Co-edited by Reuben Fowkes and Nancy Jachec

Contributors: Nancy Jachec, Natalie Adamson, Nevenka Stanković, Susan Reid, Éva Forgács, Kasia Murawska-Muthesius, Reuben Fowkes, Piotr Piotrowski, Jennifer Way, Rasheed Araeen, Genoveva Garcia, Harriet Standeven, Natalie Aubert and Istabelle Moffat

Introduction: Art and Politics in the 1950s

The essays in this collection, which have grown out of the conference 1956: Legacies of Political Change in Art and Visual Culture (September 2004, Oxford Brookes University), reconsider the production and dissemination of art in Europe in light of wider geo-political shifts that occurred during the 1950s. Events like the Suez Crisis and France’s war in Algeria, presaging the trauma of de-colonisation, prompted Europe to renegotiate its relations with newly emerging states. Equally, the dramatic oscillation between Khrushchev’s denunciation of the Stalin Cult at the Twentieth Party Congress and Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Revolution, affected the European art world both directly and more subtly, altering systems of patronage, the control of artistic resources, and the way art and artists were internationally promoted. The topics of individual papers are diverse. Yet one, if not the dominant theme to emerge from them is the idea of the 1950s as a period of interplay between Eastern and Western European art, which issued in a number of revisions: amongst critics, who were developing new social and political expectations of art; amongst patrons, particularly governmental sponsors; and not least, amongst artists themselves. Although the 1960s are popularly seen as the custodians of post modernism, many of its practices, from conceptualism to the dematerialised art object, originated in the 1950s, a process assisted by critics’ interrogation of established practices; and by the breakdown of state sponsorship of official art.

The Artist and the State
The different types of artistic practice that appeared across Europe in the 1950s were, more often than not, informed by the relationship between the artist and the state. Many contributors have taken a comparative approach to this relationship, and what emerges is the importance of state sponsorship – and its absence – as a, if not the, determinative feature in European visual culture of the 1950s. In Western Europe it appears that the degree to which a culture was politicised determined its development, or not, of a critical art practice. For example, Eva Forgacs, examining the forlorn attempt by Hungarian artists in 1956 to revive the pre-1948 avant-garde, argues that while the Uprising and its suppression was ‘not a beginning, but an end’ for dissident modernism there, equally argues that ‘in the West something new and future-bound’ did grow out of it. One of those futures was the New Left, which Nathalie Aubert, in her account of the Congress of Free Artists at Alba, Italy, in September 1956, informed artists’ rejection of conventional forms of sponsorship as well as conventional, object-based art, giving rise to the Situationist International.  Its emergence in Western Europe was not, however, immediate or uniform. As Isabelle Moffat, in her comparison of the Situationist International with the Independent Group, and Harriet Standeven’s work on British gesture painting, suggests, in Britain, visual artists were by and large responding to sociological as opposed to ideological changes. Rasheed Araeen’s essay, taking this theme in a more critical direction, argues that one of the primary changes in British culture of that era – immigration from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean, had an impact on modern art practice that has yet to be fully reckoned today.

Taken together, these papers suggest that if in the West, the absence of state involvement with the visual arts could enable the free emergence of dissident practice, it could also fail to create a sufficiently politicised environment in which such practice could develop. Yet this paradox was not unique to the West. Piotrowski, in his comparative approach to the recent art history of Central and Eastern Europe, focuses on the different status of the neo-avant-garde of the 1960s in Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland as the product of varied 1950s policies. If one of the most powerful messages to emerge from this collection is the importance of looking at case studies, and at the local conditions in which the many types of art produced and exhibited in the 1950s developed, another is that persistent state intervention seldom produced a disenfranchised, and above all, generative modernism. Nevenka Stankovic identifies the position of modernism in Titoist Yugoslavia as both a ‘sign of difference from the Soviet type of communism’ and a ‘trope for progress’. In an interesting parallel with Tito’s Yugoslavia, Genoveva Tusell García identifies the Franco regime as ‘an unexpected advocate of modern art’ in the 1950s through a ‘strange marriage’ between Spanish Informalism and official institutions based on a common desire for international recognition. Yet the Spanish government was not alone in its use of Informalism as a means of political redemption on the international stage. As Nancy Jachec’s paper suggests, it was also embraced by Italian artists, and their government, as a means of reconnecting with mainstream avant-garde currents after a lengthy period of isolation under fascism. Modernism was therefore central to the conducting of cultural diplomacy in Europe in the 1950s. Although Informalism, or gesture painting, is commonly identified as the most prevalent art form of late 1950s Western Europe, geometric abstraction was also revisited by artists in the East who were looking for ways of recuperating a modern, progressive culture within respective regimes, as Forgacs and Stankovic demonstrate.

