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Art and Propaganda in the Twentieth Century
In this wide-ranging book, author Toby Clark examines work from all points of the globe, from the state propaganda of communism to the public art of democracies, from protest art of the 1960's to the efforts of artists in the nations of modern Africa. Beginning with the classic propaganda art of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Stalin's Soviet Union - each with its own styles, motives, and purposes - he then examines how democratic governments have also sponsored propaganda art, especially in wartime, exploring such problematic issues as the representation of enemies and the commemoration of the dead. Art created in opposition to ruling ideas and values may also fall under the rubric of propaganda. Since the beginning of the twentieth century radical artists have embraced revolutionary, pacifist, amininist, and anti-colonial causes. Clark describes the spectrum of competing theories and goals of protest art from Africa to Latin America, from Europe to the United States to China, and uncovers the complex rhetoric, the high beauty, and the ambiguous role of art that dwells in the political realm. The book features 108 illustrations (including 78 in full color), a bibliography, and a timeline.
175 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1997
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
September 1, 2014
I spotted this in a second-hand bookshop and thought it might be interesting – or that it might be rubbish. Always a hard call. But this was quite surprising in many ways.
At first I thought it was going to be a chronology of crimes – mostly crimes committed by ‘them’. That is, I suspected this might be a look at Nazi and Soviet propaganda, but then be nearly completely blind to our own.
This proved to be much more interesting. It is seeking to find some notion of just how art and politics relate to one another. And this creates all sorts of problems. There are few things quite so dull as overtly political art. But is it really possible for an artist to live in our world and be entirely apolitical? I mean, is it possible for an artist to refuse to express some form of political views in their artwork?
There have been people who have advised artists to do exactly that, that is, shun politics as unworthy of their artistic talent. For example, “The dominant artistic values of the period were most influentially voiced by the critic Clement Greenberg who since 1939 had warned against the corrupting effects of what he called ‘kitsch,’ which he saw both in American mass culture and in the populist official art of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. To defend true art against this, artists should attend to purely artistic concerns; to make, in effect, abstract art which would be immune to political exploitation.” Page 8
But one of the things that is mentioned twice in this book is that even when you are pursuing an art practice that is completely abstract, politics has a way of adding meaning to your work over and above your intentions. “The numerous international exhibitions which exported Abstract Expressionism were coordinated by New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in the late 1940s and 1950s and accompanied by curators’ statements in which nationalist rhetoric contrasted the ‘mark of freedom’ in American painting with the regimented kitsch of Soviet communism. The realisation that some of these exhibitions had been secretly funded by the CIA, a fact widely known by the 1970s, made a deep impression on a generation of artists and critics radicalised by the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement, some of whom challenged the idea that art should or even could remain separate from political concerns.” Page 9 And so, “After this, no distinction between art and propaganda would ever seem simple.” Page 130
Before I go on with this review I want to tell you about one of the most moving art pieces I’ve ever witnessed. It was by a Latin American artist. It was a series of films that played in much the same way that songs might be sung in a round. From memory, the films were silent and I think about five where being played at the same time, out of phase with each other. They showed the hand of the artist painting water onto hot stones – the water staining the stone to a dark grey only to evaporate back to light grey again. The artist painted the stones with faces of people who had been ‘disappeared’ by their governments. The artist had gotten these faces from the pictures of these disappeared people that had been printed in newspapers. The images had that block monochrome look that black and white newspaper photographs do. The artist's brush would paint the person’s face and just as it was complete the image would already start to disappear. I sat watching this for ages - half an hour at least. I brought friends and family to see it. Like I said, it was one of the most moving experiences I’ve ever had in an art gallery. That story might give you some idea of where I stand in relation to art and politics.
Not all relationships between art and politics are positive – even when the politics is of the left. I had never heard the story of Mary Richardson and the Rokeby Venus by Velazquez before. Mary went to a gallery and hacked at a painting by Velazquez with an axe in protest around Mrs Pankhurst being arrested. I guess you could call this a terror act – using the shock of committing the unthinkable as a way to promote the depth of your commitment to a cause.
