Art and the Second World War

Independent scholar Bohm-Duchen delivers a powerful global history of WW II in a wide range of visual culture and art, from photographs and propaganda posters to drawings, fine art prints, and to a lesser extent, sculpture. The author does not gloss over the problematic nature of art related to the atrocities of war, including the aestheticizing of violence, the role of censorship in shaping history, and the uneasy parallel development of modernism. Instead she deftly reveals and then unpacks these issues. Her book has three key strengths. The first is organizational: chapters dedicated to each country reveal nationalistic trends in visual culture. Secondly, the author creates a careful balance of extremely well-known artists (including Pablo Picasso, Peter Blume, Norman Rockwell, and El Lissitzky) with a large number of artists whose work has not been carefully studied outside their country of origin. The third strength is the consistent juxtaposition of works of different media, purpose, and style, which disrupts the hermeneutical progression of modernism presented in most books treating art of this period. With clear, accessible prose and high-quality images, this book is indispensable for both university and museum collections. Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through researchers/faculty; general readers. E. K. Mix Butler University

In this well-researched, clear-eyed assessment of art's relationship to the war that "has left the darkest and most indelible mark on modern society," Bohm-Duchen (After Auschwitz) presents a sobering overview of the official and nonofficial fine art produced in warring nations: Spain (with the civil war treated as a prologue to WWII), England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, America, France, Italy, the Soviet Union, Germany, China, and Japan. Focused on paintings, sculpture, drawings, and prints, the book is particularly impressive for the obscure work it covers, such as that by German and Austrian refugees interned on the Isle of Man, sketches from Japanese-Americans interned in the U.S., and drawings by Italian partisans in combat. In addition to commenting on critical issues such as "the constant risk of aestheticizing the horror," the author analyzes the art of the Holocaust, China's bleak woodcut cartoons from the Second Sino-Japanese War, the revival of history and landscape painting in Stalinist Russia, U.S. soldiers' visual responses to devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and more. Bohm-Duchen punctuates the narrative with astute insights, for example, noting that "the morally murky nature of French culture under occupation" might explain Paris' post-war decline as the heart of the art world. Brimming with chilling full-color images, this handsome volume reaffirms the importance of WWII in relation to the fine arts. Illus. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.