In the days, weeks and years following the atomic bombing of Japan, trained and untrained artists who survived the bombings began documenting their experiences in artworks. The U.S. occupation authorities controlled the release of photographs and film footage of these events, while photographers and artists on the ground continued to produce visual representations of the effects of nuclear warfare. Photographer
Yōsuke Yamahata began taking photographs of Nagasaki on August 10, 1945 (the day after the bombing), however his photographs were not released to the public until 1952 when the magazine
Asahi Gurafu published them.
Historical nuclear art in Italy In 1948, the artistic movement of
Eaismo published a manifesto illustrating some aspects of the
Atomic Age and, at the same time, criticizing the industrial use of
nuclear power. It was a movement of poetry and painting, founded by the Italian artist
Voltolino Fontani, aiming to balance the role of men in a society upset by the danger of
nuclear radiation. The artistic group was strengthened by the poet
Marcello Landi and by the literary critic Guido Favati. In 1948 Voltolino Fontani depicted the disintegration and fragmentation of an
atom on canvas, by creating the artwork:
Dinamica di assestamento e mancata stasi. In 1950 the painter
Fortunato Depero published the
Manifesto per la pittura e plastica nucleare. In 1951 the painters
Enrico Baj and
Sergio Dangelo created the , criticizing and putting the repetitiveness of painting (as an artistic and commercial phenomenon) in discussion. Plenty of Italian artists, in
Milan and
Naples, and foreigners like
Yves Klein,
Asger Jorn,
Arman,
Antonio Saura joined the movement. The main representative of the arte nucleare movement was
Piero Manzoni, who in this context, for the first time in his life, put his talent in evidence. Unlike Eaismo, recommending artists to pursue painting values (and poetry),
Historical nuclear art in Spain In the meantime, Spanish painter
Salvador Dalí published the
Mystical manifesto (1951), putting Catholic mysticism and nuclear themes together. In this period Dalì created artworks like
Idillio atomico (1945) and
Leda Atomica (1949).
Historical nuclear art in France In 1949 the French artist
Bernard Lorjou started to paint his monumental artwork
l’age atomique ("The atomic age"). The painting was concluded after one year and is now located in the
Centre Pompidou. In 1950
Germaine Joumard exhibited 26 nuclear paintings at
galerie "Art et lecture" in
Paris Historical nuclear art in Belgium The first exhibition of the took place in
Brussels, in the Galerie Apollo (1952). Apart from that, the interest of Belgian artists in nuclear art is above all demonstrated by the contribution of two former participants of art movement
CoBrA, such as
Wout Hoeboer and
Serge Vandercam. Both signed the
Manifesto contro lo stile (1957), which was chronologically the second manifesto of
Sergio Dangelo and
Enrico Baj's italian group.
Historical nuclear art in the United States The painter and photographer
Eugene Von Bruenchenhein painted the artwork “Atomic age” in 1955, and other apocalyptical and post apocalyptical paintings up to 1965. The British sculptor
Henry Moore created a bronze public sculpture entitled
Nuclear Energy (sculpture) (1967), which both depicted the fatality of nuclear weapons and celebrated the invention of nuclear energy for use as electrical power. The sculpture is located on the grounds of the University of Chicago, where the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction was produced at the
Chicago Pile-1, under the oversight of the Manhattan Project and Enrico Fermi. The sculpture is in the form of a hybrid
mushroom cloud and human skull. ==Contemporary approaches to nuclear art==