New Visions, New Viewers, New Vehicles: Twentieth-Century Developments in North American Political Art

Abstract

isual, social and political commentary constitutes a powerful tradition of artistic expression in the Western world. Most art historians, critics and members of the educated public, however, lack extensive knowledge about the seminal developments in political art throughout the twentieth century. Until fairly recently, an ideology of modern art has dominated American and Western European cultural life. Artworks focusing on critical views of politics and society have typically been marginalized, routinely dismissed as quaint, historically outmoded or merely topical. Socially conscious artists who use their talents to call attention to such injustices as war, poverty, racism, sexism, alienation, persecution, political corruption, environmental degradation and scores of other social defects have generally worked without the status and recognition accorded to their contemporaries who eschew political content and controversy in their works. Recent developments in postmodern, feminist and multicultural theory and criticism have combined with activism from the 1960s up to the present to generate somewhat greater interest in and recognition of political art in the 1980s and 1990s. Respected scholars and writers appearing in new publications sympathetic to progressive cultural expressions, such as Community Murals (no longer publishing), High Performance, Heresies, Cultural Democracy and Z Magazine have added to the growing reputation of contemporary artists with visions critical of dominant social and political priorities and institutions. In the final decade of this century, political art has established a solid if precarious legitimacy in the art world. The cumulative efforts of politically committed artists shed enormous if disconcerting light on the precariousness of existence in a technological world beset with overwhelming social, economic and environmental problems. A systematic review of developments in the visual arts throughout the twentieth century convincingly reveals how political art has constituted a major strain of creative expression, cutting across the stylistic developments that still occupy the attention of conventional art scholars and writers. Inspired by their predecessors of many previous centuries, socially conscious artists of this century, including such luminaries as Kfithe Kollwitz, Ben Shahn, Diego Rivera, Edward Kienholz, Leon Golub, Hans Haacke and Barbara Kruger, have fundamentally broadened and deepened the scope of visual social commentary. By embracing new political visions, by attracting new, non-elite viewers and by initiating new vehicles of visual expression, thousands of artists have created an impressive legacy of political engagement that complements the long historical tradition of dissent in litera-