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A number of powerful works in the upcoming Contemporary Art Evening Auction on 11 February in London address the theme of war, but in very different ways. Here, we present four works that show the many facets of war, and confront the complexities of conflict through each artist’s individual vantage point.
It has often been said that artists have a particular way of sythesising the world around them, and this is never more evident than in the work of Adrian Ghenie. Using diverse source material gathered from newspaper clippings, television reports, famous works of art and scientific research, Ghenie examines moments and people in cultural history. His work often references other significant works and practitioners in art history – and the events that have shaped the political and social landscape of Europe.
The Arrival imagines a fictitious scene in which the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, known as the Angel of Death for his role in the atrocities at Auschwitz, is pictured amongst exotic jungle plants in a heavy fur coat and bowler hat, clasping a suitcase. The ominous figure appears incongruous to his surroundings, and this multi-layered technique is often employed by the artist.
Ghenie's characteristically expressive, visceral brushstrokes tease at the merest hint of a life-like portrait underneath, albeit obscured by thick, impasto paint – one imagines underneath these marks, the face is rendered with the precision of portraiture in the tradition of Lucian Freud, Edvard Munch and Francis Bacon.
“I’m looking for a fragmentation of the surface… There’s always a vibration inside, a fragmentation. For me, every object you look at in reality has this. There are no objects simply in a flat colour. Human skin, wood, everything has this grain” (Adrian Ghenie in conversation with Michael Peppiatt in: Juerg Judin, Ed., Adrian Ghenie Paintings 2014-19, Ostfildern 2020, p. 122). Mengele has recurred in a number of Ghenie’s paintings: his presence offers a means of probing the sinister extremities of human nature.
Also drawing the viewer's attention to one central figure, and painted in 1965, Georg Baselitz’s Ohne Titel (Held) (Untitled (Hero), from his celebrated Heroes (Helden) series recalls historical portraits of soldiers, exhausted from fighting, limping back from the front line. Though produced some twenty years after the end of the Second World War, the work would sit comfortably alongside a Goya etching or van Gogh drawing, such is the immediate intensity of the sketched lines, and the narrative they convey. Rendered in pencil and charcoal, this intimately scaled work on paper encapsulates the visceral immediacy of Baselitz’s draftsmanship, and provides a powerful shorthand for the series at large.
Born in 1938 and aged seven at the end of the Second World War, Baselitz famously stated of his inherited past: “I was born into a destroyed order” (Georg Baselitz in conversation with Donald Kuspit, ‘Goth to Dance’, ArtForum, Vol. 33, Summer 1995). Defeated and devastated by the Second World War, the German nation was immersed in further anguish when it was divided into East and West. Baselitz’s Helden are archetypal of the vanquished and depleted survivors of devastated post-war Germany. It is certainly true that his solitary wanderers, with their tattered uniforms that expose clumsy wounded bodies, appear mutilated by war.
Shifting from the human figure to the landscape of conflict, Gerhard Richter used aerial photographs taken during the rebuilding of cities in post-war Germany as his source material for Stadtbild Sa (Townscape Sa), which forms part of series of Stadtbilder. A body of work that marks a crucial departure from the blurred yet figurative subjects of Richter’s earlier works, the Stadtbilder stand on the cusp between figuration and abstraction. Commenting on the supposed neutrality of the Stadtbilder, Richter explained that these paintings were intended as a “rejection of interesting content and illusionist painting. A spot of paint should remain a spot of paint, and the motif should not project meaning or allow any interpretation” (Gerhard Richter cited in: Dietmar Elger, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, Chicago 2009, p. 158).
The almost compete destruction of Dresden during bombing raids weighed heavily on psyche of its inhabitants, and as a native of the town, Richter has addressed this collective trauma on several occasions. In 1960s Germany, considerable energy was directed towards re-building and erasing traces of a troubled past, and acknowledgment of the bombings was greatly suppressed in the nation’s collective memory.
As Tate curator Mark Godfrey explains: “An extraordinary sequence of reversals takes place in the townscapes. Richter started with aerial photographs that were made to document the rebuilding of cities after the war and to celebrate the achievements of architects, town planners and labourers… Rendering the images of rebuilt cities in his brushy impasto, he effectively re-destroyed the cities, albeit in the imaginary field of painting” (Mark Godfrey, ‘Damaged Landscapes’, Gerhard Richter: Panorama, Tate, 2011-12, p. 76).
Painted in 1944 at the height of the World War II, L’Incendie II ou le Feu (The Burning II or The Fire) is considered one of Maria Helena Vieira da Silva’s most important paintings, and represents an unsettling and tumultuous view of the world as it stood during the fierce conflict. At first the canvas appears to be semi-abstract, but on closer inspection, the viewer can make out figures and buildings engulfed and overwhelmed by flames. On her arrival in Paris in 1908 as a nineteen year-old student, Viera da Silva was exposed to the work of Picasso and Cézanne, and it was here she began to absorb the influences of the European Cubists and Futurists – whilst developing her own distinctive visual language.
The painting was produced during Vieira da Silva’s exile in Rio de Janeiro, where she fled in 1940 with her husband – the Jewish painter Árpád Szenes – to escape Nazi persecution, returning to Paris only in 1947. During this period, she produced a number of paintings, three of which were executed in 1944. Dark and introspective, these paintings became visual diaries through which the artist could reflect upon the war that was ravaging Europe, as much as her own turbulent state of mind. "In adding little stain after little stain, laboriously, like a bee, the picture makes itself. A picture should have its heart, its nervous system, its bones and its circulation. It should resemble a person in its movements" (Maria Helena Vieira da Silva cited in: Vieira da Silva, Geneva 1993).
In this composition, as in the works by Ghenie and Richter, almost every inch of the canvas is covered in paint, challenging the eye to roam the surface, picking out the detail as it passes. There are highly-charged elements of pure chaos – these are the lasting impressions of the horrors of war – claustrophobic and highly emotionally-charged.
There were few women artists recognised at the time this work was created – which adds a significant counter-view to the subject matter; official war artists were always male, and the famous, great history paintings depicting war and battle throughout the ages have always been commissioned and made by men. However, the importance of this painting lies not in the gender of its creator, but in its ability to probe all sides of the human condition.
But this is not to conclude all art about war centres around torment and despair, in fact, there are many images that contain traces of hope and rejuvenation. In Vieira da Silva’s dark and brooding L’Incendie II ou le Feu (The Burning II or The Fire), the central ethereal figure was reworked by the artist at the end of the war on her return to Paris, symbolically brightening and intensifying its glow as a sign of hope. In Richter’s Stadtbild Sa, the clean lines, rigid geometry and regulated town planning distill a mood of post-war optimism; the devastation present in the aerial-photo cityscapes is here replaced by plans to rebuild war-damaged Germany.
Elsewhere in the sale, are signifiers of a post-war era; from the Pop Art powerhouses of Roy Lichtenstein and Tom Wesselmann, through to David Hockney's sunshine-filled swimming pool scene and Wayne Thiebaud’s pastel-hued Fruit Stand – not only an important work in the story of contemporary painting, but an affectionate depiction of small-scale enterprise and commerce – the very bedrock of the American Dream. These works were not always blindly optimistic, however; Jean-Michel Basquiat’s street-smart critiques of post-war capitalism and pop culture often had a sting in the tail, but were delivered through punchy and bright, dynamic canvasses full of energy and vigour.
Considering these works side-by-side, the auction presents a detailed and comprehensive history spanning the 20th and 21st centuries, as seen and retold through the eyes of our most significant artists.
You can view the full catalogue here.
