Almost 40 years after the catastrophe or crime that really christened the century of potential mass destruction, is it possible for an artist to deal with Hiroshima as with any other historical event? No, it is not. Hiroshima has lost none of the horror particular to it; it has become emblematic of death’s contempt for mankind altogether. For Arnulf Rainer, the confrontation with the horrible event in the 57-work cycle here is an exception to his usual pattern of production: “This is the first and possibly the last time that I submit to pressure from another person. I personally avoid the set of problems concerning Hiroshima. . . . I close my eyes and ears to the apocalyptic vision, I bracket out the great catastrophe from my perspective on life” (from the catalogue essay). It is noteworthy that Rainer, who has repeatedly been preoccupied with death, characterizes this particular confrontation with it as an exception. And the fact that someone else had to press the artist, an intense, inspired worker, to address himself to the issue—even the idea is extraordinary. But Hiroshima must itself surely remain extraordinary. It cannot be explained; it must be felt. And it is truly felt here.
Photographs of the situation after the bomb was dropped are the grounds on which Rainer paints. This documentary material shows a devastated landscape, and the stupefied horror of those in it. Rainer uses and reuses a few photographs as the bases for an attempt at artistic mastery of an event that ultimately cannot be mastered; the methods he uses are not new, nor are they new in his work. The confrontation with death is not new either. What is new, and perhaps unrepeatable for this artist as well as for others, is the encounter with death as the absolute end. What is new is the encounter with a horror that offers no release. “In my artistic work to date, positive motivations have been the most important impetus,” Rainer states in the catalogue. Granted, a new motivation intrudes here: “to create out of anxiety and abhorrence”; but a reference to Buddha nonetheless makes it possible to hope for a shift into a positive light, even at the sight of death. Artistic veracity in the work, however, means that the artist exposes what can no longer be mastered. It means covering the spectrum between that portrayal of horror that is somehow liberating, and artistic failure at what is greater than human comprehension.
The emotional and spiritual tensions of the encounter are reflected in Rainer’s paintings here. They do not conceal the inability to master them. Some works show the artist’s undeniable anxiety about taking even a first step; others reflect the fact that the routine of artistic procedure attempts to make the horror beautiful. Still other works show the artist completely in retreat; the purpose of the retreat is to allow the document of horror to appear as horror itself. Finally, in a great number of works (mostly those incorporating photographs of people), Rainer paints in the atrociousness to such an extent that they seem to explode.
Ultimately it is hard to determine why these paintings are so disconcerting. Is it the art itself, or is it the suppression that the art interrupts in us? This is Rainer’s most muted work. He has added no artistic drama to the human drama. Black and brown are the predominant colors; where bloody red would be, it has congealed to a rusty brown. If there is any color to speak of, it is in a blue veil on the head of a woman feeding her child. The noncolors, however, succeed in avoiding the pathos of dramatic gloom. The work is like a veil; in describing it the artist uses the phrase “running starts into nothing, leaps into the fog.” Rainer’s indictment lacks the comfort that there might be some moral point. This is the source of the greatness of this work, which does not deny the human and artistic failing in the world after Hiroshima.
—Annelie Pohlen
Translated from the German by Martha Humphreys.
