Скачать или смотреть Confronting the Holocaust in Midcentury American Art

In this talk, Jennifer McComas, curator of the current exhibition Remembrance and Renewal: American Artists and the Holocaust, 1940-1970 at Indiana University’s Eskenazi Museum of Art and primary author of the accompanying catalogue, explores the ways that American artists—American-born, immigrants, refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe, and Holocaust survivors—confronted the Holocaust in their work during the war and in the decades just after. McComas describes how midcentury artists—employing a wide range of aesthetic and stylistic approaches—often alluded to the atrocities indirectly, through symbolism, abstraction, references to Jewish texts and ideas, or simply through titles. Some made private work not meant for sale or exhibition, while others proposed designs for publicly sited Holocaust memorials. Some memorialized family members who had fallen victim to the Nazis, while others grappled with how to visualize more abstract concepts: evil, memory, or renewal. Her talk will provide new insight into modernist art history and Jewish American history.

Jennifer McComas is Curator of European and American Art at the Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University, and is also an affiliated faculty member with the university’s Jewish Studies Program. She established and manages the museum’s World War II-Era Provenance Research Project and is now working on projects exploring experience and identity in the twentieth century. Dr. McComas has lectured widely and contributed to a range of academic publications. Her research has received support from the Henry Luce Foundation, the Terra Foundation for American Art, and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture.

This event is part of the online series "Flight or Fight. stories of artists under repression" organized by The Fritz Ascher Society for Persecuted, Ostracized and Banned Art in New York (https://fritzaschersociety.org).
You can find other presentations on our YouTube channel @fritzaschersociety.org.

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