EXHIBITION SECTIONS 3. NEW IMAGES OF MAN 5. CONCRETE VISIONS 7. NATIONS SEEKING TABLE OF 1. AFTERMATH: 338 Section Introduction 476 Section Introduction FORM ZERO HOUR AND THE 340 Yule Heibel 478 Pedro Erber 624 Section Introduction CONTENTS ATOMIC ERA Germany’s Postwar Out of Words: The 626 Galia Bar Or 132 Section Introduction Search for a New Spacetime of Concrete Channels for 134 Yasufumi Nakamori Image of Man Poetry Democratic Iteration Imagining a City 344 Sarah Wilson 484 Andrea Giunta 632 Atreyee Gupta PATRON’S STATEMENT DIRECTOR’S FOREWORD Through Photography New Images of Man: Simultaneous After Bandung: 7 Dr. Frank-Walter 13 Okwui Enwezor 140 Stephen Petersen Postwar Humanism Abstractions and Post- Transacting the Nation Steinmeier “Forms Disintegrate”: and its Challenges war Latin American Art in a Postcolonial World Federal Minister for CURATORS’ in the West Painting in the Shadow 490 Mari Carmen Ramirez 638 Chika Okeke-Agulu Foreign Affairs ACKNOWLEDGMENTS of the Bomb 350 Homi K. Bhabha Fanon, National Culture, The Necessity of Con- Remembering Fanon: and the Politics of 17 Okwui Enwezor, 146 Ariella Azoulay creteness: A View from BAVARIAN STATE Self, Psyche, and the Form in Postwar Africa Lygia Clark’s first major European exhibition Katy Siegel, The Natural History of the (Global?) South takes place at Signals, London, 1965. MINISTER’S STATEMENT Ulrich Wilmes Rape Colonial Condition 9 Dr. Ludwig Spaenle 6. COSMOPOLITAN APPENDIXES Minister of State for INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS 4. REALISMS MODERNISMS Education and Culture, 759 Selected Documents 20 Okwui Enwezor 418 Section Introduction 558 Section Introduction Science and Art The Judgment of Art: 776 Artists’ Biographies 420 Alejandro Anreus 560 Zainab Bahrani Postwar and Artistic Whatever happened to 806 Bibliography PREFACES Baghdad Modernism Worldliness Realism after 1945? 566 Catherine Grenier 812 About the 10 Johannes Ebert 42 Katy Siegel Figuration and Politics Plural Modernities: Contributors Secretary-General, Art, World, History in the Western Goethe-Institut Hemisphere A History of a Cosmo- 816 List of Works 58 Ulrich Wilmes politan Modernity 11 Hortensia Völckers Tanaka Atsuko wearing her Electric Dress 826 Index Postwar: (Denkifuku) at the 2nd Gutai Art Exhibition, 424 Ekaterina Degot 570 Courtney J. Martin Artistic Director, Denazification and Tokyo, 1956. Commitment to 834 List of Lenders Kulturstiftung des Humility Exiles, Émigrés and Reeducation Hermann Nitsch’s first Aktion (‘Action’) 836 List of Bundes Cosmopolitans: takes place on December 19 at the flat of 430 Anneka Lenssen 68 Mark Mazower 2. FORM MATTERS London’s Postwar Art Otto Mühl, Vienna, 1963. Acknowledgments Alexander Farenholtz Postwar: Exchangeable Realism World Administrative Director, 212 Section Introduction 840 Image Credits The Melancholy 436 Gao Minglu Kulturstiftung des 214 Emily Braun 574 Tobias Wofford 844 Colophon History of a Term The Historical Logic of 8. NETWORKS, MEDIA & Bundes The Dirt Paradigm The Black 74 Dipesh Chakrabarty Chinese Nationalist Cosmopolitans COMMUNICATION Legacies of Bandung: 220 Salah M. Hassan Realism from the 580 Damian Lentini 682 Section Introduction Decolonization and the When Identity Becomes 1940s to the 1960s Cosmopolitan Politics of Culture “Form”: Calligraphic 442 Nikolas Drosos and 684 Ješa Denegri Contaminations: Artists, Abstraction and Suda- Romy Golan Art in the Network of Objects, Media VISUAL ESSAYS AND nese Modernism Realism as Technological Media CHRONOLOGIES 226 Geeta Kapur International Style and Mass Communica- Compiled by Damian Lentini Material Facture tion: New Tendencies and Daniel Milnes 232 Richard Shiff 688 Walter Grasskamp 82 Visual Essay: Social True Grid Installation view of the Ninth Street Show, 0 to 1 and Political Events New York, 1951. 238 Terry Smith 692 Anne Massey 96 Chronology of Social Abstraction and Ideol- Reframing the and Political Events ogy: Contestation in Independent Group 102 Visual Essay: Arts Cold War Art Criticism 696 Pamela M. Lee and and Culture Fred Turner The Cybernetic Vision 116 Chronology of in Postwar Art Arts and Culture Jewad Selim’s Monument of Freedom at Tahrir Square, Baghdad, 1962. 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 concentra- tion camp, just a few miles away on the out- skirts 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 OParty 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 Fig. 2. Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, General Douglas MacArthur, the center of the party’s ideological machinery and base to its many loyalists 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, and brutal epigones.3 September 2, 1945 When American forces occupied the ruined city, the official capit- ulation of the German army was still over a week away.4 And when the earlier times important guests including Hitler, Benito Mussolini, the war’s end was celebrated all across Europe on May 8, 1945, World War II Aga Khan, and Edward, Duke of Windsor, had recorded their visits to the as such was far from over: as Europe began the process of reconstruction, museum.6 The soldiers’ graffiti-like inscriptions marked the final chapter the war in the Pacific was still raging. The surrender of the Japanese of the Haus der Deutschen Kunst before it hurtled, along with the rest of imperial military would demand another three months of intense Germany, into the postwar era. THE JUDGMENT OF ART: POSTWAR AND ARTISTIC WORLDLINESS THE DISENCHANTMENT Okwui Enwezor OF MODERN ART 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 ex- change in the arts. While the exhibition is not commemorative, Postwar marks the seventieth anniversary of Haus der Kunst as a public institu- tion 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 intol- erance remains inextinguishable, though. Perhaps for this reason, Haus der Kunst exemplifies the deep contradictions of the postwar era.7 Fig. 1. Aerial view of Munich's city center after Allied air raids, c. 1945 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 fighting—including the relentless fire-bombing of Tokyo and other understanding of art. In its former life as a Nazi cultural icon, the build- Japanese cities—before their dramatic conclusion: the detonation of ing was designed as a showcase, a triumphant work of architectural two atomic bombs, respectively christened “Little Boy” and “Fat Man,” propaganda. For Hitler the Haus der Deutschen Kunst was not just any in Hiroshima on August 6 and in Nagasaki on August 9.5 building: it was a “temple” of German art, conceived, designed, and con- Meanwhile, in Munich, American forces had occupied the Haus der structed expressly for the purpose of exhibiting the timelessness and Deutschen Kunst, a miraculous survivor of the bombing that had leveled purity of Germany’s national aesthetic spirit. This point was adumbrated a great part of the city. The occupation of the building on May 5, 1945, in a speech Hitler gave on July 18, 1937, to mark the opening of the build- was memorialized by the signatures of three American soldiers on the ing and inaugurate the first edition of theGrosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung pages of the institution’s Goldenes Buch (visitors book; fig. ),3 where in (Great German Art Exhibition; fig. ):4 “When, therefore, the cornerstone Introductory Essays Okwui Enwezor 21 of this building was laid, it was with the intention of constructing a tem- were extinguished in Germany while museums were stripped of the POSTWAR TRANSITIONS: 12 ple, not for a so-called modern art, but for a true and everlasting German works of modern art in their collections. FROM HAUS DER DEUTSCHEN KUNST art, that is, better still, a House for the art of the German people, and In counterpoint to these condemnations of modern art and Jews, the not for any international art of the year 1937, ’40, ’50 or ’60.” 8 Describing resplendent white galleries of the new art “temple” provided the perfect TO HAUS DER KUNST Impressionism, Futurism, Cubism, and Dadaism as “insane and inane backdrop for the grandiose type of work that Hitler and the Nazis saw as The aftermath of the war midwifed an atmosphere of great indeter- monstrosities,” the speech underscored Hitler’s fervent aesthetic ethno- the true German art. It was in this building that eight editions of the Grosse minacy, a state of change. Germany entered an extensive phase of centrism and overall disenchantment with modern art.9 He denounced Deutsche Kunstausstellung were staged between 1937 and 1944. Their remit denazification. It was under this policy that the Haus der Deutschen Jews in particular, accusing them of being the leading propagators of the was