Locked up in the Dachau concentration camp, the Slovenian painter Zoran Muši? (Görtz, 1909-Venice, 2005) portrayed in situ, in secret, risking his life, the horrors he had experienced there, as if he wanted to restore dignity to the dead. drawing the fragility of their bodies. After his release, in 1945, he tried to scare away the bad dream of the Holocaust by painting poetic earthy landscapes from which twenty-five years later, as if they had not resigned themselves to remaining buried, corpses emerged and looked like dead alive, in the series titled Nous ne serons pas les derniers (1970).
One of those drawings made by Muši? in the fields of horror now hangs in the exhibition What humanity? The human figure after the war (1940-1966), with which the MNAC shows how the artists reflected the restlessness and horror caused by the Second World War, the Holocaust, the atomic bomb… The way they expressed the pain and tried to overcome the trauma. The testimonies of a humanity in crisis, whose hangover, like war – the monster is always present – reaches right now.
Zoran Muši?’s drawing, four hanged men abandoned to the elements, represents the art of war at its most poignant. Those responsible for the MNAC cover it every night, due to its fragility, but also as a way to protect “the dignity of the victims,” says Àlex Mitrani, curator of contemporary art at the museum and curator of an exhibition that is both shocking and fascinating. Like that woman with her hand over her mouth, containing a cry of despair, and an accumulation of corpses in her wild eyes. She was drawn by the Jew of Lithuanian origin Lasar Segall from his exile in Brazil, before the discovery of the existence of the extermination camps through the press.
Muši? and Segall are shown in a first room where for the first time we see Mercè Rodoreda surrounded by artists who during her years of exile in Paris, in the fifties, unable to write a novel, still mute by the impact of the civil war, explored other ways to make a living, such as painting and collages, when she lost her job as a dressmaker. Because wars do not end when actions cease, but pain, violence and injustices are perpetuated, maintains Mitrani, who admits that it is a painful and moving exhibition, “because it is about moving, provoking the emotion that move us toward action and empathy for victims. It is terrible but we should not be scared because we can leave here stronger and enriched,” he argues.
What humanity? , thus among questions, is an important exhibition, for its theme, the horror of war transformed into a work of art, for the way it approaches it, for how it puts Catalan and Spanish artists on an equal footing, some as unknown as Gonçal Sobrer (who after witnessing the executions of republicans in the Camp de la Bota, created a macabre performance in the sixties that evaded censorship), with international stars such as Henry Moore, Francis Bacon, Alberto Giacometti and Maria Helena Vieira da Silva.
And because, as its director, Pepe Serra, points out, the new museum that the MNAC will become after its expansion and whose model has been being prefigured for years is advancing. In total, there are more than 100 works by 80 artists, in a thematic tour that at the end, Niki de Saint-Phalle, shooting with his 22 caliber rifle until the canvases bled in a war with no casualties other than his own demons, liberates us of the embarrassing disaster that we have just witnessed and for a moment we renew trust in human beings.
There are images of a monstrous and desperate humanity (Bacon, Guinovart, Buffet) or of a tragic religiosity (Clavé, Saura or Sutherland, whose Christ has arrived from the Vatican Museums). Others took refuge inside, such as Maria Girona, Antonio López, of whom an imposing polychrome panel of a sleeping woman is shown, or Juana Francés, who creates an enigmatic character who covers her mouth with her hand, as if, stunned by horror, did not dare to express what he feels or had nothing to say.
There are also moments in which the figure, although fragile, stands dignified on a large pedestal, like Giacometti’s lacerated man, and above all there is a lot of empathy for the victims, like those shaved women with whom the transsexual artist Anton Prinner meets. She sympathized with the shame and degradation of women in the camps.
And already in the last room, when in the sixties the collective struggles show their rejection of war and open new fronts such as feminism or racism, we find one of the last pieces that have entered the MNAC collection, an imposing sculpture of Lluís Güell, Negro wounded by a bullet, which, according to Lluís Alabern, “transforms the museum forever. He takes us into the future and it will never be the same.”
