War trauma and displacement concentrated among the downtown junk-artists.

Evidence

“We are the primitives of a new era,” he proclaimed in a 1961 drawing of two spherical orbs. As a child, Tambellini had lived through the bombing of his hometown of Lucca, Italy; Lurie was a Latvian Jew who has survived three Nazi concentration camps. Di Suvero was also displaced, albeit not so drastically, by the war; his father, a Jewish Italian naval attaché in China, brought the family to California. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 120

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s central test-case question: the avant-garde was partly produced by a specific cohort of displaced, traumatized European refugees in cheap New York space.