Political Protest

Painting, traditionally commissioned and bought by the rich, generally supportive of the political and religious needs of established order, is by its nature less given to popular viewpoint and polemics, but certain figures stand out as exceptions: Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450–c. 1516), whose paintings are certainly socially-critical of a gamut of personal vices, including those of corrupt lawyers, as seen in his Tabletop of the Seven Deadly Sins (under Avarice), or those of the clergy, male and female, as evident in his Ship of Fools. On the other hand, the fascination of this artist lies very much in his works' incomprehensibility to viewers of the early twenty-first century. Others are Hans Holbein's (1497?–1543) Dance of Death (1520s–1530s); exposing again the corruption of Law and Church; Pieter Brueghel (c. 1564–1638), whose paintings and engravings condemn the lusts of emergent capitalism and the warring of states; lesser Dutch and Flemish artists making small paintings depicting contemporary (sixteenth to seventeenth century) military abuses of civilians, unique in Europe and intended for an antiwar public; Hogarth, who raised the satirical genre to aesthetic heights, but depended financially on the sale of engravings after the paintings; Théodore Géricault (1791–1824), exposing a great contemporary scandal in The Raft of the Medusa; and Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) celebrating the revolution of 1830 in Liberty Leading the People. From the middle of the nineteenth century Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) was pleading for the dignity of the common man, and paid for his real-life (pro-Commune) radical activism with a prison term and exile. These are, however, exceptions in the mainstream development of painting as defined by orthodox art history, and sculpture hardly plays a role at all, apart from some small bronze busts by Daumier, ridiculing ministers and deputies, which remained, however, unknown at the time. The anarchism that informs the personal philosophy of the impressionist painter Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) is scarcely evident in his paintings, except as a vague sympathy for simple, rustic folk, equally present in the painting of the (earlier) Barbizon and other realist schools.

In the twentieth century the picture becomes wonderfully complicated. While the tendencies of certain late nineteenth-to early twentieth-century art in favor of the worker and the poor, heartfelt but unfashionable, such as the Ashcan School in the United States, seem to yield entirely to the stylistically and philosophically self-regarding—not to say self-indulgent and solipsistic—art that is now designated as avant-garde, this is a matter of ideologically driven historiographical bias. The Eurocentric, male-oriented, art-historical "canon" has been reluctant to admit the so-called "margins" (art of the Third World, minorities, women, lower classes). The caricature and "primitivism" that helped break the bonds of academic formalism also helped—partially or fragmentarily—to break the bonds of class prejudice. The bourgeoisie sought refuge for political revolution in artistic revolution, and drew on imagery from the (subjugated) Third World "primitive" to enrich rather than subvert. The artistic "revolution" of cubism is less socially conscious than those of dada and surrealism, which sought a kind of anarchistic destruction of social as well as artistic conventions. Surrealism particularly attracted communists and political radicals. The greatest artist of the age, Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), grew increasingly narcissistic in his work, except when it came to certain egregious military-political horrors; Guernica (1937) and War and Peace (1952) both, in different ways, try to universalize a particular incident or a particular war out of historical specificity.

All the great social movements of the century had their artistic responses. Racism, the civil rights movement, the degradation and pride of blacks in the United States are among the themes of Charles White and Jacob Lawrence. Ben Shahn was the great poster maker for human rights. While abstract expressionism in the Cold War 1950s tried to transcend the very idea of social engagement and celebrate the individual-in-isolation, U.S. pop art in the 1960s embraced ironically but not critically the world of rampant consumer imagery, of advertising, and of fashion. Among all the competing "-isms" arising later in the decade, conceptual art was formally most suited to social critique, since it aimed to represent and challenge current ideas and concepts rather than extend notions of art-as-form. Hans Haacke in New York used the language of corporate advertising to expose the sinister links between art and its patronage in industrial corporations. The new feminists, who used a variety of new visual media, conceptual, video, performance, and body art, directed attention to their hitherto unvalidated personal, social, and biological condition, and to the ongoing subordinations of women and women artists. The very idea of an exhibition of all-women artists became a form of protest against historic exclusions. In the world of postermaking, the work of the New York–based Guerrilla Girls gained notoriety, not least through their (illegal) fly-posting on random public spaces, which was also the tactic of Robbie Conal, who has concentrated on large hostile portraits of politicians, and had many brushes with the law. The text-and-image art of Barbara Kruger, is close to the poster, and constitutes enigmatic and sardonic critique of life under capitalism.

In the postwar era there have been innumerable artists torn by the injustices of war, poverty, and racism; their efforts have been gathered into exhibitions, notably Lucy Lippard's A Different War (c. 1990), showing works about the Vietnam experience, by U.S. artists and veterans of the war. Artists have formed into short-lived groupings ("Artists Call Against Intervention in Central America" in the 1980s, led by Claes Oldenburg, a pop sculptor with truly satirical flashes); and the commercial illustrator like Tomi Ubgerer was moved, by the Vietnam War, to do some of the most pungent posters of the era.

Murals.

In Mexico following the revolution (1910–1920) the once-elite and almost forgotten art of wall-painting suddenly became populist, radical, and literally revolutionary: a major weapon in the struggle to preserve Emiliano Zapata's revolution. Diego Rivera (1886–1957) returned from his early and commercially promising phase as a cubist in Paris to dedicate himself entirely to utilitarian, didactic, exhortatory, and critical revolutionary themes. Rivera and his successors, José Clemente Orozco (1883–1949) and especially the politically hyper-activist David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896–1974)—the three are known as Los Tres Grandes—laid the basis of an entirely new, socially conscious artistic movement in the very old medium of fresco painting. They revived ancient precolonial art forms, denounced the Spanish invasion, celebrated the war of independence and Benito Juárez, and damned the tyranny of subsequent presidents and the betrayals of the revolution. Their example fomented a conviction in the United States during the Depression years that art should speak to popular needs and hopes; so that a number of artists in the United States (where the three great Mexicans also worked) filled the walls of public buildings with socially relevant themes in a variety of non-abstract, easily legible, more or less social-realist styles. Since they were largely sponsored by the U.S. government's Work Progress Administration (WPA), they could not raise their voices too loud, or communistically; and when Rivera dared to put Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin into his great anti-capitalist "Man at the Crossroads" mural in New York, the sponsor, John D. Rockefeller, had it destroyed. Printmakers followed the lead: Leopoldo Méndez established a Taller de Gráfica Popular, which, like the murals, has resonated ever since.

The Great Depression also saw the rise of a new art form as a means of social agitation: photography. At the turn of the century, Jacob Riis (1849–1914) and Lewis Hine had turned their lens upon the miserable tenement housing and the plight of immigrants. In the Depression years Margaret Bourke-White (1906–1971), Dorothea Lange (1895–1965), and Walker Evans (1903–1975) registered images regarded as artistic masterpieces: the dignity and pathos of the migrant worker, the terrors of unemployment, and the hypocrisy of the United States touting itself as offering the highest standard of living in the world, above a line of miserable and ragged unemployed. In the international domain, photography-as-reportage was waged by Robert Capa, recording the Spanish Civil War from the Republican side, condemning the Japanese in China, covering World War II, down to Vietnam, where he was killed when he stepped on a mine. Poster makers have made full use of press photographs and photomontage where reality seems to condemn itself.