Drawing, from a Starting Point of Zero

Stunde null, or the “zero hour,” was the term used to mark the end of the Second World War that came with German surrender on May 8, 1945. Within a few years this rhetoric of reset, signifying a decisive break with a dark past and a launch into a new future, would begin reverberating through the cultural sphere as well. Throughout the period between 1948 and 1961, the word “zero,” and its attendant concept of absolute renewal, could be heard cropping up regularly, and internationally, in the realms of art, literature, and film. During the war cities had crumbled, the human cost had been devastating, and the moral consequences were worse. Aesthetic traditions, it was clear, had to be detonated and reimagined, too.

“So one must begin again from scratch,” declared French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, writing about the work of Alberto Giacometti in 1948—the same year that Germany Year Zero, a film by the Italian Neorealist filmmaker Roberto Rossellini, followed a 12-year-old boy through a blown-out Berlin. As the concept of renewal increasingly shifted away from politics and toward aesthetics, the French artist and critic Michel Tapié wrote admiringly, in 1952, of the “genuine departure from zero” that was possible in an America unburdened by the “clichés and…plagiarisms” of Europe’s artistic tradition. Two years later, the French critic Charles Estienne also equated “a total liberty of expression” with the idea that “each time means to start from zero”; he found this liberty possible in Europe thanks to the revolutionary tache of Tachisme, which he defined as “the zero degree of plastic writing, the zero degree of the birth of the work.”

Just as the mindset of the postwar reset manifested across cultural disciplines, within the realm of visual art it manifested across mediums. After all, Tapié was praising the paintings of Jackson Pollock, and Sartre’s essay on Alberto Giacometti was about sculpture. But there was one medium that was particularly suited to embodying this attitude. Though one would be forgiven for thinking, thanks to the many histories of postwar art, that pretty much all that was made between the late 1940s and the early 1960s were large American paintings, drawing—from an international roster of artists—was in many ways the ideal medium for a degree zero moment.

Materially, this approach often manifested in a particular kind of mark-making—a graffiti-like scribbling, an elemental scratching—that is at the heart of what drawing is. It’s an impulse visible in the skeins of works on paper by Jean Dubuffet, who in the early 1950s used the French word graphismes to refer to his drawings. At the end of the decade, the Fluxus artist Dick Higgins began his Graphis series of score-like drawings, about which he wrote, “‘calligraphic’ patterns can be permitted to arise from the material or the environment.” Though perhaps it is Cy Twombly whose work, with its free and furious scrawls, is most associated with this quality of graphism: one that lies between language and art, and rhythmically records impression and experience through gesture and line. Concerned with the project of shaping something coherent from powdery dust and ash, drawing at midcentury was unabashedly graphic—and by turns calligraphic, topographic, and choreographic—in its methods and meanings.