“I have not painted the war,” said Pablo Picasso in 1944, “because I am not the kind of painter who goes out like a photographer for something to depict.” In the months that followed, however, he began work on The Charnel House, a monumental evocation of the horror of World War II. It is one of numerous searing, history-engaging works that artists of various nationalities in diverse circumstances created during the cataclysmic period that stretched from the rise of Nazism and other totalitarian regimes, in the 1930s, to the end of the war, in 1945. Some, like José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros, had always mixed art and politics. Others, like Picasso, felt newly compelled to use their art to confront the events unfolding across the world stage. In many cases, these artists found a modernist language of fractured forms well suited to conveying a reality contorted by violence and destruction.
Collection 1880s–1940s
522
Responding to War
522
Responding to War
Floor 5
MoMA
- MoMA, Floor 5, 522 The Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Galleries
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Francis Bacon Painting 1946 -
Max Beckmann Departure Frankfurt 1932, Berlin 1933-35 -
Peter Blume The Eternal City 1934-37 (dated on painting 1937) -
Lucio Fontana Crucifixion 1948 -
Alberto Giacometti Head of a Man on a Rod 1947 -
Julio González Head of the Montserrat, II 1942 -
Barbara Hepworth Conoid, Sphere and Hollow 1937 -
Eva Hesse Untitled 1960 -
Jacques Lipchitz The Rape of Europa, II 1938 -
José Clemente Orozco Dive Bomber and Tank 1940 -
Pablo Picasso Plate (folio 3) from Sueño y mentira de Franco (The Dream and Lie of Franco) 1937 -
Pablo Picasso Plate (folio 4) from Sueño y mentira de Franco (The Dream and Lie of Franco) 1937 -
Pablo Picasso Woman Dressing Her Hair Royan, June 1940 -
Pablo Picasso The Charnel House Paris, 1944-45 -
David Alfaro Siqueiros Collective Suicide 1936 -
Graham Sutherland Thorn Head 1945 -
Rufino Tamayo Animals 1941
Installation images
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