Art Section 3

What did philosopher Theodor Adorno famously say in 1949?

" to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric " For German and Italian artists, the atrocities carried out by their governments and fellow citizens in the name of racist ideologies threw their national cultures and traditions under suspicion. To be a German or Italian artist meant having to carry the burden of an unspeakable recent history. For other countries, like France, a history of collaboration with the Nazis put into question many people with official posts or those who somehow survived the years of occupation.

The art historian Jaimey Hamilton has interpreted Burri's negation of symbolic meaning as more complicated than a simple rejection of over-inquisitive critics set on connecting the works to the artist's biography. Quoting Burri's 1955 statement ____________________ Hamilton demonstrates the contradiction in the way Burri's material processes act out the wounds of war as he simultaneously refuses to name them in language. In Burri's words: Words are no help to me when I try to speak about my painting. It is an irreducible presence that refuses to be converted into any other form of expression.... My painting is a reality which is part of myself, a reality which I cannot reveal in words. . . . I can only say this: painting for me is a freedom attained, constantly consolidated, vigilantly guarded so as to draw from it the power to paint more.

"Words Are No Help,"

Düsseldorf and its art scene were quickly becoming associated with the West German _____________________ of the 1950s and early 1960s, a period of rapid reconstruction and development.

"economic miracle"

Thus, Abstract Expressionism occupied a paradoxical position in postwar American culture. On the one hand, it was held out as a beacon of liberal American culture and a bulwark against the threat of Communism abroad. At the same time, as an avant-garde movement, it came under attack from conservatives at home who distrusted a number of the artists' earlier associations with the New Deal and 1930s leftism and famously proclaimed that ____________________________________________

"modern art equals communism." In this light, the Abstract Expressionists' retreat from the art of propaganda and illustration in which they were trained in the 1930s and immersion in the "autonomous" process of Modernist artmaking could be read as strategically apolitical, a way of sidestepping the explicitly politicized tenor of the times. Ironically, this rejection of their previous political commitments and their embrace of artistic autonomy were targeted by critics in the Soviet Union as a debased lack of social engagement that was politically suspect and an expression of a bourgeois-decadent society.

Soviet Communist Party leader Andrei Zhdanov, speaking at the Union of Soviet Writers' 1934 congress, described Socialist Realism as _______________________________________________________

"reality in its revolutionary development" and a form of "revolutionary romanticism." This is evident in the many pictorial strategies Shurpin marshaled to awaken in his viewer a sense of optimism about the future: from the balanced composition drawing the eye up and out of the canvas, to the romantic light and colors, to the subtle signs of industrial production seemingly sprouting from the very soil. After three decades of upheaval, including the Russian Revolution, Civil War, rapid industrialization, and the Second World War, the sentiment of sacrifice finally bearing fruit, as made visible in Shurpin's painting, was a rhetorically effective one. Soviet society was ready for stability and a bright future after all it had suffered.

For Japan, which was recovering from the devastation of World War II and the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Abstract Expressionism served as a way for one group of artists to participate in a global avant-garde while engaging with native traditions to produce a new art for their own time. What is the Gutai Art Association (Gutai Bujutsu Kyokai)?

- Art association founded in 1954 by 17 artists living in Osaka - Looked from Paris to New York for the latest art - Particularly interested in Art Informel and Abstract Expressionism - Their understanding of the abstract paintings they encountered in magazines and later in traveling exhibitions was not always well informed as the Gutai artists themselves noted in their manifesto of 1956 - Their ultimate goal was to enter into a conversation with the new art and to "advance into the unknown world." - Fittingly, their work often explored the themes of destruction, struggle, and rebirth

