The Art Of The Defeated-“Inventur-Art In Germany-1943-1955 At The Harvard Art Museums-A Comment
By Lenny Lynch
Of course I am way too young at thirty-five to have been affected by even the tremors of the post-World War II happenings in Western culture like a number of my older writer co-workers were in what in America was the “golden age” of lots of things. In talking to Sam Lowell, now a retired by still feisty former film editor here and Frank Jackman who still writes little sketches here as well about this art exhibit at the Harvard Art Museums which features the work of many German artists in various media they were quite surprised about how many of those artists dealt with struggling as a defeated nation. Strangely this included artists who were well-known anti-Nazi and anti-fascist who either had been in exile (those who could get out before the curtain came down and they were stuck), had been Jewish and yet had survived the camps somehow or had been stuck in Germany and worked their creative skills as best they could. Included too a catalogue of artists who showed up in the infamous “Degenerate Art” exhibits of the late 1930s in Germany.
Two things stuck out that I carried with me from the exhibit. In the art world, the serious part, sometimes necessity is the mother of invention. A defeated nation, heavily bombed by Allied warplanes, huge destruction of infrastructure, hobbling along on American rations and black markets nevertheless provided room for artists to come up with new ways of creating art from other than traditional material like oils and canvass. Shingles, scrape metal, house paints and the like let these folks create some new ways of making art. The other thing that stuff out was that even in defeat and isolation many of these artists were aware of, took part in, and expanded the new theories in art in their work from expressionism to abstraction and colorism. Minimalism in sculpture. Interesting exhibit if you are in Cambridge sometime soon.
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