Unit 8: The Individual and Postwar Europe
Fig. 1: Joseph Beuys, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965), Performed at the Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf, Germany
In this unit, students will explore themes in European art after the end of World War II. Some artists, such as Jean Dubuffet and Alberto Giacometti, participated in the Existentialist critique of older Western philosophies that presupposed that existence was defined by divine intervention or understood through universal human experiences.
They believed individuals must themselves define who they are and how they relate to the world. Dubuffet and Giacometti had very different aesthetic visions, but both explored the belief, a byproduct of Existentialism, that freedom was the essence of human experience. Fluxus was a transatlantic movement that had its origins in Germany with the activities of the Lithuanian-American intellectual George Maciunas. This collective emerged in the 1960s as a revival (at least in part) of Dada concepts, including the fusion of art and life.
1. Existentialist Aesthetics
Fig. 2: Photograph of Alberto Giacometti by Cartier-Bresson, 1961
The cataclysm of World War II scattered much of the European avant-garde, with many key figures decamping as a diaspora across the Atlantic, particularly to New York. The birth of the New York School was, at least in part, aided by the Nazi occupation of Paris, from where many artists and intellectuals fled. In addition, the rise of Fascism in Europe, the Holocaust, and the atomic bomb shook the foundation of Western civilization in an unprecedented way. After the war, the Cold War divided the Europe into two blocs, yet another devastating crisis for that continent.
Existentialism, a philosophy developed by Jean-Paul Sartre in the 1930s, picked up after the war—a rejection of the universal Humanism that hitherto underpinned modern Western thought; in its place, Existentialism stressed subjective experience, individual freedom, and autonomy.
Sartre, who was a playwright, novelist, and critic, moved in the same circles as many of the artists addressed in this unit. His individualistic outlook had a big impact on artists: “If man, as the Existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing,” he said. “Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be.” [1]
The highly individualistic and expressive work of many postwar European artists shares a great deal with his version of Existentialism (the idea can be traced back to some 19th-century philosophers).
1.1 Jean Dubuffet
Existentialism was generally not well received in postwar America. Nevertheless, the Museum of Modern Art in New York acknowledged the trend with an exhibition in 1959 called New Images of Man, which showed mostly European artists, including the French painter and sculptor Jean Dubuffet. In the exhibition catalog, curator Paul Tillich explained, rather bleakly, how postwar artists dealt with the human dilemma: “[W]hen in abstract or nonobjective painting and sculpture, the figure disappears completely, one is tempted to ask, what has happened to man? . . . [He] is in danger of losing his humanity and becoming a thing amongst the things he produces.” [2]
Tillich’s comments seem pessimistic, but the Art Informel trend in France during the period of postwar reconstruction was an expression of individual renewal and freedom from old constraints.
Fig. 3: Jean Dubuffet, Monsieur Plume Pièce Botanique (1946) (Albright-Knox Art Gallery)
Dubuffet used the term art brut (raw art) to describe his art, which was inspired by art forms that didn’t corroborate with the art world’s conventions: graffiti and art made by the mentally ill, prisoners, children, and other untrained artists. He amassed a collection of such work; for him, it represented a raw and innocent vision and a directness of technique that he admired. Dubuffet sought to emulate these qualities and, in 1948, he established a society to encourage the study of art brut. In the manifesto where Dubuffet coined “art brut,” he defined it with these words:
We understand by this term works produced by persons unscathed by artistic culture, where mimicry plays little or no part (contrary to the activities of intellectuals). These artists derive everything . . . from their own depths, and not from the conventions of classical or fashionable art. [3]
Making a break with the high art French tradition, Dubuffet painted with a heavy impasto technique: he created successive layers of paint by shaking a brush over the painting and spraying the surface with tiny droplets, scattering sand over it, and scratching it with a fork. The result was, in some cases, work that appeared to be painted with mud. With Monsieur Plume Pièce Botanique (Figure 3), for instance, the artist created lines by gouging a thick layer of paint, with the result that his portrait looks more like an awkward, if playful, caricature.