Der Wurstesser (The Sausage Eater), 1963

- Blurs the boundary between abstraction and figuration, high art and commercial kitsch, as well as Modernist seriousness and the authorless anonymity of popular culture to propose a way to move beyond Cold War binaries - Painting of a sausage - At first glance, The Sausage Eater is a banal picture of an absurdly long chain of sausage links coiling and twisting around the blank off-white space of the canvas and eventually finding its way into the grasping hand and open mouth of an anonymous smiling head in profile - The picture resembles a rather simple magazine advertisement, albeit lacking a brand name and laudatory ad copy - Polke delivered a profane, scatological realism that parodied the official idea that art should address itself to the masses - Swiss artist Peter Fischli (who was much influenced by Polke) has noted, Polke's art is "always about the world of the petit bourgeois—their aesthetic, their longings, and how they use these consumer items, which are always a little bit on the poor side." - The sausage eater in Polke's picture is hardly a proletarian hero; he is rather a Homer Simpson-like buffoon - Mercilessly mocks the realist aspirations of socialist art, neither does it spare the ideological underpinnings of Western Modernism's drive toward purity - If advanced painting, according to Modernist critic Clement Greenberg, progressively shed narrative content and emphasized the specific properties of the painting itself, then the exaggerated way in which Polke has carefully painted the sausage links to trace the surface and edges of the canvas, but never overlap or intersect, can be read as mimicking Modernist purity - An element of "the emperor's new clothes" to Polke's strategy - Authorship is destabilized

Alberto Burri

- Born in 1915 in a small town in the Umbria region of Italy - Received a degree in medicine from the university in Perugia - Served on the Axis side in the Ethiopian campaign during WW2, on the frontlines then as a physician treating wounded soldiers - 1943: his unit was captured in Tunisia and Burri was sent a war camp in Hereford, Texas as a prisoner. - Disillusioned by war and estranged by life in camp, he took up painting and taught himself a figurative style then abandoned medicine for the rest of his life. During the time at camp, he lacked a canvas, so he had a salvaged sugar and flour burlap sacks from the mess hall which he stretched and covered with a ground layer for painting - Was repatriated to Italy in 1946 and quickly immersed himself in the recent history of European art and began to exhibit his work - Back in Italy, he continued to use discarded burlap sacks from the local flour mill but instead of using them as a neutral ground for painting, he transformed his technique into tearing, collaging, and stitching fragments together with great dexterity which was called Sacchi

Kazuo Shiraga

- Born in 1924 in Amagasaki City - Studied traditional Japanese painting and later Western oil painting - Experimented with many forms using diverse implements - Starting in the mid-1950s, established his signature technique of painting with the soles of his feet, a gesture that builds on and extends the energetic painting technique pictured in Namuth's photos of Jackson Pollock.

Sigmar Polke

- Born in 1941 in Oels, the Silesian borderlands between Germany and Poland - His hometown was severely damaged by the Red Army in 1945 - Polke's family fled to Thuringia, which became part of East Germany - Germany. Eight years later, the Polkes emigrated to West Berlin and eventually settled in Düsseldorf, in West Germany - Initially apprenticed as a glass painter - Between 1961 and 1967 studied at the prestigious Düsseldorf Art Academy - Used humor and irony, as well as an inventive play with ideas and themes,

Challenging Mud (1955)

- Earlier work of Kazuo Shiraga - Shiraga had a large pile of mud delivered to the courtyard of a Tokyo exhibition hall and threw himself in the mud - He kneaded and struggled with it, using their entire bodies as photographers and a camera man

"Modernist Painting" (1961)

- Essay by Clement Greenberg - Described modernism as "the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence - What he meant by this was that the real subject of painting in the modern era was painting itself, its properties and rules as a medium, and not any content or narrative conveyed by its illusionistic capacities. For painting, this meant color, the working of paint on a flat surface, and the delineation of flatness within the picture. This demonstrated a form of autonomy—painting attempting to be as "itself," and no other medium, as possible - It was first delivered as a lecture in 1960 on Voice of America, an American government-funded radio station that broadcast internationally during the Cold War, including into the Soviet Union to counter Soviet propaganda directed to Soviet citizens - The broadcast did not have much of an effect on artists behind the Iron Curtain, but can be seen as wider culture of the era

