RISING FROM THE RUINS

By ROBERT HUGHES

A half-century ago this year, the last world war ended with the surrender of the Axis powers. It left behind a European culture broken in half, a field of ashes, ruins and grave pits that mocked the crushed utopian fantasies of early modernism. How did the visual arts in Europe put themselves together from such destruction? What forms rose from this landscape-not only in painting and sculpture but also in photography, architecture and design-during the two decades of recovery after 1945?

It is probably beyond any exhibition, no matter how large, to give more than a sketch for an answer. But an interesting sketch for such a sketch, at least, is offered by an ambitious show now on view in Barcelona that will run through July 30 and then move to the Kunstlerhaus in Vienna in the fall. "Postwar Europe 1945-1965: Arts After the Deluge" has been organized by Thomas Messer, the former director of New York City's Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, for La Caixa, Spain's leading private cultural foundation. It is a big affair-some 540 paintings, sculptures, photographs and architectural samples-and it leaves room for much wrangling about choices. (No Balthus? Why nothing by Jean Halion? And so on.)

"After the Deluge" serves as the first show in a very long while to confront what one might call the flip side of American postwar supremacy. Everyone knows that after 1945 the center of world art moved to New York. Paris no longer "mattered" much. Once this dogma took hold, Americans lost interest in most new European art; the New York School pushed it off the radar screen, and it apparently lost the mandate of art history. The new, swelling museum culture in the U.S. tended to ignore it. In the early 1950s the prewar masters remained-Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Lager, Miro-but who was going to pay much attention to insipid French abstractionists like Hans Hartung or Alfred Manessier in the face of what Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning were doing?

Nevertheless, one of art's iron laws is that sooner or later, what goes around comes around. And this show provides a moving record of Europe's reaffirmation of itself against terrible odds. The totalitarian regimes of the '30s-Nazism in Germany and Central Europe, Fascism in Italy, Stalinism in the Soviet Union-had wiped entire countries off the map of modernist culture. Though modernism had long flirted with the idea of historical amnesia, treating the past as though it were a drag on invention, it was not equipped to deal with the actual destruction of that past by war and ideology. Whole tracts of culture-German Romanticism; classical sculpture, with its image of the ideal, prosperous body-had been laid waste, fatally contaminated, by the use the Nazis had made of them, just as the Realist option had been wrecked by official Stalinist art.

Broadly, the catastrophe evoked two kinds of response from European artists. The first was to rebuild, to assert continuity with the past. The second was to embrace the ruins in an imagery of loss, primitivism and seeming inarticulateness, as with Jean Dubuffet's graffiti and turnip men, or the inchoate-looking lumps and scratches of French abstractionist Jean Fautrier. The older artists tended to take the first road, the younger the second.

Chief among the former was, of course, Picasso, who emerged from the German Occupation of France an emblem of noncollaboration, a hero of the left and of artists in general. His bronze Death's Head, 1943, is the perfect image for the show's beginning: a cannonball of impacted death, heavier than any imaginable head. Massacre in Korea, 1951, asserts continuity by quoting Goya and thus morosely pointing out that the disasters of war only recur. The cluster of gun barrels leveled at the weeping women comes directly out of Goya's The Third of May. They are fantasy weapons, more like ray guns than rifles. Their odd shapes, and the robotic look of the soldiers, suggest that Picasso had also been looking at American sci-fi comic strips. It isn't clear who the killers are, and the naked victims don't look at all Asian; every Marxist in France (which in 1951 meant most of the French intelligentsia) assumed that the painting was a denunciation of some unspecified American war crime.

Lager too still aspired to make a positivist art about modern life based on classical principles. A whole range of artists, from Piero della Francesca to Manet, are implicit in his image in praise of skilled labor, The Constructors, 1950. Perhaps the show's most moving and nuanced postwar tribute to sculpture's classical past is Henri Laurens' Morning, 1944. A bronze woman awakening: it ought to be an idyllic image. But it is not, because the massive post-Cubist forms of her limbs suggest stress, a heavy, invisible load to which the energy locked in the figure responds.

The archetypal postwar sculptor, other than Picasso, was Alberto Giacometti. His images of the figure, as much Egyptian as modern, with their ravaged bronze surfaces and their august sense of withdrawal from touch, are well represented here. The postwar years released a wave of damaged-figure sculpture, none of it quite up to Giacometti's level. But metaphors of violence enabled certain painters of the figure to do some remarkable work, whose results would continue to be recycled by others into the '80s. There was practically nothing in '80s neo-Expressionism that approached the tumultuous energy of Karel Appel, whose two huge pictures, Man, 1953, and Portrait of Michel Tapia, 1956, all but stop this show.

Most of the abstract painting coming out of the School of Paris in the late '40s and '50s, except for Serge Poliakoff (sometimes) and the still somewhat underrated Nicolas de Sta`l, was either self-consciously pious (religious stained glass was a favored metaphor) or mock convulsive. A hideous array of bravura squiggles by Georges Mathieu, whom French critics, for a while, regarded as Europe's answer to Pollock, reminds you how shallow this rhetoric could be.

Much of the strongest work by "younger" artists (younger, that is, than Picasso and Braque) internalized the vision of damage and brought it out again as metaphor. There was no point in painting Europe's ruins, like some modern-day Pannini or Piranesi; that task was done by photography. But there were things to be done with the substance of a wrecked world: Lucio Fontana's canvases pierced with jagged holes, as though by shrapnel; or Alberto Burri's torn and charred burlap. Early Dubuffet, and Antoni Tepies of course, belonged to this strain, as did Fautrier, whose painting I Am Falling in Love, 1957, with its intertwining ribbons of pink paint across a blue-gray, fresco-like surface, comes as close to an image of nostalgia as an abstract picture can.

American artists reacted to mass-media culture in the early '60s with images that were as clean, new and bright as the ads they were looking at. In Europe this newness seemed foreign and extremely artificial. For many artists-who were by temperament on the left-the signs of the liberator were also the symbols of a colonizing culture. Like the inscriptions of earlier invaders, they could sink into the wall. Hence the preference was for disfigured, layered surfaces in which the bright "buy me" message had suffered damage and entropy, as in Wolf Vostell's ironic collage Coca-Cola, 1961.

At the end of this strand, most densely vivid of them all, is the work of Joseph Beuys, whose Door, 1954-56, is a literal piece of the wreckage: a deeply burned and blackened wooden door, with a bird's skull and the skin of a rabbit's head fixed to it. Nothing in art, however scarred or forlorn it may look at first, escapes the clutch of style in the end, as a long line of artists and photographers have proved; and yet this particular Beuys still delivers a jolt, as though one were hearing a voice from an abandoned cellar, a ghost at noon.