Political Protest

Whether the numerous cartoons and posters produced to celebrate and promote the Russian Revolution (1917) may be counted as "protest" is an open question insofar as they were produced in cooperation with the new government. But patriotic protest existed to counter threats to the Revolution from the Western democracies and the reactionary White armies. In the early 1920s many Russian artists important as formal innovators in the history of art, notably the constructivists such as Vladimir Mayakovsky, Alexander Rodchenko, and El Lissitsky, using a variety of styles, some abstract, some folk-derived, made posters demanding resistance to the enemy, the promotion of literacy, and the building of industry. The Stalin era crushed dissent and vanguard artistic styles, and it was only around 1990, Exposing corruption. Cartoon of Boss Tweed and his associates as vultures (1871) by Thomas Nast. RARE BOOKS AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS DIVISION. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS following a period of perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness), that posters resumed a socially critical (if still largely officialist) function. In the later Soviet era, clandestine art, like the famous clandestine (privately circulated samizdat) literature, flourished. In the generation before the fall of the Soviet Union, impressive posters for peace were officially sponsored by the government agency Plakat, in "protest" one might say against the silent (or actively war-mongering) propaganda of the so-called Free World governments, bent on nuclear supremacy. Here one may speak of "protest" officially sponsored by the militarily weaker of the superpowers, against the officially sponsored warmongering propaganda of the other.

The posters from World War I produced by governments in the Western countries, in huge print runs and in innumerable different designs, were narrowly focused on winning the war, vilifying the enemy, and demanding sacrifice at home. They are hardly "protest" but become so in You Back the Attack! (2003), a book of "remixed" prowar posters from the two world wars, a classic example of using the enemy's weapons against him. Here, a straight graphic of a heroic pilot stepping into the cockpit of his airplane, adds to the slogan "You Back the Attack! We'll bomb who we want." Thus the world of Soviet poster advocating resistance to the enemy. Against Gen. Wrangel's White Guards (c. 1920) by Vladimir Mayakovsky. PHOTO CREDIT: SNARK /ART RESOURCE, NY. IMAGE REFERENCE: ART172706 advertising, political and commercial, which has taken over entire public air and street spaces, not to speak of invading living rooms through newspaper and television, is subverted in its own language. "Billboard conversion" (or "correction") is an illegal pastime of guerrilla artists who "improve" the slogans and images of billboard advertising. For instance, the addition to the egregiously sexist car ad saying "If this car was a lady, it would get its bottom pinched" of the words "if this lady was a car, it would run you down"; or the airline billboard "X airline flies every day to El Salvador" was changed by the substitution and addition of a few letters (fast, to avoid being caught by a passing police car) to read "Reagan lies every day about El Salvador." It is only very occasionally that a peace group goes to the great expense of renting billboard space in the legal manner.

In the United States during World War I the real protest of the era came from the leftist periodical The Masses, which consistently opposed the war, unlike leftist sectors elsewhere in the United States and Europe. The Masses and The New Masses were dedicated to class struggle in the Marxian sense and used the (unpaid) graphics of brilliant artists such as John Sloan, Boardman Robinson, and George Bellows, who denounced the prevalent social injustices, especially war and racism. Masses stalwart Robert Minor eventually turned from militant art to militant activism. Several painters during the first third of the twentieth century, dedicated to realistic styles and popular subjects, such as William Gropper, Philip Evergood, and Reginald March, are remembered perhaps more for their prints denouncing poverty and other social injustices, which eventually merged into opposition to rising fascism.

The other great foyer of anticapitalist and antiwar dissent came from Germany, where new caricatural and Expressionist styles lent force to the graphics of Johnny Heartfield and George Gross in their exposés of the bitter conditions of living under the Weimar Republic and the rise of Adolf Hitler. Heartfield established a new medium of satire, photomontage, which in the Germany of the 1980s would undergo a potent revival with new editions of his work, and new photomontages by Klaus Staeck and Jürgen Holtfreter. A Heartfield photomontage shows, for instance, Hermann Goering with his real face and body taken from a photograph, but with a butcher's arm around him and a bloody axe in his hand, while the Richstag burns behind him. Heartfield and Gross were satirists, using humor and the grotesque; Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945), by contrast, from the turn of the century onward was always deadly earnest in her graphic manner, deploring the plight of the working classes and the poor. She has left one of the most enduring antiwar icons, the simple, anguished Nur Wieder Krieg, reactivated in recent decades.