Untitled (1957)

- Painted by Kazuo Shiraga - Example of performance art where Shiraga would lay paper or canvas on the floor in his studio and walk, slide, or spin his feet in mounds of oil paint - Sometimes used a suspended rope to swing himself over the horizontal surface, dragging the paint around in broad gestures - Shows an explosion of red and yellow stains overlaid by black smudges radiating at the center of the canvas in all directions and punctuated with an occasional hand or foot - Such works were as much performances as they were two-dimensional artworks, a way of both grappling with matter and also presenting a finished product

Artist in 1950 (1950)

- Photograph of Jackson Pollock painting taken in the 1950 by Hans Namuth - Demonstrates—and itself contributed to—the mythology surrounding the figure of Pollock, the archetypal American artist of the postwar era - Pollock is in a smock standing before an easel, contemplating his composition - Pollock's painting process is very direct, unfussy, and vigorous - This is 1 of the 500 photos of Pollock that Namuth took, some of which shows Pollock smoking and holding a can of enamel paint *this exact picture not pictured here, check guide

The Dawn of Our Fatherland (1949)

- Portrait and landscape painting of Joseph Stalin by Fyodor Shurpin - Classic example of Soviet Socialist Realism - Uses a figurative style to convey a clear and uplifting message about a real event: the rebirth of the Soviet Union after WW2 - Stalin was the leader that replaced Lenin as the leader of the Soviet Union from 1924 to his death in 1953 - The landscape is not a specific place, but the idea of the productive landscape that the USSR sought to create - Together the portrait and landscape looked forward to a bright and productive feature characterized by modernizing industrialization and the transformation of the Soviet society in every aspect on a massive scale - A new morning is dawning on the land, as indicated by the rosy pink of the horizon - Long shadows cast across Stalin's figure by the tractors in the field (The wide tractors that traverse the field with ease are modern equipment that, during the period of Stalinization, came to replace the beasts of burden, such as horses and cows, that had previously plowed the fields) - Already, at this early hour, the farm and factory workers have started their day. No workers are actually present in the work; instead, they are metonymically referenced through the spaces and means of their labor: the field and the factory, the rural and the urban, which represented the two main sites of proletarian identity - Further, this broad agricultural plot that extends beyond the edges of the frame signifies the great expanse of the land that was combined under the collectivization that Stalin had ordered in 1929 *collectivization is the process of seizing smaller plots of land that were property of individual families and then transferring the rights of the land to the state - Shurpin's patriotic title refers to "our Fatherland," suggesting that this land is not the property of any individual, but instead is collective property that belongs to all of the citizens of the Soviet Union - The factories in the distance at both the left and right edges of the canvas similarly demonstrate productivity on a mass scale. The billowing smoke represents technological advancement and productivity - In addition to producing material goods and equipment, factories symbolized the project of bringing electricity to the entire country. Electrical towers emerge from the vanishing point, which is behind Stalin at the center of the canvas and extends beyond the right, following Stalin's gaze. Electricity was delivered not only to those who lived in cities, but also to former peasants who lived in remote areas and supposedly were to have been lifted out of poverty by the process of modernization - An idealized Stalin looks forward to a bright new day. This representation of Stalin is typical of heroic portraiture of ideological and revolutionary leaders like Karl Marx and Lenin that appeared in paintings, photographs, and statues across the Soviet Union. In Shurpin's painting, Stalin appears monumental, as he rises well above the horizon line and occupies nearly a quarter of the painting's surface area. Stalin had successfully led the Red Army in its victory over the Nazis, and here he returns to oversee the Soviet Union's continued progress into the future

Describe the art style of modernism.

