Karen Wilkin: A Review of ‘Soldier, Spectre, Shaman: The Figure and the Second World War’ Exhibit
http://www.wsj.com/articles/soldier-spectre-shaman-the-figure-and-the-second-world-war-review-1445985527
Review In the Museum of Modern Art’s ‘Soldier, Spectre, Shaman,’ some works gain in meaning because of their new context.
Every large museum has a repository of paintings, sculptures and works on paper, acquired over the years, that are seldom on view. They range from minor efforts by major artists (and vice versa) to ambitious works by once well-regarded practitioners that no longer correspond to current taste, and a lot in between. Smart curators often mine these holdings for forgotten treasures—taste changes—or for what these works can tell us about the desiderata of the period in which they were made. Case in point: “Soldier, Spectre, Shaman: The Figure and the Second World War,” the Museum of Modern Art’s survey of responses to the emotional climate of the fraught years before, during and after World War II.
Organized by MoMA’s Lucy Gallun, assistant curator, Department of Photography, and Sarah Suzuki, associate curator, Department of Drawings and Prints, and drawn entirely from the museum’s collections, the show assembles paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints and photographs, many rarely—if ever—exhibited, by more than 30 artists. Some celebrated, some obscure, they come from North and South America, Europe and Asia. Each of them experienced the horrors of the war, its preamble and its aftermath differently: as combatant or victim, refugee or exile, direct witness or distant observer. Despite these variables, the mood of all the works in the exhibition is one of anxiety and pessimism, whether expressed through representation, abstraction, symbol, or metaphor. Cynics can put this down to curatorial choice or to the finiteness of the human imagination. Or we can assume that the pervasive sense of threat and bleakness conveyed by “Soldier, Spectre, Shaman” accurately reflects the devastating world-wide events of the decades under review.
However we choose to explain it, there’s a remarkable consistency in the imagery used to embody the “spirit of the time.” Fangs, claws and spiky bits dominate, whatever the medium, often awash in pools of darkness in two-dimensional works. Masks, arcane glyphs and, in photographs, reflections hint at ritual, concealment and mystery, in works by Joan Miró, Adolph Gottlieb, and Lisette Model. Skeletons (the Romanian Victor Brauner’s relief) and the near-skeletons of savagely reduced forms (the French Germaine Richier’s sculpture) evoke both death, generally, and the hideous revelations that followed the liberation of the Nazi’s concentration camps. The artist’s touch can be blunt to the point of crudeness, as in the Swiss Louis Soutter’s paintings on paper, or hyper-refined, as in the British Edward Burra’s watercolors, with both extremes somehow connoting brutality and danger. Spaces are usually empty and bleak, evoking the ravaged battlefield and existential limbo. All of this is announced at the outset by the Brazilian sculptor Maria Martins’s fierce bronze “The Impossible, III” (1946), a battle or perhaps an uncomfortable seduction of two fanged forms, installed near the American sculptor David Smith’s etching “Women in War” (1941), a conflation of nudes and machines, unpleasantly intertwined, in a vast, empty plain beneath an armada of flying “cannon-spectres.”
ENLARGE “Soldier, Spectre, Shaman” is both fascinating and uneven. Some works gain in meaning because of their new context. It’s illuminating to see one of Alberto Giacometti’s attenuated standing women and an early Louise Bourgeois wooden “totem” amid tough postwar images by Japanese and European photographers. Suddenly the acute slenderness and compression of the two sculptures provoke associations beyond the formal. Similarly, the loosely drawn, gesticulating figures in Miró’s lithographs from the “Barcelona Series” (1944) start to seem angry, rather than playful.
Some works transcend the specificity of the show’s theme. Jan Müller’s compelling “Faust, I” (1956), with its densely loaded paint, abrupt contrasts and roughly rendered, tightly packed, sinister figures, is a high point of the show. It reads as a still-contemporary update of the best of German Expressionism. The painting is so powerful that it almost seems irrelevant that its presence is justified by Müller’s having fled Germany in 1933 with his parents, arriving in the U.S. in 1941, after a nomadic period in Europe when he contracted the rheumatic fever that led to his early death. Another welcome inclusion is Francis Bacon’s “Painting” (1946), with its nod to Rembrandt’s flayed ox as a metaphor for the crucifixion, combined with an allusion to British wartime politics. It’s good to be reminded of Bacon’s strengths—his gorgeous touch and ability to invent expressive images—by a work early enough to be free of the mannerisms and formulaic repetitions of his later paintings.
Some included works seem a bit of a stretch. While it’s interesting to see the self-taught Henry Darger’s kinky battle scenes from the strange saga of his nubile “Vivian girls,” it’s difficult to believe that they reflect world events more than Darger’s obsessive narrative. Other works have aged badly. The spiky metal constructions made in 1951 by the American David Hare and in 1952 by his British colleague Lynn Chadwick are mainly interesting today as period pieces.
Together, however, the often surprising works in “Soldier, Spectre, Shaman” offer an informative portrait of a highly charged era. One tour of the show and we believe in a Zeitgeist.
Ms. Wilkin is an independent curator and critic.
Comments are closed.