This book does focus (for a chapter each) on Nazism and Soviet art. There was a part of me that thought these would be more or less the same chapter. Both doctrines were obsession with realism, monumentalism, the aim of creating a new kind of human via art and culture. I thought all of this would make the discussion of the two chapters all a bit same/same. But this proved to be anything but the case. The discussion of Fascist art as a kind of timeless feudalism was something I’d never really thought about before. Communism, unlike Fascism, was obsessed with progress and technology. Fascism was obsessed with bizarre rituals from feudal myths. The similarities only really come in with their leadership cults.
Of the two, Communist art was potentially the more open to innovation. What the Nazi government banned and ridiculed as ‘degenerate art’ and this tended to be painted by people more likely to be fighting Nazism on the side of the Communists. This forced many communists to be more open to 'modern' art. However, there was always a strain of this in socialist art. As the writer says, “The dramatic reinvention of the revolution as carnival related to a vein in Marxism which envisages the future as a condition in which all human activities, harmonised by collective endeavour, become playful or creative.” Page 78
But this creative side to Marxism was increasingly undermined by the need for art to be both the educator of the ‘new man’ – and therefore, as educator art needed to be both didactic and literal – and by the requirements of the personality cults.
“The greatest hero in Stalinist culture was, of course, Stalin himself. The personality cult invented to revere the supreme achievements and qualities of Stalin matched in scale and extravagance those devoted to Hitler and Mussolini, although a cult of leadership had no basis in Marxist thought. Lenin was opposed to the creation of his own personality cult, and seems to have had a genuine distaste for the elitism and individualism which it would imply.” Page 94
The personality cult that Stalin created about himself proved very popular across the socialist world. Although, few would compare with that still extant in North Korea.
This book also looks at the propaganda that was used during war by liberal democracies. And this was utterly fascinating. We take for granted now that our governments will lie to us during wars and given we now live in the time of the ‘war on terror’, the endless war, we can expect our governments to lie to us forever. But the notion of democracy does imply that citizens, if they are going to be able to exercise a meaningful contribution to society, should know what is going on in the world – and so propaganda (as lies told to make the population compliant) really ought to be avoided.
All the same, manipulation of images – what can and cannot be shown, has had a long tradition in Western democracies. “Photographs of soldiers shown suffering acute mental stress were withheld. Pictures of enemy dead were published more readily, but not of civilians killed by American action. Images of enemy peoples in general were controlled to diminish the appearance of shared human qualities – particularly if they were Japanese.” Page 112
And this was not just the control of images from the war, but also the control of how the war would be commemorated back at home.
“In Britain, for example, during the early stages of First World War, small, temporary ‘street shrines’ were created in communities as home-made memorials to the local men killed in trenches. Gradually these were replaced by a government programme to coordinate the commissioning of larger memorials. This aimed to provide more permanent and dignified monuments, but may also have been motivated by the government’s desire to maintain official control over the imagery of war and nationhood and to prevent the street shrines from expressing, as they sometimes did, critical or oppositional sentiments.” Page 118
There is a lovely description of the US Vietnam War memorial and the problems this caused as the veterans who commissioned it wanted it to be ‘plain’ and a memorial to those who had died, not to ‘the cause’. As is pointed out here, this upset the government of the day which wanted to reinforce the ‘we were on the right side’ idea of the war. But this was a war that had divided the population and so a ‘political’ message could only undermine the point of the memorial.
I really liked this book. It gave me lots to think about and many of the images discussed, particularly the one on the cover, The Winter Palace is Taken and The Flag is Bleeding are probably worth the price of the book.
At first I thought it was going to be a chronology of crimes – mostly crimes committed by ‘them’. That is, I suspected this might be a look at Nazi and Soviet propaganda, but then be nearly completely blind to our own.
This proved to be much more interesting. It is seeking to find some notion of just how art and politics relate to one another. And this creates all sorts of problems. There are few things quite so dull as overtly political art. But is it really possible for an artist to live in our world and be entirely apolitical? I mean, is it possible for an artist to refuse to express some form of political views in their artwork?
