Facing the Future Art in Europe 1945 - 1968 Facing the Future Art in Europe 1945 - 1968 1945 - 1968 After the liberation View of the ruined British Prime Minister of the Auschwitz centre of Warsaw after Winston Churchill, US concentration camp by the retreat of the President Franklin D. the Red Army, German troops, Roosevelt and Soviet leader children show January 1945 Joseph Stalin during the photographers the © BPK Three Power Conference at prisoner numbers Yalta, February 1945. Photo: tattooed into their arms, Samary Gurary February 1945. © MAMM/MDF COLLECTION, MOSCOW © BPK 1945 27/01/1945. Jan 1945. 04-11/02/1945. Liberation of the The name “auschwitz” victims came from Warsaw, Poland, in Yalta Conference surviving prisoners has become a byword Belgium, Germany, ruins, January 1945 The three main Allies from the Auschwitz for the Holocaust. France, Greece, Italy, of World War II (USA, concentration camp There were over 5.6 Yugoslavia, Luxembourg, UK, USSR) discuss Auschwitz-Birkenau million victims of the the Netherlands, the denazifi cation, was the biggest German Holocaust, of whom Austria, Poland, demilitarization, death camp during the around 1.1 million Romania, the Soviet democratization and Nazi era. It was located people, including Union, Czechoslovakia partition of Germany, near the Polish town of a million Jews, and Hungary. along with the distribution Oświęcim, which was were murdered at of power in Europe after renamed Auschwitz. Birkenau. Most of the the end of the war. timeline I 1945-1950 ➤ Poster from the Fantasten exhibition, Galerie Gerd Rosen, Berlin, February 1946 © BPK 1945 15/06/1945. 03/07/1945. 09/08/1945. 06 & 09/08/1945. 08/08/1945. Oct 1945. Design for the USSR Founding of the La Opening of Galerie Gerd Atomic bombing of Founding of the Cultural Európai Iskola (1945- Museum of World Art to Jeune Peinture Belge Rosen in Berlin Hiroshima and Nagasaki Association for the 1948), a group of be built in Moscow (Young Belgian Painters’ Renewal of Germany Hungarian art critics Award) artists’ group in and artists, publishes Brussels its “Manifesto of the European School” 8 A statue on the Dresden The Spanish painter City Hall tower looking Pablo Picasso holds a down over the ruins skull in his hands, Paris, of the inner city, 1945. 1944. Photo: Robert Photo: Walter Hahn Capa © SLUB DRESDEN / DEUTSCHE © ROBERT CAPA FOTOTHEK / WALTER HAHN © INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF PHOTOGRAPHY/MAGNUM PHOTOS 13-15/02/1945. 24/03/1945. .25/04/1945. 25/04/1945. 07-08/05/1945. 29/05/1945. Dresden, Germany, in Pablo Picasso: “What is Elbe Day Signing of the Charter The capitulation of Speech by Thomas ruins, February 1945 an artist?”, Les Lettres, of the United Nations in Germany / End of Mann, “deutschland British/American aerial Paris, 1945 San Francisco World War II in Europe und die Deutschen” bombing of the city of (Germany and the Dresden Germans) at the Library of Congress, Washington D.C. 20/11/1945-14/04/1949. 1945-1949. 1945. 1945. 1945. 1945-1946. Nuremburg Trials Munich Central Lettrism founded by Ivo Andrić’s novel, Na Maurice Merleau- Isaiah Berlin and Anna Collecting Point Isidore Isou in Paris Drini ćuprija (The Bridge P ont y ’s Akhmatova meet in on the Drina), Belgrad, Phénoménologie Leningrad 1945 de la perception (Phenomenology of Perception), Paris, 1945 9 Sarah Wilson Writing the Disaster Trauma and Reconstruction in Post-war France 10 _038 11 PICTURES OF PAIN Whoever is tortured, stays tortured. The torture Against War — Against Fascism: is indelibly branded into him. (...) He who has the Arsenal Exhibition in Warsaw, 1955 succumbed to torture can no longer feel at home in the world. The shame of destruction In Poland, the situation was similar. Contrary cannot be erased. The collapse of trust in the to the needs of young artists who wanted to get world that starts in part with the first blow, but to grips, directly and inexorably, with the causes is fully realized in torture, is not a loss that can and consequences of Nazism and the war, in 1949 be recovered. To experience one’s fellow Man as the Polish United Workers’ Party called for the an anti-Man is a horror that stays stuck tightly adoption of Socialist Realism following the model jammed within the tortured: Moreover, none of the Soviet Union, with a view to the future and looks on into a world in which the principle of the anti-imperialist struggle for peace.7 Here again, hope prevails. The martyred are surrendered, young artists refused to continue with the “passive” unarmed, to fear. traditions of Polish colourism (Kapism) of the pre- — JEAN AMERY 1 war period. It was Andrzej Wróblewski, in particular, and the members of a student group who