Visual Art of the decade

While the camera, through the media of both still and moving images, had supplanted any documentary role painting might have had in relation to the second World War, artists could still register and express the seismic shifts of consciousness engendered by the horrors of the period. Picasso's Guernica, painted in 1936 in response to an atrocity during the Spanish Civil War, convincingly demonstrated that. But by the mid-1940s, with news of the Holocaust and the dawning of the atomic age, people were faced with new and ugly facts about their world. Francis Bacon's Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944), painted against the background of the rise of abstraction, pushed figurative painting in a new and disturbing direction. His grotesque, contorted "figures" seem presciently aware of the anxieties ahead in the post-war world.