When Artist Protest

...In a now famous print, Rue Transnonain, Daumier as- sails the militia's massacre of the in- habitants of a house, on that proletar- ian street, from which snipers were said to have fired...

...The Artist as Adversary" exhibi...

...Certainly their defiant spirits as well as their sufferings must have found some subtle expression in their absolutely non-representational pictures...

...One cannot be sure, of course, that what Barlach contemptuously called "dots, specks, lines, and smudges" may not, in some instances, have been intended by artists to express opposi- tion to totalitarian regimes...

...Where was the dissent concealed in the abstract pic- tures included in the show...

...In the opposite camp were art- ists like Ben Shahn and his associ- ates...

...But the com- pletely non-objective paintings Kan- dinsky produced through two World Wars tell us nothing about either...

...In the spirit of Whistler, who maintained that art should be "independent of all claptrap," the uninvolved artist con- siders the notion of art as communica- tion, and of the artist as the sender of a message about life, obsolete...

...Unfortunately, the number of those who betrayed concern for noth- ing except what was going on at their easels was always greater than that of those who were engage...

...That is the question...

...An adversary is defined as an "unfriendly opponent," and suggests an "enemy who fights determinedly, continuously, and relentlessly...

...The Protest Artist, then, is success- ful only if he can produce allegories, metaphors, and symbols strong enough to speak to men of all ages, all na- tions, all creeds...

...Daumier was sent to jail for having dared to satirize, in newspaper cartoons, the unpopular regime of King Louis-Philippe...

...One is in- clined to say to the Stalinist artist, imbued with the Socialist Realism creed: Why employ art as a means of indoctrination when there are so many teaching tools of wider appeal...

...Anti- Nazi poems, novels, and diaries were written in the Third Reich, but not shown even to a trusted friend, and manuscripts were often buried in gar- dens, to evade detection during Ges- tapo raids...

...The politically unin- volved artist, on the other hand, does not wish to produce such pictures...

...ALFRED WERNER is the well known art critic and historian...

...But nowhere in Degas' work can any trace of his reactionary feelings be found...

...Callot's series, The Miseries of War, can be considered social crit- icism, yet these small engravings—pre- cipitated by the invasion of Lorraine by Richelieu's armies in 1633—made no impression on the conscience of society...

...Though he differed, in his great humanity, from most of the other Old Masters, he was no more political than they who were mainly concerned with get- ting profitable assignments to portray kings and potentates, and to decorate churches...

...His compatriot, Wil- liam Blake, sympathized with the French Revolution...

...Ironically, his very spontaneous and free Expressionist work was unpalat- able to the Nazi taste-makers—so much so, indeed, that he ended up as a "victim" of Nazism (his works were confiscated from the museums, and he was forbidden to paint), however des- perately he pleaded with the author- ities to accept him as the "Nordic" painter he claimed to be...

...Artists react quickly, and with their instincts, their guts, their "hearts," to use an old-fashioned term —rather than with calculated reason- ing...

...By the same token, nearly all of true Protest Art is representational, though the "real- ism" may range from carefully drawn, not highly imaginative illustrations, to a work like Picasso's Guernica, which must be studied thoroughly to fathom the intended, but not obvious, symbol- ic meanings...

...Confin- ing ourselves to Europe, we note how rare an artist's involvement in politics was before the end of the Eighteenth Century...

...One is pleased to contrast this state of affairs with the relative freedom prevailing in this country, where (as the New School Art Center shows re- vealed) even the most outspoken graphic attacks on the Johnson and Nixon Administrations, on generals, Senators, or police chiefs can be dis- played publicly without any jeopardy to either the artists or the arrangers of the exhibitions...

...They may be dreamers but, as philosopher George Santayana put it, ones who have con- sented to dream of the actual world...

...His follower, Jean- Louis Forain, on the other hand, used his devastating powers as a cartoonist to harass the Dreyfusards and anyone else who believed that France was not being threatened by an unholy alliance of Jews, Protestants, Free Masons, and Germans (later in life, Forain was to regret deeply the satirical excesses of his youth...

...And to the protagonist of the Art-for-Art's Sake concept: Why keep on producing art if it is quite useless...

...But enthusiasm, even if childish, is nearly always preferable to cautious ambivalence...

