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The Art Assignment
Cases for Political Art Part 1
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You can argue that all art is political in some way. Even a pile of yarn or landscape painting can be interpreted through a political context. But the various moments of the 20th century are political in obvious ways. We're going to dive into Kathe Kollwitz and the German war. Then the Russian revolution by Kazimir Malevich and Vladimir tatlin and lastly Pablo Picasso. We have to consider how each of these works is political, how each artis used the material and platforms of their own times to make unforgettable statements, and how these approaches might inform our own modes and means of expression.
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Video Transcript
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and means of expression.
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These are "Cases for Political Art."
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German artist Kathe Kollwitz turned
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to printmaking in the early 1890s,
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depicting oppressed, poverty-stricken, and yet still
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defiant workers.
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She realized the print's potential
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for social commentary.
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They were inexpensive and easily reproducible,
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and her work was widely circulated and admired.
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Kollwitz bore witness to both world wars,
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losing a son in the first and a grandson in the second,
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fusing her own experience of tragedy
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with the suffering of those around her.
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Women and children often take center stage in her prints,
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showing in graphic, intimate detail the realities of war
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and the incommensurate toll it takes on society's most
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vulnerable.
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A socialist an outspoken pacifist, Kollwitz in 1933
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was forced by the Nazi government
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to resign her post as the first female professor pointed
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to the Prussian Academy, and she was forbidden to show her work.
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She died in 1945, just two weeks before German surrender.
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And the power of her work has not
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diminished in the ensuing decades.
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Her images are of universal human experiences--
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familial tenderness, mourning, and death.
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And the pain they depict is so raw and so real and so present.
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Looking at her work, I can't dismiss these agonies
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as long past but instead feel their urgency--
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the fact that parallel moments are playing out now
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throughout the world.
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This is anguish that happened then which
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must be avoided at all costs.
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But it's also anguish happening now
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that we must be awake to and do all in our power to remedy.
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Kazimir Malevich, a Russian artist of Polish descent,
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took a vastly different approach from Kollwitz and pretty much
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everyone else who were using realism
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to address the horrors of the early 20th century.
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Malevich wrote, "In the year 1913, trying desperately
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to free art from the dead weight of the real world,
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I took refuge in the form of the square."
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He unveiled his painting "Black Square"
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to the St. Petersburg public in 1915.
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And it was just that-- a black square on a white canvas,
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part of a new language of shapes and forms
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he called suprematism, whose radical
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simplicity presented a challenge to all art that came before.
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But he hung the painting in a top corner of the gallery,
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in the place traditionally reserved
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for the display of Russian icons in many homes.
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Russia in 1915 was firmly entrenched in World War I
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and hurdling toward the Bolshevik uprising and October
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Revolution of 1917.
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The world as people knew it had been upended,
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hierarchies overturned, and Malevich
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felt that art should be overturned as well, beginning
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at what he called the zero of form.
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It wasn't an escape from reality.
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For him, it was its own reality.
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And he called the painting an icon of our times--
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in a sacred spot, darkness.
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After the revolution, Malevich's abstract approach
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was put to use by the Bolshevik regime,
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creating propaganda for the new government.
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Other artists like Vladimir Tatlin
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answered Lenin's call to replace the monuments
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of the tzarist period with art more fitting of the revolution.
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Tatlin's proposed monument to the Third International
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was never built, but his model and plans
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for the abstract sculpture ignited generations
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of artists eager to explore ways other than figuration
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to express their ideals.
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Perhaps the best known indictment
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of the horrors of the war, Pablo Picasso's "Guernica"
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is the artist's response to Germany's April 1937
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bombing of the small village Guernica
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in the Basque region of Spain.
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The country was embroiled in a civil war,
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and Hitler had aligned in support
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of General Franco and the right-wing nationalists,
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who sought to overthrow Spain's left-leaning Republican
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government.
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Understood to be a training mission for the German Air
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Force, the bombing of Guernica, not
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of strategic military value, lasted for three hours
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and killed or wounded 1,600 civilians.
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The news reached Paris soon after,
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and the atrocity was well-documented in the papers.
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Picasso's monumental painting represents the horror
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of what had transpired, but not in specific or realistic terms.
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And when it was presented in the Spanish pavilion of the Paris
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Exposition later that year, it served as a powerful protest
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to the atrocities perpetrated by Germany's Third Reich,
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whose own pavilion was on display not far from Spain's.
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Complex and much-debated iconography
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is at play in this work, whose careful
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composition echoes more traditional European history
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painting.
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But it veers decisively away from that
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in its abstraction and depiction of war as thoroughly unheroic.
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Presented in the context of a fair celebrating
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new technologies, this 25-foot-wide painting instead
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confronted the public with the brutalities
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that new technologies had made possible,
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compounding the growing aggression of Hitler's
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fascist regime.
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After the fair, the painting traveled through Europe
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to help raise funds for Spanish refugees
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and was loaned to the Museum of Modern
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Art in New York for safekeeping until it
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returned to Spain in 1981.
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It remains an incredibly potent and memorable image of not just
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the tragedy that occurred at Guernica
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but of all that was about to occur
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and all that still may happen in the future.