The subject is the poet-painter Henri Michaux, who wrote a semi-autobiographical work about a comic figure named Monsieur Plume. In fact, Dubuffet completed a series of portraits of his artistic and literary friends, all painted from memory. The series was exhibited under the title Portraits with extracted Likeness, with Likeness cooked and confected in the Memory, with Likeness exploded in the Memory of Mr Jean Dubuffet.
1.2 Jean Fautrier
Fig. 4: Jean Fautrier, Femme Douce (1946) (Centre Georges Pompidou)
Dubuffet was inspired by the work of fellow painter Jean Fautrier, whose work he saw in Paris in 1945, soon after the end of World War II. Fautrier’s painting, Femme Douce, or Sweet Woman, was part of a series of paintings and sculptures he called Otages (Hostages)—his response to war atrocities he witnessed. Fautrier’s studio at Châtenay-Malabry was near a wood where the Nazis executed prisoners each night. He himself had been arrested and briefly detained by the Gestapo in 1943 because of his involvement in the resistance, and he began the series while hiding out from the Nazis in an insane asylum.
The screams haunted Fautrier, and he developed a technique to deal with this trauma in painting. He glued layers of paper to canvas to create an absorbent skin-like surface on which he applied a thick layer of paint, rendering a form that resembled a brutalized body. In addition, many of the paintings in the series were executed in bright colors such as purple, pink, and turquoise. The ironic title of this painting echoes the disconnection between the use of cheerful colors and the painfulness of his subject.
1.3 Alberto Giacometti
Fig. 5: Alberto Giacometti, Tall Woman III (1960) (Fondation Beyeler)
Before World War II, the Swiss-Italian artist Alberto Giacometti dabbled in Surrealism, but afterward he turned to Sartre’s Existentialism to find a new way to address the problem of creating art in war-ravaged Europe. In fact, Sartre, who sometimes wrote about art, saw in Giacometti’s sculptures a powerful solution to the problem of perception—how the phenomenon of spatial distance and the totality of existence could be registered. Sartre also argued that the artist dealt with how people relate to one another as isolated human beings separated by physical space: “Giacometti has restored an imaginary, undivided space to statues . . . This,” he said, “is because he was the first to take it into his head to sculpt human beings as one sees them—from a distance. He confers absolute distance on his figures.” [4]
Giacometti elongated his figures, producing tall, emaciated bodies that viewers perceived as metaphors for modern existence. Tall Woman III was one of a series of statues he conceived for a commission for a multifigure sculpture for the Chase Manhattan Bank building in New York. Each figure stood about nine feet tall, creating what some saw as unsettling encounters between the sculptures and the viewer. Each is fragile, isolated, and frightfully exposed to the elements.
Fig. 6: Alberto Giacometti, Jean Genet (1954 – 1955) (Tate Gallery)
Jean Genet, another French philosopher, also admired Giacometti; he even wrote a short book about the artist. Genet was a controversial writer who considered himself an outsider because of his youthful criminal history and homosexuality. He began writing while he was in jail, and went on to become a notorious, if not celebrated, poet, playwright, essayist, and novelist.
Genet’s work often dealt with outsiders and the people who oppressed them. Giacometti’s battered, elongated bodies appealed to the writer; they seemed to echo his own experiences as a prisoner, vagabond, and prostitute. The artist used a subdued palette and nervous line to describe a tense and shifting physique. The subject’s eyes are difficult to find, which forces the viewer to ask whether Genet’s gaze, perhaps a metaphor for creativity, succeeded or failed to overcome the world he lived in.
1.4 Francis Bacon
Fig. 7: Francis Bacon, Study after a Portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velázquez (1953)
Like Giacometti, Francis Bacon is often picked out as a quintessentially Existentialist artist. Born in Ireland, Bacon made his name as an artist in London despite the fact that he had no formal artistic education. His subject matter was rather dark as his works often dealt with vaguely described bodies—abstracted and distorted so that they appear to be tortured or suffering. Reflecting (intentionally or not) postwar continental philosophy, his figures express the theme that retaining a sense of self was a constant, sometimes painful struggle.
