CategoriesStyles and Movements
Post-War European Art
European art from 1945 to about 1970, from the scarred, material painting of the late 1940s to the performances and poor materials of the 1960s.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for Post-War European Art are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
Europe's artists emerged from the Second World War among ruins, facing a new trauma and needing to recover the modernism the Nazis had condemned. In 1955 the first documenta in Kassel set out to reconnect Germany with the art it had suppressed.
The first response was raw and material. Jean Fautrier's Hostages series (1943–45) built heads from thick paste, Alberto Burri stitched torn sacking into paintings, and the CoBrA group of Asger Jorn, Karel Appel and Constant painted with childlike violence. Francis Bacon twisted the human figure in smeared, caged spaces. By the late 1950s a cooler generation had arrived: Lucio Fontana slashed monochrome canvases, the Düsseldorf group ZERO worked with light and movement, and the Nouveaux Réalistes in Paris used the debris of consumer life. The 1960s brought Fluxus events, Joseph Beuys's performances, Gerhard Richter's blurred paintings from photographs and the humble materials of Arte Povera.
Related artists
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Post-World War I European Classicism
Post-World War II School of Paris
Postminimalism
Pre-Raphaelites
Pre-World War II School of Paris
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Process Art
Progressive Artists' Movement
Purism
Relational Aesthetics
Renaissance
Rinpa School
Rococo Art and Design
Romanticism
School of London
Shin Hanga
Social Action
Socialist Realism
Soviet Nonconformist Art
Spatialism
Spiral Group
Street Photography
Studio Museum in Harlem Artist-in-Residence (AIR) Program
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