Artistic Revolution and Cultural/political Revolutions
The role of fine art has been to simultaneously express values of the current culture while also offering criticism, balance, or alternatives to any such values that are proving no longer useful. So as times change, art changes. If changes were abrupt they were deemed revolutions. The best artists have predated society's changes due not to any prescIence, but because sensitive perceptivity is part of their 'talent' of seeing.
Artists have had to 'see' issues clearly in order to satisfy their current clients, yet not offend potential patrons. For example, paintings glorified aristocracy in the early 17th century when leadership was needed to nationalize small political groupings, but later as leadership became oppressive, satirization increased and subjects were less concerned with leaders and more with more common plights of mankind.
In its origins and its first golden age, no art owes quite as much to state power as French painting does. It was in the age of absolute monarchy launched by Louix XIV in the 17th century that the likes of Poussin and Le Brun put France in the forefront of European art. Versailles found its stately mirror in the powerful idea of classicism – a painting style, enduring in later artists like Ingres, whose austerity and grandeur express the authority of a world where Jove is very much in his throne.
Examples of revoutionary art in conjunction with cultural/political movements:
- Trotskyist & Diego Rivera
- Black Panther Party & Emory Douglas
- Cuban Poster art
- Social realism & Ben Shahn
- Feminist art & the Guerrilla Girls
- Industrial Workers of the World & Woody Guthrie
- Revolutionary Tides
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Famous quotes containing the words artistic, revolution, cultural, political and/or revolutions:
“Realism should only be the means of expression of religious genius ... or, at the other extreme, the artistic expressions of monkeys which are quite satisfied with mere imitation. In fact, art is never realistic though sometimes it is tempted to be. To be really realistic a description would have to be endless.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“I have seen in this revolution a circular motion of the sovereign power through two usurpers, father and son, to the late King to this his son. For ... it moved from King Charles I to the Long Parliament; from thence to the Rump; from the Rump to Oliver Cromwell; and then back again from Richard Cromwell to the Rump; then to the Long Parliament; and thence to King Charles, where long may it remain.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)
“A society that has made “nostalgia” a marketable commodity on the cultural exchange quickly repudiates the suggestion that life in the past was in any important way better than life today.”
—Christopher Lasch (b. 1932)
“There seems no reason why patriotism and narrowness should go together, or why intellectual fairmindedness should be confounded with political trimming, or why serviceable truth should keep cloistered because not partisan.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“Men go out to admire the heights of mountains, the huge waves of the sea, the broadest spans of rivers, the circle of ocean, the revolutions of stars, and leave themselves behind.”
—St. Augustine (354–430)