...Both works, the effective Picasso and the rather bewildering Motherwell, were included in "The Artist as Ad- versary," a summer show in New York's Museum of Modern Art that displayed more than 300 paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, and pho- tographs from the Museum's perma- nent collection...

...It was in the Nineteenth Century that what Thomas Jefferson called "the spirit of resistance to government" developed great force among artists...

...On the other hand, left-of-center idealists —like Courbet, who took part in the Commune of Paris in 1870-71, and Pissarro, who actively supported the anarchist movement—were often strict- ly non-political in their art...

...They have taken cog- nizance of the change of the public from a tiny rich elite to a still growing multitude, and they know that there is now an increasing interest in the so- cial possibilities of "art as mass com- munication...

...In Germany, Emile Nolde was a member of the Nazi Party, whose "blood and soil" ideology he shared...

...Two worlds, two philosophies...

...I am supposed to relive a spiritual experi- ence it must speak to me in a language that permits me to re-experience the deep and concealed . . . my artistic language is the human figure or the object through which or in which man lives, suffers, rejoices, feels, thinks...

...I have mentioned Kan- dinsky...

...The second is that of works which aim to affect and improve society...

...Although Rembrandt was an ad- mirer of Callot, nowhere in his work does one find any direct references to the conflagrations of his period...

...This was a problem that repeatedly puzzled visitors to "The Artist as Ad- versary" exhibition...

...How unfortunate is a soci- ety that is not constantly subjected to scrutiny by its truly creative men and women: it cannot develop and im- prove...

...There, a mere joke questioning the unchallengeable wis- dom of the Fuehrer was often enough to warrant a death sentence...

...But this is as it should be...

...The American painter and print-maker, Ben Shahn, had this in mind when, facing the flood of non-representational art, he once asked, "Is there nothing to weep about in this world any more...

...Again, it is possible that the abstract artist, who seemingly stands so aloof, also wants to arouse "pity and anger" through his non-representational work, though even an astute contemporary— such as Shahn—may not have been able to perceive his message...

...The Museum of Modern Art show told us that artists are not always narcissistic dreamers...

...Painters subjected, for po- litical or even for mere aesthetic rea- sons, to a Malverbot—the prohibition to paint—made only small sketches that could easily and quickly be con- cealed in a desk drawer, in the event of any ominous visit...

...In Peter Blume's Eternal City, at the Museum of Modern Art show, Mussolini, a jack-in-the box with a green head and red lips, now looks funny—yet he has gone down in his- tory as anything but an amusing fig- ure, rather as the ruthless slaughterer of anti-Fascists and Ethiopians, and as the only staunch ally Hitler ever had...

...This the Stalinist art- ist (severely limited in formal expres- sion as well as subject matter) could do no more than could his confrere, the Hitlerite...

...That these six artists—and 600 more names could be mentioned—may have occasionally been rash in their political judgments, overreacted to events, or been unfair to the targets chosen for their venomous irony, goes without saying...

...Yet his art was philosophical and religious...

...In the Eighteenth Century William Hogarth, though in no sense an acti- vist, was instrumental, through his satirical prints, in obtaining the pas- sage of legislation to curb the con- sumption of gin and the abuse of do- mestic animals...

...Take the cases of such staunch anti-Fascist artists as Hans Hartung or Wols (Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze) who voluntarily left Nazi Germany to settle in France (Hartung joined the maquis and lost a leg in battle...

...Had he had any intention to describe life and death in Nazi-occupied France, could he have done so...

...tion presented the latter type—the art- ist as a man with a conscience...

...Perhaps many a regime in the dis- tant past might have been less cruel, less totalitarian, had it not been for the scarcity, or even complete absence, of social and political critics...

...Is all our pity and anger to be reduced to a few tastefully arranged straight lines or petulant squirts...

...WHEN ARTISTS PROTEST by ALFRED WERNER MODERN Western art can be clas- sified under two headings...

...The victims, includ- ing a baby, were roused from sleep and slaughtered...

...But while this is theoretically possible, I have yet to see an example of non-objective art that does so successfully...

...In the 1930s and 1940s, artists still outside the reach of the dictators of- ten hid in the seclusion of their studios, justifying their abstention by asserting, "We, as artists, are above the political struggle...

...Artists do not often view con- temporary happenings with the cool detachment of historians or sociologists -—and even wise scholars have been found making naive, or irresponsible, statements...

