Hiroshima, Con Amore

 If you had to pick the image of the 20th Century, you might do worse than to take a look at the August 9, 1945 photograph of Fat Man exploding over Nagasaki. In that terrible, beautiful orgasm of fire, the terms of cold-war détente were set, and America's imperial ascendancy certified. Even at this relatively safe historical distance, the image hasn't lost its iconographic wallop: For the first time since crawling out of the primordial broth, humankind had surpassed its gods.

Although Vital Forms: American Art and Design in the Atomic Age, a new Brooklyn Museum of Art exhibition visiting the Walker through May 12, locates its ground zero at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, little of the work on display relates explicitly to nuclear holocaust. But the specter hovers anxiously: The mushroom-cloud profile, replicated in painting, sculpture, and architecture, becomes a sort of macabre leitmotif. The temper is far from nihilistic, though: Rather, Vital Forms proposes that mid-century American art was largely an implicit response to the questions posed so insistently by the A-bomb, a brave reassertion of Eros in the face of World War II's overwhelming Thanatos. Viewed in that context, even the exhibit's most abstract expressions of anxiety and hope seem bracingly human. Call it the frisson of fission.

Like most thematically conceived shows, Vital Forms' reach is bound to exceed its grasp. An exhibit proposing a comprehensive survey of two decades of American art and design would, after all, need to stretch from the Walker halfway to St. Paul. But the exhibit, the third in the Brooklyn Museum's ambitious series on 20th Century American art, follows a particular line of aesthetic evolution. Beginning as an indigenous reaction to European surrealism--and aided in no small part by an influx of artists fleeing World War II--this strain, characterized by curvy, organic imagery, became the dominant vocabulary of 1950s American art, influencing everyone from Jackson Pollock to Frank Lloyd Wright to automobile designers. (A 1954 Corvette, one of the exhibit's centerpieces, holds its ground nicely as a symbol of postwar American joie de vivre.)

In a typically lucid catalog essay, University of Minnesota cultural historian (and aficionado of 1950s Americana) Karal Ann Marling, describes the ascendancy of "the amoeba": "Although patterns of blobs and droplets adorned factory-made goods cranked out by the millions, the symbolic values conveyed by this range of elusive, hard-to-describe shapes are antithetical in spirit to mass production, military regimentation, and straight-ahead business thinking." The rise of soft, fluid biomorphism was, in other words, as much a rejection of bland 1950s conformity as it was of Internationalism and the baleful symmetry of Mutual Assured Destruction.

Confusing, right? To its infinite credit, Vital Forms makes its points without a lot of art talk. Walking through this intelligently designed show, one can trace a line of descent from the raw response of artists to World War II, to the commercial design vernacular of the 1950s, to the streamlined "high style" characterized by the Corvette. It's an instructive example of what we might call the American Process: Utilitarian demand--in this case, for war materiel--is drafted into commercial, decorative, and finally artistic, service. As Vital Forms points out, many tools of war--the acetylene torch, aerial topographic maps, molded fiberglass, and camouflage patterns, for instance--also introduced new technical possibilities for postwar art. Even the humble Slinky, it turns out, began its life aboard a navy ship.

The war and its aftertaste figure especially strongly in the exhibition's first gallery, which is largely given to surrealist work from the 1940s. In paintings by Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko, the human form is dissevered and torturously distorted, recalling not only the atrocities of the war in Europe, but also the catalog of bodily horrors recorded by John Hershey in Hiroshima. Gottlieb's "The Prisoners" is especially bleak: Painted in black and rust-brown, abstracted bits of anatomy are wedged into cage-like boxes. A pair of discarded shoes in one corner seems an explicit reference to the Shoah. Still, if the postwar mood was somber, these pieces do not convey hopelessness: The use of the human form seems, rather, to communicate a profound understanding of the fragility of flesh.

Sharing a gallery and a philosophical bent with Gottlieb and Rothko, Alexander Calder's "The Root" also expresses anxiety over the Faustian potential of technology. Constructed from curving planes of sheet metal, with the seams left purposely visible, the piece depicts a flowering plant turned on its head, with delicate wire-formed blossoms reaching toward the floor and an imposing black root pushing upward. Peace may grow tentatively, Calder seems to suggest, but the potential for destruction always threatens it from below. Calder is well-represented in Vital Forms, but his other major piece, a jovial red mobile that simulates looking up from the bottom of a pond at lily pads, is in his more familiar, and much mellower, key.