Bernard-Nouraud (Paul) : Une histoire de l’art d’après Auschwitz / A History of Art After Auschwitz
How did Auschwitz break with the traditional modes of representing the human figure inherited from the Renaissance ? To what extent has this rupture become so ingrained in modernist discourse as to nowadays go, partly unnoticed ? Is contemporary art simply art after Auschwitz or is it, in a more complex way, an art made in the aftermath of the event ?
These are some of the questions that orientate this History of Art After Auschwitz. In many respects, by offering a new critical reading of the principles of artistic modernity and a genealogy of contemporary art, this extensive study is also an art counter-history.
Therefore, the first volume of this study undertakes a reevaluation of the history of art that precedes the event itself. It argues that, besides fearing deluge and war, the fear of the plague partly founded the Renaissance art and the intellectual order of discernment that has been instituted afterwards. In spite of the Disparate Figures that perturbed such an order for five centuries, it is only after Auschwitz, with the massive apparition of Disappeared Figures (vol. 2), that this order was broken. Such figures progressively dissipated themselves into contemporary art while it shaped its Configurations (vol. 3)
The first volume traces back to the sources of the paradigm of an aesthetic of discernment elaborated during the Renaissance period, a paradigm that involved a full system of representations. The first chapter studies how these “discernible figures” were composed in the 15th century with Masaccio’s reintroduction of cast shadows in Florence. At the same period of time, Alberti instituted this system in his De Pictura by promoting the notion that a picture represents the historia. All the artistic discourse after Alberti ratified and reinforced his notion that a work of art conforms to the idea and reveals it. In entrusting the artwork with this function of discerning the history and the idea, the intellectual discourse on art implied another function, though an implicit one : to discern fear and to apprehend awe.
Against this main tendency, a series of figures does appear to be “disparate”, as chapter 2 demonstrates. They try to account for three main kinds of fear –the fear of de-creation, of disorder, and of disaster– corresponding to three archetypal phenomena –those of deluge, plague, and war. In each case, an antagonism erupted between the events themselves and the way the aesthetic of discernment resolved them into order. Historically, this tension produces disparate figures, with Francisco Goya as the main purveyor of it. It is also this tension that prepares the field to another genre of figures, which belong to the modernist era, from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century. These modernist figures are defined in the third chapter as critical ones.
They indeed manifest a recursive tendency which leads them to a transformation the seems to be provoked by the notion of art for art’s sake. Nonetheless, a closer look at them reveals that many of them do evoke war, more or less explicitly, or at least war contexts (Civil War in the United-States, First World War, Spanish Civil War). The art after Auschwitz inherits these disparate and critical figures, that are taken to their extremes, but, henceforth, are only known as Disappeared Figures, which will be studied in the second volume.