withdrew Shortly after the end of World War II, which came from their professors to form a Self-Educational for some in occupied Germany as a “liberation”, Group at the Krakow Academy of Fine Arts, who and for others as a “collapse”, the need and inter- went in search of a new empathetic realism for the est for an upswing in the economy supplanted the victims of the war. work of mourning and remembering the horrors of the past. The war had left 55 million dead, 35 million wounded, and over three million missing, not count- ing the millions of displaced persons and refugees. In West Germany, however, the new era was defined, significantly, not in terms of “before or after libera- tion”, but “before or after the currency”.2 With the currency reform and the beginning of the Cold War, artists and writers saw the end of their hopes for a socially just new beginning. With the arrival of the new currency, shop windows were fitted from one day to the next with hoards of consumer products, to the cost of many magazines and small publishers who needed to change their appearance and their production because of a lack of buyers.3 The poet Johannes Hübner stated, “As great as the euphoria ill _037 had been in the first three years after the war, the Andrzej Wróblewski disappointment now was just as black. A desperate Rozstrzelanie surrealistyczne nihilism took hold of me.”4 - Rozstrzelanie VIII [Surrealist Execution - Execution VIII], 1949 Just a few years after the war and the liberation of Oil on canVas, 130 X 199 cm the concentration camps, there was no great desire National Museum in Warsaw W — not even in the new dictatorships to the east of the ZÓ or Iron Curtain that proclaimed themselves “antifascist” On the occasion of the 1st Exhibition of Modern , G — to see artists continually focusing on the infinite Art at the Krakow Kunst Palast in 1948, Wróblewski ubuskie suffering and the crimes of the past. In early 1947, wrote, “We want you to remember war and L eum Friedrich Wolf declared in a letter to Lion Feucht- imperialism, the atomic bomb in the hands of the Z U wanger that raising the question of guilt was consid- wrong men. We paint unpleasant pictures like the — M ered “something approaching treason”.5 smell of a corpse. We also paint those that make cm In October 1948, at a meeting of socialist artists you feel the presence of death”.8 Between 16 , 80 X 60 berländer, Sylweta na bialym tle [Silhouette on White Background], 1961 Background], White on [Silhouette tle bialym na Sylweta berländer, and writers in Kleinmachnow, near Berlin, Walter January and 4 August 1949, Andrzej Wróblewski as V O can Ulbricht complained about artists being too occu- painted a series of eight paintings on the theme on pied with their concentration camp and emigration of “Executions” ( Surrealist Execution: Execution il O experiences to support the struggle for land reform VIII), and two pictures featuring, respectively, Marek and the building of socialism: “In the meantime, the a dead mother and child, and a mother with a struggle for a new order is underway, but it’s lagging dead child [see the texts by Anda Rottenberg and _046 three years behind and is now beginning now to face Daniel Bulatov]. They originated in the course of problems that should have been faced long ago.”6 preparing an anti-war exhibition that Wróblewski ← 12 II MOURNING AND MEMORY was planning with his group at the Krakow Academy along with Jan Dziedziora, Jacek Sienicki and of Fine Arts in the spring of 1949. It went ahead, but Elzbieta Grabska, an initiator and organizer of only as an independent part of the Polish Festival of the exhibition, Against War — Against Fascism. Art Schools in Poznan exhibition, which ran from 22 His pale, almost colourless painting, with its ugly, to 28 October 1949. The Party invited all the students rotten, decaying objects, is directed against both from the art academies to take part, and had not the optimism of Socialist Realism and the Polish expected the exhibition to be looking back on the colourism of the pre-war era. war, but to be staging a demonstration of Socialist In works such as The Branded (1955), he deals Realism by addressing issues like anti-imperialism and intensively, as a Jew, with the topic of the Shoah. In the struggle for peace.9 1955, this painting aroused the most controversy in In a self-criticism,10 Wróblewski admitted in Warsaw. It was painted from a photograph taken from 1950 that he and his group had failed to make the the archives of legal documents on Nazi crimes. The connection between the last war and the current 1961 painting Silhouette on a White Background shown imperialist aggression and racial discrimination of the here has a similar theme.