- Visual forms and pictorial devices that accentuated representation itself - Visible brushstrokes - Unnatural or clashing colors - Fragmented or shattered 3D forms - Flattened pictorial depth Artworks of these increasingly abstract styles came to understood as possessing a form of "autonomy" as they no longer tried to represent the world around them and instead pointed only to themselves and their own formal qualities

Composition (1953)

- Vivid example of artists' response to the dilemma facing European art in the postwar period - Made up of burlap sack, gold, and glue - Abandoned painting for stitching - Responded to trauma of previous decade - Delicately brushed on the burlap sack is a small square of gold leaf. The contrast between the values of burlap and gold signals a concern of the economic dimension of the postwar moment. It echoes the contrast between a ruined Europe and influx of American consumer goods and capital via the Marshall plan. Burri turns heads on this by asking the viewer to question what is poor and truly valuable - Burlap sacks were former containers of American goods and stands for American aid - Gold alludes to the transfiguration of the base material, almost alchemically, into something loftier, like gold alterpieces of the Italian Renaissance - Many Europeans feared that the Marshall Plan would enable an outsized American influence on their continent, promoting mindless consumerism among the population. Burri's act of transfiguration with the gold leaf could be read as a principled, if sly stand against American cultural and economic hegemony, hinting at a deeper cultural wealth hidden or ready to be transformed among the rubble.

As European artists struggled to find a legitimate way forward in the postwar years, seeking to rescue Modernism from the morass of war and destruction, American artists, too, were looking for a new modern idiom. This came in what form?

Abstract Expressionism: - Developed in the second half of the 1940s and early 1950s, only to be labelled this name later - Consisted of about a dozen artists whose work boiled down to one style - Turned inward to explore the artist's psychological states and explore the process of artmaking itself - Unlike European Art Informel, Abstract Expressionism frequently produced works that continued the formal experiments of prewar European avant-garde artists like Cézanne, Picasso, and Matisse, but in highly individualistic and original ways, like Mark Rothko's subtly floating fields of color or Jackson Pollock's complex webs of dripped paint - Combined abstract painterly language and mythology that became to be seen as quintessentially American and modern at the height of America's postwar cultural power

By framing his Sacchi as paintings that grapple with material form, Burri situated himself within a larger international movement called _______________________

Art Informel Put forward by the French critic Michel Tapié, Art Informel called for a renewal of the avant-garde through an active wrestling with the complicated, messy experiences of the modern world.

In a January 1963 article in __________________ with which Polke and his fellow artists were familiar, the critic Barbara Rose expounded on the return of _____________________ to high art: The result is what the detractors of abstract painting have clamored for: the image has returned to painting, but in a form they never imagined. It has come back via the TV, magazines, highway billboards, supermarkets and comic books, and not by way of salon painting or socialist realism.

Art International; everyday imagery

In 1963, fellow students Gerhard Richter and Konrad Lueg (who later changed his name and became the gallerist Konrad Fischer) founded a movement called ______________________________, with which Polke would also come to be associated.

Capitalist Realism In an iconic performance titled Living with Pop—A Demonstration for Capitalist Realism, staged on October 11, 1963, at the Berges furniture store in Düsseldorf, Richter and Lueg invited audience members into an "average living room" in which the two artists lounged on furniture placed on pedestals. They then took the viewers on a tour of the store "on display without alterations," except for a soundtrack of advertising slogans and four paintings by each of the artists installed amid the goods. Living with Pop was a provocation that at once critiqued East German Socialist Realism and art made under capitalism. By absurdly inserting themselves into the furniture showroom as though it were their own living room, Richter and Lueg parodied the increasing consumerism of German and West European society. Moreover, this gesture challenged the values of artistic creativity, originality, and subjectivity by which Modernist art set itself apart from the worlds of commerce and popular culture. In giving their new movement the odd name "Capitalist Realism," Polke, Richter, and their colleagues meant to draw an analogy between the socialist and capitalist representational systems: if Socialist Realist paintings conjured exaggerated dreamworlds of a bright socialist future, then Western advertising, too, appealed to people's consumerist desires that rarely lined up with reality.

