 2010. Frank Stella Born 1936 in Malden, MA, USA Lives and works in New York, NY, USA Frank Stella pioneered both post-painterly abstraction in the 1960s and postmodernist

art from the 1970s onward. He studied history at Princeton University, where he befriended the abstract painter Walter Darby Bannard (b. 1934) and art historian Michael Fried (b. 1939). Stella moved to New York in 1958 and, during the heyday of Abstract Expressionism, developed a cool painting style devoid of external reference. Stella’s “Black Paintings” of 1959 feature stripes of black house paint separated by thin bands of unprimed canvas. Fried described these paintings as “deductive,” with the shape of the canvas determining the patterning therein. Stella first showed these works in the exhibitions Three Americans (1959) at Oberlin College, Ohio, and Sixteen Americans (1960) at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In 1960 he began producing shaped “deductive” canvases, using aluminum and copper paints. In his later, brightly colored “Protractor” series, named after Middle Eastern cities, he overlaid brightly colored circular shapes. He showed widely in the 1960s, including at Documenta, Kassel (1968). In 1970, he became the youngest artist to receive a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. Since then his work took a “maximalist” turn, and he has incorporated three-dimensional, architectural, and Expressionist elements. Sindoedarsono Sudjojono Born 1913 in Kisaran, Sumatra Died 1985 in Jakarta, Indonesia Sindoedarsono Sudjojono was a largely self-taught artist, art critic, and writer who shaped the development of Indonesian modernism. During the Dutch colonial period in Indonesia he fought for a genuinely Indonesian art, free from European colonial influences. He laid great emphasis on the development of a personal artistic language and focused on depicting the everyday lives of Indonesian people during the Dutch colonial regime, which began in the eighteenth century. He rejected the predominant colonial style—which he critically termed Mooi Indië (Beautiful Indies)—for its idealized depiction of the Indonesian landscape. In Indonesian Art Now and That of the Future (1939) Sudjojono criticized Indonesian artists for adopting this style. Sudjojono helped to establish several artists associations: Union of Indonesian Painters (PERSAGI) (1937–38), Young Indonesian Artists (SIM) (1946), and People’s Painters (1947). In 1950 he joined the Indonesian Communist Party and adopted a social realist style. In 1951 he traveled to Europe and participated in the third Weltfestspiele der Jugend und Studenten (World Festival of Youth and Students) in East Berlin. His body of work includes paintings, sketches, drawings, public art, reliefs, and ceramics. After 1959 he withdrew from politics and instead focused on painting landscapes; still lifes, and portraits. Alina Szapocznikow Born 1926 in Kalisz, Poland Died 1973 in Praz-Coutant, France Sculptor Alina Szapocznikow once explained that she was “searching for form, searching for the greatest expression of sensuality or dramatic quality.” After spending several years in ghettos and prisons during World War II, she moved to

Prague in 1945 to study art. From 1946 to 1948 she studied with Otokar Velímsky and then at the Vysoká Škola Um e� leckopr umyslová ˚ (Academy of Applied Arts), in the studio of Joseph Wagner. She attended the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts (National School of Fine Arts), Paris, from 1948 to 1951, and returned to Poland, where she immersed herself in contemporary art and participated in several competitions for public monuments. Szapocznikow worked in many traditional mediums, but was noted for pioneering in new materials, namely polyester and poly­urethane. Her distinct artistic approach was linked to her wartime incarceration and chronic illness, and her sculptures evoke Surrealism, Nouveau Réalisme, and Pop art. Szapocznikow unremittingly explored the human body (especially her own), its impermanence and fragility, by casting, fragmenting, reassembling, and transforming it. Although the components were modeled on real bo­ dies (often her own), the resulting sculptures approached the abstract, because she decontextualized and rearranged disembodied parts (limbs, lips, breasts, etc.). She was re­ presented in the Venice Biennale in 1962 and finally relocated to Paris the following year.

T Takamatsu Jiro¯ Born 1936 in Tokyo, Japan Died 1998 in Tokyo, Japan Takamatsu Jiro� was an influential artist and art theorist. He majored in oil painting at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, graduating in 1958. During the 1960s and '70s he developed a diverse body of work, including sculpture, photography, painting, drawing, and performance art. He was a founding member of the legendary artist collective Hi Red Center (1963–64) and a key figure in the development of the Mono-ha (School of Things) movement (1967–79). Takamatsu Jiro� questioned the material and metaphysical foundations of art within his own practice, while challenging the boundaries between art and life (Moderu 1000-en (chu¯) [Model, 1000-Yen Note], 1963). Besides his actions and public interventions in Tokyo, he primarily worked in series, of which his “Kage” (Shadow) paintings (1964–98) and his series “Shashin no Shashin” (Photograph of Photograph; 1972–73) are among the most influential. Besides being an artist and theorist, Takamatsu also taught at the Tamabijutsudaigaku (Tama Art University), Tokyo, from 1968 to 1972. His first solo show at the Tokyo Gallery in 1966 was followed by seven other exhibitions at this venue; he also participated in many important group exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale (1968), Paris Biennale (1969), and Documenta, Kassel (1977). Rufino Tamayo Born 1899 in Oaxaca, Mexico Died 1991 in Mexico City, Mexico Rufino Arellanes Tamayo was a figurative painter who incorporated Surrealist influences in his work. He moved to Mexico City after

his parents died in 1911. Although he took some drawing lessons and attended the Escuela de Bellas Artes (School of Fine Arts) in Mexico City, he mostly studied independently. By age twenty-two Tamayo had been appointed head of the Department of Ethnographic Drawing at the Museo Nacional de Arqueología (National Museum of Archeology) in Mexico City. There he worked with and drew pre-Columbian objects, which inspired his early still lifes and portraits. During several years when he lived in Europe and the United States, he adopted the styles of modern artists, fusing them with themes from Mexican folk culture. He was awarded commissions for public murals by the Palacio Nacional de Bellas Artes (National Palace of Fine Arts), Mexico City (1952–53), and UNESCO, Paris (1958). Unlike his fellow Mexican artists of that time, Tamayo preferred easel painting and did not strive to make his art the vehicle of political change. He had a retrospective at the Instituto de Bellas Artes (Institute of Fine Arts), Mexico City (1948), and took part in the Venice Biennale (1950). Working with Luis Remba in the early 1970s, he invented mixografía (mixography), an innovative relief-printing technique. Tanaka Atsuko Born 1932 in Osaka, Japan Died 2005 in Nara, Japan Tanaka Atsuko was a leading Japanese avant-garde artist. She began studying art at the Kyotoshiritsugeijutsudaigaku (Kyoto City University of Arts) in 1950, but in 1951 she transferred to the Ato no Osaka - (Osaka Municipal Institute of ichi Kenkyujo Art) to focus on modern Western art. Her husband, artist Akira Kanayama (b. 1924), founded Zero-kai (Zero Society) in 1952. She first participated in Zero-kai, then joined the Gutai Art Association in 1955. After a series of paintings and collages incorporating numbers, she became interested in everyday materials, such as commercially dyed textiles, electric bells, and lightbulbs. She also created many innovative works involving the spectator, performative art, and new technology. At the first Gutai exhibition in 1955, Tanaka Atsuko showed her first electric and participatory piece, Work (Bell). Her most famous work, Electric Dress (1956), was a wearable kimono-like sculpture made of colorfully painted lightbulbs, which one critic described as “a powerful conflation of the tradition of the Japanese kimono with modern industrial technology.” The lights represented systems pulsing inside the human body. She later returned to painting in a visual vocabulary, featuring networks of concentric circles and circuitous lines on large-scale canvases. Her work is included in several important private and public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Antonio Tàpies Born 1923 in Barcelona, Spain Died 2012 in Barcelona, Spain The painter, sculptor, and art theorist Antonio Tàpies became one of the most famous European artists of his time. He first studied law at the Universidad de Barcelona (University of Barcelona) but quit in order to study drawing at the Academia Valls (Valls Academy), Barcelona, in 1944. Following his interest in matter over draftsmanship, he began to experiment with materials

and techniques such as collage, grattage (scraping across a painted canvas to add texture), and graffiti. In his paintings he used marble dust, chalk, sand, and earth to create scratched and uneven surfaces with tactile and associative qualities. In some later works, he even applied three-dimensional objects. In 1948 Tàpies co-founded the avant-garde magazine Dau al Set (Seven-Spotted Dice) and met Joan Miró (1893–1983), with whom he shared a lifelong friendship. Tàpies also worked closely with many poets and writers and was a prolific essayist and printmaker. His first solo exhibition was held at Galeries Laietanes, Barcelona, in 1950, when he also spent several months in France on a scholarship from the French government. His first exhibitions in the United States were presented in 1953. Tàpies was honored with numerous prizes and gained his first retrospective at age 39, in 1962. Boris Taslitzky Born 1911 in Paris, France Died 2000 in Paris, France Boris Taslitzky was a socialist Realist pain­ ter who depicted scenes of suffering and death in war and revolution. His family had fled Russia to France in 1905, where Taslitzky studied at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts (National School of Fine Arts) in the 1930s. He joined the Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists in 1933 and two years later joined the Communist Party. His father had died in World War I and his mother died at Auschwitz during World War II; thus his paintings often reference the two wars. Taslitzky first supported the French Front populaire (People’s Front), making placards for political demonstrations. In 1940, while fighting against the Germans, he was arrested but later escaped. In late 1941 he was recaptured and served two years imprisonment. In 1944 Taslitzky was sent to Buchenwald concentration camp, where he secretly made drawings of the atrocities and inhuman conditions there. After the war he returned to Paris, where his drawings were published as 111 dessins faits à Buchenwald (111 Drawings Made at Buchenwald; 1946). Continuing the heroic and figurative traditions of nineteenth-century pain­ting, he painted politicallycharged scenes (Riposte, 1949), genre scenes, and lanscapes. Taslitzky taught at the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (National School of Decorative Arts) and worked as an illustrator for the Communist press. Chua Mia Tee Born 1931 in Shantou, China Lives and works in Singapore Chua Mia Tee, whose family fled to Singapore in 1937 during the Sino-Japanese War, studied art at the Nányáng Yìshù Xuéyuàn (Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts) from 1950 to 1952. After graduation he taught at Nanyang Academy in 1956 and 1957; later that year he commenced his career as an illustrator and designer of books and advertising. Showing great attention and affection for his people and surroundings, he created detailed painted and drawn records of Singapore’s vanishing traditional urban

life and landscape. He captured important scenes in Singapore history, as well as political and social concerns in paintings like Guójia- y uyán lèi (National Language Class; - shítáng (Workers in 1959) and Zài zhígong the Canteen; 1974). Chua was also a renowned portraitist who portrayed a number of significant political and historical figures. In 1974, when he gained much acclaim for his first solo exhibition at the Ruìx-Ing m�eishù guan � (Rising Art Gallery), Chua finally decided to pursue art full-time, working predominantly in oil on canvas. His artworks have been shown extensively abroad (Indonesia, Thailand, Belgium, Germany, Australia, and New Zealand). In 2015 Chua received Singapore’s Cultural Medallion. Hervé Télémaque Born 1937 Port-au-Prince, Haiti Lives and works in Paris, France Hervé Télémaque left his Haitian homeland in 1957 to escape a newly corrupt political scene and moved to New York, where he studied at the Art Students League until 1960. During this time he discovered Abs­­tract Expressionism and the American version of Surrealism, especially as repre­ sen­ ted by Arshile Gorky (1904–1948). After his graduation, Télémaque aban­ doned the United States because of his discomfort with racism, politics, and the then-pervasive Abstract Expressionism. He moved to Paris, where he continued his career as an artist and became a lea­ ding figure in the French Pop art movement. Most likely inspired by the appearance of American and English Pop art at the Venice Biennale in 1964, Télémaque and other French artists developed the Narrative Figuration movement. Led by the art critic Gérard Gassiot-Talabot (1929–2002), Télémaque and other ar­ tists mounted the famous group exhibition Mythologies quotidiennes (Everyday Mythologies; 1964), promoting their new painterly approach. By that time Télémaque was also working in collage and assemblage as well as painting, sculp­ ture, and graphic arts. His colorful composi­ tions depict everyday objects within sometimes confusing, sometimes banal scenes, always suggesting his critical under­ standing and appropriation of Pop culture through mass media, advertising, and comics. Mark Tobey Born 1890 in Centerville, WI, USA Died 1976 in Basel, Switzerland Mark Tobey is noted for his nonrepresentational works in multi-layered, allover brushstrokes that evoke Asian calligraphy. He studied painting at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1906 to 1908 then worked as a fashion illustrator in New York and Chicago from 1911 onward. His early portrait drawings were presented in his first solo exhibition at Knoedler & Co., New York, in 1917. The following year he moved to Seattle, where he first came in contact with the Bahá’í faith and converted. His enduring interest in East Asian philosophy and aesthetics (Chinese calligraphy, Persian and Arabic script) was nurtured by his friendship with the Chinese painter Teng Kuei and his travels abroad. In 1925 Tobey left Seattle

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for Paris, then traveled in Europe and the Middle East for about two years. His journey to China and Japan in 1934 eventually led to the development of his “white writings.” These abstract compositions in a subdued palette, with dense layers of calligraphic lines, were first exhibited in 1944 at the Willard Gallery, New York. Tobey’s art has been featured in numerous solo and retrospective exhibitions since the early 1960s. He received the Guggenheim International Award (1956) and the International Award for Painting at the Venice Biennale (1958). Tony Tuckson Born 1921 in Port Said, Egypt Died 1973 in Sydney Australia Tony Tuckson, a preeminent Australian ar­ tist and Abstract Expressionist, worked in pencil, charcoal, ink, watercolor, gouache, and mixed media. His emphasis on line and brushstrokes reflected his spontaneous and highly gestural approach. Tuckson studied painting at the Hornsey School of Art in London from 1937 to 1939 and at the Kingston School of Art, serving in the Royal Air Force from 1940 onward. When he was sent to Sydney in 1946, he pursued studies at the East Sydney Technical College for three years. In 1949 Tuckson was deeply impressed by an exhibition of aboriginal art from Arnhem Land from the collection of Ronald Berndt. After he became assistant director, then deputy director (1957), of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, he pioneered curatorial work in promoting and exhibiting Australian aboriginal and Melanesian art. Tuckson painted and drew his whole life and produced some 450 pain­ tings and more than a thousand drawings. Although his work in later years was overshadowed by his museum career, he had two solo shows at Watters Gallery in East Sydney in 1970 and 1973. Igael Tumarkin (born Peter Martin Gregor Heinrich Hellberg) Born 1933 in Dresden, Germany Lives and works in Israel Igael Tumarkin is a painter, printmaker, and sculptor who created such memorials as Holocaust and Revival (1971) in Rabin Square, Tel Aviv, and a memorial to fallen soldiers in the Negev. His father, Martin Hellberg, was a German theater actor and director. In 1935, when he was only two years old, he moved from Germany to Israel with his Jewish mother and his stepfather, Herzl Tumarkin. After his military service in the Israeli Sea Corps (1951–54), he studied sculpture with Rudi Lehmann (1903–1977) at Ein Hod, an artists’ village near Haifa. Tumarkin returned to Germany in 1955 and worked with the poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) at the Berliner Ensemble and assisted the stage designer Karl von Appen (1900–1981). He continued his work as a sculptor and stage designer in Europe until 1961. After traveling abroad and living for several years in the United States, he finally settled in Tel Aviv in the late 1970s. His work has been shown internationally, and he has received many awards, including the prestigious Israel Prize, in 2004.

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U Günther Uecker Born 1930 in Wendorf, Germany Lives in Düsseldorf, Germany Günther Uecker studied painting at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee (BerlinWeissensee University) from 1949 to 1953, where he was influenced by social realism. He continued his studies in 1955 at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (Dusseldorf Art Academy) under the Expressionist printmaker Otto Pankok (1893–1966). Uecker remained in Düsseldorf, where he joined a vibrant emerging art scene and became interested in the philosophies of Buddhism and Taoism. His art practice had a turning point in 1957 when he hammered nails into his canvases. Uniting Buddhist meditation with art making, Uecker explored the ritual repetition of hammering and the reductive abstraction the nails’ shadows cast on canvas. In 1960, Uecker began to add kinetic components, such as engines, to his works. He was included among forty artists in a ser­ies of one night pop-up exhibitions in Düsseldorf organized by Heinz Mack (b. 1931) and Otto Piene (1928–2014), the founders of the anti-Expressionist ZERO movement. Uecker’s work was displayed in an exhibition entitled Das Rote Bild (The Red Image) on April 24, 1958. He joined ZERO in 1961. Later he participated in Documenta, Kassel (1968) and the Venice Biennale (1970). After the ZERO group dissolved in 1966, Uecker turned to Conceptualism, body art and theatre design.

V Stan VanDerBeek Born 1927 in New York, NY, USA Died 1984 in Columbia, MD, USA Stan VanDerBeek was a pioneering experimental filmmaker. He first studied art and architecture at New York’s Cooper Union, graduating in 1952. He continued his studies at Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina, where he met such crucial influences and collaborators as Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983), John Cage (1912–1992), and Josef Albers (1888–1976). While working on the children’s television show “Winky Dink and You” (broadcast 1953–57), VanDerBeek developed innovative ways for viewers to interact with the show. This experience, and his collaborations with other artists— including Claes Oldenburg (b. 1929), Allan Kaprow (1927–2006), and Merce Cunningham (1919–2009)—led VanDerBeek to experiment with what cinematic theorist Gene Youngblood has called “expanded cinema.” In the 1960s VanDerBeek worked with computer programmer and physicist Ken Knowlton (b. 1931), at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, to develop the language of computer animation. VanDerBeek taught animation and film at Columbia University (1963–65) and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for

Advanced Visual Studies (1969–70). VanDerBeek’s work was included in the Software exhibition at the Jewish Museum, New York, in 1970. His work was later exhibited at the Whitney Biennial (1983) and the Venice Biennale (2013). Emilio Vedova Born 1919 in Venice, Italy Died 2006 in Venice, Italy Emilio Vedova was a modernist painter and a pioneer in Italy’s art informel movement. In the mid-1930s he spent time in Rome and Florence. He joined the Milanese anti-fascist artists’ association Corrente in 1942, and from 1944 to 1945 he worked for the Italian resistance. In 1946 he signed the “Al di là di Guernica” (Beyond Guernica) manifesto and co-founded the Nuova Secessione Italiana (New Italian Secession) in Venice. Vedova first exhibited in the Venice Biennale in 1948 and later received the Grand Prize for Painting (1960) and the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement (1997). In the early 1950s his style shifted from geometric abstraction to a spontaneous, gestural informalism. His series include “Scontro di situazioni” (Collision of Situations), “Ciclo della Protesta” (Protest Cycle), and “Cicli della Natura” (Cycles of Nature). His first solo show outside Italy was at the Catherine Viviano Gallery, New York (1951). In 1960 Vedova designed lighting and costumes for Luigi Nono’s opera Intolleranza ’60. He created his first “Plurimi” (Many), freestanding, hinged sculpture-paintings made of wooden panels and metal frameworks in the following year. His Absurdes Berliner Tagebuch ’64 (Absurd Berlin Diary ‘64) was first shown at Documenta, Kassel (1964). Vedova received many prizes, including the Guggenheim International Award (1956). Jacques (Mahé de la) Villeglé Born 1926 in Quimper, France Lives and works in Paris, France Jacques (Mahé de la) Villeglé is known for making art from scraps of torn posters. He began his painting studies in 1944 at the École des beaux-arts (School of Fine Arts), Rennes, where he met his fellow student, Raymond Hains (1926–2005). From 1947 to 1949, Villeglé studied architecture at the École supérieure des beaux-arts de Nantes Métropole (School of Fine Arts in Nantes Métropole). Dissatisfied with both fields of study, he began to collect objects he found on the Atlantic beaches and then to reassemble them as sculptures, such as Fils d’acier–Chaussée des Corsaires, Saint-Malo (Son of Steel, Corsairs Highway, Saint Malo; 1947). Villeglé moved to Paris in 1949 and reunited with Hains, who introduced him to décollage. From their first collaborative work, Ach Alma Manetro (1949; named for visible word fragments), and continuing until 1954, the two artists ripped torn posters from public billboards and glued them onto their canvases. Villeglé continued to explore the artistic, documentary, and sociocritical potential of this technique, which he called affiches lacérées (torn posters), for more than five decades. While his early works focused on word fragments, he later became more interested in colors and shapes. Villeglé wrote Collective Realities in

1958, precursor to the “Nouveau Réalisme” (New Realism) manifesto of 1960. Villeglé’s works have been featured in more than 100 exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe. Wolf Vostell Born 1932 in Leverkusen, Germany Died 1998 in Berlin, Germany Wolf Vostell is known as a co-founder of the Fluxus movement of the 1960s and '70s as well as for his pioneering works in installation, happenings, and environmental art. His education included studies at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts (National School of Fine Arts) in Paris (1955) and the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (Dusseldorf Art Academy; in 1957). Starting in 1958, Vostell initiated happenings across Europe and New York. That same year, he created the first installation to incorporate a TV set (German View from the Black Room Cycle, 1958–63). Appropriating the term “Dé-coll/age” from the French language in 1954, Vostell reintroduced the Dadaist legacy of deconstructing consumerist items (like street posters) as a means of encouraging independent thinking. Vostell’s artistic achievements earned him early international recognition. He helped organize the Festum Fluxorum in Wiesbaden of 1962, among other events with the Fluxus group. Vostell was granted major retrospectives at the Musée d'art moderne de la ville de Paris (Modern Art Museum of the City of Paris) and the Neue Nationalgalerie (New National Gallery), Berlin, in 1974, and participated in Documenta, Kassel in 1977. In the 1980s, Vostell expanded his practice into environmental art, creating immersive installations for the FLUXUS-Train traveling across Germany. He founded the Museo Vostell, dedicated to his work, in 1976 in Malpartida de Cáceres, Spain.

W Andy Warhol (born Andrew Warhola) Born 1928 in Pittsburgh, PA, USA Died 1987 in New York, NY, USA Andy Warhol was a pioneer in the American Pop art movement of the 1960s. He initially studied pictorial design at the Carnegie Ins­ titute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University). After earning a BFA degree in 1949, he moved to New York, where he became a successful commercial artist and illustrator. He turned to painting and drawing in the early 1950s, developing a whimsical style based on traced photographs and other imagery. In the early 1960s, as his interest in American popular culture coincided with the emerging Pop art movement, he adapted images from advertising and commercial products. He then turned from hand-painted canvases to large-scale silkscreened images and began to feature celebrity portraits and other cultural icons, unveiling his new works in Andy Warhol: Campbell’s Soup Cans at Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles, in 1962. As Warhol described his work, “Once you ‘got’ pop, you could never see a sign the same way again. And once

you thought pop, you could never see America the same way again.” Warhol broke the boundaries between high and low art in his famous New York studio, the “Factory,” expanding the scope of his work to sculpture, photography, experimental film, and video. Susanne Wenger Born 1915 in Graz, Austria Died 2009 in Osogbo, Nigeria Susanne Wenger is known both for her art and for her commitment to restoring Yoruba shrines in her adopted home of Osogbo, Nigeria. Her career began with studies at the Akademie der Schönen Künste (Aca­ demy of Fine Arts), Vienna (1933–37), under Herbert Boeckl (1894–1966). During World War II she remained in Vienna and Graz, joined the resistance, and helped refugees, including the fantastic realist Ernst Fuchs (1930–2015). She also made her first Surrealistic drawings during this period. After the war she worked for the Communist children’s magazine Unsere Zeitung (Our Newspaper) and co-founded the Vienna Art Club in 1947. In 1946 she traveled to Italy and Switzerland, exhibiting at the Galerie des Eaux Vives (Gallery of Living Waters). In 1949 she met the scholar and author Ulli Beier (1922–2011) in Paris and the two soon married and moved to Nigeria. Wenger converted to Yoruba religion while recovering from a serious illness and eventually became a Yoruba priestess. She divorced Beier in 1958 and married a local drummer in 1959. Besides restoring a Yoruba shrine to the goddess Osogbo, she built monumental sculptures and made large-scale textiles with a special batik and dye technique. In 1965 Wenger founded the artist group New Sacred Art with Osogbo artists and craftsmen. Jack Whitten Born 1939 in Bessemer, AL, USA Lives and works in New York, NY, USA Jack Whitten works in gestural abstraction, incorporating aspects of sculpture and collage. During his premedical studies at Tuskegee Institute, Whitten discovered the legacy of inventor, scientist, and artist George Washington Carver (1860–1943). In the late 1950s, while studying art at Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, he became involved in the civil rights movement. Whitten moved to New York in 1960 and earned a BFA degree from Cooper Union in 1964. During the 1960s, Whitten created dynamic works, from brightly colored abstractions to ghostly evocations in his “Head” series (1964). He often experiments with color, technique, and materials (iron oxide, dry pigments, crushed Mylar, ash, bone, and blood). During the 1970s he created textured surfaces with squeegees, rakes, and Afro combs. In the 1980s he came to consider paint as similar to skin, but in the 1990s, he began to create canvases with small painted tiles. Whitten’s work has been featured at the 55th Venice Biennale (2013); MoMA PS1, New York (2007); and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2006). He received an honorary doctorate from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2014.

Wols (Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze) Born 1913 in Berlin, Germany Died 1951 in Paris, France A key figure of the tachisme movement, Wols left his parent’s home in Dresden to pursue art at age seventeen. Following a photography apprenticeship in 1930 at the Reimann-Schule (Reimann School) in Berlin, he moved to Paris in 1932 at the recommendation of László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946). Acquainted with leaders of the Parisian art scene such as Fernand Léger (1881–1955), Amédée Ozenfant (1886–1966), and Hans Arp (1886–1966), Wols expanded his creative output in painting, writing, music, and photography during the 1930s. In 1937, he was commissioned to photograph the World’s Fair in Paris. At the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Wols was sent to an internment camp near Aixen-Provence. In 1940 he fled to Cassis, where he began creating drawings and watercolors. With an increasing interest in abs­traction, Wols gradually shifted his focus from the line to the interplay between color fields and to the dripping of paint. Art critic Michel Tapié would coin the term “art autre” (other art) to describe the oil paintings that Wols began in 1946. Wols held his first exhibition at Galerie René Drouin in 1945; his second exhibition at the gallery two years later earned him widspread acclaim. His work was shown posthumously in the first three editions of Documenta, Kassel (1955; 1959; 1964). Andrzej Wróblewski Born 1927 in Vilnius, Lithuania Died 1957 in the Tatra Mountains, Poland Andrzej Wróblewski, who developed an individual approach to realist painting, became one of Poland’s foremost postwar artists. After World War II he moved to Krakow, where he studied art history at the Uni­wersytet Jagiellonski ´ (Jagiellonian University, 1945–48) and trained at the Akademia Sztuk Pi e˛ knych (Academy of Fine Arts, 1945–52). Even as a student he began to rebel against the predominant Kapist style (colorism) that was promoted in Polish academic circles. Searching for a unique and personal style, free from ideology, he inaugurated a Self-Teaching Art School at the Akademia Sztuk Pi˛eknych w Krakowie (Krakow Academy of Fine Arts) in 1948. His work in oil paint and gouache featured elements of Surrealism and abstraction, including geometric and stylized forms. In the late 1940s he devoted himself to his “Executions” series, depicting scenes of wartime atrocities during the German occupation of Poland. Also during that time, as a critic and theoretician, he published nearly eighty articles on art and literature. He often painted on both sides of the canvas, thus creating challenging, often contradictory combinations of recto and verso. In the early 1950s he briefly adopted the social realist style, and from 1955 onward he focused on the family as his subject. He died in a mountaineering accident at age twenty-nine.

Andrew (Newell) Wyeth Born 1917 in Chadds Ford, PA, USA Died 2009 in Chadds Ford, PA, USA

Yosuke Yamahata Born 1917 in Singapore Died 1966 in Tokyo, Japan

Andrew Wyeth was a realist painter whose work, as one critic put it, represented “continuity and permanence in the face of instabilities and uncertainties of modern life.” Wyeth began studying art in 1932 under his father, the illustrator Newell Convers Wyeth (1882–1945). Wyeth’s first solo show—at the Macbeth Gallery, New York, in 1936— was a complete success. Although his early works were in watercolor, he soon changed to egg tempera, a Renaissance-era medium that demanded great care and delicacy, allowing complexity and detail in his canvases. Wyeth’s paintings blended vivid landscapes and insightful portraits of the land and the people around his hometown of Chadds Ford, in rural Pennsylvania, and his summer home in Cushing, Maine. One subject was Christina Olson, a polio survivor and friend of Wyeth’s wife, Betsy. Helga Testorf, a neighbor in Chadds Ford, was another notable subject. Wyeth received many awards during his lifetime. He was the first artist to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1963) and was the first living artist to exhibit at the U.S. White House (1966). In 1977 he made his first trip to Europe to be admitted to the Académie des BeauxArts (Academy of Fine Arts) in Paris.

Yosuke Yamahata is best known for his photographs of Nagasaki on August 10, 1945, the day after the city was bombed by U.S. forces at the end of World War II. He first studied at Hosei University in Tokyo, but left in 1936 before completing his studies in order to begin working in his father’s photographic company, G. T. Sun (Graphic Times Sun). During World War II, Yosuke Yamahata worked as a Japanese military photographer in China and elsewhere in Asia. After the bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, he was sent to record the bomb’s effects. Within twelve hours Yosu-

Y Vasily Yakovlev Born 1893 in Moscow, Russian Empire Died 1953 in Moscow, USSR After studying mathematics and physics, Vasily (Nikolaevich) Yakovlev trained from 1914 to 1917 at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture under Abram Arkhipov (1862–1930) and Konstantin Koro­vin (1861–1939). Yakovlev’s study of the European old masters and Russian icon painting was bolstered by his role as a conservator for various institutes and museums in Moscow. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, he visited Western Europe several times, including an extended sojourn in Ita­ly at the invitation of Maxim Gorky (1869–1936) in 1932. Astaunchly conser­ vative artist, Yakovlev sought to couple the skill of Renaissance and Baroque painting with the ideological program of Soviet socialist realism. He produced many pain­ tings, usually portraits, in a highly finished academic style throughout the 1930s and 1940s. During the Great Patriotic War (1941–45) Yako­ vlev visited the front to study military life, and in 1946 he created his iconic Portrait of Georgy Zhukov, Marshal of the Soviet Union. Yakovlev twice received the coveted Stalin Prize (1943; 1949), and in 1944 he was be­stowed with the title of People’s Artist of the RSFSR. In 1952 Yakovlev began work on his last significant project, supervising the restoration of The Siege of Sevastopol (1902–4) by Franz Roubaud (1856–1928).

ke Yamahata took nearly 120 photographs of the devastated landscape and the city’s survivors, the greatest immediate photographic documentation of Nagasaki or Hiroshima by a single photographer. His photographs were published in the Japanese magazine Mainichi Shibun, but due to postwar censorship they were not seen widely until 1952, in the magazines Life and Asahi Gurafu, in the book Kiroku-shashin: Genbaku no Nagasaki (Photo-Record: The Atomic Bomb of Nagasaki), and in the exhibition and catalogue Family of Man (1955). In 1965 he became violently ill with terminal cancer, exactly twenty years after hisexposure to radiation at Nagasaki. Ramsès Younan Born 1913 in Minya, Egypt Died 1966 in Cairo, Egypt Ramsès Younan is recognized as one of the founders of Egyptian Surrealism. He finished his studies at the École des BeauxArts (School of Fine Arts) in Cairo in 1933 and became a secondary school art teacher in 1934. From 1939 to 1946, Younan participated in the Trotskyist group Art et Li­ berté. He was involved in the publication of a number of left-wing reviews, including La Part du Sable (with poet Georges Henein, 1914–1973) and al-Tatawwur—the first socialist magazine in Egypt. From 1942 to 1944, Younan edited Al Magalla al Gedida (All-New Magazine), the first Trotskyist bulletin published in Arabic. Younan immigrated to France after World War II, showing in the Expositions Surréalistes Internationaux (International Surrealist Exhibitions) in Paris and Prague in 1947. In 1948, he published a pamphlet with Henein, “Notes sur une ascèse hystérique” (Notes on a Hysterical Asceticism), critiquing elements of Surrealist practice, particularly automatism and the movement’s relationship to Marxism. He broke with the French Surrealists that same year. Younan translated the writings of Albert Camus, Franz Kafka and Arthur Rimbaud in Arabic. He returned to Egypt in 1956 and represented the country in the 1961 Bienal de São Paulo and the 1964 Venice Biennale.

