Art Appreciation - Propaganda and Art- DUE TODAY, IN 4 HOURS!!!

Social and Political Art

Art has long represented social and political ideas and issues. Important themes include war, peace, and oppression, plus social and political justice. Examples include the following:

David Alfaro Siqeuiros's painting Echo of a Scream (1937) depicts a young child or infant crying out amid war's carnage. Siqueiros (1896-1974), a Mexican artist and muralist was an active social reformer who utilized his great talents to educate the masses about the horrors of war. Echo of a Scream is an example of a surrealist painting. Surrealism is an art style that incorporates identifiable images arranged in fantastical or dreamlike compositions. To view this masterpiece of social and political protest, click the following link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/powerofart/popups/picasso.shtml

Pablo Picasso responded visually to the Spanish Civil War and created his masterpiece Guernica. At the request of Spanish General Franco, Adolf Hitler's Luftwaffe (German air force) decimated a small Spanish village called Guernica. Outraged, Picasso created his large-scale painting in defiance. Guernica is a cubist painting of fragmented figures: children, men, women, and animals wailing in anguish. Cubism is a style of art, created by Picasso and Georges Braque, that depicts simplified, abstracted objects from multiple viewpoints in the same composition. View Guernica by clicking the link: http://www.pablopicasso.org/guernica.jsp

In 1967, the organization, Another Mother for Peace (AMP) was founded by American mothers who rallied for peace and protested the Viet Nam war. Artist Lorraine Schneider created a visual image that represented the movement's sentiments, a yellow childlike flower design which contains the following text: "War is not healthy for children and other living things." The image represents an example of citizens using art to raise public awareness and to promote political change.

Figure 07-1. Artist Lorraine Schneider. Design for Another Mother for Peace, reprinted by Second Life.

African American artist Kara Walker uses art to shed light on the history of slavery in America in a series called From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995). The group of photographs of African American men and women forced into slavery challenge viewers to confront their own ideas about slavery and race. Walker selected and photographed existing photos from the J. Paul Getty museum, enlarged and toned them red, appropriating the images for her own artistic purpose. Walker's activism informs her life and art process. Click the link at the end of the lecture to view a short video of the series.

While artists create works in response to political and social power, governments create art to maintain power and to disseminate state ideas and objectives. Propaganda can be defined as ideas and images that contain biased, misleading, or false information propagated by institutions and governments in order to a). Influence the public; b). Change public attitudes and perceptions; and c). Influence behavior. Propaganda can be malicious, as in the case of Adolf Hitler's propaganda campaign against the Jewish people. Hitler used film, comics, graphic design, posters, and other media to turn public opinion against the Jews prior to and during WWII through his Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.