POSTWAR 1945-1965, Okwui Enwezor (Munique 2016)
Alice Neel, Beauford Delaney, Julio Pomar, etc
The United States had its own contingent of fellow travelers. As Alice Neel, considered by manv a pioneer of Socialist Realism in American painting, declared in 1951, "I am againest abstract and non-objective art because such art shows a hatred of human beings. East Harlem is like a battlefield of humanism, and I am on the side of the people here, and they inspire my paintings." The dandyish pose struck by the young George Arce in his portrait by Neel is hit a thin vencer over the violent life of teenagers of color in Spanish Harlem.
Alice Neel, quoted in Andrew Hemingway, Artists on the Left: American Artists and the Communist Movement, 1926-1956 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 248.
The long pictorial tradition of a victimized yet heroic peasantry continued to empower artists to voice a strong "j'accuse!" against regimes of political domination. The Portuguese artist Julio Pomar thus painted the monumental female rice-pickers in Etude para Ciclo do Arroz II (Study for Rice Cycle II, 1953; plate 183) under the dictatorship of António Salazar.
See, lúlio Pomar. Alexandre Pomar. and Natalía Vital. Júlio Pomar, Cataloque raisonné (Paris, Différence. 2001),
O capítulo Realisms, pp. 418-473, segue-se a New imges of Man, pp.338-415: "Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Auschwitz and the other camps, and colonialism had laid bare the failures of Western civilization. In the wake of these shocks came ambivalent political attempts to establish more just geopolitical systems, using new legal forms such as the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights — putatively global but in fact dominated by Western authority.
ResponderEliminarAt the same time, people in former European colonies struggled for full citizenship and autonomy. Philosophers and artists sought to inquire into human nature itself, in debates that included the discourses of Negritude and existentialism and of the rights of individuals and groups within larger (often oppressive) social and political entities.
"New Images of Man" features pictorial versions of such inquiries. Here, humans often appear battered, deformed by the horror of modern life, rent by the question of their own value. The artists making this work often deliberately combined figuration and materialist facture, refusing the choice between abstraction and representation - or between physical and social life, seeing the binary as not only ideologically false but also deeply destructive.
The most significant counterforce to universalist Western humanism came, in different veins, from the former European colonies. Sometimes, as with Frantz Fanon's "new man," the formerly colonized claimed a moral right to define humanism broadly and universally, a right abrogated by the West, and offered a correspondingly more positive, future-oriented vision of humanity." p.339
ver Sarah Wilson, "New images of man : postwar humanism and its challenches in the west. p.345
Picasso, El Salahi, Bacon, Giacometti, de Kooning, Dubuffet, Lam, Jorn, Auerbach, Tamayo, Guston 47, Baselitz, Richter, Penk, Golub, Lassnig, Siqueiros, Sekoto, etc
"An important aesthetic feature of the Cold War binary was the Socialist Realism of the Soviet Union, China, and Eastern and Central Europe. Here, to a greater extent than in the Western countries, institutional appropriation came before artistic production, not after it. Yet accounts of this category are often narrow.
Even the heyday of its governmental enforcement, Socialist Realism was not a single style. Under Mao Zedong, Chinese artists produced large official portraits of the chairman and scenes depicting model workers, but they also made traditional ink paintings, if adding appropriate symbols of the new order, such as the red flag. In the Soviet Union, art from the 1940s to Joseph Stalin's death in 1953 is primarily characterized by affirmative images of labor and, especially, by heroic images of party leaders. During the post-Stalinist thaw, genre work influenced by the nineteenth-century "Wanderers" school Russian painting became more prominent, as well as the "severe" style, infuenced by Soviet art of the 1920s and early '30s.
Outside the Soviet Union there was considerably more latitude for officially sanctioned artists, and their works, while depicting authorized subjects, introduced personal drawing styles and Surrealist elements. The "Realisms" section of the exhibition also features the similarly ideological and popular work of artists in other parts of the world and from different points on the political spectrum, from the United States to Mexico, Western Europe, and the Middle East. Along with some works of moderate size intended for museums, this section emphasizes enormous public works, popular prints, and documentation." p.419
e tb Guttuso, Siqueiros, Taslitzky, Wyeth etc