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Z Yosef Zaritsky Born 1891 in Boryspol, Russian Empire Died 1985 in Tel Aviv, Israel Yosef Zaritsky was intimately connected with the development of Israeli art. Zaritsky studied at the Akademiya khudozhestv (Academy of Art) in Kiev from 1910 to 1914. During World War I he was drafted into the Russian army, serving from 1915 to 1917. In 1923 he immigrated to Jerusalem, moving with his family to Tel Aviv in the mid-1920s. There he became actively involved in the city’s cultural life, painting the daily lives of the city’s inhabitants, primarily in watercolor. He went to Paris in 1927, where he was inspired by the modernist art he saw. With the New Horizons movement in 1948, Zaritsky and his fellow artists sought to promote progressive Zionist modernism. Beginning in the 1930s, Zaritsky painted hundreds of watercolors of Tel Aviv rooftops. The paintings became increasing abstract and this period proved a turning point for his practice. In 1948, he became the Chairman of the Association of Painters and Sculptors. He showed in the 1948 Venice Biennale. Zaritsky traveled to Europe in the mid-1950s, where he mounted a solo show at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1955. Princess Fahrelnissa Zeid Born 1901 in Büyükada, Turkey Died 1991 in Amman, Jordan Fahrelnissa Zeid was one of the first women to enroll at the Güzel Sanatlar Akademisi (Academy of Fine Arts) in Istanbul in 1920. She traveled to Paris in 1928, where she studied at the Académie Ranson ([Paul] Ranson Academy). Together with her first husband, the novelist and writer Izzet Melih Devrim (1887-1960), she traveled throughout Europe and learned about European modern art movements. Her second marriage, to the Iraqi ambassador Prince Zeid bin Hussein in 1934, also led to extensive travel throughout Europe, the Middle East, and the United States. It is not surprising, therefore, that Zeid’s art shows influences of Byzantine iconography and Sufism as well as Western Fauvism (painterly quali­ ties, bold colors) and Cubism (fractured geometric forms). Although she became most famous for her abstractions, Zeid also painted portraits and scenes of everyday life. In 1942 she joined and exhibited with the D-Group in Istanbul. Two years later she held her first solo show in Istanbul, then exhibited work in London and Paris. Her breakthrough came in 1950 with her first New York show at the Hugo Gallery, where she presented a series of large abstractions. In 1975 Zeid moved to Amman, Jordan, where she taught at the Royal Art Institute and established the Fahrelnissa Zeid Institute of Fine Arts. Charles Hossein Zenderoudi Born 1937 in Tehran, Iran Lives and works in Paris, France Charles Hossein Zenderoudi is considered a pioneer of Iranian modern art. In 1960,

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while still an art student at Tehran School of Fine Arts, Zenderoudi inaugurated Sagha Khaneh, a pictorial movement that would revive the spirit of Eastern gestural writing. The movement is named for water dispensers around Tehran that are decorated with popu­lar illuminations or verses from the Koran. Sagha Khaneh sought to incorporate Iranian national, religious, and folkloric elements. Zenderoudi soon received recognition, winning awards at the second Tehran Biennial and the Venice Biennale (both 1960), the Bienal de Sao Paulo (1961), and the Paris Biennale (1962). In 1961 he moved to Paris, where he developed his calligraphic style. While his early works remained figurative with patterns of ornamental, calligraphic, and symbolic elements—such as Alyad (The Hand; 1959) or Alshshams w al’asad (The Sun and the Lion; 1960)—his later paintings focused on the abstract qualities of Persian calligraphy. Zenderoudi once explained his goal of global communication: “Men the world over are identical and can all read my work. What matters is to achieve a harmony between the person who created it and the spectator.” In 1972 his illustrated Qur’an won the UNESCO annual award for most beautiful book. Yuri Zlotnikov Born 1930 in Moscow, USSR Lives and works in Moscow, Russia Yuri Zlotnikov was a pioneer of abstract art in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union. Paintings, he said, “should reveal the laws of psychophysiological motor behavior and the nature of reactions to color and form.” He studied at the Moscow Middle Art School for gifted children in the 1940s and in the sculpture studio of the Anna Golubkina muzey (Anna Golubkina Museum). In the 1950s, working with other artists at the studio of Vladimir Slepyan (1930– 1998), Zlotnikov sought a visual language rooted in science and psychology. His first abstract work, Schetchik Geygera (Geiger Counter; 1956), was followed by his famous “Sistema signala” (Signal System) series (1957–62). Inspired by De Stijl painter Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) and Suprematist artist Kazimir Malevich (1878–1938), Zlotnikov studied mathematics, cybernetics, and human psychology. In compositions of small, colorful geometric elements on a white background he attempted to link human perception with the communicative potential of abstraction. After 1962 Zlotnikov returned to a figurative style, and in the late 1960s he created schematic compositions (“Metaforikoy” [Metaphorics]) inspired by music and mass movement. He later favored a more impulsive, naive style in his abstract improvisations. Zlotnikov’s first solo exhibition was held in 1962; the Moskovskiy muzey sovremennogo iskusstva (Moscow Museum of Modern Art) organized a major retrospective in 2011.

Following page Shozo Shimamoto creates a painting by throwing bottles filled with paint against a canvas at the 2nd Gutai Art Exhibition, 1956. Photo: Kiyoji Otsuji

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Yiakoumaki, Nayia. This is Tomorrow. exh. cat. London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2010. Yo�ng-na Kim. Modern and Contemporary Art in Korea: Tradition, Modernity, and Identity. Elizabeth, NJ: Hollym, 2005. Younan, Ramses. “Variations on the Verb to Cover,” published in the first number of La Part du Sable (February 1947) (English translation published in Grid N° 5, Paris, January 1987; also published by Abdel Kader El-Janabi in http://www.egyptian­ surrealism.com/files/the-nile-of-surreal­ ism.pdf) (accessed September 7, 2016). Yusuke, Nakahara. “Locked-Room Paint­ ing,” 1956. In From Postwar to Postmodern: Art in Japan, 1945–1989: Primary Documents, 78–83. New York: The Museum of Modern Art 2012. Z Zelizer, Barbie. Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera's Eye. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Zhdanov, Andrei. “On the Opera, Velikaya Druzhba, by V. Muradeli—Decree of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U.” February 10, 1948. In “The Zhdanov Decree.” DSCH Journal, No. 9 (Summer 1998): 21–24. Available online at: http:// dschjournal.com/wordpress/onlineart­ icles/dsch09_zhdanov.pdf (accessed September 7, 2016). Zlotnikov, Yuri, thoughts on Signals series: Leonid Prokhorovich Talochkin et al. Drugoe iskusstvo, Moskva 1956–1976: K Khronike khudozhestvennoi zhizni. 2:90. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia galereia “Moskovskaia kollektsiia”: SP “Interbuk,” 1991; and H.-P. Riese. “Yu. Zlotnikov. Nonkonformisty. Vtoroi russkii avantgard. 1955—1988. Voprosy iskusstvoznaniia 10, no. 1 (1997): 29. Noted in Yuri Zlotnikov. exh. cat. Moscow: State Russian Museum, 2008.

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ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

Alejandro Anreus Alejandro Anreus is Professor of Art His­ tory and Latin American/Latino Studies at William Paterson University, Wayne, New Jersey. Anreus was curator at the Montclair Art Museum (1987–1993) and the Jer­ sey City Museum (1993–2001). He is the author of Orozco in Gringoland: The Years in New York (2001) and Luis Cruz Azaceta (2014), editor of and contributor to Ben Shahn and the Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti (2001), and coeditor of and contribu­ tor to The Social and the Real: Political Art of the 1930s in the Western Hemisphere (2006) and Mexican Muralism: A Critical History (2012). His essays and articles have appeared in Art Journal, Third Text, ArteFacto, Commonweal, and Encuentro de la Cultura Cubana. A published poet, he is the author of Memento mori (2010) and Los exiliados sueñan (2013). Ariella Azoulay Ariella Azoulay is Professor of Modern Cul­ ture and Media and Comparative Literature, Brown University, as well as a documenta­ ry-film director and an independent curator of archives and exhibitions. Her books on photography include From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947–1950 (2011), Civil Imagination: The Political Ontology of Photography (2012), The Civil Contract of Photography (2008), and Aïm Deüelle Lüski and Horizontal Photography (2013). She has curated Enough! The Natural Violence of the New World Order (F/Stop festival, Leipzig, 2016), Potential History (2012), Untaken Photographs (2010, Igor Zabel Award, Mod­ erna galerija, Ljubljana; Zochrot), Architecture of Destruction (Zochrot, Tel Aviv), and Everything Could Be Seen (Um El Fahem Gallery of Art). She has directed Civil Alliances, Palestine, 47–48 (2012) and I Also Dwell among Your Own People: Conversations with Azmi Bishara (2004). Zainab Bahrani Zainab Bahrani is the Edith Porada Pro­ fessor of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, New York. Bahrani is the author of numerous books and is the recipient of several awards for her work on ancient art, including a 2003 Guggenheim grant and awards from the Getty Founda­ tion, the Mellon Foundation, and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her most re­ cent book, The Infinite Image: Art, Time and the Aesthetic Dimension in Antiquity (2014), won the Lionel Trilling Book prize. She has been the Slade Professor of the Fine Arts at Oxford University and was previously a curator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her curatorial work includes Modernism and Iraq (2009).

Museums in Kibbutzim won the Ben-Zvi Prize in 2010. She curated the Israeli Pa­ vilion, Venice Biennale of Architecture (with Yuval Yaski, 2010), the Israeli Pavilion, São Paulo Bienal (1996), the Israeli Pavilion, Istanbul Biennale (1992), and numerous exhibitions in Israel, Japan, Germany, and France. Homi K. Bhabha Homi K. Bhabha is Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities, Director of the Mahindra Humanities Center, and Senior Ad­ visor to the President and Provost at Harvard University. In addition to his most famous work, The Location of Culture (1994); numer­ ous co-edited volumes; and works in journals such as Art Forum (regular contributor), Critical Inquiry, and Art in America; he has written many essays on contemporary artists. His forthcoming books will include a collection of essays on contemporary diasporic art and another on culture, security, and globalization. Bhabha is a past jury member of the Venice Biennale, serves on the Academic Commit­ tee for the Shanghai Power Station of Art, and holds honorary degrees from Université Paris 8, University College London, and Free University Berlin. In 2012 he was conferred the Government of India’s Padma Bhushan Presidential Award in the field of literature and education, and received the Humboldt Research Prize in 2015. Emily Braun Emily Braun is Distinguished Professor at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY, and the Curator of the Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection. In addition to her book Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism: Art and Politics under Fascism (2000) she has written widely on Giorgio de Chirico, Futurism, Giorgio Morandi, and the history of late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century Italian art and criticism. Other publications of hers have focused on twentieth-century American art. Among the award-winning exhibitions she has co-curated are The Power of Conversation: Jewish Women and Their Salons (2005) and Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection (2014). She mostly recently organized Alberto Burri: The Trauma of Painting for the Guggenheim Muse­ um, New York. That publication received the Dedalus Foundation Exhibition Catalogue Award and recognition for excellence from the Association of American Art Curators. Dipesh Chakrabarty Dipesh Chakrabarty is the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History, South Asian Studies, and Law at the University of Chicago. He is the au­ thor, among other titles, of Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (2000, 2008).

Galia Bar Or Dr. Galia Bar Or (PhD, Tel Aviv Universi­ ty, Institute of History and Philosophy of Sciences and Ideas; School of History) was until 2016 the Director and Curator of the Mishkan Museum of Art, Ein Harod. She has published many books and catalogues and her book Our Life Requires Art: Art

Ekaterina Degot

Zabel Award for Culture and Theory. She has published Russian 20th Century Art (2000, Trilistnik, Moscow), as well as various es­ says on Soviet realism and the art of cultural revolution, and has curated the exhibition Struggling for the Banner: Soviet Art between Trotsky and Stalin (Moscow Museum of Con­ temporary Art, 2007). Her other curatorial projects include Monday Begins on Saturday (with David Riff; First Bergen Assem­ bly, Bergen, Norway, 2013). She coedited Post-Post-Soviet?: Art, Politics and Society in Russia at the Turn of the Decade (2013). She lives in Cologne and Moscow. Ješa Denegri Ješa Denegri is an art historian and critic based in Belgrade. He has curated numer­ ous exhibitions, including the Yugoslavian participation in the Paris Biennale (1971, 1976, 1983) and the Venice Biennale (1976, 1982). He is a frequent contributor to art magazines, newspapers, and exhibition catalogues. His most recent publications include Themes in Serbian Art 1945–1970: From Socialist Realism to Kinetic Art (2009) and the five-volume work Serbian Art 1950–2000 (2013). Nikolas Drosos Nikolas Drosos is an art historian special­ izing in art and architecture from postwar Eastern Europe in its global context. He holds a PhD from the Graduate Center, City University of New York. His disserta­ tion, “Modernism with a Human Face: Syn­ thesis of Art and Architecture in Eastern Europe, 1954–1958,” examines the theory and practices relating to the “synthesis of the arts”—the integration of art into archi­ tecture—in the Soviet Union, Poland, and Yugoslavia. He has been the recipient of a Fulbright scholarship, a predoctoral fel­ lowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and a postdoc­ toral fellowship at Columbia University’s Harriman Institute. Okwui Enwezor Okwui Enwezor is Director of Haus der Kunst, Munich. In 2015 he was Director of the Visual Arts in the 56th Biennale of Venice. He served as Artistic Director of several international exhibitions, including La Triennale 2012, Paris; 7th Gwangju Biennale; 2nd Seville Biennial; Documenta 11, Kassel; and the 2nd Johannesburg Biennial, among others. He is the former Dean of Academic Affairs and Senior Vice President of the San Francisco Art Institute, and his academic positions include Visiting Profes­ sor at Columbia University, New York; the University of Pittsburgh; and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Enwezor was Kirk Varnedoe Visiting Professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University; and in 2013 Global Distinguished Professor at the Department of Art History at New York University.

Pedro Erber Pedro Erber is an Associate Professor in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell University. He holds a PhD in Asian Studies from Cornell University, an MA in philosophy from Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, and a BA in philosophy from the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. Erber is the author of Breaching the Frame: The Rise of Contemporary Art in Brazil and Japan (2015), Política e verdade no pensamento de Martin Heidegger (2004), and nu­ merous articles on art and aesthetics, liter­ ature, philosophy, and political thought. His curatorial projects include The Emergence of the Contemporary: Avant-Garde Art in Japan, 1950–1970 at Rio de Janeiro’s Paço Imperial (July–August 2016). Gao Minglu Gao Minglu is Research Professor in the Department of History of Art and Archi­ tecture at the University of Pittsburgh and Professor and Head of the Fine Arts De­ partment at the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, Chongqing. His recent books include Total Modernity and the Avant-Garde in Twentieth-Century Chinese Art (2011) and The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art (2005). Romy Golan Romy Golan is Professor of 20th Century art at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author of Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France between the Wars (1995) and Muralnomad: The Paradox of Wall Painting, Europe 1927–1957 (2009). Her recent publica­ tions include “Campo Urbano: Episodes from an Unwritten History of Participation,” in Matilde Nardelli and Pierpaolo Antonel­ lo, eds., Bruno Munari (2016); “Vitalità del Negativo/Negativo della Vitalità,” October no. 150 (Winter 2014); “The Scene of a Dis­ appearance” in Giosetta Fioroni: L’Argento (The Drawing Center, New York, 2013); and “Flashbacks and Eclipses in Italian Art in the 1960s, Grey Room 49 (Fall 2012). Walter Grasskamp Prof. Dr. Walter Grasskamp is an art critic and held the chair in art history at the Acad­ emy of Fine Arts in Munich from 1995 to 2016, where he was vice-rector from 1999 until 2003. He was coordinating editor of German Art in the 20th Century: Painting and Sculpture 1905–1985 (Royal Acade­ my, London, 1985) and author of numerous essays and books dedicated to modern and contemporary art, particularly with a focus on postwar West Germany; museum and exhibition history (with a focus on the doc­ umenta exhibition series); art in the public sphere (with a focus on Sculpture Projects in Münster); as well as pop culture and con­ sumerism. His most recent publication was The Book on the Floor. André Malraux and the Imaginary Museum (2016).

Ekaterina Degot is an art historian, writer, and curator; Artistic Director at the Acade­ my of Arts of the World, Cologne; and Pro­ fessor at the Rodchenko Moscow School of Photography. In 2014 she won the Igor

813

Andrea Giunta Andrea Giunta is Professor of Latin Amer­ ican Art at the University of Texas, Austin. An English edition of her book Avant-garde, Internationalism and Politics: Argentine Art in the Sixties was published in 2007. Catherine Grenier Heritage curator and art historian, Cathe­ rine Grenier has been the Director of the Fondation Giacometti, Paris, since 2014. She previously served as deputy direc­ tor of the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, where she curated over thirty exhibitions of modern and con­ temporary artists, including the Boltanski installation for Monumenta 2009 at the Grand Palais in Paris and more recently the Plural Modernities exhibition and the Martial Raysse retrospective at the Cen­ tre Pompidou. Since joining the Fondation Giacometti she has organised challenging Giacometti exhibitions at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Milan, the Fundación Canal, Ma­ drid, the Pera Müzesi, Istanbul, and the Fonds Hélène & Edouard Leclerc, Lander­ neau, Brittany. She has devoted numerous publications to such contemporary artists as Annette Messager, Christian Boltanski, Sophie Ristelhueber, and Maurizio Cattelan, and to modern artists including Salvador Dalí. She publishes essays regularly, includ­ ing La Fin des musées? (2013) and more recently La Manipulation des images dans l’art contemporain (2014). Atreyee Gupta Atreyee Gupta (PhD, 2011) is Jane Emison Assistant Curator of South and Southeast Asian Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art. Her research focuses on postwar art in relation to the Cold War and the Nonaligned Move­ ment, with a special emphasis on South Asia. Other interests include global art his­ tory and postcolonial studies. Her writing has appeared in edited volumes and exhi­ bition catalogues and in journals such as Third Text, Yishu, and Art Journal. She has received awards and fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, the Getty Research Institute, Haus der Kunst, and the Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin, among others. Salah M. Hassan Salah M. Hassan is the Goldwin Smith Professor and Director of the Institute for Comparative Modernities and Professor of Art History and Visual Culture in the Afri­ cana Studies and Research Center and the Department of History of Art and Visual Studies, Cornell University. He is an art crit­ ic, curator, and coeditor of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art. He has written, edited, and coedited a number of books, including Darfur and the Crisis of Governance: A Critical Reader (2009), Diaspora, Memory, Place (2008), Unpacking Europe (2001), Authentic/Ex-Centric (2001), and most recently Ibrahim El Salahi: A Visionary Modernist, (2013) the companion book to the retrospective of Ibrahim El Salahi that premiered at the Sharjah Art Museum and traveled to Tate Modern, London, in 2013.

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He has curated major exhibitions at venues including the Venice and Dakar Biennales, the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rot­ terdam, and the Sharjah Art Museum. In col­ laboration with the Sharjah Art Foundation, Hassan is working on two major exhibition and book projects: The Khartoum School: The Making of the Modern Art Movement in Sudan (1945–Present) and The Egyptian Surrealists: When Art Becomes Liberty (1938–1965), which are to premier in Shar­ jah and Cairo in 2016.

writing has appeared in October, Artforum, Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, Les Cahiers du Musée national d'arte moderne, Grey Room, Texte zur Kunst, and other jour­ nals. Lee is currently at work on Think Tank Aesthetics: Mid-Century Modernism, the Cold War and the Rise of Visual Cultue, a book considering how the interdisciplinary, cybernetic, and systems-based interests of think tanks such as the RAND Corporation sponsored new approaches to the study of art and visual culture.

Yule Heibel

Anneka Lenssen

Yule Heibel studied sculpture under Robert Jacobsen at Munich’s Academy of Fine Arts before turning to art history. She studied with Serge Guilbaut at the University of British Columbia (MA) and with T. J. Clark at Harvard (PhD). She subsequently taught art history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Brown University, and Har­ vard Extension School. Her publications range from articles in peer-reviewed aca­ demic journals and university-press-pub­ lished books to popular magazine articles (mostly on urban development and built form) and blogs. She was cofounder of a social-media and local news aggregator based in Victoria, Canada. She currently lives in Greater Boston and is working on a collection of essays.

Anneka Lenssen is Assistant Professor of Global Modern Art at the University of California, Berkeley, with a focus on twen­ tieth-century painting and visual practices in global context and the cultural politics of the Middle East. Her writing has appeared in ARTMargins, Artforum, Bidoun, Ibraaz, Springerin, and other venues. Forthcoming publications include a coedited volume of translated art writing from the Arab world, Arab Art in the Twentieth Century: Primary Documents, for the International Program at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She is a Getty Residential Postdoctoral Fellow for the 2016–17 year, where she is prepar­ ing her first monograph, Being Mobilized, on painting and popular politics in Syria. Damian Lentini

Geeta Kapur Geeta Kapur is a Delhi-based critic and cu­ rator. Her essays are widely anthologized and her books include Contemporary Indian Artists (1978), When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India (2000), and Critic’s Compass: Navigating Practice (forthcoming). She was a founder-editor of Journal of Arts & Ideas and a member of the advisory council of Third Text. She is trustee and advisory editor of Marg and editorial advisor of ArtMargins. Her curatorial projects include Disposses­ sion (1st Johannesburg Biennale, 1995), Century City: Bombay/Mumbai 1992–2001, Tate Modern, London (co-curation, 2001), subTerrain, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2003), and Aesthetic Bind, Che­ mould, Mumbai (2013–14). She has been a jury member of the Venice, Dakar, and Sharjah biennials. She has been a mem­ ber of the Asian Art Council, Guggenheim Museum, and is an advisory member of the Asian Art Archive and an Advisory Board member of the Tate Research Centre: Asia. She lectures internationally and has held visiting fellowships at the Institute of Ad­ vanced Study, Shimla; the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Delhi; Clare Hall, Uni­ versity of Cambridge; and Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. Pamela M. Lee Pamela M. Lee is the the Jeanette and Wil­ liam Hayden Jones Professor in American Art and Culture at Stanford University. She is the author of the books Object to Be Destroyed: The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark (2000), Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (2004), Forgetting the Art World (2012), and New Games: Postmodernism after Contemporary Art (2012). Her

Damian Lentini is an Australian art historian and curator who has taught at the University of Melbourne and at Federation Universi­ ty, Ballarat, has worked on a variety of art projects in Melbourne, Berlin, and Munich, and is now based in Germany. His current research examines the design and function of contemporary exhibition spaces, particu­ lar noncollecting sites such as Kunsthallen and biennials, and he is currently completing a book, The History of the Contemporary Arts Centre, that emerged from his PhD disser­ tation (2009, the University of Melbourne). He was the 2015–16 Goethe Postdoctoral Fellow at Haus der Kunst and is now working there as a research fellow. Courtney J. Martin Courtney J. Martin is an Assistant Profes­ sor in the History of Art and Architecture department at Brown University. She was previously Assistant Professor in the Histo­ ry of Art department, Vanderbilt University; Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow, History of Art, at the University of California, Berke­ ley; a Getty Research Institute fellow; and a Henry Moore Institute Research Fellow. In 2015 she received an Andy Warhol Foun­ dation Arts Writers Grant. Before obtaining a doctorate from Yale University in 2009, she worked for the Ford Foundation. In 2012 she curated Drop, Roll, Slide, Drip . . . Frank Bowling’s Poured Paintings 1973–1978 at Tate Britain. In 2014 she co-curated Minimal Baroque: Post-Minimalism and Contemporary Art at Rønnebæksholm, Denmark. In 2015–16 she curated Robert Ryman at Dia: Chelsea. She is the coeditor of Lawrence Alloway: Critic and Curator (2015) and editor of Four Generations: The Joyner Giuffrida Collection of Abstract Art (2016).

Anne Massey Anne Massey is Professor of Design and Culture, Associate Dean of Research, and Head of the Graduate School at London College of Communication. She studied the history of modern art and design at the University of Northumbria, where she also completed her PhD, “The Independ­ ent Group: Towards a Redefinition.” She is the world expert on the interdisciplinary history and contemporary significance of the Independent Group. She has written eight books, including Interior Design since 1900 (1990, 3rd ed. 2006), Blue Guide: Berlin and Eastern Germany (1994), The Independent Group: Modernism and Mass Culture in Britain, 1945–59 (1996), Hollywood beyond the Screen: Design and Material Culture (2000), Out of the Ivory Tower: The Independent Group and Popular Culture (2013), and ICA 1946–68 (2015). She has appeared on BBC television and Channel 4 as well as lecturing nationally and internationally. Mark Mazower Mark Mazower is Professor of History at Columbia University, where he also directs the Heyman Center for the Humanities. His prize-winning books include Inside Hitler’s Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941–1944 (2001), which has recently ap­ peared in a German translation; Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (1998); and Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430–1950 (2004). He comments regularly on international affairs for the Financial Times and his reviews have appeared in the Guardian, The Nation, the New York Times, and many other newspa­ pers and magazines. He recently made a film about the Greek refugee crisis with the filmmaker Constantine Giannaris: called Techniques of the Body, it premiered at the Aladza Imaret, Thessaloniki, in June 2016. He is currently writing a book about his fa­ ther and his family. Yasufumi Nakamori Yasufumi Nakamori, PhD, is the Curator and Head of the Department of Photography and New Media at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. His exhibitions and publications in­ clude Katsura: Picturing Modernism in Japanese Architecture. Photographs by Ishimoto Yasuhiro (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2010), which received the 2011 Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for Smaller Museums, Col­ lections, Libraries and Exhibitions from the College Art Association, and For a New World to Come: Experiments in Japanese Art and Photography, 1968–1979 (The Mu­ seum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2015). Chika Okeke-Agulu Chika Okeke-Agulu is a poet, artist, curator, and Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of Art & Archaeology and the Department for African American Stud­ ies at Princeton University. He is the author of Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria (2015) and, with Okwui Enwezor, of Contemporary African Art since 1980 (2009). He is

coeditor of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art. His curatorial credits include the Uche Okeke retrospective in Lagos in 1993, the Nigerian Pavilion at the 1st Jo­ hannesburg Biennale (1995), Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa (1995), The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994 (2001), the Gwangju Biennale (2014), and Who Knows Tomorrow (2010). Okeke-Agulu is a columnist for The Huffington Post and main­ tains the blog Ofodunka: Art. Life. Politics. In ˙ ˙ 2016 he received the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Art Criticism from the College Art Association. Stephen Petersen Stephen Petersen teaches art history and theory at the Corcoran School of the Arts & Design at George Washington University, Washington, D.C. He is the author of SpaceAge Aesthetics: Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein, and the Postwar European Avant-Garde (2009), which examines postwar art in light of media and technology. His 2004 article in Science in Context, “Explosive Proposi­ tions: Artists React to the Atomic Age,” sur­ veyed artistic responses to the atom bomb in Europe and the United States in the postwar decades. He has published sev­ eral articles on the aesthetic and political debates around art informel in the work of Asger Jorn, Enrico Baj, and Lucio Fontana. He has also written about the exhibition and critical reception of Picasso’s Guernica in postwar Italy, the sculptural work of Michelangelo Pistoletto, Gerhard Richter’s drawings, the photography of Andy Warhol, and other topics. Mari Carmen Ramírez Mari Carmen Ramírez is the Wortham Cu­ rator of Latin American Art and founding Director of the International Center for the Arts of the Americas (ICAA) at The Muse­ um of Fine Arts, Houston. She was previ­ ously Curator of Latin American Art at the Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art and adjunct lecturer in the Department of Art and Art History, both at The University of Texas at Austin. She has curated many exhibitions of Latin American art, including Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America (with Héctor Olea, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2004), which the International Association of Art Critics named the “Best Thematic Museum Show Nationally” in the United States for that year. At the ICAA, Ramírez conceptualized and oversees the Documents of 20th Century Latin Amer­ ican and Latino Art: A Digital Archive and Publications Project. In 2005 she was the recipient of the Award for Curatorial Excel­ lence granted by the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. She has published widely on a broad range of topics, includ­ ing the relationship of Latin American art to identity politics, multiculturalism, globaliza­ tion, and curatorial practice. Richard Shiff Richard Shiff is Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in Art at The University of Texas at Austin, where he directs the Center for the Study of Modernism. His scholarly interests

range broadly across the field of modern and contemporary art and theory, with pub­ lications that include Cézanne and the End of Impressionism (1984), Critical Terms for Art History (coedited, 1996, 2003), Barnett Newman: A Catalogue Raisonné (co­ authored, 2004), Doubt (2008), Between Sense and de Kooning (2011), and Ellsworth Kelly: New York Drawings 1954–1962 (2014). Artists featured in Shiff’s recent essays have included Georg Baselitz, Mark Bradford, Peter Doig, Marlene Dumas, Zeng Fanzhi, Ellen Gallagher, Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Alex Katz, Per Kirkeby, Julie Mehretu, Piet Mondrian, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, David Reed, Bridget Riley, Richard Serra, Joel Shapiro, Keith Sonnier, Cy Twombly, and Vincent van Gogh. Katy Siegel Katy Siegel is the inaugural Eugene V. and Clare E. Thaw Endowed Chair in Modern American Art at Stony Brook University and Senior Programming and Research Curator at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Her books include “The heroine Paint”: After Frankenthaler (2015), Since ’45: America and the Making of Contemporary Art (2011), and Abstract Expressionism (2011). She has written catalogue essays on modern and contemporary artists including Wols, Georg Baselitz, Rosalyn Drexler, Al Loving, Frank Stella, Magnus Plessen, Eberhardt Have­ kost, Sharon Lockhart, and Sarah Sze, and is a Contributing Editor at Artforum. Curated exhibitions include Painting Paintings (David Reed) 1975 (co-curated with Christo­ pher Wool; Rose Art Museum, 2014), Light Years: Jack Whitten, 1971–1974 (The Rose Art Museum, 2013); The Matter that Surrounds Us: Wols and Charline von Heyl (The Rose Art Museum, 2014); and High Times Hard Times: New York Painting, 1967–75 (ICI, traveling 2006–8). She is co-curator of the American Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale, featuring Mark Bradford. Terry Smith Terry Smith is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh and Professor in the Division of Philoso­ phy, Art, and Critical Thought at the Euro­ pean Graduate School. He is the author of Making the Modern: Industry, Art and Design in America (1993), Transformations in Australian Art (2002), The Architecture of Aftermath (2006), What is Contemporary Art? (2009), Contemporary Art: World Currents (2011), Thinking Contemporary Curating (2012), and Talking Contemporary Curating (2015). With Okwui Enwezor and Nancy Condee he edited Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, postmodernity and contemporaneity (2008). Fred Turner Fred Turner is the Harry and Norman Chandler Professor in the Departments of Communication and, by courtesy, Art and Art History at Stanford University. He has written extensively about the history of American technoculture after World War II. He is the author of three books: The

Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties (2013), From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (2006), and Echoes of Combat: The Vietnam War in American Memory (1996). Before coming to Stanford he taught Communication at Harvard’s John F. Kenne­ dy School of Government and MIT’s Sloan School of Management. He also worked for ten years as a journalist, writing about the arts and the sciences for newspapers and magazines ranging from the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine to Nature. Ulrich Wilmes Ulrich Wilmes is Chief Curator of Haus der Kunst. He was a co-organizer of Skulptur Projekte in Münster 1987 and has served as the Curator of Portikus, Frankfurt am Main, Curator of Contemporary Art and Deputy Di­ rector of Lenbachhaus, Munich, and Deputy Director of Museum Ludwig, Cologne. He has curated numerous exhibitions and has published extensively on artists including Georg Baselitz, Mel Bochner, Chuck Close, Hans Peter Feldmann, Dan Graham, Cristina Iglesias, Jörg Immendorff, On Kawara, Ellsworth Kelly, Per Kirkeby, Matt Mullican, Gerhard Richter, Ulrich Rückriem, Ed Ruscha, Wilhelm Sasnal, and Lawrence Weiner. Sarah Wilson Sarah Wilson is Professor of the History of Modern and Contemporary art at the Cour­ tauld Institute of Art, London. Recent publi­ cations include The Visual World of French Theory: Figurations (2010) and Picasso/ Marx and Socialist Realism in France (2013). In 2015 she was co-curator for the First Asian Biennale/Fifth Guangzhou Triennale. She was principal curator of Paris, Capital of the Arts, 1900–1968 (Royal Academy, London, Guggenheim Bilbao, 2002–3) and Pierre Klossowski (Whitechapel Art Gallery, 2006), and has been closely involved with shows at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Her research project “Globalisation before Globalisation” continues. She is a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres (1997) and was awarded the AICA International Award for Distinguished Contribution to Art Criticism in 2015. Tobias Wofford Tobias Wofford is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Santa Clara University. He received a PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles. His research explores the meeting of globalization and identity in the art of the African diaspora since the 1950s. Wofford is currently working on a book-length man­ uscript that examines the multifaceted role of Africa in contemporary African American art. His research has been supported by fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts and the Mellon Postdoctoral Program at Johns Hopkins University. Most recently, he was the 2015– 16 Terra Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in American Art at Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.

