[ref] Art and Political Commitment

Art and Political Commitment | Art History Teaching Resources

Karen Koehler (author) is the Marilyn Levin Professor of Architectural and Art History at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she also serves as faculty Director of the Institute for Curatorial Practice. She teaches courses on modern and contemporary art, architecture, and critical theory and has published widely on the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius, and the interaction of architecture and other art forms. Professor Koehler recently won the Gruber Teaching Award for Excellence in Advising.

Jon Mann (editor) is an Adjunct Lecturer at Lehman College, a Senior Contributor at Artsy, and a lecture contributor and editor at Art History Teaching Resources and Art History Pedagogy and Practice.

What is political art? What is a committed artist?

to examine the relationship between art and politics—not only how art reflects political ideologies or the political events of any given historical moment, but also how the artist can be examined as a committed worker in the political realm.

look at how political thinking has impacted the arts, both in terms of style and subject, and in terms of moments of heightened transformation in history. We also consider how the arts have affected history and politics—seeing art as a means of direct political action as well as the means to instigate social change, sometimes in a quieter way.

the impulse to delve into the endlessly circular definitions of “What is art?” “What is propaganda?” and “What is the political?”

the endlessly circular definitions of “What is art?” “What is propaganda?” and “What is the political?” To avoid this pitfall, this lesson uses a methodology that results in the formation not of answers but of new questions, maintaining a Socratic approach and using a series of visual objects selectively studied with historical precision. We demonstrate that, while questions about art remain in flux, the details about art and its relationship to political history can be based on evidence and specific events. While they may lie outside of the normal art historical canon, reading essays by Leo Tolstoy and Jean-Paul Sartre critically and comparatively makes a valuable addition to this pedagogical process.

• How do we discuss the relationship of art to politics (subject, style, material, format, context, intention)?
• Are concepts of beauty and pleasure inherently in conflict with art made for a political purpose?
• What is the relationship of artistic freedom to political commitment?
• Must an artist take a committed political stance?
• Is commitment the same as making art that is enlightening or educational?
• How do class, race, and gender play into expectations about political art?
• Are art and propaganda mutually exclusive?

All art is part of its political context, and this is particularly true in times of social transformation and crisis. However, not all art is so clearly politically motivated, and not all artists are committed to seeing their art as part of a political system. Furthermore, not all political art is about resistance, revolution, or change; some political art is about maintaining the status quo. Art and architecture are often demonstrations of control and power, whether the iconography is clearly polemical or not. Some powerful art is monumental and expresses its power through its scale and permanence, suggesting a commitment to reflect the strength and supremacy of the ruler or the state. Some powerful art is ephemeral, incendiary, and used to instigate change or call for protest. 

an opportunity to reflect on the narrative of art history by underscoring questions of politics and commitment that have unfolded throughout the course. If your course has covered such themes as art and authenticity, this lecture should allow you to address that legacy directly in the context of art and political commitment.

Although often used to discuss questions of the religious, transcendent, and the sublime in art, these works point towards a re-questioning of art and its histories when considered from the point of view of political power and influence. Similarly, as important cultural institutions, museums are places of power, and the methods of exhibiting non-Western art in Western contexts might be used to examine questions of colonialism and appropriation.. Tribal art seen in the museum could be considered alongside the original purpose of that object. What questions emerge about power and the aesthetics of “othered” cultures?

cross-cultural

What about the role of the patron or the political figure? How much have we learned about the relationship of art to either the political establishment or what might be called a politico-artistic resistance? Ask students to consider the survey text (Elke Linda Buchholtz, et al, Art: A World History; New York: Abrams, 2007) 

the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Timeline of Art History (used earlier in the term): how is this art political, and how does the history of art treat the politics of this art?

 “What is a committed artist?” and “Are all artists ideological?”

These questions can then be used to return to the idea of commitment as discussed in the texts by Tolstoy and Sartre.

“What is a committed artist?” and “Are all artists ideological?”

Also note biases of gender and ethnicity: do we favor seeing Western art as political? What about art made by men? Finally, to conclude this section, a few portraits of these writers—a naturalist painting by Ilya Repin of Tolstoy Plowing (1887), a Symbolist print of Tolstoy by Felix Vallotton (1895), a famous photograph of Sartre by Henri Cartier-Bresson (1946), and an abstract and expressionistic etching of Sartre by the émigré artist Wols (1948) can be used to discuss questions of abstraction and representation in relationship to political purpose.

The goal is to apply our questions about art, politics and commitment to a selection of images from the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries, focusing on questions of subject matter, style, historical context, site, materials, purpose, and audience. This part of the class is a combination of lecture (historical and biographical material combined with formal analysis) and a targeted discussion of how the broad issues outlined in part one might be applied to specific works of art. 

Political Content, Pretty Pictures

the movement of government troops during the French revolutions.

This subsection concludes with a discussion of the complex political iconography of Picasso’s Guernica (1937) and its continued appropriation of traditional poses like Michelangelo’s Pietà (1498–9), much like we saw earlier surrounding David’s Marat.

the Chinese dissident Ai Wei Wei.

