The New York avant-garde’s anti-authoritarianism came from artists who survived WWII trauma

Evidence

Such “dada” was the particular form of those artists who, traumatized by their experience of World War II, arrived in New York during the 1950s. Lurie, who had survived a two-day slaughter of Latvian Jews, as well as several Nazi concentration camps, may have been the most extreme case; however, younger artists including Aldo Tambellini, Yoko Ono, the puppeteer Peter Schumann, and the sculptor Hans Haacke endured severe bombing raids in Italy, Japan, and Germany, respectively. The Japanese painter Yayoi Kusama and Korean musician Nam June Paik also suffered as children during the war. Lithuanians Jonas Mekas and George Maciunas lived under German occupation at a time when their Jewish neighbors were being massacred. All made art that was stridently anti-authoritarian as well as anti-art. Some, like Schumann, were militant pacifists. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 227

Categorization

• XREF: Direct test case for the reader’s thesis that avant-gardes are produced by conditions (here: war trauma) rather than genius — connects to the ‘why culture stagnates now’ shelf.