...The leader of Abstract Art, Vasily Kandinsky, was a sensi- tive, philosophical Russian who ab- horred Fascism and the wanton de- struction of human lives...

...Another case in point is Piet Mondrian, the Dutch artist of this cen- tury who was "hardly more curious about the world than an anchorite in his cell," and who, while millions per- ished in Europe and Asia, continued calmly to occupy himself painting rec- tangular shapes in the three primary colors...

...It is a curious phenomenon that most modern artists with political con- victions veer to the left rather than to the right...

...wearing the sym- bolic red cap on the street in London, he was once arrested on suspicion and charged with sedition...

...Still, the France of the 1830s and 1840s was a paradise of freedom compared to, say, Nazi Germany, where no editor would have risked publishing any- thing even slightly critical of Hitler and his actions...

...We're Losing a Great Country...

...Edgard Degas was a conserv- ative who, at the time of the Dreyfus Case, developed his anti-Republican sentiments into hysteria, and grew so anti-Semitic as to break with his Jew- ish friends...

...There are a few notable ex- ceptions...

...This Museum of Modern Art exhibi- tion of works by moral men has had several predecessors here in recent years...

...The title was well chosen...

...The more than 140 artists from twenty-one countries who produced, and still pro- duce, "Social Art," are moral men who give visual shape and immortality to cries of despair, to voices of defi- ance, to "pity and anger," to quote Shahn again...

...Copies of this lithograph were con- fiscated by the police...

...In the past decade, New York's New School Art Center has been stag- ing group shows devoted to works by Angry Young, and Not So Young, Men: for instance, "The American Con- science," "Protest and Hope," and, in 1970, "My God...

...All the artists I have mentioned here, whether progressive or the oppo- site, produced work that, for lack of a more telling word, might be described as representational...

...It is, of course, conceivable that one can at- tack social ills by using abstract shapes in a manner that communicates the art- ist's attitudes about the carnage of war, the exploitation of labor, or re- actionary governments...

...Also last year, at the Met- ropolitan Museum of Art, an exhibi- tion of etchings and lithographs, en- titled, "Against Violence," demon- strated that Protest Art is not entirely a phenomenon of our century, and at least some Old Masters—like Jacques Callot, Francisco Goya, and Honore Daumier—were incensed by man's in- humanity to man...

...But all we can do is to guess...

...For instance, Robert Motherwell's Elegy to the Spanish Republic, combining some roundish and rectangular black shapes on a white ground, seeks vainly to es- tablish a credible link between the vis- ual offerings and the title...

...But what about those artists connected with Abstract Expressionism, Optical Art, Electronic Art, or Minimal Art who do not use figurative elements by which the iden- tification of a subject—such as Koll- witz' Rebellion of the Weavers or Orozco's Dive Bomber and Tank—is made easy...

...Another problem is that Protest Art often loses much, if not all, of its impact within a few years and certainly a few decades after its first appearance, unless it is so universal and human that its mes- sage cannot be diluted by the inevit- able passage of time (vide Goya's at- tacks on the Spanish Inquisition and on the foreign invaders, or, again, Guernica...

...Many artists will agree with Nietzsche: "The struggle against a purpose in art is always a struggle against the moral tendency in art—against its sub- ordination to morality...

...One consists of objects without an overt purpose except that of expressing the artist's extremely personal, private, sol- itary world...

...His renditions of wretched beggars, and miserable Jewish refugees from Eastern European pogroms, indicate his com- passion...

...In the first group one finds, pre- dominantly, non-figurative work...

...But it never occurred to him to use his enormous skill to express protest—for instance, protest against the Thirty Years' War that, while it spared Holland, devastated nearly ev- ery other European country...

...Confronted with Kandinsky's work, the sculptor and print-maker Ernst Barlach pointed out the limitations of the abstract idiom: "If...

...it is bound to stagnate, to de- teriorate, and finally, in the last chap- ter of decay, to break up and vanish...

...Goya, by painting his own brand of sharp real- ism, condemned Napoleon's soldiers as the torturers and rapists they were...

...This certainly describes men like William Gropper, 0 Jacob Lawrence, Jack Le- vine, Jose Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and Ben Shahn—all were in- cluded in the show—who never stopped sharpening their skills to cut away the very foundation of what to them appeared to be a faulty society...

...Vart pour Fart means, Let morality go to the devil...

...His most recent book is "Chagall Watercolors and Gouaches...

...But where...