Antoni Tàpies,Grey and Black Cross. No. XXVI, 1955, Mixed media on canvas, 145.1 x 113.3 cm, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Les Américans en Amérique, 1951, Póster, 120 x 77.5 cm, Bibliothèque de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine (BDIC) et Musée d'Histoire Contemporaine.

Hans Hartung: T. 1956-9, 1956. 180 x 137cm, Antibes, Colección Anne-Eva Bergman.

Museu d'Art Contemporani
Plaça dels Angels, 1
+34 93 412 08 10
Barcelona
Be-Bomb:
the Transatlantic War of Images and all that Jazz, 1946-1956
October 5, 2007-January 7, 2008

Be-Bomb: the transatlantic war images and all that jazz in the 50s analyses the aesthetic quarrels of the period between 1946 and 1956, the time when New York replaced Paris as the nerve centre of modern art. Curated by the French historian Serge Guilbaut, the exhibition compares and contrasts the art produced in France and the USA in those years in order to understand how and why some works became, if only for a short time in each country, cultural icons that contained fabulous but limited symbolic powers and then turned into media signs that could be commercialised with great success.

The show also be studys why popular icons of one culture were not recognized by the other at that moment. After the victory of American abstract expressionism, American critics despised French art production in that they regarded it as pointless. Faced with the imposing presence of the victorious movement of abstract expressionism, the French art scene, in its fragmented wealth, seemed incapable of projecting a single voice or direction for the future, as Paris had done in the past.

To study the history of French and American art after the World War II is a challenge, not only because the period has not been properly studied (despite attempts by some museums in recent years) but because the consensus among investigators has been shaped by the success of American art. French art of that period has been regarded as weak and irrelevant, but the interesting thing is that at that moment it displayed the essential features of Western art: the same debates about realism, geometrical abstraction and forms of abstract expressionism. The specific aspect of the French scene was the politicisation of artistic expression in a culture yetcontained in a violent, revolutionary tradition, at a time of strong tensions arising from the divisions of the Cold War.

The exhibition, following a strict chronological order, includes works by famous painters such as Picasso, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Wassily Kandinsky, Henri Matisse, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Michaux, van de Velde, de Staël, Soulages, Hartung or Mark Rothko, but also by others important at the time who have been forgotten by the general public (Marcel Barbeau, Viera da Silva, Gerture Barrer, Byron Brown, Romare Bearden, Giuseppe Capogrossi, Howard Daum, Philip Evergood, Alfred Manessier or Steve Wheeler, among many others). Their paintings, which in their day were major reference points in the "chaos" of everyday life, are analysed in relation to their particular history and discussed in the framework of the problems of the moment.

The show breaks the holiness of the white cube and the straitjacket of formalism to introduce different discourse into the discussion: films, newspapers, fashion, archives and radio programmes which are confronted with the works of art to develop a hypothesis about some of the reasons that explain why certain specific works were successful and others were not even shown, much less discussed.

Maria Elena Vieira Da Silva, Paisaje vertical (Jardines colgantes), 1955, Óleo sobre tela. 162 x 130 cm. Musée National d´Art Moderne, Centre d´Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou. París. Francia.

Jackson Pollock, Easter and the Totem, 1953, Oil on canvas, 84-1/4 x 58", The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Bram van Velde, Zonder Titel, 1945-58, 116 x 73 cm, gouache, Collectie Mme Porte, Paris.