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. Renato Guttuso, Abstract versus Figurative Art I can not stress enough how important a role art played in the propaganda war between the opponents in the Cold War, which pitted the Communist East against the capitalist West. Consequently my talk is just an overview it will per force neglect a lot of subtleties. And I concentrate in particular on the ways in which the different political situations in England, France and Germany during the war and in the immediate postwar period reflected on the national art scene. I have focused on art that can in one way or another be called political in the wider sense. But it is this complexity that makes it interesting. I do however, not intend to cover Spain in this, as Spain was not a participant in WWII, and all of you who live here know much more about this topic than I do.Īs it is, my topic is vast and complex.
And so I have decided to throw my net over a rather wide territory and cover England as well as France, Germany, and to some degree Italy. But, as I have discovered and as I will explain, British art is not the best example, as the presence of political art was much less prevalent there than in other European countries. My talk about art and politics in Post World War II Europe was inspired by the presence in this museum of the exhibition “Let us face the future,” which shows British art from the end of the Second World War to the late nineteen sixties.
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