Critical Revisions

Another theme running throughout some of these papers is of the 1950s as a time for revision amongst critics across Europe. Reuben Fowkes explores the critical atmosphere of the 1950s in Central Europe through an analysis of art criticism in Croatia and Hungary and argues that despite different political contexts, the art worlds of the two countries faced similar questions, from generational conflict, to heated debates over abstraction, and a wider reckoning with social and technological change. Jennifer Way argues that decolonisation, and the ‘shrinking geography’ it brought about for the coloniser, had a formative impact on British art writing and practice. As Natalie Adamson argues, the School of Paris also came under interrogation at this time. If it had been the font of utopian and politically engaged practices, by the 1950s it was resting on the laurels of that pre-war generation. Failing to adequately understand or extend its legacy, the political and ideological awareness that was a prerequisite for rejuvenation, she argues, had been replaced by an ‘atomised individualism’ in which the interpretation of abstract painting was restricted to a set of formal questions. This draining of 1950s abstraction of political content continues today. Nancy Jachec reveals how the ‘sin of political engagement’ has led to the exclusion of the Group of Eight from most accounts of Italian Informalism in favour of the canonical and apolitical figures of Burri and Fontana.

One or Two Europes?

The fact that new artistic practices associated with the neo-avant-garde appeared in Eastern as well as Western Europe returns us to the question of whether one can actually speak of a European culture at this time, especially after 1956. Only in the Soviet Union, as Susan Reid’s essay makes clear, was there no evidence of ‘a battle between discrete monoliths: society versus regime, artists versus the party-state’. Rather, it was a question of a ‘power struggle between the rank and file and a powerful, privileged few’ within the art world. Nonetheless, the partitioning of Europe was a reality, significantly impeding the exchange of people, work and ideas between the two halves of Europe. Yet, as this collection shows, there was nonetheless a dialogue between them, both real and imaginary. Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius compares the dominant tropes of ‘Eastern European’ otherness projected by the ‘West’ with those articulated within the Communist bloc. Her analysis of cartoons in Punch on the occasion of the Hungarian Revolution reveals that although the cartoons appear to support the revolt, they are at the same time firmly embedded within the orientalist discourse which, since Versailles, tied representation of Eastern Europe with images of childhood. Coming at the same problem from another angle, Eva Forgacs argues that the post-1956 developments in Western European politics and culture shaped the reception of Czech, Polish, Slovakian, Hungarian, Croatian, Serbian, and other Soviet bloc countries’ art, rolling the artistic production of disparate cultures into one package labelled “East European”, because ‘from the Western perspective it was only in this homogenized togetherness that they were functional in the Western narrative.’ Araeen’s essay also examines the inability of a western history of modern art to accommodate contributions that, through racial prejudice, have also been partitioned from it. The conference was intended to address these divisions, and also look beyond them in search of a more integrated account of the history of contemporary European art, one shaped by global events and influences. Its plenary sessions witnessed some lively discussions, and while they have sadly not been recorded, we hope that this collection of papers preserves some of the arguments sparking them, and will continue to provoke similar questions amongst its readers. (Reuben Fowkes and Nancy Jachec)