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In the weeks following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, both trained and untrained artists began creating pieces that reflected their fascination with the newest scientific discovery of atomic energy as well as the dangers that nuclear technology poses. In 1948, in Livorno, Italy, artist Voltolino Fontani co-founded the Eaismo movement alongside poet Guido Favati and artists Marcello Landi, Angelo Sirio Pellegrini, and Aldo Neri.
The Manifesto Dell’Eaismo highlighted their mission to forge an art movement that could respond to the current age: “Eaismo wants to bring art back to redraw its supreme values…It therefore aims to free artistic expression from the cerebralisms in which it has been entangled in the last fifty years and to bring it back to …the problems that urgently affect us as men rather than as stylists.” One of Fontani’s most notable paintings from this time, Grafo Dinamica, represents his belief that this atomic era demanded a reconsideration of classical art techniques. Although Grafo Dinamica does not explicitly depict nuclear warfare, the background resembles a map, one that has been painted over by dark purple shapes that can be viewed as resembling radiation wavelengths as a result of nuclear fallout. Grafo Dinamica asks its viewers to consider an artistic approach that addresses nuclear warfare without literal representation.
Voltolino Fontani, Grafo Dinamica (1948)
As Eaismo faded towards the end of the 1950s, a new Nuclear Art movement had already begun to take shape. Enrico Baj, an Italian artist based in Milan, co-founded the Movimento D’arte Nucleare with artists Sergio D’angelo and Gianni Dova in 1951. At the time, Milan was an international art hub, which paved the way for D’arte Nucleare’s place in the mainstream. The primary difference between Eaismo and the Movimento D’arte Nucleare was the extent to which Fontani and Baj focused on terror and fascination. The Movimento D’arte Nucleare highlighted the risk of apocalypse, attempting to reflect the fear of a potential nuclear war as technology quickly developed. The movement included pieces that were much more explicit in their message than Fontani. Baj painted the Manifesto Bum in 1952, which features a black and gray mushroom cloud head shape set behind a washed-out yellow background. Baj also included atomic formulas in the negative space. In the cloud, Baj writes, “People’s heads are charged with explosives. Every atom is about to explode. The blind, which is to say the non-nuclears, ignore the situation.” By inscribing these words in the head-cloud shape, Baj inextricably connects humans with nuclear weapons as well as the destruction they cause. He argues it is our responsibility to manage our own creations.
Manifesto Bum, Enrico Baj (1952)
Another one of his most famous paintings, Two Children in the Nuclear Night (1956), shows two distorted child-like figures set against a yellow-orange background splattered with black paint. Baj hopes to induce horror in his viewers and confront them with a night sky no longer lit by the moon or the stars but by explosions.
Enrico Baj, Two Children in the Nuclear Night (1956)
In 1953, Gianni Dova, co-founder of the Movimento D’arte Nucleare created Explosion. Dova utilizes abstraction as well as an unlikely combination of bright colors to create an indiscernible image. Explosion depicts the unfathomable: the moment in which our world might be destroyed as a result of nuclear warfare. Nonetheless, Dova manages to capture the chaos that we would be forced to confront. The background is split into two colors – black at the top and a mild blue at the bottom, representing the galaxy and the earth, respectively. Yet Dova’s colors know no boundaries. A nuclear explosion would break the boundaries of the world we know.
Gianni Dova, Explosion, (1953)
Both Fontani and Baj were responsible for establishing a culture of nuclear disarmament that still remains today, not only in Italy but all around the world. Nuclear art has also been transformed since the years of Fontani and Baj. Contemporary artists have made use of modern technology to create electronic art and animation to advocate their anti-nuclear weapon messages.
In an effort to engage youth in nuclear disarmament efforts, it is critical to understand the value of art as a form of both communication and advocacy. Art is a means to cope with the reality of our world: nuclear weapons exist and are here to stay unless we act. To manage this reality means to create a world in which we can understand and live in. In the Manifesto Dell’ Eaismo, Fontani explains the way Eaismo provides us with a lens through which to view the atomic age: “Eaismo will express the tragedy of the 20th century inspired by…the meaning of man as he is immersed in living in it, nourished in it… and translate the broken balance of the man-world equation into works. And this will happen necessarily: not only because art… has always, in every time, expressed the sense of the age in which it flourished.”
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