Europe Post-War, Art and Politics

Gertje Utley

 

SECTION  2

A totally different kind of realism was practiced by the group of four artists, known as the Beaux Arts quartet, or – more colloquially -- the “kitchen sink painters”. [21] They claimed to share the interests of the Socialist Realist painters in France and Italy. Yet few of them were really political or fulfilled Berger’s demand for a socially relevant art. [22]



Paolozzi, Meet the People  1948, from Ten Collages from BUNK


For the generation of painters that emerged in the 60s it was no longer relevant to agonize about the last war. They grew tired of the “iconography of despair,” which appeared to them, as one artist said, like eternally scratching the old wounds. [23] American art seemed refreshingly like a message of hope and optimism. They adopted bright colors to express their enthusiastic visions of America’s consumer society. Artists such as Eduardo Paolozzi, the photographer Nigel Henderson, Richard and Terry Hamilton, David Hockney, and William Turnbull, showed their fascination with American mass culture, by integrating advertizing imagery, cutouts from American magazines, into their art.  Because of their use of found imagery, the group, who met at the newly created ICA in London under the name the Independent Group, was often spoken of as forerunners of Pop Art.  But works such as Paolozzi’s collage is in fact closer to the collages of Dada artists of the 1920s and 30s, such as Max Ernst in this case. [24]


Richard Hamilton, Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? 1956 ;Richard Hamilton, $he

The icon of this new art was Richard Hamilton’s collage 1956 “Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?” Before starting his work, he first drew up a list of the categories that he wanted to be included in his image: “Man, Woman, Food, history, newspaper, cinema, domestic appliances, car, television, telephone, comics, etc.” [25] The enthusiasm of those images has to be seen in the context of England in the 1950s, which was still suffering from postwar shortages. It is impossible today to imagine how exotic American popular culture with its imagery of abundance and display of the riches of its consumer society appeared to those artists. [26] And yet, although fundamentally apolitical, the artists of the Independents still felt some ambivalence about their admiration for American popular culture “in the face of” and I quote, “the conditioned-reflex atomic saber-rattling of the Eisenhower regime.” [27]


Eduardo Paolozzi, Diana as an Engine, 1963; Peter Blake, The Love Wall, 1961


At times Hamilton used a mix of painting and collage as in “She” of 1958, in which he replaced a $ sign for the S; possibly as a comment on the exploitation of the image of women in advertising. [28] Hamilton’s example was followed by a younger generation of painters, who were part of the rock’n roll culture of their time. Very much part of the swinging 60s, their art exuded youth, humor and playfulness. [29]


David Hockney, Going to be a queen for tonight, 1960

But also, as in some of David Hockney’s work from the time, one could find references to the politics of sexual liberation, as in this painting “Going to be Queen for tonight,” of 1960.

On the whole, however, British artists turned to politics only in the 70s.

For France and Italy the situation was quite different. Their experience of the war and their existence under German occupation deeply divided their societies into left and right. And that at a time when there was very little middle ground in European politics.

While all of Eastern Europe came under the yoke of Soviet Russia and became Communist by force, Communists also played a major role in Italy and France, mostly because of their heroic role in the Resistance during the German occupation. The strong presence of the Communists in France and Italy had a defining influence on the postwar art scene in those countries, as – under the influence of the Soviet Union -- Socialist Realism was imposed as mandatory for their communist artists.


Giulio Turcato, Ruined City; Guttuso, The Discussion, 1959

The Venice Biennale became one of the stages on which the battle for realism versus abstraction was played out. While the organizers of the 1948 Biennale clearly favored European modernism as representing the idea of freedom, democracy and European Unity, by 1950 the polemics around the abstraction-realism debate had further sharpened. During the Mussolini years, the war and the German occupation, their opposition to fascism had united Italian artists whether they were modernists or realists. But after the war and with the nascent cold war, issues of artistic preference left the purely cultural domain and entered the highly polarized political sphere. [30] After the war, the Communist Party in Italy was politically stronger and better organized than in other western countries. And although after 1947 it was no longer part of the government, it retained ca. 20% of the popular vote. While the PCI had maintained a degree of independence from Moscow, it followed the Soviet Union’s example in cultural mattersand made Socialist Realism mandatory for its adherents. The Italian Communist Party leader Togliatti was so virulent in his condemnation of abstract art as “monstrous scribbles, that he alienated many Italian artists, such as Giulio Turcato, whose Ruined City we see on the left, and who left the PC in protest. [31]


