Art

Politics, so the old saying goes, is the art of the possible. Political art, though, is often charged with achieving the impossible: producing real, tangible change. Artists don’t pass laws or have a finger on the button, so what can they possibly do to influence governments or dislodge the structures of power? Will they ever save the world through ideas, objects and images alone?

Ancient art was all about the show of power – how the Egyptians could crush their opponents or how the Greeks created sophisticated monuments to their democracy – but early artists weren’t looking to upset the apple cart or question the political status quo. Satire and parody found their way to the streets or theatres through comics, poets and playwrights – yet painters and sculptors seem to have been more concerned with giving praise to God than examining the self-appointed monarchs who held his place on Earth. Feature continues

It wasn’t until after the Renaissance, with its emphasis on individual brilliance, that visual artists fully realised how long the church and state had been using their creativity for propaganda purposes and decided, probably for the first time, to get their own back and take a political stand. Although not explicitly criticising his king, Diego Velázquez painted Philip IV in 1656 with such honesty that it’s possible to see the decline of Spain’s empire in his inbred Habsburg features, while William Hogarth made the Tories out to be corrupt and the English upper classes to be morally bankrupt. But it was Francisco de Goya’s early nineteenth-century series of etchings depicting man’s cruelty to man, ‘The Disasters of War’, and his heroic painting of the common person standing up to the faceless might of the army, ‘The Third of May 1808’, that first constituted really challenging, conflicted and angry political art.

Scarf to commemorate the 'World Festival of Youth and Students for Peace', Berlin, August 1951, Pablo Picasso. © ADAP, Paris and DACS, London 2008

Come the era of World Wars, the twentieth century became a battleground of political imagery, one in which strongarm regimes and supposedly egalitarian allies alike learnt the potential of aesthetics to influence (if not change) opinions. In the wake of Soviet political posters and the propagandist art of the Nazis, artists such as John Heartfield (the German artist who anglicised his name in protest against anti-English sentiment) and Pablo Picasso began to lob back the odd intellectual grenade, hoping to explode the myths of ‘victory at any cost’ being espoused by both warring sides. First, Picasso depicted the human suffering of war in his legendary composition of dismembered figures, ‘Guernica’, which was painted over a couple of months in 1937 when he was supposed to be in London giving a lecture at the Royal Albert Hall. When asked by a Nazi officer, ‘Did you do that?’ of his famous picture, Picasso replied, ‘No, you did.’ Not long after, the artist was marked out as a left-wing radical, even though his depiction of a white dove – initially used in advertisements for huge socialist rallies – was widely adopted as a new symbol of peace.

As well as earning the dubious honours of round-the-clock FBI surveillance (suspect number 100-337396) and becoming the world’s most famous communist after Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong, Picasso was on the receiving end of rival, CIA-funded poster campaigns showing his peacenik dove being variously syringed by black market medicines, used to disguise an enemy tank or kept on a leash by Stalin. Examples of these posters are included in the V&A’s current blockbuster exhibition tackling the subject, ‘Cold War Modern’.

But as the propaganda age got into its stride, art could not bring itself to engage fully with strict political dogma. Even Leon Trotsky recognised the need for healthy artistic expression to keep its distance from ideology; in a letter of 1938 he wrote: ‘Art, like science, not only does not seek orders, but by its very essence, cannot tolerate them… Art can become a strong ally of revolution only insofar as it remains faithful to itself.’ The following year, on August 23, the USSR signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler, and communism promptly lost much of its artistic support and credibility.

Karel Thole's 1946 Cold War Poster © V&A Images

By the middle of the century, with the world in tatters, many artists – disillusioned about art’s ability to make a difference and afraid of becoming dated – shied away from political comment altogether, wary of being allied with a single party or position. Yet governments, retaining a touching faith in art’s power, co-opted some of these very artists in support of an ideological Cold War against the discredited Eastern Bloc.

As the V&A’s exhibition proves, the US and USSR’s 25-year battle to laud their national superiority over one another was not just fought with spacecraft or over the newswires: museum’s galleries and even kitchen showrooms also played their part. America began to promote the idea of individual liberty through slick, mass-produced consumer goods like kitchen appliances, cars and radios, but there were suggestions that the country was simultaneously running a clandestine programme of cultural propaganda, using abstract artists as unwitting conscripts to the Cold War cause. In the late ’50s the abstract expressionists – Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell and others – were toured around Europe in a show called ‘The New American Painting’, supposedly funded by the CIA, which presented Americans as freethinking individuals, standing in defiant contrast to the totalitarian threat and its mindless socialist-realist art. While the truth about any such coercive cultural campaigns won’t be known until the state releases its files on the subject, what is certain is that New York – thanks to its progressive painters, who spoke with what art critic Clement Greenberg called ‘The Voice of America’ – effectively snatched the title of the world’s foremost city of art in the second half of the century.

In London, the artistic reaction to the creep of communism was a 1951 competition at the ICA to design a public monument for ‘The Unknown Political Prisoner’ (which, naturally, was also covertly funded by the CIA), but an angry Hungarian artist vandalised Reg Butler’s winning sculpture (also in the V&A show), and the project was never built.

In the ’60s, the postwar age of anxiety – in the spiky forms of Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland and Francis Bacon, as well as in the tough
buildings of brutalist architects such as Alison and Peter Smithson – came to an end and London fell under the spell of American pop culture. As capitalism took hold, Britain once again became a parochial player in terms of political art, despite glimmers of anti-Thatcher disgruntlement in Richard Hamilton’s ‘Treatment Room’, Tony Cragg’s detritus collage of ‘Britain Seen from the North’ and Gilbert and George’s reactions to racism’s rise during the ’80s.

Erró's American Interior No. 7, 1968 © Anne Gold, Aachen

If the past two generations of British artists have disappointed with their lack of political or social consciousness, the contemporaries are slowly coming to the rescue. Jeremy Deller restaged a miners’ riot; Langlands and Bell constructed a virtual ‘House of Osama Bin Laden’; Dexter Dalwood painted the Poll Tax riots; and Mark Titchner lampooned the political slogan. War is also firmly on the artistic agenda, with Mark Wallinger’s reconstruction of Brian Haw’s peace protest outside Parliament, ‘State Britain’ of 2007, and Steve McQueen’s set of stamps featuring the faces of British soldiers killed in Iraq – although it’s worth noting that neither artist has been politically effective: the laws on demonstrating in the capital remain unchanged and the Royal Mail refuses to officially publish McQueen’s stamps.

Artists are not anti-government agents or suppliers of counter-information, and those who set out to destabilise or resist using such obvious, reactionary means will usually be shot down before their message is heard. This is because those who adopt the direct techniques and shock tactics of politicians – whether it’s Banksy’s cod-protest art or Peter Kennard’s graphic, sloganeering posters – can be dismissed as mere propagandists or political agitators. However, the truly political artist can insinuate and subtly subvert opinion without sledgehammer sermons, engaging the public consciousness on a deeper level and infiltrating the lifeblood of culture. Politics in art is still possible; in fact, in this age of apathy it might soon become vital.

‘Cold War Modern’ is at the V&A until next year.