There have been people who have advised artists to do exactly that, that is, shun politics as unworthy of their artistic talent. For example, “The dominant artistic values of the period were most influentially voiced by the critic Clement Greenberg who since 1939 had warned against the corrupting effects of what he called ‘kitsch,’ which he saw both in American mass culture and in the populist official art of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. To defend true art against this, artists should attend to purely artistic concerns; to make, in effect, abstract art which would be immune to political exploitation.” Page 8
But one of the things that is mentioned twice in this book is that even when you are pursuing an art practice that is completely abstract, politics has a way of adding meaning to your work over and above your intentions. “The numerous international exhibitions which exported Abstract Expressionism were coordinated by New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in the late 1940s and 1950s and accompanied by curators’ statements in which nationalist rhetoric contrasted the ‘mark of freedom’ in American painting with the regimented kitsch of Soviet communism. The realisation that some of these exhibitions had been secretly funded by the CIA, a fact widely known by the 1970s, made a deep impression on a generation of artists and critics radicalised by the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement, some of whom challenged the idea that art should or even could remain separate from political concerns.” Page 9 And so, “After this, no distinction between art and propaganda would ever seem simple.” Page 130
Before I go on with this review I want to tell you about one of the most moving art pieces I’ve ever witnessed. It was by a Latin American artist. It was a series of films that played in much the same way that songs might be sung in a round. From memory, the films were silent and I think about five where being played at the same time, out of phase with each other. They showed the hand of the artist painting water onto hot stones – the water staining the stone to a dark grey only to evaporate back to light grey again. The artist painted the stones with faces of people who had been ‘disappeared’ by their governments. The artist had gotten these faces from the pictures of these disappeared people that had been printed in newspapers. The images had that block monochrome look that black and white newspaper photographs do. The artist's brush would paint the person’s face and just as it was complete the image would already start to disappear. I sat watching this for ages - half an hour at least. I brought friends and family to see it. Like I said, it was one of the most moving experiences I’ve ever had in an art gallery. That story might give you some idea of where I stand in relation to art and politics.
Not all relationships between art and politics are positive – even when the politics is of the left. I had never heard the story of Mary Richardson and the Rokeby Venus by Velazquez before. Mary went to a gallery and hacked at a painting by Velazquez with an axe in protest around Mrs Pankhurst being arrested. I guess you could call this a terror act – using the shock of committing the unthinkable as a way to promote the depth of your commitment to a cause.
This book does focus (for a chapter each) on Nazism and Soviet art. There was a part of me that thought these would be more or less the same chapter. Both doctrines were obsession with realism, monumentalism, the aim of creating a new kind of human via art and culture. I thought all of this would make the discussion of the two chapters all a bit same/same. But this proved to be anything but the case. The discussion of Fascist art as a kind of timeless feudalism was something I’d never really thought about before. Communism, unlike Fascism, was obsessed with progress and technology. Fascism was obsessed with bizarre rituals from feudal myths. The similarities only really come in with their leadership cults.
Of the two, Communist art was potentially the more open to innovation. What the Nazi government banned and ridiculed as ‘degenerate art’ and this tended to be painted by people more likely to be fighting Nazism on the side of the Communists. This forced many communists to be more open to 'modern' art. However, there was always a strain of this in socialist art. As the writer says, “The dramatic reinvention of the revolution as carnival related to a vein in Marxism which envisages the future as a condition in which all human activities, harmonised by collective endeavour, become playful or creative.” Page 78
But this creative side to Marxism was increasingly undermined by the need for art to be both the educator of the ‘new man’ – and therefore, as educator art needed to be both didactic and literal – and by the requirements of the personality cults.
“The greatest hero in Stalinist culture was, of course, Stalin himself. The personality cult invented to revere the supreme achievements and qualities of Stalin matched in scale and extravagance those devoted to Hitler and Mussolini, although a cult of leadership had no basis in Marxist thought. Lenin was opposed to the creation of his own personality cult, and seems to have had a genuine distaste for the elitism and individualism which it would imply.” Page 94
The personality cult that Stalin created about himself proved very popular across the socialist world. Although, few would compare with that still extant in North Korea.
This book also looks at the propaganda that was used during war by liberal democracies. And this was utterly fascinating. We take for granted now that our governments will lie to us during wars and given we now live in the time of the ‘war on terror’, the endless war, we can expect our governments to lie to us forever. But the notion of democracy does imply that citizens, if they are going to be able to exercise a meaningful contribution to society, should know what is going on in the world – and so propaganda (as lies told to make the population compliant) really ought to be avoided.
