Charles Bittiger. Late Stage of Baker, 1946. Photo : Navy Art Collection, Naval History and Heritage Command
The discovery of atoms and radioactivity, at the onset of the 20th Century, altered the course of humankind. It also completely changed the way artists were thinking about the world, about nature and how they were representing it. The discovery by Marie Curie and others liberated artists. Suddenly, matter was energy. There was another way to represent the world we are part of and also a new understanding of time - the effects of radioactivity are almost eternal. This discovery freed artists. Then came the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the shockwave of these explosions sent shockwaves until now.
Sigmar Polke. Uranium (Pink), 1992. © The Estate of Sigmar Polke, Cologne / Adagp, Paris, 2024 / Photo : Flavio Karrer
Paris’ Museum of Modern Art (the MAM, as opposed to the National museum of modern art, in the Pompidou Center), is exploring for the first time in France the impact of the “Atomic Age” on artists, through an extraordinary ensemble of 250 art works - paintings, videos, installations, photography, historical documents).
Bruce Conner. BOMBHEAD. 2002. © Conner Family Trust, San Francisco - ADAGP 2024 - photo Courtesy Magnolia Editions, Oakland, CA.
The exhibition is divided in three parts: the scientific discoveries of radioactivity and the new worlds that were thus discovered; the making of the bomb at Los Alamos with the Manhattan Project, and the August 1945 bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and, finally, the nuclear age in which we have been living in since then.
The first part of MAM’s examination of the impact of the “atomic age” on artists looks at the way, early in the 20th Century, they interpreted this new knowledge. Some artists, like Kandinsky, transformed it as a spiritual experience. Hilma af Klint’s works are considered to be amongst the first abstract paintings. Others, like Marcel Duchamp, were interested in what he calls the “infra-sensitive”. How to make what is barely perceptible perceptible. This school of thought continues until today with artists like Pierre Huyghe or Sigmar Polke.
The second part of this very rich exhibition deals with “The Bomb” before and after Hiroshima. The atomic cloud, looking like the human head, inspires many artists like Bruce Conner and his “Bombhead” in which the atomic mushroom is replacing the head of a man in a suit and tie. For many artists, the beginning of the Atomic Age is a source of anxiety and the fear of the nuclear Apocalypse is very real. Francis Bacon’s Three studies of a portrait (1976), for example, features the head of a person as if it were blown by the blast of an explosion. Dali’s Uranium and Atomica Melancholia Idyll (1945) is another example of this understanding of the nuclear age and its threat. The bomb also became an object of popular culture interest through magazines like Life and documentaries.
Miriam Cahn. Atombombe. 1991. © Photo : Oliver Roura
Of course, artists are echoing society’s concern and, starting in the early 1960s, with the fight for ecology, a growing number of artists are using art to denounce the omnipresence of the atom, whether military or civil, with the spread of nuclear power plants across the world. The exhibition also looks at feminism and how women fought against the proliferation of the nuclear arsenal which they saw as a continuation of the domination of men over nature. The exhibition is so vast and so rich with not only artworks, but also documents - images of Los Alamos where the bomb was being built - that it deserves more than 1 visit. The nuclear age triggered artists’ imagination.
~Jean-Sébastien Stehli.
L'Âge Atomique. Until Feb. 9, 2025. Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. mam.paris.fr/
Hélène de Beauvoir, Les Mortifères, 1977. © Art Perspective Project / Hélène de Beauvoir / Photo : Christian Kempf.
