Be-bomb, Transatlantic War Through Images

By Alicia Escobio Alonso

“At Hiroshima museum, four times

I have seen people walking through.

The people walk lost in thought,

Through the photographs,

The reconstructions,

In the absence of anything else,

Explanations

In the absence of anything else”

Extract form the film ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour’, Alain Resnais, 1959.

In 1946, following the Second World War and the dropping of the atomic bomb, the exhibition “Beneath the Bomb. The jazz of the transatlantic war of images, 1946 - 1956” began to circulate, and can now be seen at the MACBA, from the 5th of October 2007 until the 7th of January, 2008. We penetrate the genealogy of art and the theory of the post-war era on the second floor, where the exhibition organizer, Serge Guilbaut, begins his attempt to make us see the necessity for memory, and the impossibility of a linear history. We go back to the past and recover for the present names which were distant then and are little known now, such as Alfred Manessier, Giuseppe Capogrossi, Claire Falkenstein, Gertrude Barrer, Howard Daum, Steve Wheeler, Maria-Helena Viera da Silva, Irene Rice Pereira, Romare Bearden and Byron Brown, among others.

Jackson Pollock, Untitled, 1951
Photo: M. Herling / A. Qwose © J. Pollock
© VEGAP Barcelona 2007

Paris would seem to have been struck dumb faced with the monumental works of abstract expressionism by those who were proclaimed the great success stories in art at the end of the forties, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Franz Kline, and who permitted the United States to cry ‘victory’ in the Cultural War.

France had to reconstruct herself from the ruins left by the war; each individual French citizen lived with the memory of the catastrophe, and in the face of this legacy artists such as Jean Fautrier, Arshley Gorky, Pablo Picasso, Henri Michaux or Robert Motherwell sought a language which distanced itself from fascist realism and was coloured by a different sensibility, driven by different fears which until the war had been unknown.

There was a debate at governmental level between Paris and New York. The Americans were submerged in communist paranoia and atomic explosions; in comparison, Europeans clung to the reinforcement of individual liberty, with campaigns signed by famous militant painters in the Communist Party, such as Picasso’s dove of peace. This discourse is presented in the exhibition through film, newspapers, books, archives and interviews; as part of this popular culture, fashion should not be forgotten. Where, as well as Dior, whose public acceptance was rather doubtful in this period, we can include John Cocteau’s Thèâtre du Monde, where a scarcity of resources made the use of miniature models obligatory, although not lacking in a certain theatricality.

Regardless of this separation imposed by the authorities, artists from both countries began to exchange ideas, and galleries such as Maeght in Paris, or Samuel Kootz in New York, and later the Galerie Arnaud or Gallery 8, whose display of the exhibitions held then also deserve a space in the MACBA, helped to promote this. But above all, this exhibition not ignore the jazz culture, centered on personalities such as Miles Davis and Juliette Greco, with whom, and with the photographer Paul Strand, we enter the first floor, the character of which seems to us more thoughtful. America watches France, and France, America, and as objects of each other’s observation, both appear displaced by the position of their observer.

Nicolas de Staël, Nice, 1954
Photo: L. Staelsworth
© VEGAP Barcelona 2007

But our State, what was it doing then, if, in 1946, even France and the United States were at least in agreement about opposing the survival of a fascist regime in Europe? Spain was suffering then form an isolation brought about by the recently created United Nations, which lasted until 1950. There were three events which showed signs of an opening up to the rest of the world. In 1951, the first Biennial of Hispano-American Art; in 1953, the Abstract Art Conference in Santander, and the Biennial in Venice in 1958 The artists chosen by Manual Borja-Villel to uncover for us the undeniable necessity for memory were to be Antoni Tàpies, Esteban Vicente, José Guerrero, Manuel Millares, Antonio Saura and Luis Feito, all of whom were members of the school which would come to be known as Spanish Informalism.

And lastly, a blitz of opposing images, Bram Van Velde versus Jackson Pollock. In sculpture, though scarce, a blurred body by Giacometti should not be forgotten. Karel Appel, as representative of the Cobra group which was so influenced by Dubbuffet’s Art Brut. And finally, a violent silence, imposed by Yves Klein’s monochrome, which continues after Piero Mazoni and Robert Rauschenberg, a change in language in order to present a message which speaks to us of terror, or of the analytical and experimental liberation of the subconscious. An ending with suspension points.

Alicia Escobio Alonso is Graduate in Philosophy, specializing in the aesthetics of contemporary art, and collaborator at the MACBA in the exhibition ‘Beneath the bomb. The jazz of the transatlantic war of images. 1946 – 1956’.