815

LIST OF WORKS

A Shafic Abboud Composition, 1954 oil on canvas 64.5 × 92 cm Collection Antoun Nabil Sehnaoui Affandi Pengemis Cirebon (Beggar in Cirebon), 1960 oil on canvas 89 × 125 cm Collection of Museum Lippo Mexico, Mother and Child, 1962 oil on canvas 119 × 99 cm Collection of Museum Lippo Fateh Al-Moudarres Icon of Moudarres, 1962 oil and gold leaf on canvas 149 × 88 × 4 cm Artwork Courtesy Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah Untitled, 1962 mixed media on canvas 69.8 × 99.7 cm QM/QF - Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha - Qatar Carl Andre Timber Piece (Well), 1964/70 wooden railway sleepers (28 pieces) 213 × 122 × 122 cm Museum Ludwig Köln / Schenkung Ludwig Karel Appel Exodus n° 1, 1951 gouache and colored paper on brown kraft pieces of paper applied on paper 100 × 65 cm Fondation Gandur pour l’Art, Genève, Switzerland. Courtesy Applicat-Prazan, Paris Hiroshima Child, 1958 oil on canvas 162 × 130 cm Hara Museum of Contemporary Art Rasheed Araeen Burning Bicycle Tyres, 1959 (1975) 9 photographic prints on paper, 45.7 × 70 cm (each) Aicon Gallery My First Sculpture, 1959 (1975) steel 45.7 × 45.7 × 38.1 cm Aicon Gallery Before Departure (Black Paintings) #1, 1963-64 oil on canvas 90.5 × 99 × 3.5 cm Sharjah Art Foundation Collection Before Departure Black Paintings) #4, 1963-64 oil on canvas 91 × 138 × 3.5 cm Sharjah Art Foundation Collection Before Departure (Black Paintings) #5, 1963-64 oil on canvas 91 × 121.5 × 3.5 cm Sharjah Art Foundation Collection

Wifredo Arcay Proposition III, 1962 relief painting on wood 36.8 × 60.3 × 6 cm The Mayor Gallery, London Siah Armajani Shirt #1, 1958 cloth, pencil, ink, wood 80.6 × 76.2 cm Lent by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, 2011 NoRuz at The Met Benefit, 2012 (2012.109)

Romare Bearden Evening 9:10, 461 Lenox Avenue, 1964 collage 47 × 27.9 cm Van Every/Smith Galleries, Davidson College, Davidson, NC Conjur Woman, 1964 photo projection on paper 162.5 × 127 cm The Studio Museum in Harlem; gift of the Artist 1972.5

Prayer, 1962 oil, ink on canvas mounted to board 179.7 × 128.9 cm Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Art Center Acquisition Fund, 1962

Mieczyslaw Berman Apoteoza (Apotheosis), 1947 photomontage 31 × 20 cm Muzeum Narodowe we Wrocławiu (National Museum in Wroclaw)

Frank Auerbach Shell Building Site, 1959 oil on board 122 × 154 cm Hartlepool Borough Council

Wojna (War), 1944 collage 30 × 23.5 cm Muzeum Narodowe we Wrocławiu (National Museum in Wroclaw)

E.O.W. Looking into the Fire I, 1962 oil on paper board 31 × 27 cm Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Gift of Sam and May Gruber in honor of Kathy Halbreich, 1996

Antonio Berni La pampa tormentosa (The Stormy Pampas), 1963 oil, tempera, wooden sticks, metals (including sheet metal, corrugated metal with paint residue, scrap and tin–plate), cardboard, imprint on paper, plastic buttons, threads and fragments of lace ontwo plywood panels 300 × 400 cm Private Collection

B Francis Bacon Fragment of Crucifixion, 1950 oil, cotton wool on canvas 158.4 × 127.4 × 9 cm Collection Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven Pope, 1955-56 oil on canvas 195.9 × 140 cm Brooklyn Museum, New York Gift of Olga H. Knoepke, 81.306 Enrico Baj Manifesto Nucleare BUM, 1951 varnish and acrylic on canvas 104 × 94 × 3.6 cm Private Collection Georg Baselitz Große Nacht im Eimer (Big Night down the Drain), 1962-63 oil on canvas 185 × 165 cm Privatsammlung Der Soldat (The Soldier), 1965 oil on canvas 194.5 × 140 cm Kunstmuseum Bonn, DLG Privatsammlung Bonn Thomas Bayrle Kennedy in Berlin, 1964 lithograph on cardboard 43 × 61 cm Sammlung Deutsche Bank Mao und die Gymnasiasten (Mao and the Schoolboys), 1965 plywood, particle board, oil paint, electric motor 136 × 53.5 × 14 cm Museum Wiesbaden

Joseph Beuys Hirschdenkmäler (Monuments to the Stag), 1958/82 mixed media dimensions variable Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris – Salzburg Fluxusobjekt, 1962 folding carton, grease, oil, broom, rubber ring and tin toy (in four parts) 47.3 × 45 × 71.8 cm (box), 5 × 66.5 × 16.5cm (broom), 10.5 × 7 × 18.5 cm (toy) Städtische Galerie im Lenbacchaus, Leihgabe Lothar Schirmer, München Verstrahlter Hangar (Radiated Hangar), 1962 polystyrene, wood, animal hair and oil 19.5  × 47.7 × 45,8 cm Museum Schloss Moyland, Sammlung van der Grinten Bedburg-Hau/Kreis Kleve MSM 02289

Alexander „Skunder“ Boghossian Night Flight of Dread and Delight, 1964 oil on canvas with collage 143.8 × 159.1 cm North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, Purchased with funds from the North Carolina State Art Society (Robert F. Phifer Bequest) Lee Bontecou Untitled, 1962 welded steel, epoxy, canvas, fabric, saw blade, and wire 172.7 × 182.9 × 76.2 cm The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Gift of D. and J. de Menil 62.45 Derek Boshier Man Playing Snooker and Thinking of Other Things, 1961 oil on canvas 190 × 152 cm Museu Coleção Berardo Vladimír Boudník Aktivní grafika III (Active Graphics III), 1959 mixed media, paper 26.6 × 19.1 cm Národní galerie v Praze (National Gallery in Prague) Horizontály a vertikály (Horizontals and Verticals), 1959 mixed media, paper 41.2 × 54.5 cm Národní galerie v Praze (National Gallery in Prague) Kompozice (Composition), 1960 mixed media, paper 23 × 31.4 cm Národní galerie v Praze (National Gallery in Prague) Krajina (Landscape), 1960 mixed media, paper 25.8 × 41.8 cm Národní galerie v Praze (National Gallery in Prague) Krajina (Landscape), 1960 mixed media, paper 26 × 48 cm Národní galerie v Praze (National Gallery in Prague) Strukturálni grafika (Structural Graphics), 1960 mixed media, paper 19.8 × 27.8 cm Národní galerie v Praze (National Gallery in Prague)

John Biggers The History of Negro Education in Morris County, Texas, 1955 conté crayon and gouache on paper 80 × 330.8 cm Courtesy Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, LLC, New York

Bez názvu – spáleništeˇ (Untitled – Burnt Place), 1963 colored structural print, paper 40.4 cm × 57 cm Národní galerie v Praze (National Gallery in Prague)

Max Bill 22, 1953/(after 1980) marble 78.5 × 78.5 × 60.5 cm Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Ankauf, 1984

Bez názvu - komposice podobné tvár� i (Untitled), 1965 mixed media, paper 34.1 × 28.7 cm Národní galerie v Praze (National Gallery in Prague)

817

Frank Bowling Swan I, 1964 oil on canvas 112 × 243 cm Courtesy a Private Collection

Chua Mia Tee Epic Poem of Malaya, 1955 oil on canvas 107 × 125.5 cm Collection of National Gallery Singapore

Swan II, 1964 oil on canvas 112 × 243 cm Courtesy the Artist and Hales Gallery

Lygia Clark Planos em superfície modulada no. 1 (Planes on a Modulated Surface N°. 1), 1957 industrial paint on wood 87 × 60 cm The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The Adolpho Leirner Collection of Brazilian Constructive Art, museum purchase funded by Caroline Wiess Law Accessions Endowment Fund. 2005.469

Alberto Burri Sacco e oro (Sackcloth and Gold), 1953 burlap and gold on canvas 126 × 111 cm Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini Collezione Burri C Anthony Caro Capital, 1960 steel, painted orange 245 × 241.5 × 132 cm Courtesy Barford Sculptures Ltd. Aluísio Carvão Cubocor (Color Cube), 1960 pigment and oil on cement 16.5 × 16.5 × 16.5 cm Private Collection, Rio de Janeiro Enrico Castellani Superficie angolare bianca (White Corner Surface), 1961 acrylic on canvas with reliefs and hollows 70 × 120 × 70 cm HEART Herning Museum of Contemporary Art Superficie angolare nera (Black Corner Surface), 1961 acrylic on shaped canvas 90 × 84 × 27 cm Collezione Prada, Milano John Chamberlain Wildroot, 1959 automobile parts; iron, lacquered and welded 175 × 133 × 95 cm MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main Ehemalige Sammlung Karl Ströher, Darmstadt Inv. No. 1981/5 Avinash Chandra Early Figures, 1961 oil on board 92 × 122 cm Leicestershire County Council Artworks Collection Ahmed Cherkaoui Le Couronnement (The Coronation), 1964 oil on canvas 91 × 119 cm FNAC 28551 Centre national des arts plastiques (France) Saloua Raouda Choucair The Poem, 1960 wood 34 × 16.5 × 13 cm Sharjah Art Museum, Sharjah Museums Department Poem, 1963-65 wooden sculpture 39 × 19 × 7.5 cm Courtesy the Artist / The Foundation and CRG Gallery

818

Casulo (Cocoon), 1959 automotive paint on metal 42.5 × 29 × 42.5 cm Private Collection, Rio de Janeiro Contra Relevo (Counter Relief), 1959 industrial paint on wood 140 × 140 × 2.5 cm Private Collection, São Paulo Bicho Caranguejo Duplo (Critter Double Crab) - replica, 1960 aluminium 43 × 25,5 × 60 cm The Associação Cultural O Mundo de Lygia Clark Bicho em si - replica, 1960 aluminum 33 × 42 × 50 cm The Associação Cultural O Mundo de Lygia Clark Bicho Sem Nome - replica, 1960 aluminium 26 × 20 × 26 cm The Associação Cultural O Mundo de Lygia Clark Obra Mole (Soft Work) - replica, 1964 Industrial rubber 173 × 48 cm The Associação Cultural O Mundo de Lygia Clark Bruce Conner A MOVIE 1958 (Digitally restored, 2016) 16mm film (black-and-white, sound) , 12’ Music: “The Pines of the Villa Borghese,” “Pines Near a Catacomb,” and “The Pines of the Appian Way,” movements from Pines of Rome (1923–24), composed by Ottorino Respighi, performed by the NBC Sympho­ ny, conducted by Arturo Toscanini Courtesy of the Conner Family Trust and Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles Waldemar Cordeiro Movimento (Movement), 1951 tempera on canvas 90.1 × 95.3 cm MAC USP Collection (Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil) Magda Cordell Figure 59, c. 1958 oil, acrylic on Masonite 243.8 × 152.4 cm Collection of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York Gift of the Artist, 1995

D Sandú Darié Sin título (Untitled), 1950s collage, pencil, ink, and watercolor on four (4) paper panels on cardboard 92.5 × 40.4 × 3.8 cm Private Collection, London Sin título Estructura transformable (Untitled [Transformable Structure]) c. 1950s oil on hinged wood elements 39 × 49.5 cm Private Collection, London Guy Debord Hurlements en faveur de Sade (Howling for Sade), 1952 35mm black-and-white film , 64’ Willem de Kooning Black Untitled, 1948 oil and enamel on paper, mounted on wood 75.9 × 101.6 cm Lent by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, From the Collection of Thomas B. Hess, Gift of the heirs of Thomas B. Hess, 1984 (1984.613.7) Woman, 1952 pastel and pencil on paper 61.6 × 41 cm Glenstone Woman, 1953-54 oil on paper board 90.8 × 61.9 cm Brooklyn Museum, New York Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Alastair B. Martin, the Guennol Collection, 57.124 Beauford Delaney Portrait of James Baldwin, 1945 oil on canvas 55.9 × 45.7 cm Philadelphia Museum of Art: 125th Anniversary Acquisition. Purchased with funds contributed by The Daniel W. Dietrich Foundation in memory of Joseph C. Bailey and with a grant from The Judith Rothschild Foundation, 1998 Untitled, c.1958 oil on canvas 76.2 × 63.5 cm Courtesy Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, LLC, New York Pedro de Oraá Sin título (Untitled), 1959 acrylic on canvas mounted on cardboard 50 × 40 × 7.5 cm Private Collection, Coconut Grove, Florida. Courtesy Tresart. Niki de Saint Phalle Fragment de l’Hommage au Facteur Cheval (Fragment of a Homage to Postman Cheval), 1962 paint, plaster, assemblage of small found objects, wire mesh on wooden board 300 × 120 × 18 cm Private Collection, Courtesy Galerie GP & N Vallois, Paris

Grand Tir - Séance de la Galerie J (Big Shot – Gallery J Session), 1961 plaster, paint, string, fence, plastic on chipboard, wire, mesh, wooden board, plastic balloons 142.9 × 77.6 × 7 cm Private Collection, Courtesy Galerie GP & N Vallois, Paris Alén Diviš Maska ticha (Mask of Silence), 1947 oil on canvas 53 × 40 cm Národní galerie v Praze (National Gallery in Prague) Jean Dubuffet La dame au pompon, 1946 mixed media and oil on canvas 80.6 × 64.7 cm National Gallery of Art, Washington, Chester Dale Fund, 1986. 11.1 Corps de dame - pièce de boucherie (Woman’s Body—Butcher’s Slab), 1950 oil on canvas 116 × 89 cm Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler E Charles and Ray Eames A Communications Primer, 1953 16mm color film, 21’30” Eames Office LLC, Los Angeles Melvin Edwards His and Hers, 1964 welded steel 27.4 × 15.2 × 10.9 cm Courtesy the Artist and Alexander Gray Associates, New York, NY Mojo for 1404, 1964 welded steel 25.4 × 16.5 × 11.4 cm Courtesy the Artist and Alexander Gray Associates, New York, NY Texcali, 1965 welded steel 50.3 × 38.9 × 21.6 cm Courtesy the Artist and Alexander Gray Associates, New York, NY Inji Efflatoun Portrait of a Man, 1958 oil on canvas 45 × 56 cm Artwork Courtesy Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah The Queue, 1960 oil on wood 90 × 35 cm SAFARKHAN Art Gallery Trees behind the Wall, c1960 oil on canvas on wood 23 × 36 cm SAFARKHAN Art Gallery Uzo Egonu Mask with Musical Instruments, 1963 oil on canvas 51 × 61 cm Egonu Estate c/o Grosvenor Gallery

Man Stealing a Shoe for His Wife, 1965 collage, cuttings from magazines, and gouache on paper 51 × 61 cm Egonu Estate c/o Grosvenor Gallery

Untitled, 1965 bronze 36.5 × 17 × 26.5 cm Artwork Courtesy Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah

Ibrahim El Salahi The Prayer, 1960 oil on Masonite 61.3 × 44.5 cm Iwalewahaus, Universität Bayreuth

Jean Fautrier Sunset in Alabama, 1957 oil on paper mounted on canvas 60 cm × 81 cm Musée d´Art moderne de la Ville de Paris

Self-Portrait of Suffering, 1961 oil on canvas 30.4 × 40.6 cm Iwalewahaus, Universität Bayreuth

León Ferrari La civilización occidental y cristiana (The Western Christian Civilization), 1965 plaster, wood and oil 198 × 122 cm Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari Arte y Acervo

Funeral and the Crescent, 1963 oil on hardboard 101.8 cm × 94.9 cm Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University. Gift of Mariska Marker Vision of the Tomb, 1965 oil on canvas 91.5 × 91.5 cm The Africa Center, formerly the Museum for African Art Erhabor Emokpae Struggle between Life and Death, 1963 oil on board 61 × 122 cm Private Collection Ben Enwonwu Anyanwu, 1954-55 bronze 210 cm Private Collection Going, 1961 oil on canvas 114 × 272 × 5.5 cm University of Lagos Erol (Erol Akyavas) The Glory of the Kings, c.1959 oil on canvas 121.8 × 214 cm The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. L. M. Angeleski, 1961 Accession Number: 130.1961 F Öyvind Fahlström Dr. Schweitzer’s Last Mission, 1964-66 variable polyptych, tempera on panel, metal, plastic dimensions variable Moderna Museet, Stockholm Wojciech Fangor Postaci (Figures), 1950 oil on canvas 100 × 125 cm Muzeum Sztuki in Łódz� Ismail Fattah Reclining Man and Shield, 1960 bronze with brown patina on natural bronze base 20 × 15.3 × 12.5 cm QM/QF - Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha - Qatar Untitled, 1965 bronze with brown patina on bronze base 20 × 11.1 × 15.3 cm QM/QF - Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha - Qatar

Lucio Fontana Concetto spaziale (Spatial Concept), 1949 paper on frame 100 × 100 cm Fondazione Lucio Fontana Helen Frankenthaler Lorelei, 1957 oil on untreated cotton duck 190.5 × 223.4 × 6.4 cm Brooklyn Museum, New York Purchase gift of Allan D. Emil, 58.39 G Ivo Gattin Red Surface with Two Slashes, 1962 burlap, resin, pigment, 145 × 89 cm Marinko Sudac Collection Gego (Gertrud Louise Goldschmidt) Vibración en negro (Vibration in Black), 1957 aluminum painted black 75 × 60 × 43 cm The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Fundación Gego Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TR:2020-2004 Alberto Giacometti Grande figure II (Tall Figure II), 1948-49 plaster 173 × 16.5 × 34.5 cm Collection Fondation Giacometti, Paris Inv. 1994-0312

Mathias Goeritz El Serpente (The Serpent), 1953 painted wood 428 × 874 × 407 cm D.R. © Mathias Goeritz (1956) Courtesy L.M. Daniel Goeritz & Galería La Caja Negra, Madrid Reconstruction authorized by Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura, Mexico City, 2016 Leon Golub L’Homme de Palmyre, 1962 lacquer on canvas 199 × 336,5 cm Courtesy the Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts and Hauser & Wirth Gorgona Gorgona Anti-Magazines (11 issues), 1961-66 mixed media 19.5 × 21.1 cm (each) Marinko Sudac Collection Karl Otto Götz Statistisch-Metrische Modulation 20:10:4:2 (Statistical-metric Modulation 20:10:4:2), 1961 felt pen on canvas 100 × 130 cm Private Collection Density 10:2:2:1, 1962-63 8mm black-and-white film, 5’54” Private Collection Marcos Grigorian Untitled, 1963 sand and enamel on canvas 76.2 × 63.5 cm Grey Art Gallery. New York University Art Collection. Gift of Abby Weed Grey, 1975 Philip Guston The Tormentors, 1947-48 oil on canvas 103.9 × 153.7 cm San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Gift of the Artist Untitled, 1958 oil on canvas 162.9 × 191.1 cm Private Collection. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth

La cage, première version [The Cage (first version)], 1949-50 bronze 90.5 × 36.5 × 34 cm Collection Fondation Giacometti,Paris Inv. 1994-0180

Renato Guttuso Boogie-Woogie, 1953 oil on canvas 169.5 × 205 cm Mart, Museo di arte contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto. Collezione VAF-Stiftung

La Clairière (The Clearing), 1950 bronze 58.7 × 65.3 × 52.5 cm Collection Fondation Giacometti, Paris Inv. 2007-0223

H Hans Haacke Condensation Cube (exhibition copy), 1965/2006 Plexiglas, water 76 × 76 × 76 cm MACBA. Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona

Femme de Venise IX (Woman of Venice IX), 1956 (cast 1958) bronze with black patina 112.7 × 17.1 × 36.2 cm North Carolina Museum of Art, Gift of Sara Lee Corporation

Raymond Hains Paix en Algérie (Peace in Algeria), 1956 decollaged posters on canvas 39 × 33.5 cm Collection Ginette Dufrêne

Les nymphéas (The Waterlilies), 1961 torn posters on zinc sheet panel 100.5 × 105.5 cm Centre Pompidou, Paris Musée national d´art moderne/ Centre de création industrielle Achat 1995 Richard Hamilton Respective, 1951 oil on canvas on board 91.5 × 122 cm Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, UK (Wilson Loan 2006) Weaver Hawkins Atomic Power, 1947 oil on hardboard 61 × 78.5 cm Collection: Art Gallery of New South Wales Purchased 1976 Carmen Herrera Iberia No. 25, 1948 acrylic on burlap 46 × 54.5 cm Courtesy the Artist and Lisson Gallery Lynn Hershman Leeson Breathing Machine, 1965 Plexiglas on wood, sound, sensors, wax, cast face, wig, make-up 32 × 42 × 42 cm Courtesy the Artist and Bridget Donahue, NYC Caged Woman, 1965 cage, make-up, wax, wig, wire and tape recorder, Plexiglas, wood, sensor and sound 41.9 × 26.7 × 45.7 cm Courtesy the Artist and Bridget Donahue, NYC Eva Hesse Untitled, 1965 painted cord wrapped around plastic tubing and ring in wood and metal 262 × 81.5 × 18 cm Moderna Museet, Stockholm Purchased 1980 with contribution from The Friends of Moderna Museet Untitled, 1965 ink and gouache on paper 29.2 × 41.9 cm Museum Wiesbaden Untitled (Study for or after ‘’Legs of a Walking Ball’’), 1965 ink and gouache on paper 28.5 × 41 cm Privatsammlung München, Courtesy Barbara Gross Galerie Maqbool Fida Husain Man, 1951 wood, metal, Masonite, oil 126.4 × 248.9 × 1 cm Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, USA Gift of the Chester and Davida Herwitz Collection, 2001 E301146 I Robert Indiana The Confederacy Alabama, 1965 oil on canvas 177.8 × 152.3 cm Miami University Art Museum

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J Jess (Burgess Franklin Collins) If All The World Were Paper And All The Water Sink, 1962 oil on canvas 96.5 × 142.2 cm Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Jia Youfu Marching Across the Snow-Covered Mount Minshan, 1965 ink and color on paper 181 × 439 cm In the collection of CAFA Art Museum, Beijing Jasper Johns Flags, 1965 oil on canvas with raised canvas 182.9 × 121.9 cm Collection of the Artist Daniel LaRue Johnson Freedom Now, Number 1, August 13, 1963-January 14, 1964 pitch on canvas with “Freedom Now” button, broken doll, hacksaw, mousetrap, flexible tube, and wood 136.6 × 140.5 × 18.9 cm The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Given anonymously, 1965 Accession Number: 4.1965 Asger Jorn De gule Øjne (Yellow Eyes), 1953 oil on Masonite 62 × 51.5 cm Galerie van de Loo Il Delinquente (The Delinquents), 1956 oil on canvas 114 cm × 146 cm Galerie van de Loo

Ivan Kožaric� Figura (Figure), 1956 bronze 44 × 14 × 19 cm Courtesy the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb

John Latham Belief System, 1959 books, plaster, metal, light bulb, paint on canvas on board 122.5 × 96.5 cm TATE: Purchased 2004

Krishen Khanna News of Ghandiji’s Death, 1948 oil on canvas 83.8 × 83.8 cm Collection of Rathika Chopra & Rajan Anandan, New Delhi, India

Lee Krasner The Seasons, 1957 oil and house paint on canvas 235.6 × 517.8 cm Whitney Museum of American Art, New York Purchased with funds from Frances and Sydney Lewis by exchange, the Mrs. Percy Uris Purchase Fund and the Painting and Sculpture Committee 87.7

Little Red Mountain, 1960-62 timber base, books, plaster, wires 132 × 64 × 64 cm Courtesy the Artist and Lisson Gallery

Kim Kulim Death of Sun II, 1964 oil and object on wood panel 91 × 75.3 cm National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea

Tetsumi Kudo The Flowing Movement and Its Condensation in Mind, 1958 watercolor on cotton fabric 260 × 275 cm Aomori Museum of Art

Jacob Lawrence Four Sheep, 1964 gouache on paper 56.2 × 76.8 cm Courtesy Andrew and Ann Dintenfass

Three Circles, 1964 Steel, oil on wood panel 181.5 × 91 cm Courtesy the Artist

Philosophy of Impotence, 1959 cord and resin on painted panel 124 × 47 × 85 cm Private Collection

Lee Seung-taek Non-sculpture, 1960 rope, paper and wood stick 13 × 110 × 631 cm Courtesy Gallery Hyundai, Seoul

Julije Knifer Meandar u kutu (Meander in the corner), 1961 oil on canvas two parts: 143 × 199 cm; 143 × 308 cm Courtesy the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb

Yayoi Kusama No. E.R.F., 1960 mixed media 182.2 × 146.7 cm Courtesy Gagosian Gallery

Lee Ufan Pushed-Up Ink, 1964 ink on Japanese paper mounted on wood 70 × 55 × 4.5 cm Private Collection

Ladder, 1963 mixed media 167.6 × 66 × 96.5 cm Des Moines Art Center Permanent Collection; Gift of Hanford Yang, New York, 1970.38

Norman Lewis Every Atom Glows: Electrons in Luminous Vibration, 1951 Oil on canvas 137.2 × 88.9 cm Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The John Axelrod Collection – Frank B. Bemis Fund, Charles H. Bayley Fund, and The Heritage Fund for a Diverse Collection

Red Yellow Blue White, 1952 dyed cotton; twenty-five panels in five parts Height: 30.5 cm Width: 30.5 cm 153.4 × 375.9 cm Width (Distance between each panel): 55.9 cm Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of the Artist in memory of Anne d’Harnoncourt, 2010

Jikken Ko-boGinrin (Silver Wheel), 1955 35mm film transferred to DVD, 11’57” © Tokuma Shoten Publishing Co., Ltd

K Thadeusz Kantor “Signez s’il vous plaît!” (Sign, Please!), 1965 mixed media 261 × 194 cm Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Jir� í Kolár� Rasierklingengedicht (A Poem of Razors), 1962 assemblage, cords and razor blades on cardboard, wooden frame with glass screen 46.2 × 34.2 × 3 cm Neues Museum Nürnberg, Leihgabe der Stadt Nürnberg

Marwan Kassab-Bachi Das Bein (The Leg), 1965 oil on canvas 81 × 100 cm MARWAN

Geliy Korzhev Raising the Banner, 1957-60 oil on canvas 156 × 290 cm © The State Russian Museum 2016

On Kawara Thinking Man, 1952 oil on canvas 100 × 65.3 cm Chiba City Museum of Art

Gyula Kosice Variation in blue, 1945 oil on canvas 88 × 60 × 6 cm © Gyula Kosice

LAT.31°25´N, LONG. 8°41´E, 1965 acrylic on canvas 83.5 × 96.3 × 5.3 cm Collection Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven

Estructura lumínica Madí 6 (Luminescent Madí Structure No.6), 1946 neon gas, Plexiglas, and wood box 60 × 50 × 12 cm The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Museum purchase funded by Caroline Wiess Law Accessions Endowment Fund. 2004.1655

Ellsworth Kelly Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance V, 1951 collage on paper 99 × 99 cm Estate of the Artist Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance VIII, 1951 collage on paper 99 × 99 cm Estate of the Artist

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Leon Kossoff City Building Site, 1961 oil on board 123.8 × 159.4 cm Private European Collector

L Wifredo Lam Lunguanda Yembe, 1950 oil on canvas 130.4 × 97 cm Museu Coleção Berardo Seated Woman, 1955 oil and charcoil on canvas 130.8 × 97.7 cm Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Gift of Mrs. Bernard Gimbel, 1978 Photo: Cathy Carver

