Horrors of War in the Context of the Fine Arts Transformation of the XX Century

Abstract

The article is dedicated to the outlook on the socio-cultural transformations of the 20th century brought by global conflicts. The main attention is paid to the problems arisen from overcoming traumas by the means of art and to the influence the traumatic experience has had on the transformation of the artistic language. The themes of the horrors of war, war and post-war experience and reflections acquire special significance in the artistic culture of the 20th century, with traumas brought by both world wars and other conflicts giving rise not only to emotional responses to ongoing disasters, but also being a catalyst for global reshaping of artistic content, form and industry, expressed in the visual revolution. In this regard, the paper turns to the essential cultural characteristics of the art of this period, to consider the similarities and differences in the individual trends that followed the general trend. Then, revealing the specifics of the artistic process, considered within the framework of the historical and cultural approach, the reasons that determined the global transformations of art were discovered. In this work, the issues mentioned above are perceived at the junction of the problems studied in the history of emotions and the history of art. So is the conceptual focus of this interdisciplinary text. Such an approach not only attempts to consider the visual revolution through the prism of personal experience, to link the transformation of visual expression with the inner state of a person and one’s perceptions of current events. It also underlines the specificities of historiography, represented both by research on the history of art and by works related to such a direction of historical science as the history of emotions. The main results of the research are as follows. Works of art related to the experience and display of the horrors of war, on the one hand, help to understand and survive the traumatic experience, telling about it in a metaphorical form, and on the other hand, embodying these goals, they radically change the artistic language in the context of the visual revolution of the 20th century.

Keywords

• 20th century art
• war
• visual revolution
• trauma
• cultural studies
• history of emotions
• modernism
• avant-garde
• post-war period