Review In the Museum of Modern Art’s ‘Soldier, Spectre, Shaman,’ some works gain in meaning because of their new context.
Every large museum has a repository of paintings, sculptures and works on paper, acquired over the years, that are seldom on view. They range from minor efforts by major artists (and vice versa) to ambitious works by once well-regarded practitioners that no longer correspond to current taste, and a lot in between. Smart curators often mine these holdings for forgotten treasures—taste changes—or for what these works can tell us about the desiderata of the period in which they were made. Case in point: “Soldier, Spectre, Shaman: The Figure and the Second World War,” the Museum of Modern Art’s survey of responses to the emotional climate of the fraught years before, during and after World War II.
Organized by MoMA’s Lucy Gallun, assistant curator, Department of Photography, and Sarah Suzuki, associate curator, Department of Drawings and Prints, and drawn entirely from the museum’s collections, the show assembles paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints and photographs, many rarely—if ever—exhibited, by more than 30 artists. Some celebrated, some obscure, they come from North and South America, Europe and Asia. Each of them experienced the horrors of the war, its preamble and its aftermath differently: as combatant or victim, refugee or exile, direct witness or distant observer. Despite these variables, the mood of all the works in the exhibition is one of anxiety and pessimism, whether expressed through representation, abstraction, symbol, or metaphor. Cynics can put this down to curatorial choice or to the finiteness of the human imagination. Or we can assume that the pervasive sense of threat and bleakness conveyed by “Soldier, Spectre, Shaman” accurately reflects the devastating world-wide events of the decades under review.