Eduardo Paolozzi, I Was a Rich Man's Plaything (1947)

This piece, with its prominent POP!, part of the Bunk! series that Paolozzi assembled, is ground zero for Pop Art.

Fourteen years before Lichtenstein and Warhol soared to fame on Ben-Day dots and soup cans, Paolozzi created collages using the kind of deconstruction, juxtaposition, and recontextualization that came to be associated with postmodern art, generally, and Pop Art, specifically.

Victor Brauner

It is usually assumed that abstract and non-objective art aren’t capable of representing concrete historical events in the same way as figurative art. In contrast to this common belief numerous abstract artists in Germany and internationally after the Second World War have referred to historical events they experienced themselves or have occupied themselves with. Examples are Gerhard Richter, Günter Uecker, K.O. Götz or K.R.H. Sonderborg in Germany or Michael Morgner and Dieter Tucholke in the former GDR. These indeed very different artists and their strategies of representation and relation to contemporary history are the primary examples discussed by art historian Anne-Kathrin Hinz's in her dissertation „Zeugnis Zweifel Zeichen - Zeitgeschichte in der Abstrakten Malerei in Deutschland nach 1945“ which was recently published by Deutscher Kunstverlag. In her very detailed discussion of artistic positions and their individual use of abstraction as testimony, doubt or sign, Hinz opens up new perspectives on postwar abstract art in Germany and its complex relationship with contemporary history.

One of the succinct examples is K.O. Götz's series „Jonction I-III“, carried out between 1990 and 1991, with which the artist reacted to the epochal event of the German reunification. By means of their abstract-expressive pictorial language they convey a dynamic sense of immediacy that Götz further underscored in his deliberations about the series: Götz closely followed the events surrounding the official reunification of the two Germanys on TV and even signed the first canvas of the Jonction series with the date of October 3rd 1990. In so doing Götz underscored his eye witnessing of the events as well as the authenticity of the work. Combined with the expressive immediacy of his pictorial language the works become individual testimonies of personally experienced events and thus authentic representations of a historic event.

"Augur" by George Cohen, 1954

Oil & gold leaf on canvas

Clyfford Still, 1957-D No. 1, 1957