Bacon completed a large number of compositions based on a celebrated portrait of Pope Innocent X by the Baroque artist Diego Velázquez. The scream of the lone figure was Bacon’s idea; it is likely a visual quotation of the screaming face of a wounded nurse who was mown down by gunfire in the famous Odessa steps sequence of the Soviet film Battleship Potemkin by Sergei Eisenstein. Bacon’s figure sits behind a kind of screen of vertical brushstrokes, like the bars of a cage or prison, which suggests that the figure is trapped. In addition, the figure seems to be dissolving, about to disappear entirely.
Bacon was an avowed atheist, and this adds another dimension to his decision to represent the head of the Church as a figure ensnared. The image evokes the Existentialist experience of an individual’s loss of faith and the vulnerability he or she might feel in a world without God. In later versions of this subject, Bacon inserted references to photographs of the current pontiff, Pope Pius XII, a controversial man who may have appeased the Nazis.
Interestingly, Bacon did not view the original painting when he visited in Rome in 1954.
2. Fluxus
Fig. 8: Poster for Joseph Beuys and Nam June Paik’s Memorial Concert for George Maciunas, 1978
The name Fluxus comes from the Latin for “flow,” and while the movement is difficult to define, the name points to Fluxus artists’ shared belief that life is generally defined by continuous change and motion.
The movement began in 1961 when the writer, performance artist, and composer George Maciunas used “Fluxus” for the title of a projected series of anthologies. It profiled the work of such artists as George Brecht, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, and Christo, who engaged in experimental music, “concrete” poetry, performance events, and what they called “antifilms.”
In his 1961 manifesto—Neo-Dada in Music, Theater, Poetry, Art—Maciunas categorized the diversity of these activities with the term Neo-Dada. In fact, Maciunas cited John Cage’s compositions, the happenings at Black Mountain College, the collaboration between dancers Merce Cunningham and Robert Rauschenberg, and Duchamp’s readymades as sources of inspiration. Like American Neo-Dada, Fluxus was defined as an alternative to the hegemony of Abstract Expressionism in the art world.
The first of a series of Fluxus festivals, or Fluxconcerts, were organized by Maciunas in 1962—at the Museum Wiesbaden in Wiesbaden, Germany—to promote his anthology. Again like Dada, Fluxus was a truly cosmopolitan phenomenon with centers of activity in Germany and New York. Maciunas, however, pushed for a global definition of art. One line in his manifesto screamed: “PURGE THE WORLD OF ‘EUROPANISM’!” [5]
By this Maciunas meant to eliminate the pervasiveness of ideas emanating from Europe and North America in the international art world. In place of this hegemony, Fluxus artists advocated for true openness to ideas from all world cultures. Indeed, a number of Fluxus artists came from Asia, notably Yoko Ono, and many women and African-Americans were included.
2.1 Nam June Paik
Fig. 9: Nam June Paik, Opera Sextronique (1967)
Opera Sextronique is the product of a long-time collaboration between Nam June Paik—considered by many to be the first video artist—and the classical cellist Charlotte Moorman. Paik, a Korean-American, met John Cage as a student in West Germany, where Neo-Dada had a considerable influence on him.
After his move to New York in 1964, he and Moorman created a performance that combined video technology with live music. In TV Cello, they stacked televisions on top of one another so that they formed the shape of a cello, which Moorman played as images of other cellists appeared on the screens. After one notorious performance of Opera Sextronique, Moorman was arrested for performing topless and convicted for lewd conduct. The piece was banned by the police and was later performed as a second version with Moorman wearing a television bra—renamed TV Bra for Living Sculpture. This version was filmed for the trial that followed the cellist’s arrest. Eventually, the city of New York passed a law to allow nudity in performance art. The irreverent tone of such performances shared the sense of humor that characterized Dada happenings in Zurich in 1916.
2.2 Joseph Beuys
Fig. 10: Joseph Beuys, 24 hours……and in us……under us……and under…- Spade with Two Handles (1965) (Galerie Parnass)
Joseph Beuys joined the international Fluxus movement in 1964 after meeting Marciunas, but he was never fully absorbed into the group. Some participants viewed his work as essentially German, which contradicted Fluxus’ internationalism. Beuys studied at the State Academy of Art in Dusseldorf soon after the war; he joined the faculty there in 1961 as a professor of monumental sculpture. The next year, in 1962, Beuys invited 15 Fluxus artists to Dusseldorf to take part in the Festum Fluxorum Fluxus.
