Hardship, suffering, and war
The exhibition moved from mid-flow social life into a sequence on hardship, suffering, and war. “War” and the exhibition’s famously oversized hydrogen-bomb image are both attested in institutional summaries: MoMA’s archives-highlights page names the H-bomb image as a late-flow pivot;1 the CNA education portal lists “war” as one of the exhibition’s themes, paired with “peace.”2
This section is the one Roland Barthes’s 1957 critique targets most forcefully. Barthes argues that by placing suffering within a universal humanist frame, the exhibition offers “an eternal lyricism” in place of the historical and political specificity of injustice. His test case — “Why not ask the parents of Emmet Till, the young Negro assassinated by the Whites, what they think of The Great Family of Man?” — is an argument about precisely this cluster.3 Any curatorial description of it that stops at “universal suffering” reproduces the humanism Barthes and subsequent critics problematized.