Anxiety and Alienation: Art in the Later 20th Century

It is most certainly not the case that previous to the 1940s there was any lack of horror in the world. The insight into the kind of madness that could result in the Holocaust, however, could only be achieved secondhand. There's an enormous difference between reading about the depths of depravity committed by Genghis Khan and actually seeing it for yourself in the newsreel footage of concentration camp survivors. The world following Hitler's own extermination seemed a nightmare compared to the even the terror of the Great Depression. For the first time, society had to come face to face with video evidence that at the center of the human psyche is a light switch that can instantly be flipped to hurl us into the chasm of darkness. Making matters worse, previous to this we could be content in our knowledge that this darkness was the work of the devil. Following the rise of Hitler it became all too obvious that we didn't need Lucifer to examine the bottomless evil capable of welling up within us.

The future seemed every bit as much a threat after World War II. Capitalism and communism swiftly engaged in a ridiculous pissing contest that left us all covered in a yellow sheen. Pessimism replaced realism; one could hardly view the future through rose-colored glasses without disciplining oneself to do so. It took an effort to hold out hope that things would turn out all right.

Anxiety became the rule of the day and this was expressed in the art of the latter half of the last century. All art took up the mantle of showing us a world that was just a little bit darker than the world we had looked at before the winds of war gathered into a tornado in Germany, Italy and Japan. Along with anxiety came alienation. These two dark views of the world resulted from the knowledge that for the first time in human history man possessed the power to extinguish the light of humanity in the blink of an eye. The philosophy of the day became existentialism, a worldview in which we must confront both the liberty and the horror of knowing we have free will. And with free will comes the acknowledgement that nothing is absolute anymore.