A History of Art after Auschwitz

How did Auschwitz break with traditional modalities of representation? of the human figure inherited from the Renaissance? To what extent does this Has rupture become lodged in modernist discourse to the point where it is now go partly unnoticed? Is contemporary art an art that is situated simply after Auschwitz or is it, in a more complex way, an art after the event? These are some of the questions that give rise to This History of Art after Auschwitz its main orientations. To be sure respects, by proposing a critical rereading of the foundations of modernity artistic and a genealogy of contemporary art, this vast study aims to be and therefore also a counter-history of art. The first volume that composes it thus undertakes to re-evaluate the history of art in the light of Auschwitz prior to the event itself. We discover in particular that with the fear of flood and war, that of the plague constitutes one of the foundations of art reborn and the order of discernment that it establishes. Despite the Figures disparate groups which have not ceased for five centuries to disrupt this order, this one only truly gave way after Auschwitz, with the massive appearance of Figures disappeared (vol. 2), which gradually dissipated in art contemporary even as they continue to inform the Configurations (vol. 3). This second volume of A History of Art after Auschwitz examines present how new artistic forms have gradually emerged developed in the shadow close to the event. After recalling how much the Survivors themselves have drawn on artistic references to try to discern the darkness into which they had been plunged, he examines the foundations of this art (chapter 4) from the project of destruction of bodies that Nazism undertook and the disappearance of the figures to which the artists have been confronted since the Auschwitz period. For the vast majority Among them, however, the image they were able to form of Auschwitz was made up of the countless ones provided to them by the photographs of the camps at the time of their opening and in the years that followed followed. In this respect, photography has played the role of a real threshold to understand the event (chapter 5). Gradually, however, A number of artists have made a real departure from these source images in order to design other artistic forms (chapter 6). These departures have taken, notably in France, with Francis Gruber, Pablo Picasso or Jean Fautrier, a figurative form, where the human figure seems threatened with disappearing. Their American counterparts (Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman) have They opted for radically abstract departures, although on a certain scale human persists under their compositions. This persistence is found under various forms in artists as different as Alberto Giacometti, Francis Bacon or Zoran MuŠič, notably in figures that all three represent in motion, as if these steps indicated in themselves the gradual distancing of art from Auschwitz (chapter 7). This is that in reality, in the shadow cast this time by the event, it is no longer a question to discern the darkness, but rather to distribute it. This distribution, and the ways in which it was carried out in later art, will be the subject of Configurations, the third and final volume of this History of Art after Auschwitz.