Untitled (Roller painting), 1964 spray paint on white duck 318 × 268 cm Courtesy the Artist and Lisson Gallery

Bonfire, 1962 oil on canvas 162.6 × 126.7 cm The Studio Museum in Harlem; gift of the Estate of Norman Lewis 1981.1.2 Li Xiushi Morning, 1961 oil on canvas 101 × 301 cm In the collection of CAFA Art Museum, Beijing

Maria Lassnig Schwarzer Kopf des Vaters (Black Head of the Father), 1956/57 Alternative Work Details: Porträt des Vaters (Kopf) (Portrait of the Father [Head]), 1956 oil on fiberboard 60 × 48 cm Maria Lassnig Foundation

Roy Lichtenstein Atom Burst, 1965 acrylic on board 61 × 61 cm Collection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Museum Purchase, The Benjamin J. Tillar Memorial Trust

Selbstporträt (Self-Portrait), 1957 Alternative work details: Selbstportrait, bereits aufgelöst (Self-Portrait, already dissolved), 1957 / Figur auf Holz (Figure on Wood), 1956 oil on wood 78.8 × 49 cm Maria Lassnig Foundation

Morris Louis Charred Journal: Firewritten II, 1951 acrylic (Magna) on canvas 89.5 × 76 cm Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek Gift of Marcella Louis Brenner Untitled (Jewish Star), c.1951 acrylic on canvas 86.4 × 72.4 cm The Jewish Museum, New York Gift of Ruth Bocour in memory of Leonard Bocour, 1997 -126

Selbstporträt mit Ordenskette (Self-portrait with Livery Collar), 1963 oil on canvas 100 × 73 cm Sammlung Klewan

M Tomás Maldonado Trayectoria de una anécdota (Trajectory of an Anecdote), 1949 oil on canvas 99.7 × 72.4 cm The Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection, Miami Ernest Mancoba Composition, 1951 oil on canvas 61.5 × 51.5 × 2 cm gordonschachatcollection, Johannesburg Untitled, 1962 oil on canvas 81 × 65 cm Moderna Museet, Stockholm Piero Manzoni Achrome, 1958 parts of canvas, impregnated with kaolin and glue on burlap 131 × 97 × 2 cm MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main Ehemalige Sammlung Karl Ströher, Darmstadt Inv. No. 1981/20 Mawalan Marika Sydney from the Air, 1963 natural pigments on bark 43.3 × 91.3 cm On loan from the National Museum of Australia, Canberra Maruki Iri and Maruki Toshi Fire (Panel II) from “Hiroshima Panels” (series of 15 panels), 1950 Indian ink and Japanese paper 180 × 720 cm Maruki Gallery for the Hiroshima Panels Atomic Desert (Panel VI) from “Hiroshima Panels” (series of 15 panels), 1952 Indian ink and Japanese paper 180 × 720 cm Maruki Gallery for the Hiroshima Panels Almir Mavignier Konvex-Konkav II (Convex-Concave II), 1962 oil on canvas 151 × 110 × 5 cm Courtesy Almir Mavignier David Medalla Cloud Gates-Bubble Machine, 1965/2013 stainless steel, methacrylate, water pump, water, soap, acrylic 320 × 300 × 300 cm Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid Long-term loan of Baró Galería, Sao Paulo, 2014 Mohammed Melehi Quadrettini, 1963 acrylic on canvas 120 × 100 cm Loft Art Gallery, Casablanca, Morocco Gustav Metzger Drawings, 1945–59/60 different materials on paper, various dimensions Courtesy Gustav Metzger

Recreation of First Public Demonstration of Auto-Destructive Art, 1960, remade 2004 glass, fabric, table, trash bag, paper, plastic and steel 300 × 250 × 10 cm TATE: Presented by the Artist 2006

Iba N'diaye Tabaski, Sacrifice du Mouton (Tabaski, Sacrifice of the Sheep), 1963 oil on canvas 150 × 200 cm Collection – République du Sénégal

Study for ‘Bell Tower for Hiroshima’, ‘Little Bomb’ and ‘Monument to Heroes’, c. 1950 pencil on paper 30.6 × 41.9 cm The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York

Evgeny Mikhnov-Voitenko Composition(on a White Background), late 1950s oil on canvas 156 × 218 cm © The State Russian Museum 2016

Alice Neel Georgie Arce, 1953 oil on canvas 55 × 65 cm Estate of Alice Neel

Memorial to Atomic Dead, 1952-82 graphite on tracing paper 47.3 × 84 cm The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York

Albert Newall Helmet Head, 1956 oil on board 70 × 45 cm Private Collection

Sculpture Study, 1952 pencil on paper 35.9 × 26.3 cm The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York

Composition No. 3, 1957 oil on board 51 × 61 cm Private Collection

O Hélio Oiticica Metaesquema, 1955 gouache on paper 40 × 56 cm Private Collection, São Paulo

Marta Minujín My Mattress, 1962 mattresses, cardboard, patching plaster and paint 200 × 135 × 105 cm Courtesy Marta Minujín Joan Mitchell Le Chemin des Ecoliers, 1960 oil on canvas 194.9 ×  96.8 cm Collection of the Joan Mitchell Foundation, New York © Estate of Joan Mitchell Lucky Seven, 1962 oil on canvas 200 × 189 × 4 cm Museu Coleção Berardo Henry Moore Atom Piece, 1964-65 bronze 120 × 92 cm Didrichsen Art Museum François Morellet 4 Double Grids 0°, 22°5, 45°, 67°5, 1960-61 oil on wood 80 × 80 cm Courtesy the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb Robert Morris Box with the Sound of its Own Making (exhibition copy), 1961 wood, internal speaker 24.8 × 24.8 cm Original work: Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Gift of Mr and Mrs Bagley Wright Sadamasa Motonaga Work (Water), 1956 installation various dimensions Motonaga Archive Research Institution Ltd Courtesy of Fergus McCaffrey, New York Movimento Arte Nucleare Nuclear Composition, 1951 oil and enamel on paper glued on canvas 97.5 × 67 cm Collezione Privata N Ernst Wilhelm Nay Augen (Eyes), 1963 oil on canvas 200 × 160 cm Ernst Wilhelm Nay Stiftung, Köln Meteor, 1964 oil on canvas 200 × 160 cm Courtesy Aurel Schreiber, Berlin

Barnett Newman The Beginning, 1946 oil on canvas 101.6 × 75.6 cm The Art Institute of Chicago, Through prior gift of Mr. and Mrs. Carter H. Harrison Malangatana Valente Ngwenya Untitled, 1961 oil on canvas 123.5 × 61.5 cm Iwalewahaus, Universität Bayreuth Hermann Nitsch Blutbild (Blood Painting), 1962 fabric, blood on canvas 110 × 80.5 × 6 cm Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien acquired in 1983 Luis Felipe Noé ¿A donde vamos? O presente (Where are we going? Or Present), 1964 oil, paper collage, synthetic on canvas and wood 260 × 255 cm Courtesy Luis Felipe Noé Isamu Noguchi Humpty Dumpty, 1946 ribbon slate 149.9 × 52.7 × 44.5 cm Whitney Museum of American Art, New York Purchase 47.7a-e Memorial to Man, 1947 wallpaper dimensions variable The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York Bell Tower for Hiroshima, 1950 (1986) terra-cotta, wood 128.6 × 78.7 × 78.7 cm The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York Sculpture Study, c. 1950 ink wash on paper 25.4 × 36.2 cm The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York

Relevos especial (Spatial Relief), c. 1960 paint on cut-out wood 114.3 × 114.3 × 25.4 cm The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The Adolpho Leirner Collection of Brazilian Constructive Art, museum purchase funded by the Caroline Wiess Foundation, 2005.1023 B17, Glass Bólide 5, “Hommage to Mondrian”, 1965 glass, textile, water, pigment, cork 30 × 47.5 × 60 cm TATE: Purchased with Assistance from the American Fund for the TATE Gallery, TATE Members and the Art Fund 2007 Uche Okeke Ana Mmuo (Land of the Dead), 1961 oil on board 92 × 121.9 cm National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Gift of Koanne B. Eicher and Cynthia, Carolyn Ngozi, and Diane Eicher, 97-3-1 Aba Revolt (Women‘s War), 1965 oil on board 182.9 × 12.9 cm Artist’s Estate, Courtesy Asele Institute, Nimo Colette Oluwabamise Omogbai Agony, 1963 oil on hardboard 69 × 50.5 cm Iwalewahaus, Universität Bayreuth Alfonso Ossorio Full Mother, 1951 oil, enamel on canvas 129.5 × 96.5 cm Courtesy Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, LLC, New York Rescue, 1961-62 mixed media on panel 121.8 × 244.2 cm Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of the Artist, 1969

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Hamed Owais Al Zaim w Ta’mim Al Canal (Nasser and the Nationalisation of the Canal), 1957 oil on canvas 109 × 134.7 cm QM/QF - Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha - Qatar P Nam June Paik Zen for TV, 1963/90 47 × 68 × 37 cm TV, wooden case, magnet Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie 1993 Gift of the Artist Eduardo Paolozzi I Was a Rich Man’s Plaything, 1947 printed papers on card 35.9 × 23.8 cm TATE: Presented by the Artist 1971 Lessons of Last Time, 1947 printed papers on card 22.9 × 31.1 cm TATE: Presented by the Artist 1971 It’s a Psychological Fact Pleasure Helps your Disposition, 1948 printed papers on card 36.2 × 24.4 cm TATE: Presented by the Artist 1971 Windtunnel Test, 1950 printed papers on card 24.8 × 36.5 cm TATE: Presented by the Artist 1971 Yours Till the Boys Come Home, 1951 printed papers on card 36.2 × 24.8 cm TATE: Presented by the Artist 1971 Shattered Head, 1956 bronze on stone base 32 × 30.5 × 23 cm Private Collection, London Robot, c.1956 bronze 48.5 × 14.5 × 8 cm Grosvenor Gallery Standing Figure, 1958 bronze 175 × 51 × 31 cm Private Collection, Courtesy Galerie GP & N Vallois, Paris Lygia Pape Livro da arquitetura (Book of Architecture) exhibition copy, 1959-60 tempera on cardboard 12 pieces, each 30 × 30 × 2 cm Projeto Lygia Pape Jeram Patel Untitled, 1961 oil on Masonite board 91.4 × 121.9 cm Kiran Nadar Museum of Art A.R. Penck Elektrischer Stuhl (Electric Chair), 1959-60 oil on Masonite 43 × 41 cm Private Collection Umsturz (Coup d’état), 1965 oil on canvas 96 × 200 cm Private Collection

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Pablo Picasso Massacre en Corée (Massacre in Korea), 1951 oil on plywood 110 cm × 210 cm n°inv. MP 203 Dation 1979 Prêt du Musée national Picasso-Paris Ivan Picelj Composition XL-1, 1952-56 oil on canvas 100 × 81 cm Courtesy the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio La sirena e il pirata (The Mirmaid and the Pirate), 1958 mixed media on canvas roll 1770 × 95 cm Galerie van de Loo Sigmar Polke Rasterzeichnung (Porträt Lee Harvey Oswald) [Raster Drawing (Portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald)], 1963 posterpaint and pencil on paper 94.8 × 69.8 cm Privatsammlung Jackson Pollock There Were Seven in Eight, c.1945 oil, enamel and casein on canvas 109.2 × 259.1 cm The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Mr. and Mrs. Walter Bareiss Fund and purchase, 1980 Accession Number: 429.1980 Number 23, 1948 enamel on gesso on paper 57.5 × 78.4 cm TATE: Presented by the Friends of the TATE Gallery (purchased out of funds provided by Mr and Mrs H.J. Heinz II and H.J. Heinz Co. Ltd.) 1960 Julio Pomar Resistência (Resistance), 1945 oil on Masonite 33 cm × 73 cm Câmara Municipal de Lisboa / Museu de Lisboa Étude para Ciclo do Arroz II (Study for Rice Cycle II), 1953 oil on Masonite 63 × 132 cm Private Collection Luis de Carvalho e Oliveira, Lisbon Viktor Popkov The Builders of Bratsk Hydro-Electric Power Station, 1960 oil on canvas 183 × 302 cm The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow R Carol Rama Tovaglia (Table Cloth), 1951 tablecloth, Plexiglas 123 × 123 cm Courtesy Isabella Bortolozzi and Archivio Carol Rama Ovale Nero (Black Oval), 1961 mixed media and oil on canvas 50 × 35 cm Aishti Foundation, Beirut -Lebanon

Robert Rauschenberg The White Painting (two panel), 1951 oil on canvas 182.9 × 243.8 cm © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation

Kölner Divisionen (Cologne Divisions), 1965 150 pages cut out of the Kölner Tageszei­ tung, adhesive binding, cardboard cover 2 × 2.3 cm Dieter Roth Foundation, Hamburg

Axle, 1964 oil and screen print on canvas 275.7 × 610 × 4.7 cm Museum Ludwig Köln / Schenkung Ludwig

Literaturwurst (Martin Walser: „Halbzeit“), 1967 chopped book, pressed into sausage form, dissected and framed by the Artist 52.5 × 42.5 × 12 cm Dieter Roth Foundation, Hamburg

Ad Reinhardt Untitled (Composition #104), 1954-60 oil on canvas 281.3 × 108.6 × 6,4 cm Brooklyn Museum, New York Gift of the Artist, 67.59 Gerhard Richter Sargträger (Coffin Bearers), 1962 oil on canvas 135 × 180 cm Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen – Pinakothek der Moderne 1979 erworben von PIN. Freunde der Pinakothek der Moderne Bomber (Bombers), 1963 oil on canvas 130.4 × 180.6 × 2.5 cm Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg Neger (Nuba), [Negroes (Nuba)] 1964 oil on canvas 145 × 200 cm Larry Gagosian Larry Rivers The Last Civil War Veteran, 1961 oil on canvas 209.6 × 163.8 cm Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Foundation purchase, Phyllis C. Wattis Fund for Major Accessions 2009.13 Joaquim Rodrigo Kultur 1962, 1962 tempera on canvas 73 cm × 92 cm Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea – Museu do Chiado, Lisboa, Portugal Dieter Roth Bilderbuch (Picture Book), 1955 (1962) artist book, spiral-bound, 14 pages 34 × 32 × 1.5 cm Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne Bilderbuch (Picture Book), 1957 (1976) artist book, spiral-bound, 14 pages 24 × 23 × 1 cm Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne Bilderbuch (Picture Book), 1957 (1976) artist book, spiral-bound, 23 pages 25.5 × 22.5 × 3.5 cm Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne

Rhod Rothfuss Composición Madí (Madí Composition), 1946 enamel on wood 86.4 × 49.8 cm The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Museum purchase funded by Caroline Wiess Law Accessions Endowment Fund. 2004.1658 Gerhard Rühm L’Essentiel de la grammaire (The Essence of Grammar), 1962 German grammar in 6 plates, painted over with India ink, foldable 46.5 × 68.2 cm Generali Foundation Collection – Permanent loan to the Museum der Moderne Salzburg Ed Ruscha Hurting the Word Radio #1, 1964 oil on canvas 150.2 × 140 cm The Menil Collection, Houston 1971-30 DJ S Sadequain Seascape with Three Boats, 20th century oil on wood 57.2 × 81.3 cm Lent by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of the Government of Pakistan, 1980 (2016.12) Cactus, 1960 oil on canvas 90 × 120 cm Mr. Taimur Hassan c/o Grosvenor Gallery Mohan B. Samant Green Square, 1963 synthetic polymer paint, sand, and oil on canvas 175.4 × 132.1 cm The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Mr. George M. Jaffin, 1963 Accession Number: 334.1963 Mira Schendel Untitled, 1963 tempera and plaster on canvas 100 × 100 cm Hecilda & Sergio Fadel Collection

bok 4 A, 1961 artist book, spiral of hand-cut cardstock, 45 pages 31 × 40 × 1.7 cm Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne

Ruth Schloss Ma‘abarah (New Immigrants‘ Camp), 1953 oil on canvas 81 × 60 cm Mishkan Léomanut, Museum of Art, Ein-Harod

Daily Mirror Book, 1961 150 pages cut-out of newspapers, adhesive binding 2 × 2 cm Dieter Roth Foundation, Hamburg

Carolee Schneemann Conversions, 1961 wood, paint, rope, metal on board 142.2 × 104.1 cm Courtesy Private Collection, London

Colorado House, 1962 wood, stretchers, wire, fur, strips of painted canvas, bottles, broom handle, glass shards, flag, photograph, plywood base 154.9 × 132.1 × 81.3 cm Courtesy the Artist and P.P.O.W., New York; Galerie Lelong, New York; Hales Gallery, London Gerard Sekoto Prison Yard, 1944 oil on canvas 71,5 × 61,5 cm gordonschachatcollection, Johannesburg Head of a Man, 1962 watercolor on paper 48.9 × 31.8 cm Grosvenor Gallery Jewad Selim Untitled, 1951 oil on canvas 48 × 54 × 4 cm Artwork Courtesy Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah Baghdadiat, 1956 mixed media on hardboard 98.5 × 169 cm QM/QF - Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha - Qatar Twins Seven Seven Devil’s Dog, 1964 ink and gouache on paper 73.5 × 113.8 cm Iwalewahaus, Universität Bayreuth Ismail Shammout A Sip of Water, 1953 oil on canvas 45 × 60 cm Private Collection Beginning of the Tragedy, 1953 oil on canvas 48 × 68 cm Private Collection Anwar Jala Shemza City Wall, 1960 oil on board 55.8 × 25.4 cm Private Collection, NY The Fable, 1962 oil on hand dyed cloth on mountboard 68 × 47 cm The Estate of Anwar Jalal Shemza Composition in Three Parts, 1963-64 oil on canvas on hardboard 80 × 55 cm The Estate of Anwar Jalal Shemza Meem, 1964 oil on canvas 91.5 × 91.5 cm Butcher Family Collection Ahmed Shibrain Untitled, 1963 ink on paper 76 × 45.7 cm Iwalewahaus, Universität Bayreuth Kazuo Shiraga Work II, 1958 oil on paper, mounted on canvas 183 × 243 cm Hyo�go Prefectural Museum of Art

Sho�zo� Shimamoto Sakuhin (Work), 1955/92 galvanized steel painted on both sides 123 × 244 cm Axel & May Vervoordt Foundation Fyodor Shurpin The Morning of Our Motherland, 1946 oil on canvas 166 × 232 cm The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow Yohanan Simon Shabat on the Kibbutz, 1947 oil on canvas 65 × 55 cm Collection Tel Aviv Museum of Art Mitchell Siporin Endless Voyage, 1946 oil on canvas 111.1 × 123.8 cm University of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa City University acquisition, 1947.44 David Alfaro Siqueiros Cain in the United States, 1947 pyroxylin on Masonite 77 × 93 cm Colección Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil – Secretaria de Cultura – INBA, Mexico City From the Dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz to the Revolution - The People in Arms, 1957–65 mural dimensions variable Secretaría de Cultura-INAH-MEX Reproduction authorized by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia Gazbia Sirry The Fortune Teller, 1959 oil on canvas 52 × 88 × 2 cm Courtesy the Artist and Zamalek Art Gallery, Cairo Lucas Sithole Lazarus I, 1961 bronze 195 cm Courtesy Laurie Slatter Willi Sitte Arbeitspause (Break), 1959 oil on hardboard 200 × 122 cm Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig David Smith Perfidious Albion, 1945 bronze and cast iron 36.5 × 11.4 × 6.7 cm Raymond and Patsy Nasher Collection, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas The Maiden’s Dream, 1949 bronze 73 × 52.1 × 57.4 cm The Estate of David Smith /courtesy Hauser & Wirth Loló Soldevilla Sin título (Untitled), 1954 Bronze and wood 39 × 34 × 25.5 cm Private Collection

Sin títutlo (Unitled), c. 1960 mixed Media on wood in artist’s frame 99 × 99 × 4 cm Gordon Family Collection, Los Angeles, CA Jesus Rafael Soto Sin título (Estructura cinética de elementos geométricos) [Untitled (Kinetic Structure of Geometric Elements)], 1956 paint on Plexiglas and wood with screws 55.2 × 55.6 × 33 cm The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Muse­ um purchase funded by the Caroline Wiess Law Accesions Endowment Fund, 2010.76 Francis Newton Souza Degenerates, 1957 oil on board 143.5 × 175.3 cm Aicon Gallery Head of a Man Thinking, 1965 oil on canvas 66 × 50.8 cm Collection Amrita Jhaveri Two Saints (After El Greco), 1965 oil on canvas 101.5 × 76 cm Grosvenor Gallery Aleksandar Srnec Construction 53, 1953 brass wire 10 × 83.5 × 46 cm Marinko Sudac Collection Frank Stella Arbeit macht frei, 1958 enamel on canvas 215.5 cm × 308.6 cm Private Collection Sindoedarsono Sudjojono Pertemuan di Tjikampek yang Bersedjarah (Historic Meeting in Tjikampek), 1964 oil on canvas 153.5 × 106 cm Collection: Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Nusantara (Museum MACAN), Jakarta, Indonesia Alina Szapocznikow Hand. Monument to the Heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto II, 1957 patinated plaster and iron filings 144.5 × 73 cm Courtesy the Estate of Alina Szapocznikow/Piotr Stanislawski / Galerie Loevenbruck, Paris Head VII, 1961 lead 19.5 × 16 cm Courtesy the Estate of Alina Szapocznikow/Piotr Stanislawski / Galerie Loevenbruck, Paris T Takamatsu Jiro� The String in the Bottle Nr. 1124, 1963-85 Coke bottle (1L), vinyl rope 30.5 × 6 cm The Estate of Jiro Takamatsu, Courtesy Yumiko Chiba Associates, Tokyo; Stephen Friedman Gallery, London; Fergus McCaffrey, New York

The String in the Bottle Nr. 1126, 1963-85 bottle, black cotton rope 17 × 6 cm The Estate of Jiro Takamatsu, Courtesy Yumiko Chiba Associates, Tokyo; Stephen Friedman Gallery, London; Fergus McCaffrey, New York The String in the Bottle Nr. 1128, 1963-85 beer bottle (Ashai), cotton rope (black and white) 29 × 7 cm The Estate of Jiro Takamatsu, Courtesy Yumiko Chiba Associates, Tokyo; Stephen Friedman Gallery, London; Fergus McCaffrey, New York The String in the Bottle Nr. 1129, 1963-85 bottle, green electric cord 17 × 6 cm The Estate of Jiro Takamatsu, Courtesy Yumiko Chiba Associates, Tokyo; Stephen Friedman Gallery, London; Fergus McCaffrey, New York The String in the bottle Nr. 1131, 1963-85 square bottle, black electric cord 22 × 7.5 cm The Estate of Jiro Takamatsu, Courtesy Yumiko Chiba Associates, Tokyo; Stephen Friedman Gallery, London; Fergus McCaffrey, New York The String in the Bottle Nr. 1132, 1963-85 beer bottle (Kirin), white electric cord 29 × 7 cm The Estate of Jiro Takamatsu, Courtesy Yumiko Chiba Associates, Tokyo; Stephen Friedman Gallery, London; Fergus McCaffrey, New York Rufino Tamayo Terror cósmico (Cosmic Terror), 1947 oil on canvas 106 × 76.2 cm Colección/INBA/Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico City Tanaka Atsuko Electric Dress, 1956 (reproduced in 1986) synthetic paint on incandescent lightbulbs electric cords and control 165 × 80 × 80 cm Takamatsu Art Museum Work (Yellow Cloth), 1955 commercially dyed cotton and glue, three parts 100 × 208 cm / 100 × 202 cm / 100 × 377 cm Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York Purchased through prior gift of Andrew Powie Fuller and Geraldine Spreckles Fuller Bequest, 2013 Antoni Tàpies Forma negra sobre quadrat gris (Black Form on Grey Square), 1960 mixed media on canvas 162 × 162 cm Collection Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona Boris Taslitzky Riposte, 1951 oil paint on canvas 210 × 310 cm TATE: Presented by the Friends of the TATE Gallery 1998

823

Hervé Télémaque My Darling Clémentine, 1963 oil on canvas, collages, painted wooden box, rubber doll, Plexiglas 194.5 × 245 × 25 cm Centre Pompidou, Paris Musée national d´art moderne/ Centre de création industrielle Achat 1991 Mark Tobey Verso i Bianchi (Towards the Whites), 1957 tempera on paper 112 × 71 cm GAM - Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Torino Tony Tuckson Black Woman, Half Length, 1956 oil on paperboard 99 × 70 cm Collection: Art Gallery of New South Wales - Gift of Margaret Tuckson 1977 Igael Tumarkin Aggressiveness, 1964-65 iron 218 × 87 × 60 cm Collection Tel Aviv Museum of Art U Günther Uecker TV, 1963 TV, table, nails 118 × 80 × 80 cm Private lender V Stan VanDerBeek Breathdeath, 1964 16mm black-and-white film, 15’ Copyright Estate of Stan VanDerBeek Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York. Emilio Vedova Europa 1950, 1949-50 oil on canvas 123 cm × 126 × 18 cm Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna di Ca’Pesaro Berlin, 64, 1964 relief, paper, iron, mixed media on wood 105 × 121 × 18 cm Fondazione Emilio e Annabianca Vedova, Venezia Jacques Villeglé Palissade aux palmiers (Fence with Palm Trees), 1957 ripped posters mounted on wood 111.5 × 45.5 × 3 cm Private Collection, Courtesy Galerie GP & N Vallois, Paris «OUI» - Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, 1958 ripped posters mounted on canvas 68 × 100 × 3 cm Private Collection, Courtesy Galerie GP & N Vallois, Paris Rue Jacob. 5 décembre 1961, 1961 ripped posters mounted on canvas 114 × 225 × 3 cm Private Collection, Courtesy Galerie GP & N Vallois, Paris

824

Wolf Vostell Deutscher Ausblick, 1958-1959 aus dem Environment „Das schwarze Zimmer“ (German View from the Black Room Cycle), 1958–59 décollage, wood, barbed wire, tin, newspaper, bone, television with cover 115.5 × 130 × 30.5 cm Berlinische Galerie – Landesmuseum für Moderne Kunst, Fotografie und Architektur Sun in Your Head, 1963 black/white Film, 5’30” Original 16 mm, transferred into Video (U-Matic) in 1967 Restored and digitalized on DVD in 2006 The Wolf Vostell Estate, Bad Nauheim You are Leaving the American Sector, 1964 123 × 451.5 cm spray paint on silkscreen print on photo canvas Museum Folkwang, Essen W Andy Warhol Mustard Race Riot, 1963 2 parts; acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas 289.2 × 208.3 cm Udo und Anette Brandhorst Sammlung Thirty-Five Jackies (Multiplied Jackies), 1964 silkscreen and acrylic on canvas 255.7 × 286.8 × 6.1 cm MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main Ehemalige Sammlung Karl Ströher, Darmstadt Inv. No. 1981/58 Susanne Wenger Yemoja, 1958 batik 170 × 252 cm Neue Galerie Graz Jack Whitten Birmingham, 1964 aluminum foil, newsprint, stocking, and oil on plywood 42.2 × 40.6 cm Collection of Joel Wachs Head I, 1964 acrylic on canvas 27.9 × 27.9 cm Courtesy the Artist and Hauser & Wirth; Zeno × Gallery, Antwerp Head IV, 1964 acrylic on canvas 33 × 25.4 cm Courtesy the Artist and Hauser & Wirth; Zeno × Gallery, Antwerp Head VII, 1964 acrylic on canvas 38.1 × 38.1 cm Courtesy the Artist and Hauser & Wirth; Zeno × Gallery, Antwerp Head VIII, 1964 acrylic on canvas 38.1 × 38.1 cm Courtesy the Artist and Hauser & Wirth; Zeno × Gallery, Antwerp

Wols (Alfred Otto Woldgang Schulze) Composition jaune (Yellow Composition), c.1947 oil on canvas 73 × 92 cm Staatliche Museen zu Berlin,National­ galerie. 1972 erworben durch das Land Berlin

Charles Hussein Zenderoudi The Sun and the Lion, 1960 ink, watercolor and gold paint on paper mounted on board 106.7 × 147.3 cm Grey Art Gallery. New York University Art Collection. Gift of Abby Weed Grey, 1975

Andrzej Wróblewski Słon�ce i inne gwiazdy (Sun and other Stars), 1948 oil on canvas 90 × 120 cm Muzeum Sztuki in Łódz�

Yuri Zlotnikov 4 works from the series ‘Signal Systems’, 1957-62 tempera and watercolors on paper each 81,5 × 57.5 cm Collection of the Artist

Liquidation of the Ghetto/ Blue Chauffeur, 1949 Oil on canvas 89 × 120 cm Private Collection Executed Man, Execution with a Gestapo Man, 1949 oil on canvas 120 × 90 cm Private Collection Young America, 1950 egg tempera on gessoed board (“Renaissance Panel”) 82.6 × 115.1 cm Courtesy the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Joseph E. Temple Fund Y Vasiliy Yakovlev Portrait of Georgy Zhukov, Marshal of the Soviet Union, 1946 oil on canvas 206 × 153 cm The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow Yoko Ono Cut Piece, 1965 black-and-white film at Carnegie Recital Hall in New York City in March 1965 8” Collection of Yoko Ono Yo�suke Yamahata Nagasaki Journey, 1945 gelatine silver prints Courtesy Daniel Blau Ramsès Younan Cristaux Rocheux (Rocky Crystals), 1960 oil on fiberboard 59 × 88 cm Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien acquired in 1978 Arabesques, 1961 oil on board 90 × 61 cm May and Adel Youssry Khedr Collection, Cairo Z Yosef Zaritsky Yehiam (Life on the Kibbutz), 1951 oil on burlap mounted on canvas 208 × 228 cm Collection Tel Aviv Museum of Art Fahrelnissa Zeid My Hell, 1951 oil on canvas 205 × 528 cm Istanbul Museum of Modern Art Collection S�irin Devrim and Prens Raad Donation