How did Jackson Pollock die in 1956?

Car accident from drunk driving This branded himself as a tormented, self-destructive artistic genius

In the critical reception of Abstract Expressionism, after an initial period of indifference and misunderstanding, Pollock and his contemporaries came to be hailed as the culmination of Modernist painting in America. Which artist is most responsible for this?

Clement Greenberg, whose essay "'American-Type' Painting" (1955) attempted to place Abstract Expressionism in a longer history of modern art. For Greenberg, the particular formal qualities of Abstract Expressionist painting—its shallow depth, all-over quality, and individualistic calligraphic marks—positioned Abstract Expressionism within the history of Modernism's progressive purification of the medium of painting itself. According to Greenberg, the most advanced art is that which grapples with "society's capacity for high art ... by testing the limits of the inherited forms and genres, and of the medium itself." The Impressionists had done this in the late-nineteenth century when they flattened the picture plane in an attempt to capture the impression of living in the modern moment. The Cubists had done it in the first decades of the twentieth century by shattering the surface of their picture.

Tapié and his contemporaries drew on the _______________ of French philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus.

Existentialism; They thought that the modern world produces situations that cause people to experience feelings of grief, anxiety, and trauma, and believed that artists should communicate their internal experience of these feelings in order to inspire people to take individual responsibility rather than remain passive bystanders Informel works like Burri's Sacchi rejected the bold rhetoric of Modernist movements, like Italian Futurism and Russian Constructivism, whose declarations of inexorable progress in the construction of a new world now seemed to echo the forces that had helped drive the world to war. In opposition to the thrusting abstract forms of the pre-war avant-gardes, Burri embraced the formless, seemingly irrational style of expression where feeling and the body are reduced to pure matter.

What created the Marshall Plan?

Foreign Assistance Act (1948)

Which work by Pablo Picasso is widely considered a Modernist masterpiece?

Guernica (1937)

Both Shiraga's untitled foot paintings and his performance with mud participate in the discourse of Western avant-garde art, such as Abstract Expressionism and Art Informel. By breaching the edges of the canvas to embrace performance, Shiraga's works made radical and original statements in their time and could be placed alongside international developments in performance art of the late 1950s and early 1960s, such as ____________________________

Happenings and Fluxus At the same time, Shiraga's Untitled clearly references traditional Japanese cultural forms, such as calligraphy, martial arts, and Sumo wrestling, thus complicating a singular reading of Shiraga's work as derivative of Western developments.

From the Western European perspective, the "triumph" of American painting in the postwar era was part and parcel of an American ascendancy, in which the U.S. moved to the center of Western political and economic power, and Abstract Expressionist paintings alongside American products like ___________________________ came to stand as readymade symbols of modernity.

Hollywood films, Coca Cola, and Ford automobiles

What was the biggest question facing European artists in 1945?

How do I continue to make art after the traumatic experiences of the Holocaust and WW2?

In 1934, the Union of Soviet Writers held its first congress in Moscow, bringing together nearly 600 delegates from the Soviet Union and many other countries. What happened during this event?

In 1934, the Union of Soviet Writers held its first congress in Moscow, bringing together nearly six hundred delegates from the Soviet Union and many other countries.

Germany's cultural situation after the war was a microcosm of the Cold War division between East and West. After the war, Berlin and Germany were divided into four zones: American, British, French, and Soviet. What were the zones consolidated then?

In 1949, the three Western zones were consolidated into the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG, or West Germany), while the Soviet zone became the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East Germany). The art of West and East Germany largely followed the binary between Modernist abstraction and Socialist Realist figuration; art in the West was supported by Marshall Plan cultural programs, and art in the East was supported by new socialist state institutions funded by the U.S.S.R.

In other photos, Pollock steps into the canvas, flinging the paint from his brush, his movements too swift for the film's slow exposure. The popular image of Pollock—nicknamed "__________________" by the press—as brooding, aggressive, and quiet, and the Abstract Expressionists as "The Wild Ones" or "The Irascibles" echoed ideas about _____________________ as the source of artistic creativity.

