By the late 1940s, in the aftermath of the most cataclysmic chapter in human history, the world had become an uneasy place. Even after the guns were silenced and the dust had settled, the prevailing question was, ‘What now?’ Like everyone else, members of the artistic community spent the subsequent decades struggling to make sense of geopolitical, psychological and emotional landscapes that lay in ruins.

“There were a number of artists who were struggling to figure out how to come to grips with a world that could take itself to the point of war,” says Virginia Mecklenburg, senior curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. “The question was, ‘How could humanity come to this?’ They were struggling with how to deal with that in their art.”

Mecklenburg is the architect of “Modern Masters from the Smithsonian American Art Museum,” on view at the Dayton Art Institute through Oct. 10. The exhibit includes 43 paintings and sculptures by 31 abstract artists — some immigrants from Europe, some native to the U.S. — who came to prominence in the 1950s. It’s the third stop for the show, which has also been to Miami, Florida, and Greensburg, Pennsylvania, in recent years.

The years after World War II were  “a time of turbulent emotions,” says Mecklenburg. “It was difficult to define, and abstraction was probably the best way — or the most effective way — for some of these artists to make sense of what had been going on over the last several years. How do you deal with a world that will never be the way it was before?”

Working in New York, California, the South and abroad, abstract artists of the mid-20th century blended the sensibilities of the old masters with those of modernists, including Picasso and Matisse, along with philosophy and ancient mythology. They created compositions that addressed broad social concerns as well as their own personal histories. Some worked within the conventions of oil on canvas, while others mixed hardware store paint with bits of paper torn from magazines and newspapers. Likewise, sculptors dispensed with the stone and clay of their predecessors and instead cobbled together found objects that reflected the events and circumstances of the times in which they lived.

The pieces in the “Modern Masters” exhibit are divided into three groups. “Significant Gestures” includes the work of artists such as Franz Kline, Hans Hofmann and Philip Guston, who generated a sense of energy on the canvas via loose, sweeping brush techniques. “Optics and Order” features paintings and sculptures that are mathematically and geometrically balanced, as evidenced in the works of Josef Albers, a German immigrant who fled the Nazis and came to the U.S. in the 1930s. “New Images of Man” is a collection of works crafted by artists including Romare Bearden and Seymour Lipton, whose subject matter directly relates to the human condition by incorporating recognizable figures within an abstract context.

Some of the greatest abstract work to emerge from the period was the result of heady conversations fueled by heady spirits, says Will South, chief curator at the Dayton Art Institute. Artists in the New York scene would frequently meet in bars and discuss some of the great thinkers of the day, including Freud and Einstein, whose theories surfaced in the cultural mainstream by the 1950s.

“So you give these ideas to some artists who’ve had a few drinks — the idea that time and space are relative, or the idea that the mind is full of information that can only be accessed through our dreams — and that’s a very powerful combination,” says South. “These ideas aren’t things you can see in your daily life, so you have to express them in some other way. How do you do that? How do you unleash something that has no real fixed image? You get the paint and you go at the canvas and you let your body and your emotions do the talking.”

Two of South’s favorite pieces in the exhibition range from the brutally powerful to the soft and beautiful. An untitled piece painted by Franz Kline in 1961 is a series of bold black strokes on a white canvas measuring 6 feet high by almost 9 feet wide.

“It’s just basic black and white — huge strokes that land on the canvas like thunder,” says South. “You can’t help but look at this thing and feel a jolt. It seems so simple — just black strokes on a white background — but it just feels like power. It feels like movement. It’s just this visual explosion.”

Esteban Vicente’s “Spring,” on the other hand, is more orderly and rectangular, but softened by gauzy, peaceful shades of red and gold. “It’s absolutely soft, diaphanous, exquisitely rendered,” says South. “Vicente’s hand on the surface of the canvas is just expert. This is an example of a painting where people will be enthralled by the beauty of it. And it doesn’t have to represent a thing. It’s a process and an orchestration of color. It’s such a smart painting. You can sit there and contemplate it for a while and ask yourself, ‘What’s possible?’’

The answer, not just in Vicente’s “Spring” but also throughout the entire “Modern Masters” exhibit, is anything.

“The things that the abstract artists were searching for were the things that make us human,” says South. “What are these emotions? What is it that I’m really thinking? What is going on inside of me and in the world in general? Just painting things didn’t seem to answer those questions. It only answered the question of ‘Can I represent this thing?’ Well, yes, you can, but to what end?

The abstract artists were looking beyond that.

“Abstraction was saying that these were all open questions ready to be explored,” he adds. “There were no edges. There were no boundaries.”

For more information, visit daytonartinstitute.org.