Post-war Landscapes
This article considers how painterly space was redefined in the work of artists after World War II. Right after the war, when cities were in a state of destruction, the trope of the city in ruins featured prominently in art. A metaphorical approach to ruins can be seen in documentary photographs of...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw
2020-01-01
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| Series: | Miejsce |
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| Online Access: | https://miejsce.asp.waw.pl/en/english-post-war-landscapes/ |
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| Summary: | This article considers how painterly space was redefined in the work of artists after World War II. Right after the war, when cities were in a state of destruction, the trope of the city in ruins featured prominently in art. A metaphorical approach to ruins can be seen in documentary photographs of devastated Warsaw, the drawings of Tadeusz Kulisiewicz, and the classical paintings of Felicjan Szczęsny Kowarski. Within this spectrum lies a broad range of paintings that portrayed landscape in terms of peril, strangeness, and unrecognizability—landscapes deprived of visual coherence or unity and instead defined by oblivion, fissure, and the abysmal.
This article discusses a group of paintings that transformed the tradition of landscape painting. It analyzes work by Bronisław Wojciech Linke (“Morze przelanej krwi” [Sea of Blood], 1952 and “Ustka–Morze” [Ustka–Sea], 1954), Jadwiga Maziarska (“Bez tytułu” [Untitled], circa 1970), and Jonasz Stern (“Niski horyzont” [Low Horizon], 1960 and Kałusz w roku 1942 [Kalush in 1942], 1988) and identifies new, unique meanings that were nonetheless informed by the legacy of Surrealism. Hailing from multiple decades, these works can also be interpreted by distinguishing post-Holocaust models of painting that redefined space as a basic template for representing and remembering this event. Incongruent portrayals of claustrophobia, the void, or space as a boundless expanse consistently feature iconography associated with the Holocaust in post-war art. |
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| ISSN: | 2450-1611 2956-4158 |