Language:
English
Year of publication:
1999
Titel der Quelle:
Jewish Quarterly
Angaben zur Quelle:
46,3 (1999) 17-22
Keywords:
Louis, Morris,
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945), and art
Abstract:
The abstract painting of Morris Louis (1912-1962, born Maurice Bernstein) was first hailed by the leading American art critic Clement Greenberg, the prophet of Abstract Expressionism. Greenberg himself reacted to the Holocaust by stressing the need to "indulge our feelings about Auschwitz" privately rather than publicly. Louis expressed his Jewishness publicly in a series of works made in 1951; his "Charred Journal" paintings relate to the Holocaust in their very abstraction, their intentional "ultimate, confusing meaninglessness", which recalls Blanchot's view of the Holocaust as the disaster which refuses meaning. A less abstract connection to the Holocaust was Louis's association of the title of this series with book burnings, by which the Nazis excluded Jews from what they defined as civilization.
URL:
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