BENTONVILLE - A handful of art lovers in Northwest Arkansas took the opportunity Saturday to participate in a discussion of one of the major movements in the history of American art and how the artists of the 20th century reacted to the atrocities of World War II.
In one of an ongoing series of informal lectures and discussions, Sara Segerlin, a senior educator at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, led a discussion inside the museum’s Twentieth Century Art gallery of abstract expressionism, a form that initially arose in New York City in the mid-1940s.
About half a dozen patrons participated in the discussion.
Seated among the gallery’s collection of works by artists including Mark Rothko, Hans Hofmann, Theodore Roszak and others, Segerlin explained the rise of abstract expressionism as a popular form of painting in which artists tried to communicate the underlying emotions of a time or event, rather than a precise visual depiction of the subject.
Segerlin said critics of the time wrote about the works of abstract expressionists in terms of how “they were reacting to changes in the world.”
“After World War II, many artists from Europe fled to New York City,” Segerlin said. “So there was a different scene happening with some of the European artists - surrealism, cubism, dadaism, were all in New York.”
Segerlin’s lecture Saturday followed a sold-out presentation Friday night by Robert Edsel, author of The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History, which tells the story of efforts to protect works of art throughout Europe during World War II.
“There was such devastation in Europe; everything was ruined and destroyed,” Segerlin said.
She said the work of European artists working in New York City after the war “represents the moment in time in America where we wanted to say to the world, ‘We are open to creativity, we’re open to new ideas, and we have the ability to just be spontaneous and put our thoughts and our minds onto the canvas.’ Then these artists became popular to European artists, who had been so alienated, so deprived by totalitarianism.”
Leo Mazow, an associate professor of art history at the University of Arkansas, said artists often choose to address the overwhelming emotions and events of combat in indirect depictions.
“There are some exceptions, but from the Revolutionary War to the present, more often than not, I think artists deal with war in some subtle, discreet ways,” Mazow said.
“Even for the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, there are a few classical responses, but most of the works show not the ‘during’ of war, but the ‘before’ and the ‘after.’
“The way abstract expressionists respond to war is by creating a new, abstract vocabulary, because the literal vocabulary of the past has let them down,” Mazow said. “It’s perpetuated myths about ‘happy living’ and ‘representative governments.’”
Within the abstract expressionist movement, Mazow said, Rothko’s painting No.210/No.211 (Orange), which is currently part of the collection at Crystal Bridges, is “an obvious indirect engagement.”
“It’s a large orange square. To look at this, you’d think it doesn’t show anything,” he said.
“But Rothko believed that no identifiable human language could necessarily respond to a post-atomic world. He looked for a sublime vocabulary, something so large that it could capture the monumental sense of loss.”
“Rothko retreated to a nonrepresentative art form. That’s an example of an indirect response to war.”
Mazow said that other works throughout the museum also reflect indirect responses to war during other time periods and in other forms. Mazow cited the 1962 Andy Warhol painting Coca-Cola(3), which is a simple depiction of a bottle of Coca-Cola on a white canvas, about 4 feet by 5 ½ feet , as an example.
“Now, you might ask, ‘What does this have to do with the Vietnam War?’ Well, one way people in this country dealt with that war was though consumption of commodities,” Mazow said. “Pop art almost plays on ideals of ‘retail therapy’ and consumption during the war.”
Mazow said that the use of abstract images, rather than realistic depiction, does more to respect the often devastating reality of war.
As an example, Mazow described what he saw as a problematic representation of George Washington in Charles Wilson Peale’s portrait, which depicts the former president during the Revolutionary War.
“Washington is leaning on a cannon, somewhat jauntily, his other hand on his hip. It’s a picture of confidence, stern but accessible - on a battlefield,” Mazow said. “It’s more of an American myth than an accurate depiction of war.”
Mazow added that war is a tough thing to picture.
“I think abstraction can be a very effective strategy for reckoning with the atrocities of war,” he said.
Arkansas, Pages 9 on 03/10/2014