Programme 12: The Effects of War

The Art Works

Title: Large Tragic Head
Artist: Jean Fautrier
Medium: Bronze on marble base
Date: 1942

This head, a mutilated slab of bronze, stands on a marble base as a monument to those who suffered during the war. Although one eye is clearly defined, the mouth is more of a gouge, and half of the face appears to have been scraped away. Jean Fautrier (1898–1964) had been gassed during World War I and was briefly a German prisoner during World War II. For the remainder of the war his studio was within earshot of Nazi killings. This brutality had a strong impact on his style, as can be seen from this roughly modelled work.

Title: Standing Woman
Artist: Alberto Giacometti
Medium: Bronze
Date: 1948–9

Alberto Giacometti (1901–66) was associated with Surrealism before the war, but gradually moved back to a more realistic style of depiction. After the war his work is perhaps most closely connected with the Existentialists, a group of writers and philosophers who, partly in response to the horrors of World War II, doubted the existence of God. Without God, there is no one to guide us, no moral code to follow, and, at its worst, no point to life. Each person could only be defined by their own existence – hence the name of the movement.

These ideas are expressed in Giacometti’s work through the extreme emaciation of his figures, intended in part to provoke the idea of isolation. The Standing Woman, modelled in plaster before being cast in bronze, appears to have been worried away rather than built up. It is as if Giacometti is trying to find the essence of the woman, and has almost reduced her to the bones.

Title: In the Course of Time II
Artist: Hannah Collins
Medium: Photograph on paper mounted on muslin
Date: 1994

In this large-scale photographic print of an overgrown graveyard the foreground appears almost life-size, and the path on the right-hand side is like an invitation to walk into the work and wander around. The inscriptions on the gravestones are not in English, and some of the writing does not use the Latin alphabet. They are in Hebrew: this is a photograph of the Jewish cemetery in Warsaw.

Hannah Collins (born 1956) deliberately uses black and white photography as it creates a sense of history, and here it has a melancholy feeling evoking memory and loss. The cemetery is overrun not only because the people buried here are long dead, but also because so are their descendents, killed during the Holocaust. The work is a reminder that the effects of war are lasting, and the destruction permanent.