Jack the Dripper virile masculinity

When Shiraga's work was first introduced to the U.S. as part of an exhibition of Gutai art at the _________________ Gallery in New York in September 1958, critics were unable to recognize this larger set of meanings and aspirations and dismissed it as merely derivative of American action painting.

Martha Jackson Whereas in Japan critics saw Abstract Expressionism as an international phenomenon, praising it for its "liberty" and "vivacity of spirit," a kind of Cold War distortion of vision led American critics to misperceive the Gutai artists' contributions and miss out on a truly international dialogue around abstraction, which was once again imbued with narrowly national characteristics. Gutai works attempted to participate in a dialogue with Modernism, building on the innovations of Western artists while at the same time contributing novel insights from Japanese traditions.

But even beyond the failures of specific national histories, for European and American artists more broadly, there was a sense that the larger cultural project of the modern era had become tragically and irreparably compromised. What project was it?

Modernism; And its cultural meanings would be hotly contested throughout the Cold War Modernism arose in Europe at the end of the 18th century as the continent was undergoing great societal processes of Enlightenment and Industrialization. In the realm of fine arts, Modernism reached its maturity in the second half of the 19th and early 20th century as artists strove to break free from the traditions of the Academy and began to explore more radical styles like Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and Cubism. These artistic movements moved away from the requirements of academic painting, which had called artists to accurately represent the world using a visual language based on classical Greek and Roman art.

How was Abstract Expressionism through the lens of politics?

Reading Abstract Expressionism within a Cold War context is tricky because how the artists themselves felt about their political moment often did not align with how their art was put to use by cultural authorities. The period of Abstract Expressionism's development and blossoming (1945 through around 1960) coincided with a vast move to the right in American politics and culture under Presidents Truman and Eisenhower. It was a period of heightened alarm over the perceived threat of Communism; McCarthyism and the Red Scare brought with them surveillance and deep conformity in many areas of life and culture. While Abstract Expressionism itself was not overtly partisan, many of the artists had come of age in the politically progressive 1930s and felt worn out by and at odds with the establishment. Some despised what they considered to be America's "commercial philistinism" and instead identified with the "working man" and even spoke out against America's use of atomic weapons.

What did Richter and Polke both do?

Richter, like Polke, had moved to Düsseldorf from East Germany, where he (unlike Polke) had worked as a painter of state-sponsored murals, and so he was therefore well familiar with the codes of Socialist Realist representation.

What was critics' association with Sacchi?

Some compared the tattered burlap (sometimes caked with buildup of clear glue) to bloodstained bandages used to dress wounds during the war Others in the rough sackcloth the ascetic robes of the Franciscan order founded in the countryside near Burri's hometown, reading the occasional red underpainting of the holes in the burlap as references to stigmata. The most common association of the Sacchi, however, was with the trauma of the postwar moment. The destroyed and reconstructed surfaces of Burri's burlap assemblages seemed to many critics to act as a surface that registered the traumatic memories of the war and perhaps portended new horrors associated with the atomic bomb. The fact that Burri had been a medic who would have literally sutured soldiers' bodies made the connection between the violently disassembled and reassembled sacks and the war-torn body of European civilization even more visceral.

As the Cold War intensified, the symbolic struggle between East and West, Socialist Realism and Modernism also intensified. While Abstract Expressionism was positioned as apolitical "pure" art, politics continued to permeate American society, and Communism was proclaimed to be a national threat in the U.S. Each side portrayed the other as politically dangerous and saw the other's art as a form of propaganda calculated to delude its citizenry with false ideas. How did Soviet critics denounce Western Modernist art?