 Ai Wei Wei: Never Sorry by director Alison Klayman about the titular Chinese dissident. The film touches on many aspects of political imagery vs. political practice, of the relationship of the artist to the state, of morality, and of Sartre’s concepts of freedom and commitment. Because much of his art is site-specific, temporary, and yet also visually striking, Tolstoy’s ideas of beauty and pleasure, and of the economic issues central to the commerce of art are also at play in this film.

Ai Wei Wei is an artist that breaks the boundaries of contemporary art making—even his actions on social media might be seen as a kind of political activism merged with performance art. But is this really visual art, or is it political spectacle? In fact, does our media-saturated world reflect the end of art as we know it? Or, does it require a renewed sense of our need for art—perhaps in differently mediated platforms? Refer to Tolstoy and Sartre if they help you make your argument.

After the Russian Revolution, when Malevich was given a sanctioned position as an art teacher and cultural statesman by the Bolshevik government, his non-objectivity was put to direct, propagandistic, partisan political use. His designs for the “Committee on Rural Poverty” from 1918 are here compared with examples of painted trains, walls, and other forms of Bolshevist propaganda.

As a means of conclusion, the lecture considers a quintessential image of the political activist—the raised fist—in art. Yet, as a stand-in for the artists themselves, this political figure is more complex to decipher. Three works by Käthe Kollwitz—Outbreak (1903), Bread! (1904), and Never Again War! (1924)—are used to introduce the theme, which are then compared to Eugène Delacroix’s painting Liberty Leading the People (1830), Max Pechstein’s broadsheet Call to All Artists! (1919), Otto Dix’s print series The Art of War (1924), Gustav Klutsis’s Soviet constructivist poster, We Will Fulfill the Plan of Great Endeavors (1930); an anonymous U.S. recruiting poster from 1943—“We have just begun to fight!”—as well as photographs and posters from the Civil Rights and Vietnam War eras (including both American and Chinese images). A Situationist-designed poster of a raised fist from the Paris unrest of May 1968 is studied in the context of street graffiti and, in conclusion, similar images from the Occupy Movement of recent years. The raised fist is a clear call to action—but does it always mean the same thing, regardless of context or intended audience? 

• Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature? (1949) Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 3rd ed., 1988, [especially chapters 1–3].
• Leo Tolstoy, What is Art (1898) (Penguin Classics). London and New York: Penguin, 2004.

• Antliff, Allan. Anarchy and Art: From the Paris Commune to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Vancouver: Arsenal, 2007.
• Baxandall, Lee and Stefan Morawski, eds. Marx & Engels on Literature and Art: A Selection of Writings. St. Louis: Telos Press, 1973.
• Beaumont, Matthew, ed. As Radical as Reality Itself: Essays on Marxism and Art for the 21^st Century. Oxford and New York: Peter Lang, 2007.
• Boime, Albert. Art in an Age of Bonapartism, 1800–1815. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.
• Boime, Albert. Art in an Age of Civil Struggle, 1848–1871. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
• Boime, Albert. Art in an Age of Counterrevolution, 1815–1848. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.
• Boime, Albert. Art in an Age of Revolution, 1750–1800. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
• Bradley, Will and Charles Esche, eds. Art and Social Change: A Critical Reader. London: Tate, 2007.
• Chave, Anna. “New Encounters with les Demoiselles d’Avignon: Gender, Race, and the Origins of Cubism.” Art Bulletin. v. 76, no. 4 (1994), 597–612.
• Clark, T. J. The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848-1851. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982.
• Clark, T. J. “The Conditions of Artistic Creation” (1974) in Eric Ferme. Art History and Its Methods. London: Phaidon. 1995. 245–253.
• Crow, Thomas. Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris. Yale: Yale University Press, 1985.
• Egbert, Donald Drew. Social Radicalism and the Arts in Western Europe. New York: Knopf, 1970.
• The Great Utopia: The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde, 1915-1932. New York: Guggenheim/Rizzoli, 1992.
• Harrison, Charles, Paul Wood and Jason Gaiger, eds. Art in Theory: 1815-1900: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.
• Harrison, Charles, and Paul Wood, eds. Art in Theory: 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003.
• Joffe, Dennis G. and Frederick H. White, eds. Russian Avant-garde and Radical Modernism: An Introductory Reader. Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2012).
• Kachurin, Pamela. Making Modernism Soviet: The Russian Avant-Garde in the Early Soviet Era. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2013.
• Leighten, Patricia. The Liberation of Painting: Modernism and Anarchism in Avant-Guerre Paris. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.
• Leighten, Patricia. Re-Ordering the Universe: Picasso and Anarchism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).
• Leighton, Patricia. “The White Peril and l’art nègre: Picasso, Primitivism, and Anti-colonialism.” Art Bulletin. v. 72, no. 4. December 1990. 609–630.
• Maynard, Solomon. Marxism and Art: Essays Classic and Contemporary. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1979.
• Rockhill, Gabriel. Radical History and the Politics of Art. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.
• Schapiro, Meyer. Modern Art, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. New York: Braziller, 1978.
• Schapiro, Meyer. Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist and Society: Selected Papers. New York: Braziller, 1994)
• Shapiro, Theda. Painters and Politics: The European Avant-Garde and Society. New York: Elsevier, 1976.