The 1961 Paris Massacre and the Spectacle of Modern Revolt
Seymour Rosofsky is an old pop artist whose work is best appreciated against a background of his travels. As the saying goes, being in the right place at the right time is half the battle. Rosofsky made being in the right place at the right time look natural.
His first cultural immersion was in military service in Europe during World War II. He had received training in art as a youth when he attended Saturday classes at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Rosofsky was a precocious talent then, the Army recognized his ability, and assigned him the duty of illustrating technical manuals.
Rosofsky did not miss the opportunity afforded by his service in Europe to visit its art museums and monuments. After completing his military service, he returned to his studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, earning a BFA in 1949 and an MFA in 1951.
The Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art owns a curious oil painting by Rosofsky, titled Operating Room (1955). It is one of his first mature works. The color scheme is anemic, befitting the subject. The general style resembles that of the Paris "school" immediately after the War's end. The emaciated operating room patients appear to have one leg suspended at the knee bend, visibly a painfully awkward position.
The composition's style has the feel of a Bernard Buffet, who was an up-and-coming artist at the time. Today, Buffet is universally reviled. His work is just crass. Like him or not, however, he successfully engaged the distinctive social anxiety that pervaded French art after the War. His work sold like hot cakes, stimulating the imagination of a generation which, through his ungainly figures, abreacted the pain of the War.
The anxious style came naturally to Rosofsky, who had experienced first-hand the devastation of war against the background of Europe's high cultural achievements. Consequently, around 1957 or 1958, Rosofsky painted his iconic masterpiece, Unemployment Agency. It is a manifold statement fully in sync with social and economic conditions, and simultaneously demonstrates complete mastery of the medium.
For these qualifications, Rosofsky was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship, enabling him to return to Europe to study in Rome. In Rome, Rosofsky married. After the Fulbright ended, the couple went to Paris, where they lived from 1961 to 1963, supported by a Guggenheim Grant. The Paris phase of Rosofsky's cultural immersion proved to be a turning point.
I do not know the exact date of Rosofsky's arrival in Paris, but I would bet it was shortly before the Paris Massacre of October 17, 1961. Any sensible person hesitates to live where such an event occurred. Not to blame Paris, but that grotesque atrocity must have puzzled the newly-wed couple, who were likely oblivious—like most Americans—to the local color of French politics.
Knowing the volatile situation in Paris, it would have been wiser for the couple to remain in Rome. I hope I will not be accused of trolling, if I review the events of October 17, 1961 on this day of violent street demonstrations in France. It was not until placing Rosofsky into historical context that my ongoing interest in the art and politics of post-war France exposed to me the 1961 crime against humanity. An understanding of the figurative painting of post-war Paris is necessarily incomplete without knowing the background politics of the day.
Charles de Gaulle was an ultra-nationalist, another in a long line of arrogant French "leaders," endlessly provoking hostility in every nation with which France had contact. His chief of National Police at the time, Maurice Papon, would (much later) be convicted of collaborating with the Nazis in the deportation of French Jews to concentration camps. Their joint reaction to Algerians living in Paris was blunt. The official count is 40 dead—some from drowning in the Seine—plus many more wounded, an unknown number of whom later died of their wounds.
Perhaps the Rosofskys were unaware of the cause of the excitement around them. They were new in town and did not understand French well enough to get a read on the situation from the newspapers. All they knew with certainty was that they were in the midst of great events taking place around them. Eventually, the danger dawned on the couple, and in 1964 they made the sensible decision to return to the United States, settling in Chicago, Seymour's home. Rosofsky taught at City Colleges until his death in 1981.
A painting by Rosofsky from 1965 is remarkable for two reasons: its style falls within the ballpark of what would later be known as the "Monster School" of Chicago art. I am not belittling the movement as lacking serious intent by repeating that dismissive epithet. The artists of Chicago didn't invent it. They knew they had discovered a new and distinctive style, with so many adherents as to constitute a movement, akin to the street art movement overtaking the salons of Europe. From the security of Chicago, they could laugh.