Soviet critics denounced Western Modernist art, like Pollock's drip paintings, as "formalism," lacking in humanity and uplifting purpose and certain to lead to its viewers' debasement and dehumanization. In the U.S., an equally vicious attack on Socialist Realism equated the realist style with political propaganda and its viewers with being either programmed automatons or tragic victims. While there was a grain of truth in both arguments, the blunt ways in which they were deployed left no room for an understanding of historical nuances or consideration of the agency of individual artists working in each system. Paradoxically, these attacks had repercussions in their own countries. In the West, artists working in realist styles were seen as outmoded and were all but barred from the advanced art world, while Soviet artists who wanted to paint outside of Socialist Realist conventions had to go underground, creating art in secret and exhibiting their works to small groups of friends in their apartments. Artists on both sides of the Iron Curtain finally found a wider public in the 1980s, when petrified Cold War rhetoric began to be challenged, and the harsh political divisions between East and West finally began to break down.

Why was The Dawn of Our Fatherland commissioned for?

Stalin's 70th birthday. The painting was widely praised by critics and the public and was reproduced extensively in books, postcards, and posters. It was one of the most recognizable images of the Soviet leader in the postwar period, and it earned Shurpin the prestigious Stalin Prize in the area of painting in 1949.

What was not depicted in the painting The Dawn of Our Fatherland?

The casualties of collectivization: the millions of prosperous peasants executed under the dekulakization campaign and the five to seven million others who died as a result of famine. Although it was based on the tradition of nineteenth-century Russian Realism, which had set out to capture the realities of social life in Russia, critique injustices, and bring art to the people, Socialist Realism was more future-oriented, intended to picture the ideal socialist society that was in the process of being built.

Abstract Expressionist works first appeared in Japan in early 1951, when they were exhibited at the ___________________________ in Tokyo.

Third Yomiuri Independent exhibition - This show introduced the Japanese public to recent works by Jackson Pollock, Richard Pousette-Dart, Mark Rothko, and Theodoros Stamos, among others - American critics like Clement Greenberg had emphasized the purely optical qualities of Pollock's work - Leading Gutai figure, Yoshihara Jirō, praised the exhibition for its deeply material qualities and kinesthetic effects on the viewer. In a review for the art magazine Kansai Bijutsu, he wrote of Pollock's canvases: An undefined beauty, something attractive is expressed powerfully in them; this something has an impact not so much on the purely visual perception, but rather directly on ourselves. As Jackson Pollock proves, drops of paint are more beautiful than that which they present. . . . You would say that painting has purified itself: the elements of painting, shapes, lines, colors, had come apart to reunite and undergo rebirth in abstract painting. - Yoshihara and his contemporaries also saw the first publications of Hans Namuth's iconic photographs of Pollock in Art News and in Art d'Aujourd'hui, as well as Namuth's film of Pollock painting. In response, Yoshihara and his contemporaries' work became more abstract, participating in what they considered to be a transnational, rather than a specifically American, avant-garde movement.

How did Soviets and Eastern bloc/satellite nations view Abstract Expressionism?

Thought to have even more politicized messages as the Cold War progressed Through traveling exhibitions put on by cultural institutions like the Museum of Modern Art and covertly funded by the CIA, Abstract Expressionism was used to promote a certain vision of freedom, bolstered by the kinds of mythologies about directness, virility, and rugged American individualism that we see in the Namuth photo. As art historian Serge Guilbaut explained it, to audiences abroad, Abstract Expressionism symbolized "the freedom to create controversial works of art, the freedom symbolized by action painting, by the unbridled expressionism of artists completely without fetters," in other words, the existential freedom of creation.

By the 1950s, Modernism had become the dominant art form in the West and was defined by Western critics in purely ________________________________ terms.

aesthetic, non-political But as the Cold War divided the world into opposing sides, Modernist culture became increasingly politicized and contested. Artists in both the East and the West increasingly found it difficult to maintain a position of neutrality, as both abstract and figurative art came to be associated with Cold War ideologies.