He called hisworks “actions.” One of these famous actions, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, took place on the opening night of Beuys’s exhibition of drawings (see Figure 1). The public arrived at the gallery only to find the doors locked. Through the glass front of the gallery, they saw Beuys sitting in a chair with his face covered in honey and gold leaf, cradling a dead hare in his arms. For three hours he wandered around the exhibition, as if explaining each work to the hare.
In another action, called 24 hours… …and in us… …under us… …and under…, he spent 24 hours on top of a small, white box, where he repeatedly performed a sequence of individual actions. The various objects he used included a wedge of fat, a double spade, and a recording tape onto which he documented sounds and voice fragments. The sound component was significant to him:
. . . there was the use of sound as a sculptural material to enlarge the whole understanding of sculpture from the point of view of using materials . . .not only solid materials, like metal, clay, [and] stone, but also sound, noise, [and] melody, using language. [6]
Fig. 11: Joseph Beuys, Eurasian Siberian Symphony 1963 (1966) (MoMA)
Beuys used animals—the hare, for example—in a number of his actions, and honey, fat, and felt were materials he often employed in his work. He explained what these materials meant to him to a semifictitious autobiography he produced in 1964. While it is certain that Beuys volunteered for the Luftwaffe in 1941 and was stationed in the Crimea, some aspects of the myth he formed around his biography are difficult to distill from the truth.
Beuys explained that he was in a plane that was shot down over the Crimea (this is true) and that he was rescued by nomadic Tatar tribesmen, who nursed him back to health by covering his burnt body with fat: “I remember . . . the felt of their tents, and the dense, pungent smell of cheese, fat, and milk. They covered my body in fat to help it regenerate warmth, and wrapped it in felt as an insulator to keep warmth in.” [7]The story of his rescue was fiction—he in fact recovered in a German hospital.
Those themes and motifs came together again in Eurasian Siberian Symphony 1963, a performance that took place in a Berlin gallery in 1966. The reference to Eurasia evokes the fusion of Eastern and Western cultures, which, as students have seen, was most important to Fluxus artists. At a time when Germany was cleaved into Eastern and Western halves, this idea took on even more meaning. In this piece, the hare, which can cover long distances at great speed, evokes geographical unity.
The blackboard and other items were so-called “props” used during performances that Beuys staged in Berlin and Copenhagen. You can see the taxidermy hare that he manipulated during this action and the numbers on the chalkboard—they record both the degrees of the angles of the fat and felt affixed to the poles during the action and correspond to the temperature of a high human fever (42-degrees Celsius). The year 1963 may refer to the year when John F. Kennedy delivered his famous speech in West Berlin, in which he proclaimed the United States’s solidarity with the people of that city, a hopeful moment in the middle of the Cold War. Fat and felt are essential components of Beuys’s wish that art could serve to heal humanity, just as he, according to his story, was healed back to health by these materials.
Citations
[1] Jean-Paul Sartre, from Existentialism and Humanism, in Harrison and Wood, 601.
[2] Quoted in Paul J. Karlstrom and Ann Karlstrom, Peter Selz: Sketches of a Life in Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 74 – 75.
[3] Jean Dubuffet, “Crude Art Preferred to Cultural Art,” in Harrison and Wood, 607.
[4] Jean-Paul Sartre, We Have Only This Life to Live: The Selected Essays of Jean-Paul Sartre, 1939 – 1975, eds. Ronald Aronson and Adrian Van den Hoven (New York: New York Review Books, 2013), 193.
[5] Quoted in Charles Merewether, Rika Iezumi Hiro, and Reiko Tomii, Art, Anti-Art, Non-Art: Experimentations in the Public Sphere in Postwar Japan, 1950 – 1970 (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2007), 20.
[6] Quoted in Mariellen R. Sandford, Happenings and Other Acts (London: Routledge, 1995), 278.
[7] Quoted in Chris Thompson, Felt: Fluxus, Joseph Beuys, and the Dalai Lama (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 136.
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