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theses

This dissertation investigates the visual legacy of the atomic bomb as viewed through the eyes of a distinct set of witnesses, American artists who came into contact with the physical and psychological after-effects of the bomb from the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, through the years leading up to the implementation of the partial test-ban treaty in 1963. While technical jargon, metaphorical language, and jingoistic sentiment all helped to shape public attitudes about the bombings, the visual condensation of the atomic experience into a single image, that of the mushroom cloud, offered a limited perspective of the bomb's unique capacity for destruction. Censorship of photographs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki shielded the public from troubling images of victims on the ground. Unseen dangers, such as lingering radiation at the bomb sites, as well as the creeping global menace of nuclear fallout from atmospheric testing, were difficult to communicate through visual media. The escalation of the arms race between the United States and Russia gave birth to existential dread over the unimaginable consequences of a large-scale nuclear war.
Living in the shadow of the bomb, a handful of American artists turned to an interpretative visual language to give form to a terror of dimensions impossible to assimilate. Acknowledging that the scope and brutality of destruction of World War II had reshaped their vision of the world, these artists rejected conventional imagery as simply inadequate to represent the uncertain realities of the postwar era. But rather than adopt a language of abstraction that could be loosely interpreted as a reverberation of the anxiety of those years, instead, these artists applied expressive visual styles to highly-charged subject matter that sought to address, head-on, the human fallout of America's experimentations with the bomb. In a broader sense, this dissertation is an investigation into what it means to be a witness to the first atomic age, both in the historical sense, of being present at critical events in the timeline of nuclear development; and in the ethical sense, of being compelled to bear witness to the use, testing, and proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 499-510).

http://hdl.rutgers.edu/1782.2/rucore10001600001.ETD.17556

ETD_1334

doi:10.7282/T3NZ87Z4

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.

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