By Liam Otten
In the 1930s and 1940s, restrictive cultural policies and a climate of racial and political persecution forced a generation of artists and intellectuals to flee Nazi Germany and occupied Europe. More recently, the war in Bosnia has created a similar exodus, uprooting hundreds of thousands of civilian non-combatants.
 "Evacuation of the Jews," from the exhibition "Farewell to Bosnia, 1993," which opens at the Gallery of Art today. The show features 93 images by renowned photojournalist Gilles Peress, who spent seven months documenting the suffering and violence inflicted by the war in Bosnia. |
Beginning this week, the University's Gallery of Art will examine these twin catastrophes though a pair of exhibitions. "Caught by Politics: Art of the 1930s and 1940s" explores the cultural intertwining of European exiles like Max Beckmann, Hans Hoffmann and Marcel Duchamp, who emigrated to the United States, and their American contemporaries. On a rawer note, "Farewell to Bosnia, 1993," features photographs by the New York-based French photographer Gilles Peress, who spent seven months documenting the suffering and violence inflicted by war.
Both exhibitions open with a reception from 5 to 7 p.m. today and remain on view through March 18; both are free and open to the public.
"Caught by Politics" includes approximately 65 paintings, sculptures, photographs, drawings and prints culled entirely from the collections of the University and the Saint Louis Art Museum. The show hangs work by such influential Europeans as Max Ernst, George Grosz, Fernand LŽger, Jacques Lipchitz, Matta Echaurren and Yves Tanguy side-by-side with those of Americans like William Baziotes, Alexander Calder, Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, Philip Guston, Robert Motherwell, Ben Shahn and the Armenian-born Arshile Gorky.
"The complexity of this period is still widely underestimated," said Sabine Eckmann, curator of the Gallery of Art, whose previous credits include the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's much heralded 1997 exhibition "Exiles and ƒmigrŽs: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler." She pointed out that the Europeans' impact is usually seen in linear terms: Their arrival sparks the creation of American Abstract Expressionism, which in turn transforms New York into the world center of the visual arts.
Yet in many ways, those exiles also adapted themselves to American demands. Eckmann gives the example of the New Bauhaus (later the Institute of Design) in Chicago, whose emphasis on practical design principles "reveals the Bauhaus's modifications of its agenda from concerns with societal betterment to meeting challenges of the American corporate world.
"By showing American and European artworks of this period together, 'Caught by Politics' challenges the one-sided narrative," Eckmann said. "The show suggests that different degrees of acculturation determined both exile and American artistic practices, often involving significant cross-fertilization."
An example of this can be found in the work of European surrealists like Ernst, Duchamp and Tanguy, here displayed alongside paintings by "American Mythmakers" Baziotes, Gorky, Motherwell, Rothko and Gottlieb. (Both groups shared an interest in myths and used primitive forms of expression in their formulation of responses to the terrors of World War II.) Of particular interest is Ernst's "Eye of Silence" (1943-44), which transforms a primitive and uncivilized Western American landscape into a haunting image of a barren and destroyed world.
"Farewell to Bosnia" --organized by the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and co-presented here with the St. Louis Chapter of the United Nations Association --captures the war's disastrous effects on the everyday lives of civilians. Images are disturbing and often heartrending: refugees carrying belongings, wounded victims (many of whom are children), the digging of a mass grave, a cityscape seen through a window pierced by a bullet.
"Peress' photographs are empathetic, outspoken and shocking studies of the deeply disorienting experience of suffering," Eckmann said. "These disturbing scenes --taken in Tuzla, central Bosnia, Mostar and Sarajevo --place the viewer in the role of witness to some of the century's most violent atrocities."
In addition to his time in Bosnia, Peress has covered the Irish conflict, the Iranian revolution and violence in Rwanda, among other events. His work has been honored by major arts institutions around the world, including the Guggenheim Foundation, the Fondation de France and the National Endowment for the Arts. His photographs are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the MusŽe d'Art Moderne in Paris, among others.
Support for the exhibitions is provided by the University's Hortense Lewin Art Fund; the St. Louis Printmarket; the Regional Arts Commission, St. Louis; the Missouri Arts Council, a state agency; the Arts and Education Council; and private donations.
The Gallery of Art is located in Steinberg Hall, near the intersection of Skinker and Forsyth boulevards. Hours are 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. weekdays and 1 to 4:30 p.m. weekends. For more information, call 935-4523.
