The Enduring Arts

Agustín Lamanna
Fernanda Carrera
 Topics
Responses to Totalitarism

Interactions: Asia and Europe

United States Thnaks to this
This four hundred
thousand works were
emphasis on expressing murals, paintings,
social and regional sculptures, prints,
In the United States, as a response to the awareness, art in the posters, desings and
economic state of the nation, due to the photographs. Much of
USA took on a
which recorded the
stockmarket crash on October 1929, Franklin documentary function.
regions and social
Roosevelt, president elected in 1932, conditions in America.
inaugurated a wide range of funded initiatives
to provide employment in the Arts. For
Nearly ten thousand painters, sculptors and
example: The Federal Arts Project (FAP).
other artists were employed in the eight
years the FAP was running. Between them
they produced well over four hundred
thousand works to express social and
regional awareness in the rural areas of the
whole country.
 The Changing West
by T.H. Benton and
José C. Orozco
From a series of murals painted in the
early 1930s, for the new School of
Social Research, New York. Benton, as
most of this Regionalist movement,
used Realism style for the portrayal of
what was “reality” in those years of
crisis.
Historical context in Europe

Europe was rapidly reaching a state of turmoil that would only

be resolved in war. The Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936,
commanding active support from both Hitler in Germany and
Mussolini in Italy. In the Soviet Union, Stalin began a reing of
terror in which no one was safe and, in Germany, Nazi power
became supreme. Heavy censorship was imposed on the press
and radio, and on all forms of art and literature.
“Degenerate Art” vs
“Great German Art”
In 1937 an exhibition totally unlike any
other in the century opened in Munich. It
was billed by the Nazis as an exhibition of
“Degenerate Art”, the decadent work of
“Bolsheviks and Jews”, and drawn from a
collection of some twenty thousand such
pictures confiscated from German
museums. The day before that exhibition
opened, Hitler inaugurated a companion
“Great Exhibition of German Arts”, also in
Munich.
“The artist does not create for
the artist but just like everyone
else he creates for the people” Cubist techniques used for posters
advertising “Degenerate Art Exhibition”
The Spanish Civil War
In July 1936 a military revolt was started
by General Franco, with the support from
The Condor Legion,
the Spanish Fascist party. Germany's crack
Pablo Picasso
Military and economic intervention on the aviation unit, was sent commemorated
to blast civilian targets the bombing in one
part of Hitler and Mussolini to help Franco, to pieces in bombing of his most famous
and of the Soviet Union on behalf of the raids. On 26 April 1937 it
paintings, simply
destroyed the Basque
Republicans. town of Guernica. called Guernica.

Writers, poets, painters from all
over the world rallied to the
Republican cause as members of
the International Brigades,
coordinated in Paris by the Soviet
Communist party.
As with the poets, so with the painters: the best of
them were for the Republic. Like Picasso, the Spanish
Surrealist Joan Miro supported the Republican cause,
and produced work whose horror derived directly
from the war. There was a spectacular output of
posters, both educational and propagandist and the
more impressive examples, in a lively Socialist Realist
style, were from the artists of the Republic.
Guernica by Picasso
The German Condor Legion,
testing its ability to destroy
civilian targets, bombed this
Basque town; 1600 people
were killed. Picasso's painting
universalized the horror of the
event.
 Existencialist Writers
Existencialism concerned itself with the reality human
freedom and the necessity of choice,however impossible
that choise might seem.

Jean Paul
Martin Heidegger Sartre Albert Camus Simone de Beauvoir
 Writers of World War II
In World War I, writing concentrated on the trenches and the
stalemate of the Western Front.
During World War II writing was more dispersed ,more fluid.

T.S.ELIOT´S JEAN ANOUILH KEITH PRIMO LEVI

DOUGLAS
 Music and Film
193Os
During Stalin politics,increased
the pressure on artists of all kinds
to put their art into the service of
the state.

In the end of the World War II music

took place in small instrumental
orchestras in cinemas pit.
 REALISM
Realism is not easy to
difined. It should mean “the
representation of what is
real. But... what is real? Is
what we see or what we
think we see?

“ORNAN´S FUNERAL”
Gustave Courbet
India and Europe
One recurring European perception of India was as
a reservoir of religious values in a world denuded
by Western materialism. The German writer
Hermann Hesse visited India in 1911 and wrote his
novel Siddhartha from the knowledge he gained of
the country.
Mulk Raj Anand was born in Peshawar in 1905 and
Hesse spoke of wanting to show that beneath the
educated at the universities of Punjab and London.
world's variety there was a unity in which opposites
After World War I he settled in Bombay. Written in
like beauty and ugliness, sin and sanctity, are
opposites only for a moment, and continually "pass English, his novel Untouchable (1935) describes a day
over into each other"; this was the lesson of in the life of Bhakya, a latrine cleaner and sweeper,
Siddhartha. lowest of the low in the strict Hindu social order.
Written partly as an impassioned protest against
the injustices of the Hindu caste system, the novel
also adroitly presented a panorama of Indian
society.
Brahmacharis by
Amrita Sher-Gil
One of the main objectives of
Indian artists was to reveal
the vital life of India. This
became the major concern of
a young woman of mixed
Hungarian-Indian parentage,
Amrita Sher-Gil. Before she
died in 1941, aged only 29, she
had fulfilled her wish to
produce "an art connected
with the soil".
Music and dance in
Asia
At the beginning of the 20th century, a combination of
British rule and Indian indifference led to the decline of
the rich and sacred traditions of India.
 ¿Why
“Enduring
Arts?