INDEX

A ‘AI, Ahmad Abdel 224 A Little-Known Story about a Movement, a Magazine, and the Computer’s Arrival in Art: New Tendencies and Bit International, 1961–1973 686 A Problem for Critics 56n19 A Woman in Berlin 147 A Young Photographer’s Statement: I Refute Mr. Natori 139n11 Abboud, Shafic 286 Abdul-Hai, Muhammed 223 Abela, Eduardo 423n1 Aboul-Ela, Hosam 56 Abstract Expressionism, Abstract Expressionist 29, 45, 46, 64, 144, 213, 216, 239, 422, 445, 635, 697, 698 Achebe, Chinua 77, 643n4 AD&A Museum 695 Adorno, Theodor 26, 27, 29, 40n44, 50, 54, 57n66, 346 Adrian, Marc 687n1 Affandi 411 African socialism 222 Agamben, Giorgio 25 Akademie der Künste 444 Akimov, Nikolai 585 Al Hurufiyya 222 Al Rahal, Khalid 563 Al Sa’id, Shakir Hassan 50, 222 Al-Adab 50 Al-Anbiyya’ (Prophets) series 221 Al-Awam, Ibrahim 224 Al-Khaldi, Ghazi 431, 432, 434 Al-Moudarres, Fateh 52, 383, 599 Al-Musawwar 431 Al-Nasiri, Rafa 432 Al-Sudanawiyya 223 Albers, Josef 481, 701 Aleksic�, Dragan 686 Alfonsin, Raúl 423n15 Algeria Unveiled 354 Allied Control Council 60 Allied New World Order 147 Allied; Allies 59, 60, 67n4, 69, 71, 136, 147, 151, 152, 229, 231n7, 341 Alloway, Lawrence 46, 241, 690, 693–95, 701 Alonso, Carlos 422 Alonso, Paloma 423n15 Altdorfer, Albrecht 23, 23 Alte Pinakothek 40n19, 65 Alte Universität 65 Althusser, Louis 348 Alviani, Getulio 687n1 Ambedkar, B.R. 231n7 American Seventh Army 21 American Society of African Culture (AMSAC) 575, 578 Ana, the Igbo earth goddess 641 Anatol 155 Anceschi, Giovanni 687n1 Anders, Günther 41n55 Anderson, Benedict 633 Andre, Carl 517 Anselmo, Giovanni 687n12 Anthropometries 144 Anti-Nazi 40n46, 69 Anti-Semite; Anti-Semitic 216, 352, 584, 628 Antipodean Manifesto 239 Apollinaire, Guillaume 481, 481 Apollonian 342 Apollonio, Umbro 584 Appel, Karel 30, 30, 182–83, 345, 694 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 581 Arab-Israeli War of 1948 628 Araeen, Rasheed 230, 74, 535–36, 569, 571, 572, 573n4, 573n9 Arcay, Wifredo 542 Arce, Georgie 444, 459 Archives de la critique d’art 241

Ardon, Mordecai 630 Arendt, Hannah 25, 26, 40n35, 40n45, 627, 628, 631 Arikha, Avigdor 348 Aristotelian 345 Armajani, Siah 230, 271, 608 Arnold, General Henry H. 703n10 Art and Liberty Group (JFH) 231n8 Art brut 215, 224, 347 Art in Nigeria 243 Art Informel 213, 216, 241, 347, 689 Art Society at the Khartoum Technical Institute 642 Art Society at the Nigerian College of Art, Science and Technology, Zaria 641 Arte Nucleare 141, 144 Arte Nuevo 485 Arte Programmata 685 Arte Spaziale 141 Artist Placement Group 227 Arturo 485, 487 Asahi Camera 139n11 Asahi Graph 136 Asahi Graph and Life 41n53 Ashton, Dore 244 Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención (AACI) 485, 487 Atlantic Charter 13, 69 Atlas 26, 27, 29 Atom Age 144 Auerbach, Frank 233, 259, 382, 572 Auschwitz 26, 27, 29, 30, 40n30, 339, 627 Ausstellung Bayerischer Gemälde des 15. Und 16. Jahrhunderts 23, 39 Avant-garde 59, 215, 216, 218, 224, 227, 229, 230, 241, 421, 425, 438, 440, 477, 479, 481, 482, 485, 487, 488, 489, 492, 493, 494, 561, 569, 572, 573, 581, 585, 630, 636, 639, 641, 642, 687, 694, 698, 701 Azimuth 685 Azzawi, Dia 223, 600

B Bacon, Francis 26, 49, 159, 345, 362, 571, 572, 691 Baj, Enrico 30, 30, 141, 143, 144, 199, Bakic�, Vojin 687n1 Balaghi, Shiva 49 Baldessari, John 687n12 Baldwin, James 33, 458, 576, 577 Bandung Conference 33, 54, 75, 76, 222, 431, 576, 633, 698 Banham, Reyner 693, 694, 701 Barilli, Renato 141, 686 Barker, Heather 241 Barr, Alfred 567 Barr, Alfred H. (Jr.) 242 Barr, Alfred (“model”) 567 Barson, Tanya Barthé, Richard 575 Barthes, Roland 444 Baselitz, Georg 46, 50, 52, 64, 387, 586 Bashir, Al Tijani Yusuf 225n2 Bataille, Georges 218, 219n8, 227 Baudissin, Klaus Graf von 62 Bauhaus 343n7, 485, 488, 491, 630 Baumeister, Willi 50, 52, 343n5 Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich 39n6 Bayerischen Staatsministerium für Unterricht und Kultus (Bavarian State Ministry of Education and Culture) 66 Bayley, Edgar 485, 487 Bayrle, Thomas 376, 754 Bearden, Romare 582, 722, 723 Becker, Carl 69 Beckmann, Max 24, Beier, Ulli 243, 244, 585 Bek, Božo 687 Belkahia, Farid 432, 642

Belting, Hans 43 Ben-Gurion, David 628 Benjamin, Walter 351 Bense, Max 493, 686, 689 Benton, Thomas Hart 446, Bergen-Belsen 26 Bergner, Yosl 630 Bergson, Henri 53, 235 Berlin Wall 43, 690 Berman, Mieczysław 202 Berni, Antonio 52, 334, 422, 423, 423n11 Beuys, Josef 26, 26, 162–64, 193, 228, 690, 728 Bezalel Art School 628, 630, 631n3 Bezalel Museum 628 Bezem, Naftali 627, 628, 630, 631 Bhabha, Homi 30 Bianchi (Whites) series 215, 217 Biasi, Alberto 687n1 Biblioteca Nacional 422 Bichos (Critters) series 53, 494 Bienal de São Paulo 487, 488, 492, 583, 584 Biennale de la Méditerranée 583 Biennale der Ostseeländer 587n30 Biennale Grafike 583, 584 Big Three 71 Biggers, John 423n1, 446, 454 Bill, Max 485, 487, 492, 493, 493, 499, 584 Birkenau 41n48 Bishoff, First Lieutenant Robert E. 39n6 Bisière, Roger 642 Bit International 686 Bit International—[Nove] tendencije. Computer und visuelle Forschung. Zagreb 1961–1973 686 Black Arts Movement 576 Black Orpheus 348, 559, 585 Black Phoenix 230 Blackman, Charles 239 Blaszko, Martín 485 Bloch, Ernst 427 Bodet, Jaime Torre 346, 348 Boghossian, Skunder 244, 576, 585, 593 Boletín Arte Concreto Invención 485 Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group 231n7 Bomberg, David 642 Bonaparte, Napoleon 71 Bonsiepe, Gui 686 Bontecou, Lee 312 Borduas, Paul-Emile 216 Borgese, Leonardo 143 Boriani, Davide 687n1 Boshier, Derek 718 Boto, Martha 687n1 Boudník, Vladimír 49, 290, 291, 347 Bourdelle, Émile-Antoine 347 Bourriaud, Nicolas 41n81 Bowling, Frank 571, 572, 573n5, 582, 587n16, 614, 615 Boyd, Arthur 239 Boyd, David 239 Brack, John 239 Brady, Mary B. Braithwaite, Edward Kamau 572 Braque, Georges 23 Breker, Arno 22, 60 Brenna, Enrico 144 Brest, Jorge Romero 242, 487, 488 Breton, André 444, 487 Brett, Guy 572, 698 Bretton Woods Conference 24, 35 Breuer, Marcel 571 Bridges, Ruby 446 Bristol Aeroplane Company 693 British Army Film and Photographic Unit 26, 40n42 1958 Brussels World Fair 447n15 Bryen, Camille 347 Buchloh, Benjamin H.D. 27 Buddhist 52, 346

Bundestag Elections 62 Bunte Illustrierte 690 Buñuel, Luis 488 Burda 690 Buren, Daniel 687n12 Burri, Alberto 215, 216, 217, 218, 227, 230, 233, 293 Buruma, Ian 40n29 Butler, Reg 347, 347

C Cage, John 701 Cai, Yuanpei 437 Caliban 77 Camargo, Sergio 573, 583 Camberwell School of Art 225n1 Cardazzo, Carlo 141 Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM) 572 Caro, Anthony 502 Carvão, Aluísio 494, 495n13, 515 Cassirer, Ernst 342 Castellani, Enrico 532, 533, 585, 687n1 Castro, Fidel 422 Catrami (Tars) series 215, 217 Celan, Paul 29, 41n51 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand 216 Center for the Cultivation of Jewish Consciousness 630 Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing 432 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 64, 578 Centre for Advanced Creative Study 572 Centre Pompidou 567, 569n5 Centro de Arte Realista 421 Césaire, Aimé 25, 32, 33, 41n67, 49, 52, 54, 75 Cézanne, Paul 341 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 38 Chamberlain, John 331 Chandler, John 479 Chandra, Avinash 571, 572, 582, 583, 620 Chardin, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon 427 Charoux, Lothar 487, 495n13 Chase-Riboud, Barbara 348 Chelsea Polytechnic 573 Chelsea School of Art 573n6 Chen, Duxiu 437 Chen, Peng 441n10 Chen, Shizeng 437 Chen, Yongjiang 441n10 Chen, Zunsan 441n10 Cherkaoui, Ahmed 287, 432, 642 Chiang, Kai-Shek 437 Chiggio, Ennio 687n1 Chimei, Hamada 56n18 China Academy of Art, Hangzhou 441n10 Chizu 136, Choucair, Saloua Raouda 56n11, 493, 494, 544 Christen, Andreas 687n1 Chua, Mia Tee 472 Chuikov, Semyon 427, 445, 446 Chukhrov, Keti 429 Ciudad Universitaria, Caracas 492 Ciudad Universitaria, Mexico City 492 Civil Rights Movement 32, 36, 446, 625, 633, 636, 701 Clark, Lygia 53, 229, 242, 309, 477, 487, 494, 495n13, 507, 508, 509, 510, 511, 573, 583 Clifford, James 581 Cloud Canyons series 53, 230 Coalition Provisional Authority 565n11 CoBrA 586n13, 694 Coffineau, Nicole 245 Cold War 30, 33, 35, 43, 45, 46, 54, 55, 71, 72, 75, 76, 133, 138, 242, 341, 342, 343, 345, 419, 421, 423n11, 437, 444, 446, 575, 579, 581, 690, 698, 702 Coldstream, William 642

827

Collages and Objects 694 College of Fine and Applied Art 221, 225n1 Colombo, Gianni 687n1 Colombo, Joe Cesare 141, 144 Commission on Human Rights 35 Commonwealth Art Today 583 Commonwealth Institute 583 Communist; Communism 35, 43, 46, 49, 71, 229, 230, 235, 242, 343, 345, 347, 348, 421, 422, 423n10, 425, 427, 428, 429, 431, 432, 437, 438, 441n1, 443, 446, 584, 627 Conceptual art 242, 479, 572 Congress for Cultural Freedom 40n27, 64 Congress of Black Writers and Artists 222, 585, 639 Connelly, Matthew 56n4 Conner, Bruce 748 Constructive Universalism 492 Constructivism 227, 485, 491, 687, 689, 690 Continuité et avant-garde au Japon 585 Contro lo stile 144 Cordeiro, Waldemar 487, 493, 494, 495n2, 495n13, 523, 687n11 Cordell, Magda 30, 52, 347, 378, 693 Corriere della Sera 143 Costa, Toni 687n1 Council of Foreign Relations 55 Crawford, Ralston 141 Cremonini, Leonardo 348 Crippa, Roberto 141 Cruz-Diez, Carlos 687n1 Cubism; Cubist 22, 49, 216, 224, 341 Cuevas, José Luis 242

D D’Harnoncourt, René 40n27, 575 Da Silva, Maria Helena Vieira 485 Dachau 21, 39n12 Dada; Dadaism 22, 139n11, 227, 485, 492, 687, 689, 690 Dada Jazz 686 Dada Tank 686 Dadi, Iftikhar 221, 223 Dahlmann, Alfred 63 Dalí, Salvador 30, 143 Damas, Léon 41n67 Damisch, Hubert 217 Damnjanovic�-Damnjan, Radomir 687n12 Dangelo, Sergio 141, 143, 144 Darié, Sandú 493, 494, 495n2, 522, 524 David, Jacques-Louis 443 Davis, John A. 578 De Barros, Geraldo 495n13 De Beauvoir, Simone 345, 347 De Camargo, Sergio 583 De Campos, Augusto 479, 481, 482, 487 De Campos, Haroldo 482, 487 De Castro, Amílcar 242, 495n13 De Castro, Willys 495n13 De Kooning, Elaine 46, 67n15 De Kooning, Willem 45, 49, 67n15, 141, 233, 251, 345, 372, 373, 445 De Oraá, Pedro 540 De Saint Phalle, Niki 228 De Stijl 485 De Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri 689 De Vecchi, Gabriele 687n1 Denazification 23, 39n15, 40n46, 59, 60, 65, 67n5 Debord, Guy 694, 751 DeFeo, Jay 52 Degas, Edgar 347, 347 Del Prete, Juan 485 Del Renzio, Toni 693, 695 Delaney, Beauford 233, 273, 458 Delaunay, Robert 23 Deleuze, Gilles 235, 236 Deng, Shu 441n10 Denis, Maurice 215

828

Der Blaue Reiter. München und die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts 23, 66 Derain, André 23 Descartes, René 345 Design Unit Group 693 Destruction in Art Symposium (DIAS) 227 Deutscher Ausblick 26 Di Tella, Guido 242, 492, 702 Díaz, Porfirio 446 Dickerson, Robert 239 Die Neuen Tendenzen. Eine europäische Künstlerbewegung 1961–1973 686 Die Zeit 66 Dillgardt, Just 62 Dimitrijevic�, Braco 687n12 Dionysian 342 Diop, Alioune 578 Discourse on Colonialism 32, 75 Diviš, Alén 402 Diwani style 225n2 Dmitrieva, Nina 428 Documenta I 46 Documenta II (1959) 46, 56n21, 64 Domon, Ken 136 Dong, Xiwen 52, 439, 440 Dong, Zuyi 441n10 Dorazio, Piero 687n1 Dorfles, Gillo 686 Dova, Gianni 141 Dreyfus Affair 631n3 Dubois, William Edward Burghardt 40n26, 41n67, 576, 578 Dubuffet, Jean e215, 216, 217, 218, 227, 345, 347, 374, 375 Duchamp, Marcel 227 Dunayevskaya, Raya 348 Dürer, Albrecht 23, 23 Dvizheniye group, 685

E Eames, Charles 744 Eames, Ray 744 East German Willi Sitte 446 Eco, Umberto 347, 685 Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Casablanca 642 École des Beaux-Arts, Paris 348 Edward, Duke of Windsor 21, 39n6 Edwards, Melvin 655, 656, 657 Efflatoun, Inji 49, 421, 431, 467, 669 Egonu, Uzo 582, 597, 719 Egyptian Surrealists 229, 231n8 Eichmann, Adolf 630 Ein Harod Museum 630 Einstein, Albert 41n54 Eiriz, Antonia 422 Eisenhower, General Dwight D. 39n4 El Salahi, Ibrahim 30, 32, 221, 222, 223, 224, 360, 361, 571, 585, 586n15, 596, 604, 642 Elangovan, Arvind 79 Electric & Musical Industries (EMI) 693 Emokpae, Erhabor 493, 554 Emperor Hirohito 139n6 Enayat, Heba 432 Ensor, James 24 Entartete Kunst 22, 23, 39n11, 39n13, 62 Entartete Kunst. Bildersturm vor 25 Jahren 23 Enwonwu, Ben 32, 33, 52, 243, 370, 571, 575, 576, 641, 642, 666 Epoca blu 144 Equipo 57 687n1 Ernst, Max 489n7 Erol (Erol Akyavas) 607 Erste Allgemeine Deutsche Kunstaus­ stellung 64 Escuela de Arquitectura y Diseño 485, 487, 488 Espinosa, Manuel 485 EXAT-51 686, 687

Expo ’70 136 Exposição de arte condenada pelo III Reich (Exhibition of art condemned by the Third Reich) 487

F Fahlström, Öyvind 690, 756 Fangor, Wojciech 444, 457 Fanon, Frantz 32, 33, 49, 52, 53, 54, 75, 339, 348, 351, 352, 353, 354, 355, 639, 641, 642 Farfield Foundation 67n15 Fat Man 21, 30 Fatah, Ismail 347 Fautrier, Jean 26, 46, 158, 215, 216, 217, 218, 227, 233, 281, 347 Fauvism 641 Fax, Elton 575 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) 347 Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) 15, 23, 63, 67n4 Féjer, Kazmer 587n36 Feldman, Hannah 160 Feng, Zhen 441n10 Fenollosa, Ernst 482 Ferrari, Ariel 703n20 Ferrari, León 49, 701, 702, 703n20, 729 Fire Paintings series 144 First All-Union Congress of Soviet Artists 427 First Congress of Negro Writers and Artists 575, 576 First International Congress of Black Writers and Artists 585 First World 36, 136 First World Festival of Negro Arts 578 Fleischmann, Julius 67n15 Fluxus 228, 683, 691, 703n13 Fontana, Lucio 141, 227, 233, 235, 294, 485, 689 Formalist 53, 215, 222, 227, 482, 689 Förster, Otto H. 62, 63, 65 Fotivec, Dorotea 687 Fougeron, André 49, 444, 584 Franke, Herbert W. 686 Frankenthaler, Helen 52, 233, 260 Frankfurter Rundschau 63 Free Democratic Party (FDP) 62 French Revolution 627 Freud, Lucian 572 Freud, Sigmund 351 Frohne, Ursula 165 Frohner, Adolf 215 Fromm, Erich 348 Fu, Baoshi 439 Fuller, Hoyt 578 Futurism 22, 133, 425 Futurist Manifesto 241

G Gabo, Naum 571 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 569 Gaitonde, V.S. 228 Galerie Franke 341 Galerie Iris Clert 144 Galerija suvremene umjetnotsi 685, 686, 687 Galleria Apollinaire 144 Galleria del Cavallino 141 Galleria del Naviglio 141 Galleria San Fedele 143, 144 Gallery 67 56n19 Gallery One 572, 583 Gandhi, Mahatma 75, 231n7 Garcia-Miranda, Héctor 687n1 Gardner, Anthony 584 Garnier, Pierre 482

Gattin, Ivo 49, 328 Gauguin, Paul 235 Geoffrey, Iqbal 571 German Democratic Republic (GDR) 23, 63 Gerstner, Karl 686, 687n1 Gestapo 29 Getty Research Institute 241 Ghamari-Tabrizi, Sharon 698 Giacometti, Alberto 30, 345, 346, 347, 363, 364, 366, 367 Gilroy, Paul 636 Girola, Claudio 487 Giunta, Andrea 241, 702 Godfrey, Mark 29 Goebbels, Joseph 60, 62 Goertiz, Mathias 52, 487, 488, 493, 538 Goldenes Buch 21, 39n6 Goldschmidt, Gertrude (Gego) 488, 498 Golub, Leon 396 Gomringer, Eugen 481 Gordon, Allison 435n3 Gorgona group 686, 687 Gosebruch, Ernst 62 Götz, Karl Otto 689, 690, 735, 751 Go�zo�, Yoshimasu 482 Grabowski Gallery 583 GRAV (groupe de recherche d’art visual) 685, 689 Greek Alecco 67n2 Green, Charles 241 Greenberg, Clement 216, 219n8, 241, 245n5, 341, 698 Grez, Ramón Vergara 487 Gribaudo, Ezio 585 Grigorian, Marcos 229, 316 Gris, Juan 341 Grohmann, Will 65, 341 Gropius, Walter 343n7 Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung 21, 22, 39n18, 59 Grote, Ludwig 66 Group 1890 230, 231n9 Group of Modern Art 445, 636 Grundig, Hans 64 Grünewald, Matthias 347, 23, 23 Grupo Ruptura 495n13, 584 Gruppo N 685, 687n1 Guerrilla Art Action Group (GAAG) 573 Guggenheim, Peggy 444 Guha, Ranajit 56n5 Guilbaut, Serge 41n78, 586n11, 635 Gujral, Satish 231n7 Gullar, Ferreira 242, 482, 483, 484 Guo, Shaogang 441n10 Guston, Philip 263, 385 Gutai 53, 213, 216, 228, 236, 241, 347, 493, 585 Guttuso, Renato 49, 53, 422, 444, 445

H Haacke, Hans 53, 493, 516 Haar, Leopold 587n36 Hacker, Dieter 687n1 Hadashim, Ofakim 628 Haga, To�ru 585 Hains, Raymond 302, 678, 689 Hall, Stuart 572, 582 Hamilton, Richard 690, 691, 693, 695, 701, 734 Hampton Institute 446 Hantaï, Simon 233 Harmon Foundation 575, 576 Hartung, Hans 46, 216 Haruo, Yamanaka 56n18 Haubrich, Josef 65 Haus der Deutschen Kunst 21, 22, 23, 39n17, 59, 65 Haus der Kunst 21, 23, 24, 40n19, 59, 65, 66, 67n2

Hautes pâtes (thick pastes) 215 Hawkins, Weaver 30, 190 Heckel, Erich 64 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 235, 345, 354, 428 Heidegger, Martin 345 Heise, Carl Georg 66 Hekate series 341 Henderson, Nigel 693, 695 Hepworth, Barbara 571 Heron, Patrick 573n3 Herrera, Carmen 500 Hesse, Eva 233, 288, 616, 617 Higgins, Dick 701 Hiroshima (event) 21, 25, 30, 41n53, 43, 71, 135, 136, 138, 141, 143, 149, 345 Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Dome 136 Hiroshima Peace Center 139n6 Hirschenberg, Shmuel 628 Histadrut 628 Hitler, Adolf 21, 22, 39n6, 39n13, 60, 62, 71, 341, 342, 343n7, 425, 697 Hlito, Alfredo 485 Hochschule der Bildenden Künste (Universität der Künste) 63 Hochschule für Bildende Künste 64 Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm 491, 584 Hoehme, Gerhard 690 Hofer, Karl 64, 343n10 Hofgarten 22 Hofgartenarkadengebäude 62 Holocaust 25, 26, 27, 29, 40n32, 141, 227, 347, 421, 488, 628, 630, 631 Holroyd, Geoffrey 695, 695n8 Hölzel, Adolf 66 Honda, Ishiro� 41n56 House of Un-American Activities Committee 636 Howard University 575, 576 Howard University Museum 575 Hua, Li 432 Hudson Institute 698 Huebler, Douglas 687n12 Huelsenbeck, Richard 686 Hughes, Langston 578 Huidobro, Vicente 485 Humanism and Terror 345 Husain, Maqbool Fida 32, 231n7, 400, 582, 635, 635, 636, 637 Hussein, Saddam 565n11 I Ibrahim, Muhammed al-Makki 223 Ibrahim, Salah Ahmad 224 Ichiro�, Haryu� 56n18, 241 Ideal Home Exhibition 695n7 Ifriqi style 225n20 Iljenkov, Evald 429 Ilse 155 Ilya Repin Leningrad Institute for Painting, Sculpture and Architecture 425 Imperial Institute 583 Impressionism 22, 642, 690 Independent Group 683, 690, 693, 694, 695, 695n7, 698, 701 Indiana, Robert 648 Indica Gallery 573 Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) 583, 693 Instituto di Tella 702 Instituto Torcuato di Tella, Buenos Aires 492 International Center for the Arts of the Americas at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston 241 International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art 567 International Conference on the Detection of Atomic Explosions 144 International Klein Blue (IKB) 144 International Monetary Fund 24, 35 International Olympic Committee 60

International Pop 56n23 International Style 491, 559 Internationale Jugendebuchausstellung 65 Iommi, Godofredo 485 Iron Curtain 43, 348, 443, 444, 446, 690 Isozaki, Arata 135, 138 Itike ite yokata 144 Ivanissevich, Oscar 489n5

J Jabareen, Hassan 56n2 Yakovlev, Vasiliy 450 Jama’at Baghdad lil Fan al-Hadith (The Baghdad Group for Modern Art) 563 James, C. L. R. 75 Jami’yat asdiqa al fan (Friends of Art) 563 Jardim, Reynaldo 242 Jaspers, Karl 40n46, 346 Jenkins, Ronald 695 Jess (Collins, Burgess Franklin) 191 Jeyifo, Biodun 643n9 Ji, Xiaoqiu 441n10 Jia, Youfu 446, 468, 469 Jiang, Feng 439 Takamatsu Jiro� 711 Johns, Jasper 635, 647 Johnson, Daniel LaRue 494, 654 Johnson, Sergeant Eugene 39n6 Jorn, Asger 380, 381, 694 Jornal do Brasil 242 Joyce, James 347, 481, 482 Judaism (Jew, Jewish) 22, 341, 347, 425, 628, 630, 631, 693 Judeo-Bolshevism 341 Judt, Tony 35, 72

K Kamei, Fumio 144 Kammer der Kunstschaffenden 64 Kämmer, Rudolf 687n1 Kandinsky, Vasily 23, 24, 46, 66, 235, 485, 686 Kang, Youwei 437 Kant, Immanuel 582 Kantor, Tadeusz 49, 755 Kaprow, Allan 228, 585, 701, 702 Karkutli, Burhan 432, 434, 435n16 Kassab-Bachi, Marwan 407 Kassák, Lajos 686 Katzenstein, Inés 241 Kawada, Kikuji 136 Kawara, On 32, 45, 49, 50, 52, 403, 707 Kazuo, Shiraga 216, 228, 274, 493 Keeler, Paul 230, 572, 583, 698 Keitel, Field Marshal Wilhelm 40n29 Kelly, Ellsworth 233, 493, 518, 520, 521 Kemble, Kenneth 242 Khadda, Mohamed 43, 50 Khalwa style 224, 225n20 Khan, Aga 21, 39n6 Khanna, Krishen 582, 672 Khartoum School 221, 222, 223, 224, 642 Khrushchev, Nikita 445 Ki, Zao-Wou 348 Kibbutz Lohamei HaGhettaot 631 Kibbutz Yechiam 628 Kiefer, Anselm 216 Kierkegaard, Søren 345 Kinetic art 348, 573, 583, 683, 687, 689, 690, 698 Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig 24, 66 Kiroku shashin: genbaku no Nagasaki 136 Kitaj, R.B. 572 Kitasono, Katue 479, 481, 482 Klee, Paul 23, 49, 66, 141, 642 Klein, Yves 30, 144, 493 Kleine, Rasmus 687

Klek, Jo 686 Kline, Franz 46 Knifer, Julije 685, 686, 687n1 Kobo, Jikken 749 Kofi, Vincent Akweti 576, 578 Köhn, Heinz 62 Kolár�, Jir� í 322 Konkrete Kunst 485 Koraïchi, Rachid 223 Korean War 52, 76, 347 Korzhev, Geliy 428, 429, 452 Kosice, Gyula 485, 487, 492, 501, 706 Kossoff, Leon 258, 572 Kotelawala, Sir John 76 Kounellis, Jannis 687n12 Kožaric�, Ivan 414 Kramer, Hilton 56n24 Krampen, Martin 686 Krasner, Lee (Lena, Lenore) 45, 254 Krauss, Rosalind E. 219n8, 690 Krauss, Werner 342 Kristl, Vlado 686, 687n1 Ku-lim, Kim 207 Kubin, Alfred 489n7 Kubota, Shigeko 228 Kubrick, Stanley 41n56 Kudo, Tetsumi 228, 233, 276, 324 Kunstakademie Düsseldorf 690 Kunsthalle-Altbau 40n22 Kunstmagistrat 343n10 Kunstverein 40n22 Kupferman, Moshe 630, 631 Kusama, Yayoi 228, 233, 320, 321, 690 Kwon, Heonik 56n5

L L’Étudiant noir 41n67 La Phalange 215 La Rose, John 572 Laañ, Diyi 485 Lacan, Jacques 353, 355 Lagos galleries 578 Laguna, Juanito 422 Lam, Wifredo 52, 56n11, 376, 377, 542, 583, 694 Landi, Edoardo 687n1 LaRue Johnson, Daniel 494, 654 Lassnig, Maria 272, 404 Latham, John 227, 267, 313, 314 Laverdant, Gabriel Désiré 215, 218 Lawrence, Jacob 423n1, 575, 578, 582, 585, 621 Le Parc, Julio 687n1 League of Nations 69, 633 Lebrun, Rico 347, 423n1 Lee, Christopher 79n12 Lee, Seung-taek 52, 228, 319 Leeson, Lynn Hershman 730, 731 Léger, Fernand 446 Lehmbruck, Wilhelm 24 Lenin, Vladimir 422, 423n2, 427, 443 Leninist 422, 427, 443 Lepman, Jella 65 Les Temps Modernes 345 Levi, Primo 40n30 Lewis, Norman 49, 195, 582, 651 LeWitt, Sol 687n12 Li, Jun 441n10 Li, Keran 439 Li, Tianxiang 441n10 Li, Yuan-Chia 573 Liang, Qichao 437 Library of Congress 40n27 Lichtenstein, Roy 30, 200, 690 Lifshitz, Mikhail 428 Lijn, Liliane 573 Lin, Fengmian 437 Lin, Gang 441n10 Lippard, Lucy R. 479, 569

Lissitsky, El 686 Little Boy 21 Liu, Lydia 56n5 Liu, Shaoqi 439 Llinás, Julio 242 Locke, Donald 571 Louis, Morris 29, 174, 175 Lozza, Raúl 485, 487 Lu, Dingyi 439 Lu, Zheng 437 Luda and Yangquan 440 Luftwaffe 26 Lukacs, György 428 Lumumba, Patrice 221 Luo, Gongliu 441n10

M Ma, Yuanhong 441n10 MacArthur, General Douglas 136 Mack, Heinz 585, 687n1, 689 Macke, August 23 Madí group 53, 477, 485, 492, 495n11, 584 Madrasat al-Ghaba wa al-Sahra’ (Jungle and the Desert School) 223 Madrasat Al-Wahid (The School of One) 224 Maghribi tradition 225n20 Maharaj, Sarat 35 Mahdaoui, Nja 222 Mainichi Shinbun 30, 41n53 Makchmobk.M 438 Maksimov, Konstantin 427, 444 Malangatana 670 Maldonado, Tomás 242, 485, 487, 492, 493, 504, 686 Maler am Bauhaus (Painters at the Bauhaus) 23, 66 Malevich, Kazimir 227, 485, 493, 686 Mallarmé, Stéphane 347, 481 Malraux, André 347, 348 Mancoba, Ernest 50, 52, 252, 253, 348, 586n13 Mané-Katz, Emmanuel 630 Manet, Édouard 347 Manhattan Project 71 Manichaean 75, 354 Manifeste de la peinture nucléaire 144 Manifesto neoconcreto 242 Manzoni, Piero 227, 233, 270, 685, 687n1 Mao, Zedong 49, 419, 437, 438, 439, 440, 441n1, 446 Marc, August 24 Marc, Franz 23 Marcks, Ney Gerhard 64 Mari, Enzo 685, 687n1 Marika, Mawalan 674 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 218, 241 Marker, Chris 41n56 Marshall Plan 152, 345, 491, 492, 698 Martin, Agnes 488 Maruki, Iri 30, 184, 186 Maruki, Toshi 30, 184, 186 Marxism and Questions of Linguistics 427 Marxism; Marxist 78, 216, 229, 346, 422, 427, 428, 429, 437, 487, 494 Massironi, Manfredo 584, 685, 687n1 Masson, André 56n19 Mathieu, Georges 216 Mathur, Saloni 56n16 Matiériste (matter painting) 215 Matisse, Henri 23, 235, 571, 573n2 Mavignier, Almir 584, 685, 687, 687n1, 689, 737 Mbari Artists and Writers Club 585, 587n50 Mbembe, Achille 506 Mc Hale, John 690, 693, 694, 695, 701, 743 Mc Luhan, Marshall 701 Mc Mahon, Colonel Bernard B. 63

