History
Document Type
Article
Abstract
This article examines how states with a fascist past - Germany, Austria and Italy - used modernism in the visual arts to rebrand national and European culture at the Venice Biennale of Art after 1945. I argue that post-war exhibitions of modern art, including those at the Biennale, reveal a vast confrontation with Jewish absence after the Holocaust. Christian Democrats and proponents of European integration attempted to reimagine modernism without the Jewish minority that had shaped it in crucial ways. Meanwhile, living Jewish artists resisted their exclusion from the post-war interpretations of modernism, as well as absorbtion of modernism as part of national heritage. Their criticisms lay bare a seeming paradox at the heart of postwar Europe: a desire to claim the veneer of pre-Nazi cosmopolitanism without returning its enabling demographic and cultural diversity. This article points to the significance of philosemitism for establishing postwar national and continental identities.
Publication Title
Contemporary European History
Publication Date
5-2022
Volume
31
Issue
2
First Page
243
Last Page
258
ISSN
0960-7773
DOI
10.1017/S0960777321000138
Keywords
fascism, modernism, visual arts, Holocaust, postwar Europe, cutlural identity
Repository Citation
Tanzer, Frances, "European Fantasies: Modernism and Jewish Absence at the Venice Biennale of Art, 1948-1956" (2022). History. 124.
https://commons.clarku.edu/historyfac/124
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Copyright Conditions
Must link to publisher version with DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0960777321000138
