UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO Vitality in Crisis: Rethinking the Atomic Legacy in Postwar U.S. Art A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Art History, Theory, and Criticism by Benjamin Andrews Snyder Committee in charge: Professor W. Norman Bryson, Co-Chair Professor Grant Kester, Co-Chair Professor Elizabeth F. Cartwright Professor Kuiyi Shen Professor Mariana Razo Wardwell 2016 Copyright © Benjamin Andrews Snyder, 2016 All rights reserved. The Dissertation of Benjamin Andrews Snyder is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication on microfilm and electronically: Co-Chair Co-Chair University of California, San Diego 2016 iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Signature Page ................................................................................................. iii Table of Contents ............................................................................................ iv Acknowledgements .......................................................................................... v Vita .................................................................................................................. vii Abstract of the Dissertation ............................................................................ viii Introduction: All Thoughts and Things Were Split: Tracing Rupture in the Postwar ............................................................................................................. 1 Chapter 1: New Economies of Life: The Shifting Rhetoric of Vitality in U.S. Art and Politics of the Early Postwar Period ......................................................... 19 Chapter 2: Robert Morris’s Non-Vital Forms .................................................. 48 Chapter 3: “Everything Would Go”: The Nuclear Issue in the Early Work of Andy Warhol ................................................................................................... 94 Chapter 4: Reclaiming Vitality: Ana Mendieta in the Late Postwar .............. 144 Endnotes ...................................................................................................... 195 Bibliography .................................................................................................. 236 iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Numerous people across three continents have my deepest gratitude for their help in completing this project. The co-chairs of my committee, Norman Bryson and Grant Kester, and my committee members, Mariana Wardwell, Kuiyi Shen, and Lisa Cartwright, have kindly put up with me living in Norway and Ghana over the last four years; I’m sincerely thankful for their patience, for all the ways they’ve inspired me, and for teaching me so many new things. I’d like to further thank David Antin, Charles Curtis, Jack Greenstein, Babette Mangolte, Sheldon Nodelman, and John Welchman for their gracious instruction and feedback over the years. I’m grateful to the staffs at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, the Archives of American Art in Washington D.C., and special collections at UCSD’s Geisel Library for making archive work so enjoyable, and to the Galerie Lelong in New York for their expertise and assistance regarding Ana Mendieta’s estate. I feel myself lucky to have shared the last six years with brilliant friends and colleagues in the VisArts program, and would like to thank Katrin, Tim, Emily, Ru, and Chanda (among many others) for the conversations and memorable moments. I’ll be forever grateful to Tristan Shone and Marilia Maschion for taking such good care of me in my first two years in Mission Hills, and to Simon Sørheim in Oslo for providing me a beautiful, sorrow free space to write. I would have never finished without the support of my loving family both here and in Norway, especially my mom, dad, and sister who have each played v a special role in helping me get over the finish line. Nina, my greatest joy in life, played the most special role of all. This dissertation is dedicated to her. vi VITA 2008 Bachelor of Arts, Sarah Lawrence College, New York 2010 – 2013 Teaching Assistant, Department of Visual Arts, University of California, San Diego, California 2012 Master of Arts, University of California, San Diego, California 2016 Doctor of Philosophy, University of California, San Diego, California vii ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Vitality in Crisis: Rethinking the Atomic Legacy in Postwar U.S. Art by Benjamin Andrews Snyder Doctor of Philosophy in Art History, Theory, and Criticism University of California, San Diego, 2016 Professor W. Norman Bryson, Co-Chair Professor Grant Kester, Co-Chair This dissertation examines the role of atomic weapons in the formation of post-World War II United States national culture and the post-1945 U.S. art canon. While the consideration of the presence of nuclear weapons in postwar art history has often been constricted to specific atomic imagery existing within an accepted historical framework (e.g. the “Atomic Age,” c. 1945-1960), this dissertation traces a much deeper level of influence beyond the standard “atomic” imagery and outside the received (art) historical framing. The argument begins by exploring the distinct rupture that occurred within United States public consciousness in the wake of the U.S. bombings of viii Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and identifies how, as a recuperative gesture in the wake of this rupture, a new problematic rhetoric of life, under a rubric of “vitality,” emerged across mainstream U.S. political, economic, and art discourses. The dissertation then extends this framework forward to provide new studies of three important U.S. artists, Robert Morris, Andy Warhol, and Ana Mendieta. Together, the studies show how, often contrary to their standard receptions and placements within in the art historical literature, their transformations of the U.S. avant-garde landscape, beginning in 1960, were deeply informed by questioning the troubled, paradoxical idea of life that had become dominant in mainstream postwar United States discourse in the wake of the U.S.’s development, use, and proliferation of atomic weapons. ix Introduction: All Thoughts and Things Were Split: Tracing Rupture in the Postwar On August 20, 1945, Time magazine published its first run of the postwar era.1 Its contents and tone were far from what readers might have predicted just a few weeks earlier. Instead of a celebratory mood welcoming a long anticipated Allied victory, a foreboding sense that “progress had a price” at Hiroshima and Nagasaki pervaded the magazine’s early appraisals of the new “Atomic Age.”2 In those early days, news of the atomic bomb in the U.S., while tightly controlled, produced an initial sense of shock and confusion that sent a wave through U.S. public consciousness. Under a column titled “THE PEACE,” yet tellingly subtitled “The Bomb,” Time’s editors described the atmosphere that hung over the war’s end in the United States in a series of startling and lucid statements: “In what they said and did, men were still, as in the aftershock of a great wound”; people of all stations were trying to grasp “out of the chaos an age in which victory was already only the shout of a child in the street”; the win itself by the bomb was dubbed the “most grimly Pyrrhic of victories.”3 In a strange and chaotic initial reception, the Time editors describe a situation in which the U.S. public almost assumed the posture of a victim, bringing the news of the bombing into an odd rhetorical equivalency with the bombings themselves: in the “aftershock of a great wound” they appraised the sudden emptiness of victory and the development of a new dramatic precariousness to their own survival. “Humanity,” the editors wrote, “was brought inescapably into a new age in 1 2 which,” taking the form of the chain reaction that birthed it, “all thoughts and things were split.” Scientists were quoted warning that now “civilization would have a means to commit suicide at will.” Discussing the inevitability that other world powers and potential enemies would acquire the bomb’s secret, they cautioned how it “put a new premium on aggression (surprise) and even on chance.” Straining for a silver lining, they wrote how “It was wonderful to think of what the Atomic Age might be, if man was strong and honest. But,” they conceded darkly, “at first it was a strange place, full of weird symbols and the smell of death.”4 One such symbol found its way onto the cover of that very issue. The August 20, 1945 cover of Time broke with tradition. In a rare instance of not picturing a face, the editors presented instead a symbolic effacement, with the red circle of Japan X’ed out by two bold black marks. With no accompanying quote or slogan (also a break from tradition), this X, rendered in the distinct style of lively, expressive, oil-paint brush strokes, ostensibly reached for a totalizing representation of the U.S.’s atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the fall of Japan, the final end of World War II, and the distinct beginning of a new age. The X is startling for how, on the cover of a quintessential U.S. magazine, it transforms the U.S. into a black mark of violent erasure in the opening act of the postwar era. The cover was made by Boris Artzybasheff, a mid-century magazine and book illustrator of some fame, who seemed to go out of his way 3 to combine a sense of aggression and violence in the X with what is, in fact, a sense of ‘Americanness.’ For in making the X in the way that he did, Artzybasheff departed from his usual recognizable