Prior to the crises of the 1930s and the outbreak of the Second World War, Modernism had been strongly associated with ______________________________

artistic and political progress In gradual purification of visual forms toward abstraction, it sought to push art beyond the existing edge of culture. Artists and critics of the prewar years optimistically wanted Modernism to serve as an "avant-garde" that would picture into a new modern world. However, after that most advanced world had given birth to the horrors of two world wars and the tyrannical regimes of Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin, the strident pronouncements and utopian aspirations of those avant-gardes no longer seemed credible. Thus, when European artists began to emerge from the war-torn world, they had to seek new sources of artistic inspiration beyond modernist progress or national identity.

In the context of the Cold War, Burri's Sacchi can be read through one other important lens: ______________________________________

economic and cultural influence over postwar Europe

For Polke, as for his fellow Capitalist Realists seeking to find a valid artistic path in Cold War Germany, _________ served as a form of understated rebellion, a way to sidestep the politics imposed on them from both East and West.

humor

As Europe entered the modern age, society directed its hopes and collective efforts toward building the institutions of what 3 things?

knowledge, technology, and and democracy. They also threw off monarchy and religious superstition.

Between 1949 and 1960, Burri made hundreds of Sacchi, which excavated the open wounds of the recent past. Through the symbolic work of grappling with and ultimately suturing the material back into a finished work, however violent or ungainly the final product, Burri returned meaning to the artistic process and to Modernist painting. By offering painting as a site of struggle and ultimate triumph, Burri and his fellow Informel artists reasserted their ___________________________ as centered, modern subjects in the face of modernism's failures.

moral authority and status

Already in Living with Pop, Richter and Lueg undermined the ________________________ as the source of artistic inspiration and unique genius.

personality of the artist Polke's comic-like canvas likewise undermines the idea of the artist's touch as the source of a unique individual style that ensures the work's authenticity. If anything, The Sausage Eater could have been painted by an ordinary sign painter, and in fact, Polke did occasionally task his friends with painting his works for him.

Throughout his life, Burri (accepted/rejected) such metaphorical readings of violence in his Sacchi and his other works, including those made out of torn household linens, torched wood veneer, and melted and charred plastics.

rejected He instead insisted on the autonomy of each artwork, locating its significance in the way in the way treated form, space, and materials. For Burri, it is the work itself that is important, rather than any social or psychological meanings that could be read into the artwork or its methods.

While European and American artists strove to renew Modernism in the postwar period through new idioms and artistic identities, the Soviet Union pursued a different path, consistent with its political ideology of Marxism-Leninism. This had not always the case. Before _____________________, Russia had contributed a great deal to Modernist art, both in delivering some of the earliest support for European Modernist art through its patrons and in producing some of the most striking examples of Modernist painting, including arguably the most radical painting of all time, Kazimir Malevich's Black Square (1915).

the Revolution of 1917 After the Russian Revolution, Soviet art increasingly put itself in the service of the state. At first, artists continued to explore innovative and radical forms to imagine the new society of workers, drawing on the visual language of abstraction in order to do so. However, by 1934, such radical experimentation was no longer tolerated by the state. In a sweeping reorganization of Russia's artistic life, all official art groups were dissolved, and one single Union of Soviet Artists was proposed. In the meantime, a special committee was organized to handle artistic affairs. This reorganization made the state the sole source of commissions and the means necessary to fulfill them. Artists who did not join the union were unable to obtain artistic materials or studio space and were barred from exhibiting in state-sponsored exhibitions.

In 1962, Gerhard Richter decided that he would "______________________________; I have nothing to help me, no idea I serve, . . . no belief that shows me the way, no image of the future, no construction that lends a higher meaning to things. I acknowledge only what is, and accordingly consider any description or portrayal of things we do not know to be pointless."

think and act without the aid of an ideology As the 1960s progressed, however, Richter's perspective that it was possible to create art uninformed by ideology would come to be untenable, as art that examined the inescapable influence of the economy and social pressures came to the fore.