All the same, manipulation of images – what can and cannot be shown, has had a long tradition in Western democracies. “Photographs of soldiers shown suffering acute mental stress were withheld. Pictures of enemy dead were published more readily, but not of civilians killed by American action. Images of enemy peoples in general were controlled to diminish the appearance of shared human qualities – particularly if they were Japanese.” Page 112
And this was not just the control of images from the war, but also the control of how the war would be commemorated back at home.
“In Britain, for example, during the early stages of First World War, small, temporary ‘street shrines’ were created in communities as home-made memorials to the local men killed in trenches. Gradually these were replaced by a government programme to coordinate the commissioning of larger memorials. This aimed to provide more permanent and dignified monuments, but may also have been motivated by the government’s desire to maintain official control over the imagery of war and nationhood and to prevent the street shrines from expressing, as they sometimes did, critical or oppositional sentiments.” Page 118
There is a lovely description of the US Vietnam War memorial and the problems this caused as the veterans who commissioned it wanted it to be ‘plain’ and a memorial to those who had died, not to ‘the cause’. As is pointed out here, this upset the government of the day which wanted to reinforce the ‘we were on the right side’ idea of the war. But this was a war that had divided the population and so a ‘political’ message could only undermine the point of the memorial.
I really liked this book. It gave me lots to think about and many of the images discussed, particularly the one on the cover, The Winter Palace is Taken and The Flag is Bleeding are probably worth the price of the book.
September 16, 2018
Muy buen manual que recoge las principales corrientes artísticas del siglo XX, pero haciendo muchísimo hincapié en la influencia que ejercieron otros movimientos artísticos, pero sobre todo en los sucesos históricos. Así, los capítulos no se suceden en fauvismo-cubismo-futurismo,...sino en capítulos históricos como el nacimiento del feminismo, las dictaduras del siglo XX (fascismo, nazismo, comunismo), democracia,...
Es una manera complementaría y muy útil de entender las vanguardias y los movimientos posteriores: El arte entendido como medio de comunicación de masas, y por tanto utilizado para vender un mensaje, una idea.
Es una manera complementaría y muy útil de entender las vanguardias y los movimientos posteriores: El arte entendido como medio de comunicación de masas, y por tanto utilizado para vender un mensaje, una idea.
November 30, 2014
Clark writes a comprehensive coverage of art propaganda in chronological form.
The first chapter charts propaganda's beginnings in suffrage, the avant garde and revolution, chapter 2 covers Fascism, chapter 3 Communism, chapter 4 Wartime, and chapter 5 up to the present day, protest art, Vietnam, AIDS and feminism.
In some ways this is a really good book, covering the art of propaganda through its most potent forms in Nazi Germany, wartime Britain and communist USSR to the present day, but I felt it was also a bit lacking. As a book about art I would have lot more commentary on how the pieces of art worked, explanation of symbolism, interpretation of the use of light, colour etc. Clark just gives historical background to each piece which is useful but incomplete.
The last chapter fails to address street art, a major form of protest. Also, there is not enough coverage of the monumental statuary and architecture of fascism and communism. Could have been a much better book.
The first chapter charts propaganda's beginnings in suffrage, the avant garde and revolution, chapter 2 covers Fascism, chapter 3 Communism, chapter 4 Wartime, and chapter 5 up to the present day, protest art, Vietnam, AIDS and feminism.
In some ways this is a really good book, covering the art of propaganda through its most potent forms in Nazi Germany, wartime Britain and communist USSR to the present day, but I felt it was also a bit lacking. As a book about art I would have lot more commentary on how the pieces of art worked, explanation of symbolism, interpretation of the use of light, colour etc. Clark just gives historical background to each piece which is useful but incomplete.
The last chapter fails to address street art, a major form of protest. Also, there is not enough coverage of the monumental statuary and architecture of fascism and communism. Could have been a much better book.
October 20, 2017
If you are interested in the question "why does art matter?" then this is an accessible and absorbing piece of work.
April 5, 2020
Başucu kitaplarımdan birisi olmaya hak kazandı. Muhteşem açıklamalar ve görseller kullanılmış.
June 28, 2022
I picked this up on a whim from a used book store and loved it. Tons of interesting stuff, lots of cool art and artists.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews