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:
“To “give style” to one’s character—a rare and noble art! Those practice it who compass all that their natures present as strengths and weaknesses and then fit them into an artistic plan until every one appears as art and reason and even weakness enchants the eye.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“The tremendous outflow of intellectuals that formed such a prominent part of the general exodus from Soviet Russia in the first years of the Bolshevist Revolution seems today like the wanderings of some mythical tribe whose bird-signs and moon-signs I now retrieve from the desert dust.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“All cultural change reduces itself to a difference of categories. All revolutions, whether in the sciences or world history, occur merely because spirit has changed its categories in order to understand and examine what belongs to it, in order to possess and grasp itself in a truer, deeper, more intimate and unified manner.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“Modern equalitarian societies ... whether democratic or authoritarian in their political forms, always base themselves on the claim that they are making life happier.... Happiness thus becomes the chief political issue—in a sense, the only political issue—and for that reason it can never be treated as an issue at all.”
—Robert Warshow (1917–1955)
“Yes, revolutions are the only salves,
But they’re one thing that should be done by halves.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)