Strange worlds : London in ruins, 1940-1994
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- In 1944, the thirty-five-year-old Francis Bacon lived with his childhood nanny in a bomb-damaged house in London. Impoverished, his art unknown, he ran an illegal casino at night to make money. It was here that he painted Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, which changed British art by confronting the Blitz's destruction of the human body. This work is one of many examples of how the Blitz provoked new ways of living and making art, advanced modernism into the home, and changed how people understood cities. My dissertation shows how the Luftwaffe's aerial campaign reshaped British art. The art and architecture which took root in the bombsites during the nineteen-forties and 'fifties countered triumphalist narratives of postwar prosperity, instead exposing a fragmentary world torn asunder by violence. Instead of portraying wartime and postwar London culture as a conservative retrenchment towards patriotic values, I will tell a different history, where radical artists embraced the rough poetry of a post-conflict city. This dissertation presents a fresh historical perspective on the Blitz, encompassing marginalised artists and communities that have previously been hidden from view. These narratives paint a richer picture of British culture, where queer men, West African and West Indian migrants, and Jewish Holocaust survivors lived amongst the bombsites, even as architects sought to rebuild the city as an urban utopia. Rather than reinforcing the Blitz spirit, I lay bare how mass aerial bombardment created new conditions of artistic creation, ultimately giving rise to Brutalism. The dissertation changes how postwar British art is framed; it emerges as an art of aftermath, grappling with the trauma of war and the end of a global empire. I analyse works of art and architecture in specific, contextualised urban spaces, unearthing their histories to show that the spaces which most provocatively challenged Britain's social and ideological basis were ruins, revealing the utopian and dystopian alternatives to the status quo.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2024; ©2024 |
| Publication date | 2024; 2024 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Brandon-Salmon, Altair |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Nemerov, Alexander |
| Thesis advisor | Nemerov, Alexander |
| Thesis advisor | Eshel, Amir |
| Thesis advisor | Jenkins, Nicholas (Nicholas Richard) |
| Thesis advisor | Lugli, Emanuele |
| Degree committee member | Eshel, Amir |
| Degree committee member | Jenkins, Nicholas (Nicholas Richard) |
| Degree committee member | Lugli, Emanuele |
| Associated with | Stanford University, School of Humanities and Sciences |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Art and Art History |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Altair Brandon-Salmon. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Art and Art History. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2024. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/cg353xz6800 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2024 by Altair Brandon Salmon
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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