Renato Guttuso, Abstract versus Figurative Art
Moreover, the growing importance of abstract art in the 1950s heated the debate about abstract art’s capacity to express issues of wider human importance. The polemic between the defenders of abstraction and those of realist and figurative art, the so-called battle for Realism, was from the beginning fraught with strong political implications. Therefore, while the political content of a work of art may at first sight not be apparent, its idiom – abstract or figurative – made it a player in the aggressively political discourse that opposed the two artistic approaches at the time.
When we speak about art and politics, we must also acknowledge the wide variety of what can be understood as political expression in art: it can be the partisan belief in the precepts of one political party, or the theoretical and philosophical belief in a political dogma, or it can quite simply be one’s response to a set of historical local or international conditions.
Rarely have conditions been more horrendous than during the war and the immediate post war period in Europe. In order to have some sense of what politics could mean right after the war, one has to realize what an incredible wasteland Europe was in 1945. In fact Europe would live for many decades – and certainly the decades that are covered by the exhibition – in the shadow of the dictatorships of Hitler and Stalin and of the war and its effects. And the postwar period was in many respects as bad as the war itself. Only with the retreating German army towards the end of the war, did the full horror of the holocaust come to light. And this was followed by news of the first atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, and in 1947 by the escalating Cold War with the ever-present threat of the use of nuclear weapons.