Figures of the Human Being In the decades that elapsed in the period between the end of the Second World War and the 1970s, a series of international artists rejected the field of abstraction, instead focusing their work on new forms of figuration that explored certain aspects related to the figure and the human condition, stressing their corporealness and vulnerability. They represent continuity throughout the period of post-war existentialism and the pessimistic outlook concerning the fate of the human being that arose from this philosophical and literary movement. caged human is one of the literary images with the greatest impact and one which was deployed by existentialism, appearing literally in Spanish artist Darío Villalba’s (1939) “encapsulados”, for instance in Pies vendados (Bandaged Feet, 1973) and La oración (The Prayer, 1974), photographic pieces on canvas that, trimmed and literally encapsulated inside methacrylate in the form of a chrysalis, reveal transparent isolation.
This renewed interest in the human being finds its clearest exponent in the exhibition New Images of Man, presented in New York’s MoMA in 1959, along with the following words from its curator: “The revelations and complexities of mid-twentieth-century life have called forth a profound feeling of solitude and anxiety. The imagery of man which has evolved from this reveals sometimes a new dignity, sometimes despair, but always the uniqueness of man as he confronts his fate […] These imagists take the human situation, indeed the human predicament rather than formal structure, as their starting point. Existence rather than essence is of the greatest concern to them.” This exhibition also featured the participation of Francis Bacon (1909-1992), whose work depicted a grim humanity and altered genres of classical painting. This can be noted in Lying Figure (1966), where a classic image of a supine model (frequently present in the past in portraits with odalisques and models in the painter’s studio) is subverted as it presents the foreshortened body becoming a formless mass that appears to be fighting with itself, tormented by a claustrophobic space. This reference to the tortured and
New acquisitions Öyvind Fahlström. Life-Curve No. 1, Ian Fleming, 1967 Luis Gordillo. Dibujos post-abstractos, 1962-1963 Philip Guston. Ground, 1967 Philip Guston. Untitled, 1968 Martial Raysse. Tri-Color Modern, 1962 Hervé Télémaque. A main armée, 1962-1963
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While abstract movements dominated the artistic landscape in both the USA and Europe, some artists used their markedly expressionist character for the purposes of figurative approaches to the human being. They were visibly pervious to the atmosphere created by existentialist writers, convinced that the inheritance of war hurled people into an uncertain abyss: the reflection and experience of their own existence. Such despair in the face of individuality and the mistrust in social relationships has been summed up in Jean-Paul Sartre’s maxim of “hell is other people”, which in art takes the form of bodies that are convulsive, low and formless.
On an international scale, Philip Guston (1913–1980) was one of the first artists to legitimise the passage of Abstract Expressionist practices to figuration. The destructive and equally accumulative expression present in the large Action
Painting canvases from North America represented a model for the assembly of corporeal fragments presented randomly and unstructured and converted into a compact mass with no identity in Confrontation (1974). A similar impulse also emerged in the work of Luis Gordillo (1934), who in Dibujos post-abstractos (Post-Abstract Drawings, 1963-1964) advocates the relinquishment of abstraction through soft and formless corporealness, intentionally devoid of solidity. In a similar vein, in Where the Railroad Leaves the Sea Roland B. Kitaj (1932–2007) highlights the images offered by existentialism when presenting his characters as grotesque and debased. At the same time as these new figures of human beings materialised in painting, human photography was developing internationally in an attempt to recompose lost hope in the context of post-war recovery. Diane Arbus (1923-1971) also participated in this movement, yet she eliminated the most optimistic aspects through portrait to focus on the evocation of solitude, latent in the individuality of her subjects, who were distanced from the mundane and commercial photographic images found in illustrated magazines in what was an attempt to turn her work into a tool of desperate communication with human beings.
Bibliography AA. VV. Francis Bacon: Five Decades. Londres: Thames and Hudson, 2013. Ades, Dawn y Andrew Forge. Francis Bacon [cat. exp.]. Londres: Tate Gallery, 1985. Darío Villalba: retrospective 19721976 [cat. exp.]. Bruselas: Palais des Beaux Arts, 1976. Darío Villalba. Una visión antológica, 1957 – 2007 [cat. exp.]. Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2007. Ibáñez Fanés, Jordi. “Letras sin canción. Antipoesía y antisublime en la vanguardia europea de posguerra”, en AA. VV. ¿La guerra ha terminado? Arte en un mundo dividido (1945 – 1968). Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2010. Luis Gordillo. Iceberg Tropical [cat. exp.]. Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2007. Morphet, Richard (ed.). R.B. Kitaj: A Retrospective [cat. exp.]. Londres: Tate Gallery, 1994. Philip Guston: Paintings 19691980 [cat. exp.]. Londres: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1982. Selz, Peter. New Images of Man [cat. exp.]. Nueva York: MoMA, 1959. Sussman, Elisabeth. Diane Arbus: Revelations [cat. exp.]. San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Nueva York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003. Links www.francis-bacon.com www.luisgordillo.es http://diane-arbus-photography.com