It had disappeared a little from people’s minds. Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un and a few others have made the nuclear threat fashionable again. It occupies the rooms of the Museum of Modern Art in Paris until February 9, 2025 for a current exhibition. “The Atomic Era” addresses the topic from the point of view of plastic creation. In addition to the works, there are documentary sections where texts and images accumulate, often redundant. There are so many of them and they are so packed together that sometimes it is difficult to know which element corresponds to which poster and the eye no longer knows where to land. The same happens with the paintings, which follow one another along the walls at a more than sustained pace. All of this is a long journey, and it’s wise to set aside two hours of your time to try to see and read it all.
There are, in this abundance, capital works, starting with the one that welcomes visitors at the entrance, pagan voidby Barnett Newman (1905-1970), a black circle in the center of a white cloud that appears liquid and where blue splashes float. Since Newman is American and a work from 1946, its presence in this place suggests recognizing a reference to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the previous year.
This interpretation is not the only one that can be proposed and on occasions we have believed we see in it the representation of an eclipse, but, whatever we choose, there are few works that, through color and shapes, give off a denser feeling of fear. At the other end of the exhibition is Eternityby Luc Tuymans, a large red sphere that radiates its light and we do not know if it is the cloud of an explosion or the dome imagined by the Nazi physicist Werner Heisenberg, one of the actors in the uranium project decided by Hitler in 1939. Once Furthermore, it is to the form and chromaticism that the work owes its strength, more than to what it would show. The two works thus respond to each other from a distance.
Erasure of humanity
There are others that are equally notable and raise no fewer questions. Are they undoubtedly related to the atomic theme? For some it is safe, since the artist put a lot of emphasis on it. For his canvas Uranium and Atomic Melancholic Idyll Since 1945, Salvador Dalí has accumulated symbols. There is no lack of the attacker, nor the bombs, nor the pale specters on a black background. Without ambiguity or excitement: a laborious exercise in style. There nuclear composition (1952), by Gianni Dova, is infinitely more expressive, although Dova is less known than Dalí and his almost abstract and non-narrative canvas. Still, its title is self-explanatory. This is not the case of eagle law (1951), by Asger Jorn, by The unthinkable (1958), by Roberto Matta, or by Luce Space (1960), by Francesco Lo Savio, but we do not doubt for a moment that they are on the subject, each in their own way, and that their authors project in painting the anguish of the erasure of humanity.
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