829

McNish, Althea 571, 572 Medalla, David 53, 230, 330, 571, 572, 583, 698 Melé, Juan 485 Melehi, Mohammed 738 Mencken, H.L. 77 Mendes, Murilo 485 Menschenbild (image of man) 50, 341, 342, 343 Mercader, Ramón 423n4 Mercer, Kobena 583 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 235, 345, 487 Merton Simpson Gallery 575, 576 Messiaen, Olivier 29 Meštrovic�, Matko 587n37, 685, 686 Metzger, Gustav 227, 322, 572, 618 Mexican Communist Party 421 Mexican muralism 242, 421, 445 Meyer, E. W. 694 Mezei, Leslie 686 Miyakawa, Atsushi 241 Micic, Ljubomir 686 Midas 54 Mignolo, Walter 56n5 Mikhnov-Voitenko, Evgeny 585, 602 Milan design triennial 138 Miller, Dorothy C. 244 Minimalism; minimalist 53, 427, 491, 493 Minujín, Marta 242, 304 Miró, Joan 215 Misaki, Kiuchi 56n18 Mitchell, Joan 269, 347 Mitter, Partha 585 Mochal’skii, Dmitrii 493 Modern Art in the United States: A Selection from the Collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York 571 Moderne Französische Malerei 23 Moderne Kunst als Hoffnung 63 Modernist; modernism 22, 23, 32, 33, 36, 38, 43, 45, 46, 49, 50, 52, 53, 63, 64, 66, 73, 213, 215, 221, 222, 223, 224, 227, 228, 229, 230, 242, 341, 342, 345, 425, 437, 439, 440, 477, 491, 561, 563, 564, 567, 568, 569, 571, 575, 576, 578, 581, 582, 584, 585, 628, 630, 635, 636, 639, 641, 642, 686, 687, 689, 691, 698 Modernités plurielles collection 567 Mohamedi, Nasreen 488, 493 Moholy-Nagy, Lázló 30, 686 Moles, Abraham 686, 689 Mondrian, Piet 235, 445, 481, 485, 487, 488, 571 Monet, Claude 347 Monterrey and Monclova 492 Montiel, Ramona 422 Moody, Ronald 571, 572 Moore, Henry 30, 201, 571 Morellet, François 687n1, 739 Morris, Robert 515 Motonaga, Sadamasa 53, 493, 548 Movimento Arte Nucleare 198 Müller, Gotthart 687n1 Mumford, Lewis 41n55 Munari, Bruno 685 Munch, Edvard 66 Murakami, Saburo 216, 228 Murray, Gilbert 69 Murray, Kenneth 242 Museo Experimental el Eco, Mexico City 488 Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia 569n5 Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires 489n5 Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo 242, 487 Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro 487 Museum Folkwang 62 Museum für Konkrete Kunst 686

830

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston 241 Museum of Modern Art, New York 23, 24, 50, 56n11, 63, 135, 241, 345, 347, 445, 482, 567, 569n5, 571, 575, 585, 685, 690, 698 Museum of the Child in the Ghetto Fighters Museum 631 Museumsverein 62 Musgrave, Victor 583 Muslim Brotherhood 225n17 Mussolini, Benito 13, 21, 39n6 Myrdal, Gunnar 75

N N’Diaye, Iba 49, 52, 348, 664 Nabaa, Nazir 431 Naef, Sylvia 50 Nagasaki (event) 21, 25, 30, 40n32, 41n53, 43, 71, 135, 136, 138, 141, 143, 339, 345 Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum 136 Nagasaki International Culture Hall 136 Naipaul, Vidiadhar Surajprasad 35 Nake, Frieder 686 Naskh tradition 225n20 Nasser 56 79n12 Nasser, Gamal-Abdel 77, 231n8, 431, 432, 434, 445, 583, 633, 636 National Gallery, Washington D.C. 575 National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo 482 National Socialism (Nazi; Nazi Party; Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei [NSDAP]) 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 29, 35, 40n46, 46n40, 59, 60, 62, 63, 64, 66, 67n3, 67n4, 69, 71, 147, 216, 217, 227, 341, 342, 345, 347, 425, 431, 443, 487, 693, 697 Nationalgalerie Berlin 62 Natori, Yo�nosuke 139n11 Natural Synthesis 33, 244, 641 Nay, Ernst Wilhelm 49, 264, 265, 341 Nedoshivin, German 445 Neel, Alice 444, 459 Nees, Georg 686 Négritude 32, 41n67, 222, 339, 348, 351, 585, 639, 641, 642 Negro Digest 578 Nehru, Jawaharlal 76, 77, 230, 231n7, 421, 633 Neo-Concretist 229 Neo-Dada 348 Neoconcrete 53, 477, 479, 482, 483, 495n11, 573 Nerlinger, Oskar 64 Neruda, Pablo 423n4, 423n9 Neue Galerie 686 Neue Sachlichkeit 65 New Horizons 628, 630 New Images of Man 50, 345, 347, 348 New Vision Centre 583 New Vision Group 583 New Year Painting Movement 438 New York Times 576, 578 Newall, Albert 541, 543 Newman, Barnett 50, 52, 194, 233, 235, 236 Newsbulletin 583 Ngwenya, Valentin 670 Nicholson, Ben 571 Nicks, Walter 488 Nietzsche, Friedrich 351 Niikuni, Seiichi 482 Nikonov, Pavel 427 Nippon 136 Nitsch, Hermann 233, 297 Nixon, Richard 348 Nkrumah, Kwame 14, 55, 633 Noé, Luis Felipe 408, 422 Noguchi, Isamu 30, 139n6, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181

Noigandres 481, 482 Nolde, Emil 24 Noll, Michael A. 686 Non-Aligned Movement 231n7, 572, 633, 636, 685 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) 14, 35 Nouveau Réalisme 241 Nova tendencija 3 685 Nove Tendencije 685 Nove tendencije 2 685 Novedades 242 Nwoko, Demas 52, 641, 642 Nyerere, Julius 76, 77

O Oba, Hideo 41n56 Oehm, Herbert 687n1 Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs 40n27 Office of War Information 40n27 Oiticica, Hélio 53, 229, 326, 487, 494, 495n13, 513, 534, 573 Okamoto, Taro 50, 52 Okara, Gabriel 77 Okeke-Agulu, Chika 578, 636 Okeke, Uche 32, 52, 244, 590, 641, 668 Olea, Héctor 493, 495n13 Oluwabamise, Colette 415 Olympia-Film GmbH 60 Olympia: Fest der Völker/ Fest der Schönheit 60 Omar, Madiha 564 Omogbai, Colette 30, 415 On The Beach 239 Onabolu, Aina 242 Ono, Yoko 228 Orientalist 642 Orozco, José Clemente 421, 423n2, 444, 641 Ossorio, Alfonso 52, 333, 347, 379, 585 Otero, Alejandro 573 Otra Figuración 50 Ové, Horace 572 Owais, Hamed 432, 434, 445, 473

P P1 Club 59, 67n2 Padmore, George 40n26 Paik, Nam June 691, 747 Pan American Union 242 Pan-African Festival 222 Pan-Africanism 43, 45, 222, 572, 585, 639 Pan-Arabism 43, 45, 222, 559, 564 Pan, Tianshou 437 Paolini, Giulio 687n12 Paolozzi, Eduardo 143, 192, 480, 481, 486, 487, 488, 491, 492, 493, 494, 690, 693, 695, 701, 720, 721, 732, 733 Papastergiadis, Nikos 582 Pape, Lygia 242, 487, 494, 553 Parallel of Life and Art 695 Paris Salon d’Automne 444 Pasmore, Victor 571 Pasvolsky, Leo 71 Patel, Jeram 230, 280 Paulhan, Jean 217 Paz, Octavio 230, 231n9 Pechstein, Max 64 Pedrosa, Mário 241, 487, 492 Peeters, Henk 687n1 Peirce, Charles Sanders 235, 237 Petliura, Symon 628 Penck, A.R. (Winkler, Ralf) 394, 410 Penone, Giuseppe 687n12 People’s Daily 438 Perceptismo 485 Perceval, John 239

Pérez, Matilde 487 Perón, Juan Domingo 422, 487, 489n5 Peter the Great 425 Petka 155 Pettoruti, Emilio 485 Phelps-Stokes Fund 479n5 Photography 100 Years: A History of Photographic Expression by the Japanese 138 Physical Damage Division of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey 136 Picard, Max 342 Picassian 141 Picasso, Pablo23, 36, 66, 341, 347, 358, 444, 571, 576, 582 Picelj, Ivan 530, 685, 686, 687n1 Picture Post 144 Piene, Otto 687n1 Pignatari, Décio 481 Pinakothek der Moderne 65 Pinakothek, Alte 65 Pinot-Gallizio, Giuseppe 300 Pintaric�, Vera Horvat 686 19 Pintores (19 Painters) 487 Pirie, Norman 694 Piskur, Bojana 56n16 Pittura Nucleare 143 Piyadasa, Redza 35 Platonic 375 Poblete, Gustavo 487 Pohl, Uli 687n1 Polke, Sigmar 690, 714 Pollock, Jackson 45, 46, 64, 141, 144, 216, 219n8, 228, 233, 248, 250, 345, 347, 423n1, 585, 635, 698 Pomar, Júlio 422, 446, 464 Ponge, Francis 217, 218 Pop; pop art 46, 241, 422, 572, 635, 690, 691, 693, 695, 701 Popkov, Viktor 428, 446, 453 Portinari, Candido 423n1 Post-cubism; post-cubist 141, 223, 241, 641 Pound, Ezra 482 Poussin, Nicolas 347 Prakash, Gyan 635 Prashad, Vijay 56n5 Prati, Lidy 485, 487 Pre-Socratic 345 Preda, Enzo 144 Présence Africaine 50, 578, 585 Prestes Maia gallery 487 Progressive Artists’ Group, Bombay 582 Prospero 77 Pure Paints a Picture 46 Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts 425 Putar, Radoslav 685, 686 Putzel, Howard 56n19

Q Qi, Baishi 437 Qi, Muer 441n10 Qian, Shaowu 441n10 Quan, Shanshi 441n10 Quartet for the End of Time 29 Quin, Carmelo Arden 485 Quit India Movement 231n7 Qur’an 221, 222

R Raad, Walid 56n11 Rabin, Yitzhak 631 Rabindralaya, Lucknow 230 Radelet, Sergeant Richard S. 39n6 Ragon, Michel 481 Raindance Corporation 703n13 Rama, Carol 308, 506 Rancière, Jacques 563 rand Corporation 698, 703n10

Rauschenberg, Robert 53, 196, 216, 690, 712 Raza, S. H. 231n7 Red Army 151, 443 Regent Street Polytechnic 572, 573n6 Reich, Annie 354 Reichskulturkammer 39n13, 62 Reinhardt, Ad 46, 141, 514 Reinhartz, Karl 687n1 Renaissance 141, 215 René Drouin Gallery 215 Repin Institute of Art, Leningrad 438, 446 Repin, Ilya 439, 444 Resnais, Alain 41n56 Restany, Pierre 241, 584 Reuben Gallery 701 Revueltas, José 421 Rheinisches Muesum Köln-Deutz 40n22 Richier, Germaine 347 Richter, Gerhard 26, 27, 50, 64, 170, 171, 388, 690 Richter, Vjenceslav 686, 687n1 Riefenstahl, Leni 60 Riley, Bridget 237 Riopelle, Jean-Paul 216 Rivera, Diego 421, 423n2, 444 Rivers, Larry 649 Robinow, Lieutenant Wolfgang F. 39n1 Rockefeller, Nelson D. 242 Rockwell, Norman 49, 446 Rodchenko, Aleksandr 686 Rodin, Auguste 347 Rodrigo, Joaquim 708 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 69 Rosenberg, Harold 241 Rotella, Mimmo 689 Roth, Dieter 550, 551, 689, 726, 727 Rothfuss, Rhod 485, 505 Rothko, Mark 49 Royal College of Art and the Slade School 572 Rubens, Peter Paul 425 Rühm, Gerhard 698, 743 Ruscha, Ed 742 Rushdie, Salman 77 Russell-Einstein Manifesto 41n54 Russell, Bertrand 41n54, 71 Russian Constructivism 491 Russian Revolution 427, 628 Ruwad (Pioneers) 563, 564

S Sabogal, José 423n1 Sacilotto, Luís 487, 495n13 Sadamasa, Motonaga 53, 493, 548 Sadequain 50, 222, 612, 613 Said, Edward 79, 581 Salahi, El 30, 32, 221, 222, 223, 224, 360, 361, 571, 585, 596, 604, 642 Salahov, Tahir 446 Salazar, António 446 Salim, Jawad 563 Salim, Naziha 564 Salkey, Andrew 572 Salvadori, Marcello 572 Samant, Mohan 229, 329, 582, 635 Sartre, Jean-Paul 33, 50, 345, 346, 347, 348, 351, 352, 481 Sattler, Dieter 66 Sauvy, Alfred 56n6 Schaeffer, Pierre 686 Schanze, Helmut 691 Schendel, Mira 209 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang 216, 218 Schlemmer, Oskar 66 Schloss, Ruth 628, 630, 660 Schmidt-Rottluff, Karl 64, 489n7 Schneemann, Carolee 228, 310, 311, 701 Schoenberg, Arnold 29 School of Arabic Calligraphy and College

of Applied Arts 225n1 School of Design in Gordon Memorial College, Khartoum 221 School of London 572 School of Paris 230, 568, 630 Schwitters, Kurt 686 Second World 36 Sedlmayr, Hans 50 Segall, Lasar 489n7 Segi, Shinichi 144 Seissel, Josip 686 Seitz, William 685 Sekoto, Gerard 32, 348, 412, 413, 575, 576 Selim, Jawad 413, 600 Selz, Peter 347 Senghor, Léopold Sédar 33, 41n67, 53, 54, 77, 78, 79, 348, 351, 577, 587n50, 641 Serpa, Ivan 487 Seung-taek, Lee 52, 228, 319 Sevcenko, Nicolau 492 Shahn, Ben 45, 423n1, 445 Shamma, Abdul Manan 432 Shammout, Ismail 446, 628, 663 Shannon, Claude 697 Shao, Da Zhen 441n10 Shapiro, J. S. 694 Shapiro, Jerome F. 41n53 Shemza, Anwar Jalal 50, 284, 285, 493, 494, 512, 571, 572, 582, 583, 609 Shi, Lu 439 Shibrain, Ahmed Mohammed 221, 222, 223, 224, 585, 606, 642 Shimamoto, Sho�zo� 216, 305 Shindo�, Kaneto 41n56 Shiraga, Kazuo 216, 218, 228, 274, 493 Shoah (also see: Holocaust) 41n51 Shurpin, Fyodor 427, 443, 451 Shute, Nevil 239 Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts 440 Sicre, José Gómez 242 Siegel, Katy 635 Signals Gallery 230, 572, 583 Signals Group 698 Simias of Rhodes 481 Simon, Yohanan 662 Simone, Nina 578 Sintenis, Renée 64 Siporin, Mitchell 661 Siqueiros, David Alfaro 30, 49, 409, 421, 422, 423n2, 423n10, 444, 445, 446, 466, 584 Sirry, Gazbia 53, 598, 636, 637 Sithole, Lucas 368 Sitte, Willy (Willi) 446, 456 Slade School of Fine Art 221, 586n15, 641 Smith, Bernard 239 Smith, David 160, 161 Smith, Terry 38 Smithson, Alison 693, 695, 701 Smithson, Peter 693, 695, 701 Sobrino, Francisco 687n1 Socialist Modernism 686 Socialist Realism 35, 73, 239, 242, 419, 421, 422, 423n10, 425, 427, 437, 438, 439, 440, 443, 444, 445, 686 Société Africaine de Culture (SAC) 578 Society for Islamic Thought 225n17 Soldevilla, Loló 495n4, 526, 527 Sommerrock, Helge 687n1 Sontag, Susan 241, 249 Šoškic�, Ilija 687 Soto, Jésus-Rafael 572, 736 Soulages, Pierre 216 Soutine, Chaim 630 Souza, Francis Newton 32, 52, 231n7, 398, 399, 571, 572, 582, 583, 585, 591 Soviet Socialist Realism 242, 421, 423n10, 437, 438, 439, 443 Soyinka, Wole 643n9 Spanudis, Theo 242 Srnec, Aleksandar 531, 686, 687n1 Stalin, Joseph 49, 69, 419, 421, 425, 427,

428, 438, 443, 445 Stalinist 419, 421, 425, 428, 444, 584 Stamos, Theodore 53 Stanford University 79 State Museum of Oriental Art, Moscow 434 Staudt, Klaus 687n1 Steichen, Edward 41n53 Stein, Joël 687n1 Steinbeck, John 446 Stella, Frank 29, 172 Still, Clyfford 423n1 Stockhausen, Karlheinz 347 Stonard, John-Paul 691 Storm Society 437 Street Art (Zouxiang shizi jietou de yishu) 437 Studio Osman 225n1 Subramanyan, Kalpathi Ganpathi 230 Süddeutsche Zeitung 60, 63 Sudjojono, Sindoedarsono 673 Sukarno 33, 54, 77, 633 Summers, David 43 Sun, Zixi 440 Suprematists; suprematism 227, 493 Supreme Command of Allied Powers (SCAP) 41n53 Šutej, Miroslav 687n1 Suzuki, Masafumi 135 Swaminathan, Jagdish 230 Swiss Allianz group 485 Szapocznikow, Alina 29, 167, 347, 405 Szilard, Leo 71 Szombathy, Bálint 687n12

T Tagore, Rabindranath 75, 230 Tahrir Monument 563 Taizo�, Yoshinaka 56n18 Talman, Paul 687n1 Tamayo, Rufino 384, 421, 422 Tambal, Hamza al-Malik 225n13 Tan, Yongtai 441n10 Tanaka, Atsuko 493, 494, 546, 689, 744, 745 Tanavoli, Pervez 222 Tange, Kenzo� 139n6 Tapié, Michel 241, 347, 585 Tàpies, Antoni 215, 227, 230, 296 Taslitzky, Boris 444, 462 Tate Gallery 67n15, 347, 571 Tate Modern 56n11, 569n5 Tatlin, Vladimir 227, 686 Tatsuo, Ikeda 56n18 Teige, Karel 686 Tel Aviv Museum 628 Télémaque, Hervé 690, 716 Tendencije 4 685 Tendencije 5 685 The Effect of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima, Japan 136 The Family of Man 41n53, 135 The Great Depression 235, 241 The New School for Social Research 423n2 Theatre Institute, Leningrad 585 Third Reich 59, 60, 487 Third World 36, 43, 72, 221, 229, 230, 231n7, 351, 421, 431, 432, 573n3 Thorak, Josef 60 Tibol, Raquel 423 Tillich, Paul 345, 347 Time magazine 141, 575 Tito, Josip Broz 633, 689 Tobey, Mark 45, 49, 585, 605 Togliatti, Palmiro 487 Tolstoy, Leo 427 Tomasello, Luis 687n1 To�matsu, Sho�mei 136 Tomii, Reiko 241

Torres-García, Joaquín 485, 492 Traba, Marta 244, 422 Trbuljak, Goran 687n12 Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security 136 Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will) 60 Tropicália movement 229 Trotsky, Leon 423n4 Truman Doctrine 345 Truman, Harry S. 63, 71 Tuckson, Tony 406 Tumarkin, Igael 203, 630 Turki, Tomader 432 Turnbull, William 693 Tutankhamun 348 Tzara, Tristan 487, 686

U U.S. Seventh Army 59 Uecker, Günther 687n1 Ufan, Lee 228, 295 Uhlmann, Hans 64 Uli aesthetic 641 Uemae, Chiyu� 216 United Nations 24, 35, 69, 75, 76, 339, 345, 698 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) 35, 345, 346, 348, 698 Universal Declaration of Human Rights 35, 339 Universidad de Guadalajara Escuela de Arquitectura 488 University College, Ibadan 643n4 University of Auckland 77 University of Heidelberg 40n46 University of Ibadan 243 Utaibi, Ahmad Abdallah 224

V V-E Day 39n4 Valéry, Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules (Toussaint) 351 Valoch, Jir� í 686 Van Doesburg, Theo 485, 492, 493, 495n13 Van Dongen, Kees 23 Van Rijn, Rembrandt Harmenszoon 427 VanDerBeek, Stan 750 Vanya 155 Varisco, Grazia 687n1 Vassilakis, Panagiotis (Takis) 573 Vedova, Emilio 306, 646 Velázquez, Diego 427 Velepic�, Ciril 584 Veneuse, Jean 353 Venice Biennale 46, 444, 583 Ver y Estimar 487 Victoria and Albert Museum 571, 573n2 Villeglé, Jacques (Mahé de la) 303, 679, 689, 724 Vinholes, L.C. 482 Viswanathan, Gauri 77 Vittorini, Elio 487 Vlaminck, Maurice 23 Voelcker, John 693, 695 Volta Redonda and Voturantim 492 Volwahsen, Herbert 65 Von Gentz, Friedrich 71 Von Graevenitz, Gerard 687n1 Von Jawlensky, Alexej 23 Von Metternich, Klemens 71 Vostell, Wolf 26, 26, 166, 689, 691, 748, 752 Vu, Tuong 56n5

831

W Wa Thiongo, Ngugi 77 Walker Art Center, Minneapolis 56n23 Wallerstein, Immanuel 56n15 Wallraf-Richartz-Museum 63, 65 Wang, Baokang 441n10 Waqialla, Osman 221, 223, 224, 225n2 Warhol, Andy 30, 635, 690, 691, 715 Warnke, Martin 587n32 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising 631 Warsaw Pact 35, 423n9, 689 Watteau, Jean-Antoine 347 Weaver, Warren 697 Weissmann, Franz 242 Welles, Sumner 71 Wells, Herbert George 69 Wenger, Susanne 594 West Indian Students Centre 572 Westad, Odd Arne 56n5 Westermann, Horace Clifford 348 White, Charles 49, 423n1 Whitechapel Art Gallery 582, 695, 695n7 Whitney Museum of American Art 49, 569n5 Whitten, Jack 30, 52, 390, 391, 392, 393, 636, 650 Wiener, Norbert 697, 701, 702 Wilding, Ludwig 687n1 Williams, Aubrey 571 Wilson, Colin St John 693 Wilson, Ellis 575 Wilson, Sarah 26 Wilson, Woodrow 71 Winter, Fritz 341 Wladyslaw, Anatol 587n36 Woeller, Wilhelm 489n7 Wols (Alfred Otto Woldgang Schulze) 141, 262, 347, 585, 694 Woodcut Movement 437, 438 Woodruff, Hale 578 World Bank 24, 35 World Trade Organization 35 World War II 21, 24, 25, 26, 29, 30, 35, 43, 49, 52, 56n7, 59, 63, 66, 69, 71, 73, 135, 136, 138, 147, 148, 215, 222, 227, 231, 241, 345, 421, 423, 425, 437, 491, 559, 567, 571, 572, 573, 575, 582, 583, 585, 627, 633, 635, 636, 687, 693, 697, 701 Wright, Edward 693 Wright, Frank Lloyd 66 Wright, Richard 75, 577, 633 Wróblewski, Andrzej 29, 168, 169, 204, 443 Wu, Biduan 441n10 Wu, Zuoren 439 Wyeth, Andrew 45, 443, 465 Wyss, Marcel 687n1

X Xi, Jingzhi 441n10 Xiao, Feng 441n10 Li Xiushi 470 Xiwen, Dong 52, 439, 440 Xu, Beihong 439 Xu, Minghua 441n10

Y Yakovlev, Vasiliy 425, 443 Yamahata, Yo�suke 30, 135, 136, 138, 188 Yan’an Talk 438, 440 Yoshiaki, To�no 241 Yoshihara, Jiro� 585 Yoshihara, Michio 216 Younan, Ramsès 233, 278 Young Commonwealth Group 583 Yozo, Hamaguchi 584

832

Yu�suke, Nakahara 241 Yvaral, Jean-Pierre 687n1

Z Zadkine, Ossip 348 Zamriq, Hisham 432, 434 Zaria Art Society 52 Zaritsky, Yosef 628, 631, 658 Zayyat, Elias 432 Zehringer, Walter 687n1 Zeid, Princess Fahrelnissa 254, 583 Zein El Abdein, Ahmed El Tayib 223 Zen 49 341 Zenderoudi, Charles Hossein 50, 348, 610 Zeno 582 Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie 686 Zero (group) 493 Zhan, Jianjun 439 Zhang, Huaqing 441n10 Zhdanov, Andrei 443, 444 Zhou, Benyi 441n10 Zhou, Zheng 441n10 Zhukov, Marshal Georgy 425 Ziegler, Adolf 22, 39n13, 62 Žižek, Slavoj 427 Zlotnikov, Yuri 205, 740 Zurbarán, Francisco de 427 Zyklus das schwarze Zimmer 26

LIST OF LENDERS

The Africa Center, formerly the Museum for African Art, New York Aicon Gallery, New York Aishti Foundation, Beirut Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York Aomori Museum of Art Archivio Carol Rama, Turin Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney The Art Institute of Chicago Asele Institute, Nimo Associação Cultural O Mundo de Lygia Clark, Rio de Janeiro Barford Sculptures Ltd., London Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah Baró Galería, Sao Paulo Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen – Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich Berlinische Galerie – Landesmuseum für Moderne Kunst, Fotografie und Architektur, Berlin Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin Frank Bowling Udo und Anette Brandhorst Collection, Munich Brooklyn Museum, New York Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne Butcher Family Collection CAFA Art Museum, Beijing Luis de Carvalho e Oliveira, Lisbon Centre national des arts plastiques, Paris Centre Pompidou, Paris Chiba City Museum of Art Rathika Chopra & Rajan Anandan, New Delhi Saloua Raouda Choucair Collection Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona The Conner Family Trust, Los Angeles CRG Gallery, New York Des Moines Art Center Deutsche Bank Collection, Frankfurt am Main Didrichsen Art Museum, Helsinki Bridget Donahue Gallery, New York Ginette Dufrêne Eames Office, Los Angeles Melvin Edwards Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York. Estate of Uzo Egonu, London Estate of Ellsworth Kelly Estate of Alice Neel Estate of Anwar Jalal Shemza, London Estate of David Smith, New York Estate of Alina Szapocznikow Estate of Jiro Takamatsu Estate of Stan VanDerBeek Estate of Wolf Vostell, Bad Nauheim Hecilda & Sergio Fadel Collection, Rio de Janeiro Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Fondation Beyeler, Riehen bei Basel Fondation Gandur pour l’Art, Geneva Fondation Giacometti, Paris Fondazione Emilio e Annabianca Vedova, Venice Fondazione Lucio Fontana, Milan Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna di Ca’Pesaro, Venice Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini Collezione Burri, Città di Castello The Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection, Miami Stephen Friedman Gallery, London Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari Arte y Acervo, Buenos Aires Larry Gagosian Gagosian Gallery, New York Galería La Caja Negra, Madrid Galerie Georges-Phillipe & Nathalie Vallois, Paris

Galerie Lelong, New York Galerie Loevenbruck, Paris Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris – Salzburg Galerie van de Loo, Munich Gallery Hyundai, Seoul GAM - Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin Generali Foundation Collection, Vienna Glenstone, Potomac Daniel Goeritz Gordon Family Collection, Los Angeles gordonschachatcollection, Johannesburg Alexander Gray Associates, New York Grey Art Gallery. New York University Art Collection Barbara Gross Galerie, München Grosvenor Gallery, London Hales Gallery, London Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo Hartlepool Borough Council Taimur Hassan Hauser & Wirth, Zürich, London, Somerset, Los Angeles HEART Herning Museum of Contemporary Art Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University. Ithaca, NY Carmen Herrera Lynn Hershman Leeson Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura, Mexico City International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam) Istanbul Museum of Modern Art Iwalewahaus, Universität Bayreuth Amrita Jhaveri, New Delhi The Jewish Museum, New York Jasper Johns Kim Kulim Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi Klewan Collection, Munich Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles Kunstmuseum Bonn Kunstmuseum Winterthur Maria Lassnig Foundation, Vienna John Latham Leicestershire County Council Lisson Gallery, London Loft Art Gallery, Casablanca Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek MAC USP Collection – Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo MACBA. Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona Mart, Museo di arte contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto Maruki Gallery for the Hiroshima Panels, Higashimatsuyama Marwan Kassab-Bachi MATHAF: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha Almir Mavignier The Mayor Gallery, London Fergus McCaffrey, New York The Menil Collection, Houston The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Gustav Metzger Miami University Art Museum, Oxford, OH Marta Minujin Joan Mitchell Foundation, New York MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth Moderna Museet, Stockholm Musée d´Art moderne de la Ville de Paris Musée national d´art moderne/Centre de création industrielle, Paris Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City

Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico City Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon Museu de Lisboa, Lisbon Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea – Museu do Chiado, Lisbon Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig Museum der Moderne Salzburg Museum Folkwang, Essen Museum Lippo, Jakarta Museum Ludwig Cologne Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna Museum of Art, Ein-Harod Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb Museum of Fine Arts, Boston The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston The Museum of Modern Art, New York Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Nusantara (Museum MACAN), Jakarta Museum Schloss Moyland, Bedburg-Hau Museum Wiesbaden Muzeum Narodowe we Wrocławiu (National Museum in Wroclaw) Muzeum Sztuki in Łódz� Národní galerie v Praze (National Gallery in Prague) Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas National Film Center, Tokyo National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C National Gallery Singapore National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C National Museum of Australia, Canberra National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Gwacheon National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo Ernst Wilhelm Nay Stiftung, Cologne Neue Galerie Graz Neues Museum - Staatliches Museum für Kunst und Design in Nürnberg, Nuremberg Luis Felipe Noé The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC Uche Okeke Yoko Ono P.P.O.W., New York Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, Projeto Lygia Pape, Rio de Janeiro Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Philadelphia Philadelphia Museum of Art Prêt du Musée national Picasso-Paris Prada Collection, Milan Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, New York République du Sénégal Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York Dieter Roth Foundation, Hamburg Safarkhan Art Gallery, Cairo San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Aurel Scheibler, Berlin Carolee Schneemann Antoun Nabil Sehnaoui Sharjah Art Foundation Collection Sharjah Art Museum Gazbia Sirry Laurie Slatter Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts Staatliche Museen zu Berlin,Nationalgalerie The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg John-Paul Stonard The Studio Museum in Harlem Marinko Sudac Collection, Zagreb

Takamatsu Art Museum TATE, London Tel Aviv Museum of Art Tresart, Coral Gables, FL University of Iowa Museum of Art University of Lagos Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven Van Every/Smith Galleries, Davidson College, Davidson, NC Axel & May Vervoordt Foundation, Antwerp Joel Wachs Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Susanne Wenger Foundation, Krems Whitney Museum of American Art, New York Jack Whitten May and Adel Youssry Khedr Collection, Cairo Yumiko Chiba Associates, Tokyo Zamalek Art Gallery, Cairo Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp Yuri Zlotnikov And the lenders who wish to remain anonymous