Guttuso, Crucifixion; Guttuso’s The Beach, 1955

Others like Renato Guttuso remained faithful to the Communist Party and to a form of Socialist Realism. He became a spokesman for Neo-Realism (the terminology preferred by the Italians) and continued to embrace an art for the people, depicting the life and sometimes the leisure (as here on the Beach) of the working class. [32] Like other Italian artists after the liberation, he found in Picasso’s Guernica a model for bridging the divide between modern and socially relevant art.  He would carry a reproduction of Guernica it in his pocket and called it his Communist Party membership card. While he painted at times in a Picasso derived style as in the crucifixion scene, he would at others turn to the most drastic realism.


Guttuso, The Battle of Ponte dell’Ammireaglio, 1951

His “Battle of Ponte dell’Ammireaglio” was painted for the 1952 Venice Biennale and depicts a heroic event in the Risorgimento, the unification of Italy, an apt subject for the post fascist era in Italy.

It was however in France that the Battle for Realism became the most contentious. And I am showing the work of one Socialist Realist painter and one who chose the abstract idiom, Edouard Pignon’s “Dead Worker” and one painting from Fautrier’s  series “Otages”.


Edouard Pignon, The Dead Worker; Fautrier, Têtê d’Otage 1

France was not so much physically destroyed during the war, as Germany had invaded it without having to overcome much resistance. But in the aftermath of its four-year occupation by German forces, the country suffered from what is now recognized as essentially a civil war between the supporters of the pro-Nazi Vichy regime and the Resistance. The trauma of years under the occupation had left post-War France in the grip of brutal confrontations and retributions against the collaborators.

Much of the immediate postwar art was understandably pessimistic and dark. Yet, some of the more interesting art found ways to show the violence of the era without resorting to a realist idiom.


Pierre Soulages, Painting 23 May 1953; Fautrier, Têtê d’Otage 20

Pierre Soulages, for example, turned to abstraction as a reaction to the Nazi policy that denounced abstract art as degenerate. And he looked to Picasso’s Guernica as a model for the expressive power of a color scale of black and white.

The works in Fautrier’s series “Otages” (hostages) are only slightly less abstract and every bit as tragic.  Malraux, who called Fautrier “l’artiste le plus tragique de son époque,” saw in those paintings “hieroglyphs of suffering”. [33]


Work of Wols; Francis Gruber, Job, 1944

The German born artist Otto Wolfgang Schulze, better known as Wols, fled Germany to France where he ended up in an internment camp. The spidery forms of his abstract works translate the anxiety and suffering he endured during the war, internment, and exile.

Others found that realism was better suited to express the hardship of the war and postwar existence. For the French artist Francis Gruber only history painting was capable of translating the human suffering, and he turned to a biblical subject matter for his painting “Job” of 1944. He dedicated the painting to the steadfastness of the Parisian population who managed to keep hope alive all during the years of the German occupation. And he exhibited it at the Communist organized Salon de la Liberation in 1946. [34] As a member of the French Communist Party, Gruber subscribed to their insistence on Socialist Realism in the arts, but he died too young to be really part of the realism debate.

During the early postwar days, and despite the retaliations going on against the collaborators, there reigned a climate of relative harmony, in which the right and the left tried to promote a climate of national unity, as pre-condition for the desired national renaissance. Yet it did not last.

At the end of the German occupation Communism played an important role in France, as the largest party with some 900 000 members. French Communists were celebrated for their heroic – if belated – fight in the Resistance against the Nazi occupier. Moreover, as chief victim of the war, the Soviet Union was widely credited -- rather than the Americans -- with having liberated Europe, and was consequently seen as the only active opponent and viable alternative to Fascism. The Soviet Union’s support of the Spanish Republicans during the Civil War in Spain endorsed this claim and was of course an essential factor in Picasso’s decision to join the party.

Although few artists were actually members of the party, many were fellow travelers.  And for a while after the war the art world was dominated by the Communist party and its Soviet influenced artistic policies.

