ART: MOCA Exhibit, World Post-War Abstract Painting

Destroy the Picture: Painting the Void, 1945-1962, MOCA Exhibition - Raging at the Dead Light, the Dark Night

The work in this exhibition is noteworthy for its pioneering use of materials and processes, and the magnitude of its screaming expressive pain.  Paul Schimmel’s last curated exhibit for MOCA before resigning due to conflicts with the new director, Jeffrey Deitch - “contemporary art lite” vs. serious-scholarship approach. So you want to see it for that reason too.  Where’s Schimmel going to go?

 Some of the artists are familiar: Jean Fautrier, Lee Bontecou,  Alberto Burri.  It’s a selected comparative world survey of modern painters who responded to the tragedy of World War II by hacking, burning, cutting, smearing, excavating, rejecting imagery.  The works look vital, angry, direct, shocking:  poignant efforts to heal the broken faith between nation,  citizen, and self.

Lee Bonecue, Alfredo Burri

How could one go on, after the ghastly brutality and horror of world war, nuclear destruction, and monstrous genocide?  Gutai, (“embodiment/making with the/of the body’) the Japanese post-war movement, was particularly painful to view. 

Kazuo Shiraga, painting with his feet

The countries I love for their astonishing aesthetic accomplishments:  France, Italy, Japan - all enemies during World War II.  My memory is longer than it should be. And now they have the ability to transmit their empty souls to me, even though they are at primary fault for that terrible war.  Humanity would not have come to this if real democracy had prevailed.  Alas, only stupidity ruled those days.  Not like today at all, n’est ce-pas?

But it’s all very obvious and familiar, brutal in its own way, as if the painters’ hands and brains had become intellectual stumps, making the art of amputees smearing and raging at a dead light, the dark night.  And the work is still somehow seductively beautiful; that’s what so wrong and disturbing.  This reality makes the work even more powerfully subversive, corrosive, denying and creating a subtle reality about the actual nature of evil.  

Here’s the thing - I don’t think this artistic direction develops much beyond the body/skin/canvas metaphor which depicts its torture and degradation, in a sort of ghastly decorative way.  And then it’s done.  No place else to go.  You can only destroy everything there is to destroy, after all.  

At MOCA you can walk across the lobby after seeing this disturbing group of artworks and sit quietly and mostly alone with eight Mark Rothkos, more of them together than you can find at the Met or MOMA.  They will take you in the other direction:  the Abstract Color Field painting movement, a seeking of spiritual release and transcendence, another kind of loss of self that is an understandable response to war.  

In these works the artist assumes you already Got It; you don’t need assistance to plumb the  dimensions of atrocity.  But you need to go on, to find a way to do that, some neutralizing calm, from which you harvest a release forward.

And one is given beauty in a new formal manner, an innovation that seems a culmination of the intent and direction of the painting movement known as abstraction.  

But I can’t help returning to now, and to Gerhard Richter’ squeegee paintings. A step back, but the only redemptive work from the warrior countries that I find.

The work to the right above is titled “Uncle Rudi”, a photo he painted of his actual relative in his Nazi uniform.  Not hard to for me to imagine the wiping over of his canvas is his wiping out of his history, his memory, his shame, a kind of burial and green graveyard.