835

LIST OF ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Priscilla Abecasis Jane Acheson Sarah Adamson Marianne Ahrensberg Yasmine Aidel Olufunke Akinsode Gozen Muftuoglu Aksan Amna Al Hemeiri Furat al Jamil Yuri Albert Sarah Allen Alya Mohamed Al Mulla Aldo Jimenez Altamirano Isabel Soares Alves Sivan Amar Kyung An Anasthasia Andika Ekaterina Andreeva Melisa Angela Michelle Antonisse Maria Cristina de Almeida Araujo Kelsey Arrington-Ashford Sharon Matt Atkins Swapnil Avdhesh Heidrun Bachmaier Zdenka Badovinac Roberta Cerini Baj Catherine Scrivo Baker Dabashree Banerjee Matt Bangser Joe Baptista Olatunde Barber Geanna Barlaam Friedrich-Michael Barnick Stephanie Barron Georg Baselitz Joellen El Bashir Carlos Basualdo Tobias Bäumer Olivia Bax Susana Maldonado Bayley Rodrigo Bazaldua Anneliis Beadnell Rie van Beek Attilio Begher Bavand Behpour Sarah Bejerano Margherita Belaief Luca Belenghi Gabriella Belli Ramon Tio Bellido Angela Bell-Morris Yasmine Benamara Amanda Bender Eva Bendova Antonia Bergamin Thomas Berghuis Evelyn Bergner Anders Bergstrom Inés Rodríguez Berni José Antonio Berni Mohamed Berrada Yasmine Berrada Rita Cecilia Bertoni Tobia Bezzola Jyoti Bhatt Avijna Bhattacharya Marlene Bielefeld Klaus Biesenbach Stefanie Bihlmayer Xu Bing Daniel Birnbaum Janine Biunno Christa Blatchford Daniel Blau Bernard Blistene Tamara Bloomberg Tim Blum Diana Blumenroth Marianne Boesky Laurent Le Bon

Francesco Bonami Manolo Borja-Villel Isabella Bortolozzi Jan Böttger Leila Bou Nasr Marisa Bourgoin Capucine Boutte Carol Braide Michael Brand José Mário Brandão Udo Brandhorst Maria Brassel Sabine Breitwieser Ilse Ordaz Briz Elizabeth Broun Courtney Brown Renée Brown Kristyna Brozova Friedrich von Brühl Hilde de Bruijn Susanne Brüning Adam Budak Marion Buffaut Michael Buhrs Charlotte Bullions Rico Burgmann Pablo Butcher Cordelia Butler Kristy Caldwell Levent Çalıkog˘lu Alice Calloway Marusca Caltran Andrianna Campbell Andrew Cannon Kelly Carpenter Andrea Cashman Barbara Bertozzi Castelli Edwin Castro Francesca Cattoi Dennis Cecchin Alban Chaine Dipesh Chakrabarty Sucheta Chakraborty Carla Chammas Eleanor Chapman Johnny Chen Melissa Chiu Rowena Chiu Yol Cho Anna Chodorska Emilie Choffel Maciej Cholewin�ski Angela Choon Radhika Chopra Michael Bank Christoffersen Sara Chun Tiffany Chung Vanessa Clark Sennen Codjo Jean Colombain Heidi Colsman-Freyberger Moira Connelly Matt Conway Harry Cooper Analivia Cordeiro Cathy Cordova Jerome Coupé Eleanor Crabtree Reggy Havekes-van Creij Elena Crippa Andrew Crompton Hope Cullinan Nicholas Cullinan Patrick Cunningham Elz�bieta Cyganik Fereshteh Daftari Laetitia Dalet Jörg Daur Federico Deambrosis Kirsten Degel Jürgen Dehm

Josef Deisböck John Delk Laura Deluca Liliana Dematteis Wolfgang Denk Natasha M. Derrickson Annick Des Roches Lucy Dew Söke Dinkla Andrew Dintenfass Ruti Direktor Amy Distler Leanne Dmyterko Camille Doizelet Elèna Dolino D. Angie Lee Dollard Bridget Donahue Arielle Dorlester Maurice Dorren Douglas Dreishpoon Douglas Druick Thadeu Duarte Issa M. Benitez Dueñas Diane Dufour Ginette Dufrêne Andrés G. Duprat Anita Duquette Melisa Durkee Anne-Sophie Dusselier Prajit K. Dutta Ciarán Dyke Marta Dziewan�ska Yilmaz Dziewior Barbara Economon Michael Edler Arne Ehmann Cornelia Eilers Juliane Eisele Dietmar Elger Carol Eliel Naheda El-Khoury Jane England Oliver Enwonwu David Ertl Charles Esche Nicole Espaillat Ursula Esposito Werner Esser Bruno Cezar Mesquita Esteves Reem Fadda Olukemi Fadehan Marta Fadel Elisabeth Fairman Will Faller Max Pérez Fallik Sonke Faltien Victoria Fernández-Layos Moro Annie Farrar Guide Faßbender Hannah Feldman Anna Ferrari Marc Feustel Bernd Ficker Ariane Figueiredo César Oiticica Filho Carly Fischer Dora Fisher Mónica Montes Flores Claire Floyd Tiffany Floyd Francine Flynn Megan Fontanella Sandra Fortó Fonthier Clarissa Fostel Dorotea Fotivec Jonathan Fox Mark Francis Alessio Fransoni Eliza Frecon Francesca Frediani Denis French

Wolfram Friedrich Ronja Friedrichs Lena Fritsch Jesús Fuenmayor Takashi Fukumoto Daniel Gabrielli Carla Galfano Meem Gallery Vicki Gambill Juliana Ganuza Gao Gao Felix Gaudlitz Nelly Gawellek María C. Gaztambide Fabrizio Gazzarri Chloé Geary Susanne Geiger Isa von Gerlach Narimane Gharib Larry Giacoletti Marion Gillet Guigon René Gimpel Adelaide Ginga Ellen Ginton Massimiliano Gioni Hadwig Goez Thelma Golden Barbara Gunz Goldschmidt Sasha Gomeniuk Eliza Gonzalez Timothy Goodhue Frau Götz Claudia Gould James Gould Vivien Greene Maggie Gregory Margaret C. Gregory Detlev Gretenkort Alexander Grönert Barbara Gross Nicole Groß Gabriela de la Guardia Mr. de la Guardia Tatyana Gubanova Gina Guddemi Christophe Guglielmo Ferreira Gullar Nkosinathi Gumede Jaqueline Gutiérrez Fabio Carapezza Guttuso Charlotte Gutzwiller Gina Guy Sophie Haaser Kathrin Haaßengier Fernand F. Haenggi Heinke Hagemann Kayla Hagen Noura Haggag Ken Hakuta Lubna Hammad Toshio Hara Lesley Harding Hans-Jürgen Harras Halley K. Harrisburg Helen Harrison Dakin Hart Sergey Harutoonian Yuko Hasegawa Rainer Hauswirth Lauren Haynes Allie Heath Matt Heffernan Marien van der Heijden Margareta Helleberg Sandy Heller Ann Henderson Amy Henry Carra Henry Ines Henzler Fabrice Hergott Michael Hering

837

Eva Hernández David Hertsgaard Michaela Hetzel Wolfgang Heubisch Thomas Heyden Christina Hierl Christopher Higgins Joanna Hill Jennie Hirsh Erica E. Hirshler Achim Hochdörfer Emily Hodes Aliza Hoffman Maja Hoffmann Pernille Højmark Constanze Holler Abigail Hoover Sigrid Horsch-Albert Meagan Kelly Horsman Cássia Hosni Johannes Hossfeld Christine Hourde Laura Hovenac Laura M. Hovenac Jeannine Howse Claire Hsu Marge Huang Milan Hughston Matthieu Humery Michelle Humphrey Laura Hunt Marie Christine Huyn Donald Christopher Hyde Toru Ikeda Patrycja de Bieberstein Ilgner Andrea Inselmann Tomoko Ishida Nataša Ivancˇevic� Cecilia Ivanchevich Alison Jacques Sebastian Jaehn Vineet Jain Jasna Jakšic� Robert Jarosz Alejandro Jassan Ivna Jelcˇic� Marko Jenko Amrita Jhaveri Èric Jiménez Maika Jirous Abraham Joel Jasper Johns Jennifer Johns Caren Jones Rose Jones Henna Joo Julie Joseph Jennifer Josten Miguel Juarez América Juárez François Jupin Emilia Kabakov Sonia Ka�dziołka Katerˇ ina Kalvarová Toby Kamps R. Siva Kamur Sojung Kang Geeta Kapur Evgenia Karlova Roobina Karode Abdellah Karroum Mizuho Kato Koichi Kawasaki Clive Kellner Sara Kelly Julieta Kemble Chris Kendall Amalyah Keshet Vera Kessenich Sandra Khazam Ahmed Khedr

838

Hideki Kikkawa Hyunjin Kim Seolhee Kim Matt Kirsch Naveen Kishore Udo Kittleman Michiko Kiyosawa Norman L. Kleeblatt Helmut Klewan Eva Klimtova Sanne Klinge Claudia Klugmann Simone Kobler Eunnarae Koh Thomas Köhler Nadine Koller Walther König Markus Kormann Karin Koschkar Alain Kouyoumdjian Danielle Kovacs Ute Krebs Johanne Kristensen Maren Kröger Christine Kron Jolanta Krzywka Elke Küchle Alexandra Kühnert Aya Kunii Allison Kupietzky Kerstin Küster Sung-oh Kwon Young Kwon Sarah Lagrevol Natasha Laing Eskil Lam Luciano Lanfranchi Laura Lang Katie Langjahr Elizabeth Largi Emily Larsen Emanuel Layr Galerie Emanuel Layr Carol A. Leadenham Doreen Leberecht Jiyoon Lee Mary Anne Lee Seung K. Lee Katja Leeuw Katja Lehmann Erin Leland Erin Leland Johanna Lemke Marc Leve Andreas Leventis Dominique Levy Andrea Lewis Jeremy Lewison Marie Liard-Dexet Jennifer Lim Jung Eun Lim Amy Lin Elaine Lin Barbara Lindop Nicolas Linnert Joachim Lissmann Charlie Littlewood Philippe Litzka Herve Loevenbruck Arshiya Lokhandwala Marie-José van de Loo Marília Bovo Lopes Antonia Lotz Cardiff Loy Kristen Lubben Kathleen Ludwig Eva Lund Amber R. Lynn Lisa MacDougall Diego Machado Amy MacKinnon

Conor Macklin Julie Maguire Charley Maher Zain Mahjoub Martin W. Mahoney Olga Makhroff Tomás Maldonado Wael Mansour Martin Mäntele Emilie Le Mappian Christine Marcel Adele Marini Andreas Marks Aimee L. Marshall Karin Marti Leila Martinusso Anne Massey Taro Masushio Almir Mavignier Shoair Mavlian Marie Mbow Fergus McCaffrey Cale McCammon Tara McDowell Maria McGreger Susan McGuire Franciska Meijers J. Meissner Mohammed Melehi Sonia Menezes Karla Merrifield Marianne Le Métayer Andrea Mihalovic-Lee Ann Milad Adele Minardi Gao Minglu Fabio Miniotti Marta Minujín Camille Misson Brent Mitchell Gaby Mizes Hirokazu Mizunuma Kate Monsted Joana Sousa Monteiro Charles Moore Janet Moore Stacy Moore Pavlína Morganová Gabriella Mori Laura Morris Lynda Morris Robert Morris Stuart Morrison Tanya Morrison Anne Mosseri-Marlio Markus Mueller Ramez Mufdi Mathias Mühling, Lenbachhaus Alya Mohamed Al Mulla Jennifer Mundy Estelle Mury May Muzaffar Noda Naotoshi Tommy Napier Tanja Narr Hammad Nasar Ginny Neel Hartley Neel José Alvarenga Neto Olga Neufeld Elke Neumann Constantin Neumeister Andrew Newall Lia Newman Rebekah Newman Clara Nguyen Tuan Andrew Nguyen Lara Nicholls Nick Nicholson Georges Nicol Alexandra Nicolaides

Selima Niggl Harumi Nishizawa Corinna Nisse Lutz Nitsche Luis Felipe Noe Sarah Norris Eveline Notter Ady Nugeraha Cynthia Octavianty Sean O'Harrow Vassilis Oikonomopoulos Chukuma I. Okadigwe Marie Okamura Yukinori Okamura Nadezhda Okurenkova Luisa Oliveira Sarah Oliver Duro Olowu Duro Oni Ayala Oppenheimer Patricia O'Regan Sicarú Vásquez Orozco Johanna Ortner Andrea Pacheco Filipe Pacheco Filipe Pacheco Hazelle Anne Page Marina Panteleymon Paula Pape Taiyana Pimentel Paradoa Mihwa Park Shruti Parthasarathy Anne Pasternak Bettina Paust Mirta Pavic Marc Payot Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro Luis Pérez-Oramas Friedrich Petzel Wilfried Petzi Chelsea Pierce Joachim Pissarro Jan Placák Charles Pocock Jeff Poe Alexandre Pomar Sabina Povšicˇ Ida Rodriguez Prampolini Franck Prazan Natalia Pribytok Vivienne Prince Leslie Prouty Maureen Pskowski Bernhard Purin Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi Derek Quezada Wojciech Radlinski Amy Rahn Meheen Rangoonwala Karola Rattner Nada Raza Sangeeta Razu Kasia Redzisz Sophie Reinhardt Jonathan Rendell Natalia Revale Liz Reynolds Annika Riethmüller Sofia Rinaldi Ryan Roa Lauren Robbins Soledad de Pablo Roberto Andrea Robertson Sylvain Rochat Anne Rodler Daniel Goeritz Rodriguez Shawn Roggenkamp James Rondeau Andrea Rosen Adriana Rosenberg Cora Rosevear

Emmanuelle Rossignol Claudia Rozzoni Nicole Ruppert Mickey Ryan Hanseug Ryu Anna Saciuk-Ga�sowska Mona Saïd Ibrahim El Salahi Katherine El Salahi Ludmilla Sala Tony G. Salame Armando Salas Emily Salmon Jillian Samant Julião Sarmento Chiara Sarteanesi Hidenori Sasaki Adriana Scalise Carmen Schaefer Tatjana Schäfer Aurel Scheibler Katharina Schendl Amy Schichtel Claudia Schicktanz Lothar Schirmer Nikolaus Schneider Henning Schroeder Shannon Schuler Anna Schüler Dirk Schulz Patricia Schulze Rachel Schumann Sabine Schumann Hans-Jürgen Schwalm Dieter Schwarz Heather Schweikhardt Otto Selen David Senior Luise Seppeler Pilar García Serrano Annemarie Seyda Yazid Shammout Gulam Mohammed Sheikh Samantha Sheiness Aphra Shemza Mary Shemza Oksana Shestaka Richard Shiff Amir Sidharta Warren Siebrits Manjari Sihare-Sutin Michelle Silva Mark Simmons Lorna Simpson Janne Sirén Anat Danon Sivan Laurie Slatter Kim Sluijter Daniela Smetanca Elizabeth Smith Adam Sobota Jana Suhani Soin Dawn Somerville Patricia Sorroche Francisca Sousa Heather South Allison Spangler Nancy Spector Chelsea Spengemann Julie Spielman Stefan Ståhle Amy Staples Galeria Starmach Pari Stave Kevin Stayton Jane Steinhaeuser Andrea Stengel Nadezhda Stepanova Peter Stevens Laura Stewart John-Paul Stonard

Jeremy Strick Sile Stuttard Marinko Sudac Kathrin Sündermann Chris Sutherns Astrid Suzano Katsuo Suzuki Yoshiko Suzuki Sandra Sykorova Christian Tagger Marjan Tajeddini Suheyla Takesh Philip Tan Takako Tanabe Stef Tanki Bárbara Tavares Alex Taylor Benjamin Teague Ann Temkin Serkan Terziog˘lu Helga Theodhori Lukas Thiele Amanda Thompson David Thompson Florence Thurmes Jennifer Tobias Valerio Trabandt Flora Triebel Łukasz Trzcin�ski Yassmeen Tukan Alexandr Tulenev Ijeoma Uche-Okeke Yoko Ono Frau Uecker Günther Uecker Joseph Underwood Xavier Guzmán Urbiola Burkhard von Urff Michael D. Uva Eugenio Valdes Georges-Philippe Vallois Nathalie Vallois Leni Velasquez Noelia Ordoñez Velez Sander Vermeulen Ulf Vierke Franck Vigneux Maria Villa Olga Viso Marcia Vissers Wendy Vogel David Vogt Igor Volkov Kristina von Knorring Angelika von Schwedes Rafael Vostell Joel Wachs Sheena Wagstaff Caroline V. Wallace Anthony Wallis Cathleen Walter Eva Walters Katy Wan Lisa Webb Barbara Weber Stefan Wedepohl Low Sze Wee Anne Wehr Adam Weinberg Bernd Weiß Astrid Welter Dr. Clemens Wendtner Julia Westner Rachel Wetzler David White Jack Whitten Mary Whitten Mirsini Whitten Ann Noel Williams Maggie Williams Margaret Williams

Brent Willison Andrew Wilson Katherine Wilson Amelia Winata Mr. and Mrs. Winokur Beate Witt Agnès Wolff Michèle M. Wong Karli Wurzelbacher Kelso Wyeth Deborah Wythe Li Yaochen Thomas Yarker Atsuo Yasuda Cho Jeong Yeol Satoshi Yokota Sylvie Younan Okamuru Yukinori Luca Zaffarano Abdulaziz Mohammad Zaghmout Adamova Zaneta Bruno Zanon Lisa Zemann Isabella J. Zieritz Magdalena Ziolkowska Magdalena Ziółkowska Carolina Ziotti Yuri Zlotnikov Bonnie van Zoest

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IMAGE CREDITS

Table of Contents (left to right) Leo Castelli Gallery records, circa 1880– 2000, bulk 1957–1999. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Photo: Kiyoji Otsuji, © Seiko Otsuji; Courtesy of Musashino Art University Museum & Library and Tokyo Publishing House. From the portfolio “GUTAI PHOTOGRAPH 1956–57”; Photo: Latif Al Ani, Courtesy Ruya Foundation for Contemporary Culture in Iraq; Photo: Hans Niederbacher © Atelier Hermann Nitsch; Photograph: Clay Perry, Courtesy England & Co. Visual Essay: Social and Political Events 1 © Imperial War Museums (BU 1292); 2: © Imperial War Museums (NYP 27322); 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 12, 14, 18, 30 National Archives and Records Administration; 7 © Imperial War Museums (BU 8573); 8 © Imperial War Museums (D 25636); 10 AFP/Getty Images; 11 © Imperial War Museums (MH 29427); 15 Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1990032-29A; 16 U. S. Army Photo; 19 Central Press/Getty Images; 21, 44, 49, 67, 70 picture alliance/AP Images; 22 Photo by Dmitri Kessel/The LIFE Picture Collection/ Getty Images; 23 Photo by Keystone-France/ Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images; 24 Photo by Frank Shershel/GPO via Getty Images; 25 Henry Ries/NYT/laif; 26, 39 U.S. Defense Department; 27, 32 © Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos/Agentur Focus; 28 © Robert Capa © International Center of Photography/Magnum Photos/ Agentur Focus; 29 © New China Pictures/ Magnum Photos/Agentur Focus; 33 UNRWA photo by Hrant Nakashian, 1949; 34 Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-S88796/Fotograf: Erich Zühlsdorf; 35 Allsport/Getty Images; 36 Photo by J. R. Eyerman/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images; 37 Presseund Informationsamt der Bundesregierung, Perlia-Archiv; 38 Photo by Earl Leaf/ Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images; 40 IVAA; 42 Bibliotheca Alexandrina; 43 Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Archives; 45 Bentley Archive/Popperfoto/Getty Images; 46 akg-images/Erich Lessing; 47 Photo: Eli Weinberg; 48 Presse- und Informationsamt der Bundesregierung; 50, 54, 62, 78 Bettmann Archive/Getty Images; 51 © Marilyn Silverstone/Magnum Photos/ Agentur Focus; 52 © Burt Glinn/Magnum Photos/Agentur Focus; 53 Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ppmsca-19729; 55 OFF/AFP/ Getty Images; 57 Courtesy FCA Group; 58 NASA; 59, 63 © Rene Burri/Magnum Photos/Agentur Focus; 60 Everett Collection/ action press; 61 STF/AFP/Getty Images; 64 © Nicolas Tikhomiroff/Magnum Photos/Agentur Focus; 65 Vasiliy Malyshev/ Sputnik; 66 picture alliance/dpa; 68, 76 © Marc Riboud/Magnum Photos/Agentur Focus; 69 © Micha Bar Am/Magnum Photos/Agentur Focus; 71 Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LCUSZ62-128465; 72 AFP/Getty Images; 73 © Wayne Miller/Magnum Photos/Agentur Focus; 74 Photo: Latif Al Ani, Courtesy Ruya Foundation for Contemporary Culture in Iraq; 75 L HUMANITE/KEYSTONE-FRANCE/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images; 77 Cecil Stoughton, White House Press Office (WHPO); 79 Carl T. Gossett/ NYT/Redux/laif; 80 © Bruce Davidson/ Magnum Photos/Agentur Focus; 81 Photo: Horst Faas, picture alliance/AP Images.

Chronology of Social and Political Events 1 Art Media/Print Collector/Getty Images; 2 National Archives and Records Administration; 4 U. S. Army Photo; 7 © Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos/Agentur Focus; 8 © Marc Riboud/Magnum Photos/ Agentur Focus; 9 UN Photo/MBH; 10 © Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos/Agentur Focus; 11 Photo: Horst Faas, picture alliance/ AP Images. Visual Essay: Arts and Culture 1 Courtesy of the Western Regional Archives, State Archives of North Carolina; 2 © Pierre Jahan/Roger-Viollet; 3 © Sidney Nolan Trust. Port Phillip City Collection; 4 © The Willem de Kooning Foundation, New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Harry Bowden papers, 1922-1972. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; 5 Archive Cobra Museum of Modern Art, Amstelveen; 6 Photo: Charles Breijer © Charles Breijer/Nederlands Fotomuseum; 7 ©2016 Mondrian/Holtzman Trust; 8 Unknown photographer, Establishment of the Monument at Mishmar HaEmek, 1945, Photograph, 11.5 × 17.2 cm, Information Center for Israeli Art, Israel Museum, Jerusalem; 9 Courtesy of The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow; 10, 21 Archivi Farabola; 11 La Biennale di Venezia – Archivio Storico delle Arti Contemporanee, photo by Ferruzzi – Venezia; 12 Courtesy Museu do Neo-Realismo, Vila Franca de Xira; 13 DAG Modern archives; 14, 25, 69 Courtesy of Lubna Hammad; 15 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Courtesy Archivi Guttuso; 16 © The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016; 17 Família Cordeiro; 19 © Pollock-Krasner Foundation/VG BildKunst, Bonn 2016. ©1991 Hans Namuth Estate, Courtesy Center for Creative Photography, Arizona; 20, 36 IVAA; 22 © Alexander Calder, Calder Foundation, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Arquivo Histórico Wanda Svevo/ Fundação Bienal de São Paulo; 23 © The Estate of Reg Butler; 24, 39 Courtesy Li Yaochen; 26 © Man Ray Trust, Paris/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016; 28, 45 © Estate of Anwar Jalal Shemza; 29 © Succession Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti + ADAGP) Paris. Photograph by Ernst Scheidegger © 2016 Stiftung Ernst Scheidegger-Archiv, Zürich; 30 © Succession Picasso/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016; 31 From the archive of the photographer Israel Zafrir, The Information Center for Israeli Art, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; 32 Courtesy of The Ben Enwonwu Foundation; 33 Photographer: Kiyoji Otsuji, © Seiko Otsuji, Musashino Art University Museum & Library, Courtesy of Tokyo Publishing House. From the portfolio “eyewitness”; 34 Photo: Karel Koukal, Courtesy Ztichlá klika; 35 Courtesy of the Gallizio Archive, Turin; 37 Architectural Press Archive/RIBA Collections; 38 © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photograph Collection. Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Archives, New York. Photo: Kay Harris; 40 Osaka City Museum of Modern Art GA12; 41 © Helen Frankenthaler Foundation Inc./ VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. © Burt Glinn/ Magnum Photos/Agentur Focus; 42 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo: Siegfried Kühl, Courtesy K.O. Götz und Rissa-Stiftung; 43 ©YAYOI KUSAMA, Courtesy of Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo/

Singapore; 44 Photographer: Kiyoji Otsuji, © Seiko Otsuji, Courtesy of Musashino Art University Museum & Library and Tokyo Publishing House. From the portfolio “GUTAI PHOTOGRAPH 1956-57”; 46 Photo by Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images; 47 Photo by Fritz Goro/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images; 48 Archive of Pancho Guedes, Lisbon; 49 Samsung Museum of Art, Leeum Library: donated by Yi Ku-yol; 50 © Niki Charitable Art Foundation/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo: Shunk-Kender © J. Paul Getty Trust. The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2014.R.20); 51 Courtesy of Projeto Hélio Oiticica; 52 Photo by Martha Holmes/ The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images; 54 Photo: Shunk-Kender © J. Paul Getty Trust. The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2014.R.20); 55 Photo: Kishor Parekh, Courtesy Jyoti Bhatt Archive at Asia Art Archive; 56 AMSAC Papers at the Moorland-Spingarn Archives, Howard University; 57 Courtesy Allan Kaprow Estate and Hauser & Wirth; 58, 74 Marta Minujin Archives; 59 Courtesy Estate of K.G. Subramanyan, Jyoti Bhatt, and Asia Art Archive; 60 Jyoti Bhatt Archive at Asia Art Archive; 61 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo: Hiroko Kudo; 62 © VG BildKunst, Bonn. bpk/Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Archiv Sohm/Hartmut Rekort; 63 © ullstein bild - Rudolf Dietrich; 64 © Nam June Paik Estate, Photo: Manfred Leve © estate of Manfred Leve, Courtesy Museum Kunstpalast, AFORK, Düsseldorf; 65 Courtesy Antony Penrose; 66 © Courtesy Atelier Cruz-Diez Paris; 67 DEVA/Iwalewahaus, Universität Bayreuth; 68 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo: Enrique Bordes Mangel, reproucción autorizada por El Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura, 2016; 70 © Elisabeth Nay-Scheibler, Köln/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Günther Becker/© documenta Archiv; 71 Minoru Hirata, “Hi Red Center’s Cleaning Event (officially known as Be Clean! and Campaign to Promote Cleanliness and Order in the Metropolitan Area)”, 1964, Gelatin silver print, Image size: 33.5 × 22.2 cm, Paper size: 35.7 × 27.8 cm, © Minoru Hirata, Courtesy of Taka Ishii Gallery Photography/Film; 72 Photo Desdemone Bardin, Courtesy of Projeto Hélio Oiticica; 73 Courtesy George Maciunas Foundation Inc., New York; 75 Photo: Eustachy Kossakowski, © Anka Ptaszkowska. Negative owned by Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Poland; 76 Photo by Fred W. McDarrah/Getty Images. Chronology of Arts and Culture 1 © Succession Picasso/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. 2 Haus der Bayerischen Geschichte, Augsburg (Bayer. Pressebild); 4 © Kosice Museum, Buenos Aires, Argentina; 5 Courtesy of the Andrzej Wroblewski Foundation; 6 Archive Cobra Museum of Modern Art, Amstelveen; 7 © 1998 Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona Foundation, Photo Courtesy Ad Reinhardt Foundation, New York; 8 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Collection of the Library and Documentation Center of MASP; 9 © Folhas, Image Courtesy Arquivo Histórico Wanda Svevo/Fundação, Bienal de São Paulo; 10 D.R.© MATHIAS GOERITZ (1953), BAJO LICENCIA DE L.M.DANIEL GOERITZ AND GALERÍA LA CAJA NEGRA, MADRID and FONDO MATHIAS GOERITZ. CENIDIAP/INBA.; 11

© Alexander Calder, Calder Foundation, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photographer, Paolo Gasparini. Courtesy Calder Foundation, New York/Art Resource, NY; 12 Günther Becker/© documenta Archiv; 13 Horace Mann Bond Papers (MS 411). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries; 14 Photographer: Kiyoji Otsuji, © Seiko Otsujii; Courtesy of Musashino Art University Museum & Library and Tokyo Publishing House. From the portfolio “GUTAI PHOTOGRAPH 1956-57”; 15 © Yves Klein, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2016 © Photo Paul Sarisson; 16 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Hollis Frampton, untitled from The Secret World of Frank Stella, 1958–1962, black-and-white photograph, 8 × 10’’, Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, © Estate of Hollis Frampton; 17 Artistic action by Yves Klein, © Yves Klein, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2016, Photo © Harry Shunk and Janos Kender – J.Paul Getty Trust. The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. (2014.R.20); 18 © Succession Picasso/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. © Inge Morath/Magnum Photos/Agentur Focus; 19 Courtesy Archivio Baj, Vergiate; 20 Photo © Harry Shunk and Janos Kender - J.Paul Getty Trust. The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. (2014.R.20); 23 Courtesy Julieta Kemble; 25 Photo: Sameer Makarius, Courtesy Luis Felipe Noé papers, Buenos Aires; 26 Photograph: Reiner Ruthenbeck/GERHARD RICHTER. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016; 27 Photograph: Clay Perry, Courtesy England & Co.; 28 Courtesy Galerie Krinzinger Vienna. Essays Enwezor fig. 1 Photo by Margaret BourkeWhite/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images; Enwezor fig. 2 © Imperial War Museums (A 30427); Enwezor fig. 3 Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München; Enwezor fig. 4 Stadtarchiv München; Enwezor fig. 5 Haus der Kunst, Historisches Archiv; Enwezor fig. 6 Haus der Kunst, Historisches Archiv; Enwezor fig. 7 Photo by John Deakin/Picture Post/Getty Images; Enwezor fig. 8 © Yosuke Yamahata; Enwezor fig. 9 © Gerhard Richter 2016 (1175); Enwezor fig. 10 © Succession Picasso/ VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. © 2016. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence; Enwezor fig. 11 © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. © Tate, London 2016; Enwezor fig. 12 © VG BildKunst, Bonn 2016; Enwezor fig. 13 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Adam Rzepka; Enwezor fig. 14 Courtesy Maruki Gallery for the Hiroshima Panels; Enwezor fig. 15 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photography © The Art Institute of Chicago; Enwezor fig. 16 DEVA, Universität Bayreuth; Enwezor fig. 17 © Estate of F N Souza. All rights reserved/ VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Image Courtesy of Aicon Gallery; Siegel fig. 2 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016; Siegel fig. 3 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Philippe Migeat; Siegel fig. 4 © Taro Okamoto; Siegel fig. 6 © Lee Seungtaek; Siegel fig. 7 © Gazbia Sirry; Siegel fig. 8 © 2016. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence; Siegel fig. 9 © Image: Projeto Lygia Pape. Photograph by Paula Pape, 1983; Wilmes