It is difficult to exaggerate the prominent role art played in Communist party politics and the passions that inflamed the champions of realism against the defenders of abstraction in the late 1940s and early 1950s.


Women of the Kolkhoz by an unknown Ukrainian painter; Boris Vladimirski, Roses for Stalin

Socialist Realism in art and literature, the brainchild of Stalin and Gorki, had been imposed in the 1930s as a means to marshal the intellectuals’ participation in the socialist struggle. Intellectuals were summoned to turn away from individualism and what was called “decadent aestheticism”. The artist was to participate in "the ideological education of the workers in the Socialist spirit." Their works had to be optimistic and tendentious, and exalt – as sole subject for their art -- the efforts of the industrial and rural working masses and their fight for socialism. Artistic quality was disregarded in favor of an easily accessible style and an optimistic and enthusiastic tenor. [35] In essence artists and intellectuals (this applied equally to literature) were demanded to abdicate the autonomy on the very field of their competence, which became nothing but a tool in the defense of the prevailing party policy of the hour.

Just as the Italian Communists, the French Communist Party swiftly followed the new dictates and launched a new “bataille du realisme”. The debate around the "réalisme socialiste" became for French Communists the stage on which world politics were acted out and political loyalties were tested. The French Surrealist poet Louis Aragon, a diehard Communist since the 1930s, became for French leftwing intellectuals Socialist Realism’s most militant advocate, declaring it to be the official style of the Communist Party, [36] and promoting it in the party press, which he turned into a mouthpiece for party dogma. [37]

Aragon repeatedly stressed the political character of the bataille du realisme, maintaining that the struggle for Socialist Realism is really an aspect of the struggle for peace. [38] Indicative of the increasingly closer bond of the French Communists with Moscow, Aragon insinuated that non-figurative art was a crime that benefitted what he called "American imperialism". [39] Whoever showed reticence towards Socialist Realism was now considered to commit “a genuine political attack on the party.” [40] Yet in the attempt to disprove the French Communist Party’s subservience to Moscow, Aragon's terminology "nouveau réalisme" supplanted "réalisme socialiste" in party rhetoric. [41]

Courbet, The Stonebreakers, 1849

In order to find a relevant source in the French Realist Tradition, Courbet was set up as example. He was praised for the realism of works such as his “The Stonebreakers” of 1849 as well as for his radical politics.

Aragon's book L'Exemple de Courbet is really a plea for Socialist Realism. Aragon's argument is that the defense of Socialist Realism implies much larger stakes, such as the adherence to the revolutionary as well as the cultural history of France. Surprisingly, Aragon advanced that the one who most faithfully perpetuated the lessons of Courbet was "the artist from whom one would expect it the least: ... Picasso". [42] In associating Picasso with Courbet, Aragon responded to the dilemma of the party: how to reconcile the contradiction between its embracing of Socialist Realism and the celebrated presence of Picasso within its ranks.

Picasso, Doves

The question of how to reconcile their glorification of Picasso with its imposition of Socialist Realism was a major problem for the party, one that was of particular consequence for its relations with its artists. [43] The adopted solution was to confine Picasso's prominence to his role in the Peace Movement and his production of an endless stream of peace doves. [44]

As a member of the party, which declared itself to be the champion of the masses, Picasso now claimed that he wanted his art to be more easily accessible to a wider audience. His first attempts date already from the spring of 1945:

Picasso, Charnel House, 1946

The painting was Picasso’s first unambiguous reference to the massacres of World War II, be it to the Holocaust or to the suffering of the civilian population in general. Like so often in his war paintings, Picasso followed Goya’s example in that he turned his focus on the fate of the civilian population.


Picasso, Massacre in Korea, 1951

This was certainly the case with Picasso’s painting Massacre in Korea, in which he clearly tries to show his support of the Communist position in the Korean War. The war had started in 1950 when the Communist North Koreans invaded the South. Although this was done with Soviet support, they would denounce the war as a transgression by the United States. Picasso’s painting clearly defended this position; and he did so in a highly recognizable figurative style.

