Reconstructing the subject

by Yule F. Heibel

Through an exploration of the reception of modernist painting, Yule Heibel discusses how West German artists, intellectuals, and audiences attempted to fashion a secure "image of man" in the wake of the most serious and radical crisis in modern history: Nazism and the Holocaust. In the period from 1945 to about 1950, expressive and "unbeautiful" elements in abstract painting were discursively and practically purged, mainly because expression was a reminder of dangerous and traumatized subjectivity. This purging resulted in a hegemony of "harmonious" abstract art, which critics to date have viewed primarily as a decorative art and thus an avoidance of Germany's twentieth-century history. Until now, no one has analyzed the discursive maneuvers of the late 1940s that encouraged painting to develop in this way. . Focusing on political, aesthetic, and theoretical issues, this book is an inquiry into the instability of subjectivity in Germany and its implications for the development of abstr