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fig. 1 © Scherl/Süddeutsche Zeitung Photo; Wilmes fig. 2 Stadtarchiv München; Wilmes fig. 3 © bpk – Bildagentur für Kunst, Kultur und Geschichte; Wilmes fig. 5 Picture alliance/AP Images; Wilmes fig. 7 Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-1992-0410546/Fotograf: Dietrich, Hans; Wilmes fig. 8 Photo: Maximilian Geuter © Haus der Kunst; Wilmes fig. 9 © Süddeutsche Zeitung Photo; Wilmes fig. 10 © Succession Picasso/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Stadtarchiv München; Mazower fig. 1 © The Estate of John Vachon; Mazower fig. 2 Picture alliance/AP Images; Mazower fig. 3 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo: Dirk Pauwels; Chakrabarty fig. 2 Photo by Keystone/Getty Images; Chakrabarty fig. 3 Photo by Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images; Nakamori fig. 1 © Yo¯suke Yamahata; Nakamori fig. 3 © Shomei Tomatsu. Photo: Minneapolis Insitute of Art; Nakamori fig. 4 © 2016 Arata Isozaki; Petersen fig. 1 © Lucio Fontana by SIAE/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Courtesy Galleria del Naviglio Milano; Braun fig. 1 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. © Fondation Gandur pour l'Art, Geneva, Switzerland. Photo: Sandra Pointet; Braun fig. 2 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo: The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Denis Farley; Braun fig. 3 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016; Hassan fig. 3 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016; Kapur fig. 1 © The John Latham Foundation; Courtesy Lisson Gallery; Kapur fig. 2 © Murakami Makiko and the former members of Gutai Art Association. Courtesy of Fergus McCaffrey; Kapur fig. 3 Photo: Ashish Dhir, KNMA Photography; Kapur fig. 4 Courtesy Projeto Hélio Oiticica; Kapur fig. 5 Courtesy Estate of K.G. Subramanyan, Jyoti Bhatt, and Asia Art Archive; Shiff fig. 1 © Lucio Fontana by SIAE/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo: J & M Zweerts; Shiff fig. 2 © Barnett Newman Foundation/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016; Shiff fig. 3 © Shiraga Fujiko and the former members of Gutai Art Association. Courtesy of Fergus McCaffrey; Smith fig. 2 © Sidney Nolan Trust © National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Heibel fig. 1 © Elisabeth Nay-Scheibler, Köln/VG BildKunst, Bonn 2016; Heibel fig. 2 © VG BildKunst, Bonn 2016. © bpk – Bildagentur für Kunst, Kultur und Geschichte; Wilson fig. 2 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016; Wilson fig. 3 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016 © Piotr Stanisławski; Bhabha fig. 1 © Marc Riboud/ Magnum Photos/Agentur Focus; Anreus fig. 1 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo: Agustin Estrada; Anreus fig. 2 Archivio Antonio Berni; Degot fig.1 The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow; Degot fig. 2 © The State Russian Museum 2016. Photo: Mark Vasilevich Skoromorokh; Degot fig. 3 © The State Russian Museum 2016. Photo: Mark Vasilevich Skoromorokh; Degot fig. 4 © The State Russian Museum 2016. Photo: Mark Vasilevich Skoromorokh; Lenssen fig. 2 Courtesy Rafa Nasiri Studio; Lenssen fig. 3 © The State Museum of Oriental Art (Moscow); Drosos & Golan Fig. 1 The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow; Drosos & Golan Fig. 2 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo: Zdeneˇk Sodoma; Drosos & Golan Fig. 3 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. © The State Russian Museum 2016; Erber fig. 1 © Image: Projeto Lygia Pape; Erber fig. 2 Reproduced with the permission of Ms. Sumiko Hashimoto; Erber fig. 3 © Ferreira Gullar; Giunta fig. 1 © 2016 Galería Jorge Mara-La Ruche; Giunta fig. 2 © The Asso-

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ciação Cultural O Mundo de Lygia Clark; Giunta fig. 3 © Projeto Hélio Oiticica; Ramirez fig. 1 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Collection: Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil; Ramirez fig. 2 © Tomás Maldonado. Photo: José Cristelli; Ramirez fig. 3 © The Estate of Anwar Jalal Shemza; Ramirez fig. 4 © Image: Projeto Lygia Pape. Photograph by Paula Pape, 1983; Grenier fig. 2 Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by-nc-nd/4.0/; Martin fig. 1 © VG BildKunst, Bonn 2016. Courtesy Frank Bowling Archive; Martin fig. 2 © VG BildKunst, Bonn 2016 © Clay Perry, England & Co, London; Wofford fig. 2 © Gerard Sekoto Foundation/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016; Wofford fig. 3 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Courtesy Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York; Wofford fig. 4 © VG BildKunst, Bonn 2016. AMSAC Papers at the Moorland-Spingarn Archives, Howard University; Wofford fig. 5 AMSAC Papers at the Moorland-Spingarn Archives, Howard University; Lentini fig. 1 © Clay Perry, England & Co, London; Lentini fig. 2 Courtesy of Moderna galerija (MG+MSUM), Museum of Modern Art and Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, Ljubljana; Lentini fig. 3 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016; Bar Or fig. 1 © Shlomo Bezem ; Bar Or fig. 2 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016; Bar Or fig. 3 Roni Ben Dor; Gupta fig. 1 © Estate of M.F. Husain; Gupta fig. 2 © Gazbia Sirry; Gupta fig. 3 © Jack Whitten/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016; Okeke-Agulu fig. 2 © Estate of Uche Okeke ; Okeke-Agulu fig. 3 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016; Okeke-Agulu fig. 4 © Demas Nwoko; Denegri fig. 1 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo: Agostino Osio, Milano © Fondazione Piero Manzoni, Milano; Grasskamp fig. 1 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016; Grasskamp fig. 2 John-Paul Stonard; Lee Turner fig. 1 Photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt/Pix Inc./The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images; Lee Turner fig. 2 Photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt/Pix Inc./The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images; Lee Turner fig. 3 © Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari. Arte y Acervo, Buenos Aires. Plates 1, 73 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016 © Musée d'Art Moderne/Roger-Viollet; 2 © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All Rights Reserved/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo: Peter Cox, Eindhoven, The Netherlands; 3 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo: David Heald; 4 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo: Gary Gold; 5, 6, 7, 13, 70, 77, 85, 98, 99, 133, 134, 151, 165, 208, 225, 260, 270, 272, 274, 328, 331, 339, 341, 346, 351 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016; 8, 160 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo: Fabrice Gousset; 9, 10, 43 By Courtesy of Andrzej Wróblewski Foundation; 11 © Gerhard Richter 2016 (1175). Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg; 12 © Gerhard Richter 2016 (1175) © bpk/Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Galerie-Verein München e.V; 14, 15 © All Rights Reserved. Maryland Collage Institute of Art/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016; 16 © The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Digital Image © Whitney Museum, N.Y.; 17 © The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum/

VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo: Patty Wallace; 18, 19, 20, 21 © The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum/ VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016; 22 © The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo: PD Rearick; 23 © The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum/ VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo: Soichi Sunami; 24 © K. Appel Foundation/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Courtesy of the Foundation and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles/ New York/Tokyo; 25 © K. Appel Foundation/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016; 26, 27 Courtesy Maruki Gallery for the Hiroshima Panels; 28 © Yo¯suke Yamahata; 29 © Estate of HF Weaver Hawkins. Photo: AGNSW; 30 © The Jess Collins Trust; 31, 325 © Trustees of the Paolozzi Foundation, Licensed by VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016; 32 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Stiftung Museum Schloss Moyland/ Joseph Beuys Archiv. Photo: Walter Klein; 33 © Barnett Newman Foundation/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photography © The Art Institute of Chicago; 34 © Estate of Norman W. Lewis. Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY. Photograph © 2016 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; 35 © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016; 38 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo: Kevin Todora; 39 © The Henry Moore Foundation. All Rights Reserved/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016; 42, 282, 285 © Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Photo: Elad Sarig; 44 © Yuri Zlotnikov. The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow; 45, 46 © Kim Kulim; 47 © Mira Schendel Estate; 48 © Pollock-Krasner Foundation/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016 © 2016. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence; 49 © Pollock-Krasner Foundation/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016 © Tate, London 2016; 50 © The Willem de Kooning Foundation, New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016 © bpk/The Metropolitan Museum of Art; 51, 52 Courtesy of the Estate of Ernest Mancoba and Galerie Mikael Andersen; 53 © Pollock-Krasner Foundation/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Digital Image © Whitney Museum, N.Y.; 55 © 2016 Leon Kossoff; 56 © 2016 Frank Auerbach. Image reproduced with the permission of the Museum of Hartlepool, copyright Hartlepool Borough Council; 57 © Helen Frankenthaler Foundation Inc./VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016; 58 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016 © bpk/Nationalgalerie, SMB/Jörg P. Anders; 59 © Estate of Philip Guston, Courtesy Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Genevieve Hanson; 60, 61 © Elisabeth Nay-Sheibler, Köln/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo: Lothar Schnepf, Köln; 62, 102 © The John Latham Foundation, Courtesy Lisson Gallery. Photography: Ken Adlard; 63 © Estate of Joan Mitchell. Photo: José Manuel Costa Alves; 64 © Estate of Joan Mitchell; 65, 114 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo: Axel Schneider, Frankfurt am Main; 66 © Siah Armajani/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016; 67, 159 © Maria Lassnig Foundation; 68 © Estate of Beauford Delaney, Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY; 69 © Mr. Hisao Shiraga; 71 © Archives Ramsès Younan, Paris, France. Photo © Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien; 72 © Estate of Jeram Patel; 74 © Rasheed Araeen.

Image Courtesy of Sharjah Art Foundation; 75, 76, 259 © The Estate of Anwar Jalal Shemza; 78 © Droits réservés/Cnap/ Photographe: Yves Chenot; 79 © 2016 The Estate of Eva Hesse. Galerie Hauser & Wirth, Zurich; 80, 81, 82, 156 Photo © 2016 National Gallery in Prague; 83 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016 © Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini Collezione Burri, Città di Castello – by SIAE 2016; 84 © Lucio Fontana by SIAE/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016 © Fondazione Lucio Fontana; 86 © Fondation Antoni Tàpies Barcelona/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016; 87 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo © Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien; 88, 89 © Niki Charitable Art Foundation/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo : André Morin; 90 © Estate of Pinot Gallizio; 91, 307 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016 © bpk/ CNAC-MNAM/Philippe Migeat; 92, 299, 317 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo: André Morin; 93 © Marta Minujín; 95 © Paolo Mussat Sartor © Fondazione Emilio e Annabianca Vedova, Venezia; 96, 199 Courtesy © Archivio Carol Rama, Torino and Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin; 97, 203, 204, 205 © The Associação Cultural O Mundo de Lygia Clark; 100 © 2016 Lee Bontecou. Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, USA/Museum purchase funded by D. and J. de Menil/Bridgeman Images; 101 © The John Latham Foundation, Courtesy Lisson Gallery © Tate, London 2016; 103 © The Estate of Marcos Grigorian; 104 © Estate of Jirˇ í Kolárˇ. Photo: Neues Museum in Nürnberg/New Museum in Nuremberg; 105 © Lee Seung-taek; 106 © Yayoi Kusama. Photo: Rich Sanders, Des Moines, Iowa; 107 © Yayoi Kusama; 108 © Gustav Metzger; 109 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo: Genevieve Hanson; 110 © Projeto Hélio Oiticica © Tate, London 2016; 112, 257, 278 © 2016. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/ Scala, Florence; 113 © David Medalla. Archivo Fotográfico Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía; 115 © The Ossorio Foundation. Courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art; 116 Archivio Antonio Berni; 117 © Succession Picasso/ VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016 © bpk/RMN - Grand Palais/Jean-Gilles Berizzi; 118 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photography Courtesy of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University; 119, 244, 254 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. DEVA, Universität Bayreuth; 120 © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All Rights Reserved/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016; 121, 122, 123, 124 © Succession Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti + ADAGP) Paris; 125 © The Haenggi Foundation Inc; 126, 127, 141, 191 Courtesy Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha; 128, 187, 250 Image Courtesy of Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah; 129 © Oliver Enwonwu/The Ben Enwonwu Foundation; 130 © The Willem de Kooning Foundation, New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016; 131 © The Willem de Kooning Foundation, New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo: Tim Nighswander/Imaging4Art.com; 132 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Beyeler Collection. Photo: Peter Schibli, Basel; 135 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photography by Fenessa Adikoesoemo; 136 © Estate of Magda Cordell McHale; 137 Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY; 138,

139 © Donation Jorn, Silkeborg/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016; 140 © 2016 Frank Auerbach; 142 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016 © D.R. Museo Nacional de Arte/ Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura, 2016; 143 © The Estate of Philip Guston. Photo: Ben Blackwell; 144 © Georg Baselitz, 2016. Photo: Frank Oleski, Köln; 145 © Georg Baselitz, 2016. Photo: David Ertl; 146 © Gerhard Richter 2016 (1175); 147, 148, 149, 150 © Jack Whitten/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photographer: John Berens. Courtesy of the Artist and Hauser & Wirth, New York and Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp; 152 © Estate of Leon Golub/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016 © The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts. Courtesy The Estate of Leon Golub and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Alex Delfanne; 153, 154 © Estate of F. N. Souza, All Rights Reserved/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016; 155 © Estate of M.F. Husain. Image © 2011 Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA. Photography by Walter Silver; 157 © On Kawara; 158 © Maria Lassnig Foundation. Photo: Wilfried Petzi; 161 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo: AGNSW; 162 © Marwan Kassab-Bachi. Photo: Jörg von Bruchhausen; 163 © Luis Felipe Noé; 164 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo: Javier Hinojosa; 167, 169 © Gerard Sekoto Foundation/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016; 168 Jewad Selim Estate. Image Courtesy of Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah; 170 Courtesy City of Zagreb, Studio Kožaric´. Courtesy of Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb; 171, 256, 293 DEVA, Universität Bayreuth; 172 The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow; 173, 175 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow; 174, 253 © The State Russian Museum 2016; 176 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016 © Estate of John T. Biggers. Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY; 177 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016 © bpk/Museum der bildenden Künste, Leipzig/Ursula Gerstenberger; 178 Courtesy Galeria Stefan Szydlowski; 179 © Estate of Beauford Delaney. Courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art; 180 © Estate of Alice Neel. Photo: Ethan Palmer; 181 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016 © Archivio Fotografico e Mediateca Mart; 182 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016 © Tate, London 2016; 183 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016 © Fundação Júlio Pomar; 184 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. António Jorge Silva/Atelier-Museu Júlio Pomar 2016; 185 © Andrew Wyeth/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Joseph E. Temple Fund; 186 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo: Gerardo Cordero; 190 Collection of National Gallery Singapore; 192 © Fundación Gego. Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, USA. Fundacion Gego Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston/Bridgeman Images; 193 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016 © Schweizerisches Institut für Kunstwissenschaft Zürich, Lutz Hartmann; 194 © Carmen Herrera, Courtesy Lisson Gallery. Photography: Adam Reich; 195 © Gyula Kosice; 196 Courtesy of Barford Sculptures Limited/ Gagogian Gallery. Photo: Mike Bruce; 197 © Tomás Maldonado; 198 Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, USA/Museum purchase funded by the Caroline Wiess Law Accessions Endowment Fund/

Bridgeman Images; 200 © The Associação Cultural O Mundo de Lygia Clark. Mario Costa Grissolli; 201 © The Associação Cultural O Mundo de Lygia Clark. Photo: Marcelo Ribeiro Alvares Correa; 202 © The Associação Cultural O Mundo de Lygia Clark. Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, USA/The Adolpho Leirner Collection of Brazilian Constructive Art, museum purchase funded by the Caroline Wiess Law Accessions Endowment Fund/ Bridgeman Images; 206 © The Estate of Anwar Jalal Shemza. Image Courtesy of Jhaveri Contemporary and the Estate of Anwar Jalal Shemza. © Vipul Sangoi; 207 © Projeto Hélio Oiticica; 209 © Aluíso Carvão. Photo Courtesy of Edições Pinakotheke and Almeida Braga Collection; 210 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo: Elizabeth Mann; 211 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photo: Hans Haacke; 212 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo: © Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln: rba_c024180; 213 © Ellsworth Kelly. Photo: Graydon Wood, Courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art; 214, 215 © Ellsworth Kelly. Photo: Courtesy Ellsworth Kelly Studio; 216, 218, 219, 220, 230, 232 Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London; 217 © Família Cordeiro. Collection: Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil; 221, 332 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Courtesy of Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb; 222 Courtesy of Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb; 224 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo: Roberto Marossi; 226 © Projeto Hélio Oiticica. Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, USA. The Adolpho Leirner Collection of Brazilian Constructive Art, museum purchase funded by the Caroline Wiess Law Endowment Fund/Bridgeman Images; 227, 228 © Rasheed Araeen. Image Courtesy of Aicon Gallery; 229 Courtesy of Ida Rodríguez Prampolini and Daniel Goeritz Rodríguez © Armando Salas Portugal Foundation; 235 Courtesy of the Artist and CRG gallery; 236, 338 © Kanayama Akira and Tanaka Atsuko Association; 237 © Motonaga Archive Research Institution Ltd.; 238, 239 © Dieter Roth Estate, Courtesy Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Wilfried Petzi; 240 Courtesy and copyright Projeto Lygia Pape. Photo © Paula Pape; 241 Photo: Anthony Nsofor. Courtesy Chika Okeke-Agulu; 242 © Estate of Uche Okeke, Courtesy Asele Institute, Nimo. Photo: Franko Khoury; 243 © Estate of F. N. Souza, All Rights Reserved/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Image Courtesy of Aicon Gallery; 246 © Susanne Wenger Foundation, Krems an der Donau; 247 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. The Africa Center, formerly the Museum for African Art; 248, 309 © Egonu Estate c/o Grosvenor Gallery, London; 249 © Gazbia Sirry; 251 Jewad Selim Estate. Courtesy Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha; 255 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. By Courtesy of the Fondazine Torino Musei. All Rights Reserved; 258 © Siah Armajani/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016 © bpk/The Metropolitan Museum of Art; 261 © Archives Ramsès Younan, Paris, France © Nabil Boutros; 262 © bpk/The Metropolitan Museum of Art; 264, 265 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo: Charlie Littlewood; 266 © 2016 The Estate of Eva Hesse. Galerie Hauser & Wirth, Zurich. Photo: Wilfried Petzi; 267 © 2016 The

Estate of Eva Hesse. Galerie Hauser & Wirth, Zurich. Photo: Museum Wiesbaden/ Bernd Fickert; 268 © Gustav Metzger/ Sonke Faltien. Photo: Sonke Faltien; 269 Leicestershire County Council Artworks Collection © The Estate of Avinash Chandra; 271 © Fondazione Emilio e Annabianca Vedova, Venezia. 2016 © Photo Archive - Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia; 273 © Morgan Art Foundation/ ARS, New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Image Courtesy of Miami University Art Museum, photograph by Scott Kissell; 275 © Jack Whitten/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Courtesy of the Artist and Hauser & Wirth, New York and Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp; 276 © Estate of Norman W. Lewis; 277 © 2016 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts © bpk/ Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen; 279, 280, 281 © Melvin Edwards/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016; 283 © Museum of Art, Ein Harod, Israel . Photo: Ran Erda; 286, 287 © Shammout Family; 288 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016 © Anne Fourès Agence Luce; 289 University of Lagos; 290 © Estate of Uche Okeke, Courtesy Asele Institute, Nimo; 296 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016 © Estate of the Artist licensed by Aboriginal Artists Agency Ltd; 297 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Deutsche Bank Collection; 298 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo: Wilfried Petzi; 300 © Gyula Kosice. Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, USA/Museum purchase funded by the Caroline Wiess Law Accessions Endowment Fund/ Bridgeman Images; 301 © On Kawara . Photo: Peter Cox, Eindhoven, The Netherlands; 302 © Direção Geral do Património Cultural; 303 © The Estate of Jiro Takamatsu, Tokyo, Yumiko Chiba Associates, Tokyo, Stephen. Photography: Maseru Yanagiba; 304 © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo: © Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln: rba_c000182; 305 © The Estate of Sigmar Polke, Cologne/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo: Wolfgang Morell; 306 © 2016 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Photo: Axel Schneider, Frankfurt am Main; 308 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo: David Rato; 310, 311, 312, 313, 314 © Trustees of the Paolozzi Foundation, Licensed by VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016 © Tate, London 2016; 315 © Romare Bearden Foundation/ VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016; 316 © Romare Bearden Foundation/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Collection of Van Every/Smith Galleries at Davidson College; 318, 319, 320 © Dieter Roth Foundation and Dieter Roth Estate, Courtesy Hauser & Wirth; 321 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo: Mario Gastinger, Photographics, Munich; 322 © Fundación Augusto y León Ferrari. Arte y Acervo, Buenos Aires; 323 © Lynn Hershman Leeson. Photo: Dejan Saric; 324 © Lynn Hershman Leeson. Photo: Wilfried Petzi; 326 © Trustees of the Paolozzi Foundation, Licensed by VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo: José Manuel Costa Alves; 327 © R. Hamilton. All Rights Reserved/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016; 329 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, USA. Funds provided by the Caroline Wiess Law Endowment Fund/Bridgeman Images; 330 © Almir Mavignier; 333 © Yuri Zlotnikov; 334 © Edward Ruscha. Photo: Paul Hester; 335 © Yale Center for

British Art; 336 © Generali Foundation Collection–Permanent Loan to the Museum der Moderne Salzburg; 337 © Eames Office LLC; 340 © Estate of Nam June Paik 2016 © bpk/Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof, SMB/Jens Ziehe; 343 © Tokuma Shoten Publishing Co., Ltd; 344 © Estate of Stan VanDerBeek; 345 © Yoko Ono; 348 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016 © Museum Folkwang Essen - ARTOTHEK; 349 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo: Museum Wiesbaden/Bernd Fickert. Selected Documents 1, 7, 13, 46 Archivo Lafuente; 2 Courtesy of Heide Museum of Modern Art; 3 Fondo Leopoldo Mendez. CENIDIAP/INBA; 5, 29 Courtesy of Museu do Neo-Realismo (Neo-Realism Museum) Vila Franca de Xira; 8 © Lucio Fontana by SIAE/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Courtesy Archivo Lafuente; 10 Photo: Reinhard Truckenmüller, Courtesy Archiv Baumeister im Kunstmuseum Stuttgart; 16 Graphic design: S. Marzari. Printer: Omassini & Pascon. La Biennale di Venezia – Archivio Storico delle Arti Contemporanee; 18 DAG Modern archives; 19 Image Courtesy Nada Shabout; 20 Archive Cobra Museum of Modern Art, Amstelveen; 24 Courtesy of Marjan Tajeddini; 26 © Tomas Santa Rosa, image Courtesy of Arquivo Histórico Wanda Svevo/Fundação, Bienal de São Paulo; 27 Image Courtesy of Harumi Nishizawa; 30 Courtesy of Marion Gillet Guigon; 31 Courtesy of Studio Bibliografico Marini; 33 Courtesy Família Cordeiro; 35 Courtesy of The Marg Foundation; 36 Courtesy of Sylvie Younan; 37, 38, 42 Courtesy of Osaka City Museum of Modern Art GA12; 40 Courtesy of Meem Gallery 41 © documenta Archiv; 44 Modern Art Iraq Archive, Item #9; 47 Image Courtesy Fereshteh Daftari and Leila Heller Gallery; 48 © Donation Jorn, Silkeborg/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Image Courtesy Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University; 51 Courtesy Allan Kaprow Estate and Hauser & Wirth; 53, 54 Samsung Museum of Art, Leeum Library: donated by Yi Ku-yol; 57 Courtesy MSU Zagreb; 61 Courtesy Luis Felipe Noé papers, Buenos Aires; 62 Courtesy Alexandre Pomar; 63 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Courtesy of Georg Baselitz; 64 © The Estate of Emmett Williams; 65 Courtesy Gulammohammed Sheikh and Asia Art Archive; 67 © Gerhard Richter Archive; 69 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Courtesy George Maciunas Foundation Inc., New York; 70 Care of Yirrkala elders; 72 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Courtesy the Artist and P•P•O•W; 73 Courtesy Lubna Hammad; 74 Courtesy Elke Neumann; 75 © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Courtesy of Galerie Emanuel Layr, Vienna; 76 Courtesy England & Co. Despite thorough research, it was not always possible to determine the identity of the copyright holders for all images. We ask copyright holders with justified claims to contact Haus der Kunst.

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COLOPHON

This catalogue is published in conjunction with the exhibition Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965, held at Haus der Kunst, Munich, from October 14, 2016, to March 26, 2017

Haus der Kunst Team

External Affairs

Finance Director Marco Graf von Matuschka

Press & Communications Elena Heitsch

Stiftung Haus der Kunst München, gemeinnützige Betriebsgesellschaft mbH

Director’s Office

Mediation & Visitor Relations Martina Fischer

Executive Assistant to the Director Melissa Klein

Marketing Tina Anjou

Assistant to the Director Teresa Lengl Iris Ludwig

Digital Communications & Social Media Anna Schüller

Director and CEO: Okwui Enwezor Prinzregentenstrasse 1 D-80538 Munich Tel. +49 89 21127 113 www.hausderkunst.de

Finance Director’s Office Assistant to the Finance Director Moritz Petersen

Under the patronage of Dr. Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Federal Minister for Foreign Affairs

Head of Accounts Daniela Burkart Accounts Assistant Karin Mahr

Major funding support by

Assistant Jacqueline Falk Graphic Design Jakob Jakob Digital Communications Consultant Christian Gries Children & Youth Program Sylvia Clasen Anne Leopold

Personnel Administration Arnulf von Dall’Armi Mail Order Miro Palavra Technical Office Anton Köttl Glenn Rossiter Curatorial Office

Generous support by

Chief Curator Ulrich Wilmes Curator Julienne Lorz

We would like to thank our shareholders: Freistaat Bayern Gesellschaft der Freunde Haus der Kunst e.V. and our major supporter: Alexander Tutsek-Stiftung for their annual support of the program

Archive Curator Sabine Brantl Assistant Curators Daniel Milnes Anna Schneider Exhibition Secretary Isabella Kredler Public Program Andrea Saul Exhibition Coordination Tina Köhler Registrar Cassandre Schmid

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Exhibition Team

Publication

Curators of the Exhibition and Editors of the Catalogue Okwui Enwezor Katy Siegel Ulrich Wilmes

Exhibition Coordination Tina Köhler

Managing Editor Tim Roerig

Chronologies Damian Lentini

Registrar Cassandre Schmid

Essay Editor David Frankel

Assistant Curators Damian Lentini Daniel Milnes

Assistant Exhibition Coordination Sofia Sprick Nilsson

Selected Documents Megan Hines Daniel Milnes

Essay Authors Alejandro Anreus Ariella Azoulay Zainab Bahrani Galia Bar Or Homi K. Bhabha Emily Braun Dipesh Chakrabarty Ekaterina Degot Ješa Denegri Nikolas Drosos Okwui Enwezor Pedro Erber Gao Minglu Romy Golan Andrea Giunta Walter Grasskamp Catherine Grenier Atreyee Gupta Salah Hassan Yule Heibel Geeta Kapur Pamela M. Lee Anneka Lenssen Damian Lentini Courtney Martin Anne Massey Mark Mazower Yasufumi Nakamori Chika Okeke-Agulu Stephen Petersen Mari Carmen Ramirez Richard Shiff Katy Siegel Terry Smith Fred Turner Ulrich Wilmes Sarah Wilson Tobias Wofford

Research and Curatorial Assistants Megan Hines Tim Roerig Sonja Teine Goethe-Institut Postdoctoral Fellows at Haus der Kunst Atreyee Gupta (2013–14) Yan Geng (2014–15) Damian Lentini (2015–16) Jelena Vesic´ (2016–17) Exhibition Liaison Luz Gyalui Film Program Mark Nash Music Program Markus Mueller Curatorial Interns Carina Kaminsky Laura Lang Exhibition Architects KUEHN MALVEZZI, BERLIN

Assistants Lucas Hagin Mareike Hetschold Conservators Johannes Baur Marjen Schmidt Susanne von der Groeben Interns Chloé Coquilhat Maxim Weirich Technical Office Anton Köttl Glenn Rossiter Installation Team Anton Bosnjak Markus Brandenburg Elena Carvajal Díaz Tanja Eiler Andrea Faciu Vincent Faciu Hans-Peter Frank Adam Gandy Ben Goossens Martin Hast Tommy Jackson Marzieh Kermani Christian Leitna Ruth Munzner Kaori Nakajima Roland Roppelt Tina Schultz Andrea Snigula Nikolaus Steglich Magnus Thoren Laura Ziegler Media Team Florian Falterer Moritz Friedrich Tim Wolff

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Visual Essays Daniel Milnes Artists’ Biographies Carina Kaminsky Damian Lentini Nicolas Linnert Daniel Milnes Alexandra Nicolaides Tatjana Schäfer Wendy Vogel Index Jordan Pace Copy-Editors Jonathan Fox (Chronology of Social and Political Events; Chronology of Cultural Events) Ann Henderson (Artists’ Biographies) Stacy Moore (Artists’ Biographies) Monica Rumsey (Artists’ Biographies) Emily Salmon (Artists’ Biographies) Wendy Vogel (Artists’ Biographies) Proofreading Stacy Moore Monica Rumsey Emily Salmon Translators Richard Flantz (Galia Bar Or) Dorotea Fotivec (Ješa Denegri) Judith Rosenthal (Ulrich Wilmes; Patron’s Statement; State Minister’s Statement; Prefaces) Rebecca van Dyck (Walter Grasskamp) David Wharry (Catherine Grenier) Graphic Designers Double Standards Chris Rehberger Julia Egger Annika Riethmüller

© 2016 Stiftung Haus der Kunst München, gemeinnützige Betriebsgesellschaft mbH und Prestel Verlag, Munich · London · New York A member of Verlagsgruppe Random House GmbH Neumarkter Strasse 28 · 81673 Munich With respect to links in the book, the Publisher expressly notes that no illegal content was discernible on the linked sites at the time the links were created. The Publisher has no influence at all over the current and future design, content or authorship of the linked sites. For this reason the Publisher expressly disassociates itself from all content on linked sites that has been altered since the link was created and assumes no liability for such content. © for the texts by the authors © for the works of art by the artists Prestel Publishing Ltd. 14-17 Wells Street London W1T 3PD Prestel Publishing 900 Broadway, Suite 603 New York, NY 10003 Library of Congress Control Number: 2016954276 A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Editorial direction: Constanze Holler Design and layout: Double Standards Production management: Cilly Klotz Separations: Helio Repro GmbH, Munich Printing and binding: Longo SPA | AG, Bozen Typeface: Lyon Display; Berthold Akzidenz Grotesk Paper: 150 g/qm Garda matt 0,9f.; 80 g/qm Druckfix 2000

Verlagsgruppe Random House FSC® N001967 Printed in Italy ISBN 978-3-7913-5584-9 (English edition) ISBN 978-3-7913-5583-2 (German edition) www.prestel.com