Picasso, Chapel in Vallauris, 1952

Yet neither of those two paintings found party approval. It was only with his panels of “War” and “Peace” in the chapel in Vallauris that he had finally achieved what the party demanded from its intellectuals and artists: to approach their work like a military operation; "determine the weak point of the adversary and strike". The panels contained a clear accusation of the US, which was then falsely being accused of bacteriological warfare.


Boris Taslitzky, Death of Danielle Casanova, 1950; Boris Taslitzky, Stalin visiting Thorez (the longtime leader of the French Communist Party)

Despite efforts like the Charnel House or his painting Massacre in Korea, Picasso was eclipsed within the Communist Party by younger artists, who accepted the artistic dogma of Socialist Realism. Andre Fougeron and Boris Taslitzky set the standard of what the party expected from its artists. Both had experience of political combat, of war and resistance and were seen as adequate representatives of the “parti des fusilles”.

Boris Taslitzky, the son of Russian émigrés, had survived internment in the concentration camp at Buchenwald. His painting of the death of the wife of a prominent Communist party official in Buchenwald has the effect of an eyewitness account. [45] Paintings such as this or his “Stalin visiting Maurice Thorez,” the French Communist longtime party leader, were what the party expected from its painters.


Fougeron, Woman Pealing apples; Fougeron, Parisian Woman at the Market, 1947/48

The poster child of Socialist Realism became André Fougeron.  Fougeron, a diehard Communist and a former worker at Renault, had distinguished himself during the Occupation in the Resistance and as coeditor of the underground publication Vaincre.  If Fougeron was not the artist who had most immersed himself in Socialist Realism  -- others, like Taslitzky, could be deemed just as representative -- what impressed the party was his drastic, dogmatic switch from a Matisse and Picasso inspired style, as in “Woman Pealing Apples” to the style that was now fostered by the communists:

With his painting “Les Parisiennes au Marché” in 1947/48 Fougeron left the wake of modernist influence and adopted an easily accessible pictorial language which was to become the paradigm of postwar Socialist Realism in France. [46] By showing the daily life of the "petit peuple Parisien," Fougeron could be celebrated as the "painter of the working class," and his art as serving their struggle. [47] Together with Taslitzky's painting “La Mort de Danielle Casanova,” Fougeron’s “Parisiennes au Marché” answered the contemporary call for history painting. Anecdotal, didactic, and rendered in a realist idiom, they were the paradigm of the party's dictates for Socialist Realism.


André Fougeron, The murder of André Houllier, 1949; Fougeron, Les Paysans Français défendent leur terre,  1953 (Nato forces under American General Ridgeway, Shape, near Paris)

Louis Aragon went so far as to claim that the destiny of the world was being played out in Fougeron’s figurative art.[48] The painting on the left “the murder of André Houllier” commemorates the death of a communist militant who was killed by an overzealous police officer when he was pasting flyers against atomic weapons. The French Communist party bought Fougeron’s painting for the then exorbitant prize of 1 million ancient Francs and sent it as a present to Stalin.


Taslitzky, La riposte (“The Reaction”), 1949

The year 1951 presented the summit of Socialist Realism as for the noise it created. The paintings by the Communist painters at the Salon d’Automne were considered so politically incendiary, that seven paintings, Taslitzky’s “riposte” (“Reaction”) among them, were taken off the wall by the police for having “attack(ed) the national sentiment.” In face of violent reaction four of those paintings had to be reinstalled.


Leger,  Hommage à Louis David. Les Loisires, 1948/49; Leger,  Construction Workers  

Leger had spent the war years in the US and had returned in 1946, at which point he joined the French Communist Party.  Despite his deep-seated Communist belief, he did not wholeheartedly subscribe to the concept of art for the people. His comment betrays as much: “Ce n’est pas a nous de descendre jusqu’a eux, mais à eux de monter jusqu’a nous” (It is not for us to descend to their level, but for them to climb to ours.)

There were of course abstract artists working in France, but they were on the most part outside the political debate, except in the opposition their art faced, and not only from the political left, but also from the right. [49] Picasso of all people adhered to that view. In the late 1940s he apparently said to his companion Francoise Gilot: "non-figurative painting is never subversive. It's always a kind of bag into which the viewer can throw anything he wants to get rid of.” [50]

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