Art and politics have always been the closest and strangest, of bedfellows.
Artists as activists have been very successful in spreading dissent. Their work is sometimes obvious but oftentimes it is more furtive and requires the viewer/reader/listener to delve deeply to puzzle out the meaning. Once that happens, word travels fast.
The thought of the amazing artist Kitagawa Utamaro being so heart broken after his incarceration and torture that he lost his devotion to his art is the down side of an artist using his gift in the service of his beliefs. Naming names of some of his subjects was a political statement he must have felt he had to make and it cost him everything.
It isn't just a historic occurrence. Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs continued to cause an uproar as recently as 1998 when police in Britain confiscated a book of his photographs and threatened it with burning . Luckily, in the end that wasn't the case but just the idea that things like this can still happen is almost inconceivable. Mapplethorpe's photographs came about after the Stonewall riots of 1969 New York when gay men were actively fighting to be recognized as people with rights. Mapplethorpe's work put that struggle in the forefront with his erotic gay images and the news they garnered.
An aside: An excellent documentary of Mapplethorpe and his lover, the art dealer and amazing character Sam Wagstaff is Black White + Gray. http://www.blackwhitegray.com/ Fascinating!
This is a really well done site.
There is a page that highlights an exhibit called The Design of Dissent at New York's School of Visual Arts. The first link doesn't work. Use the second. Here are some images that really spoke to me:
Inspiration
There are so many works of art that have been in my life peripherally without me actually being conscious of them. Two Japanese woodblock prints have been displayed in my cousin's house all of my life. They are Katsushika Holusai's 'Red Fuji' and 'In the Hollow of the Wave off the Coast of Kanagwa". I never thought about who created them. It's interesting to learn of the profound affect that national isolationism had on art history. It's hard to imagine what Japanese art of that era would have become had the country been open to input from all over the world. I love it the way it is. The simplicity of some images of nature especially, is breathtaking.
My guess is that Gustav Klimt's masterpiece "The Kiss" is one of the most imitated artworks of all time. I have known teenage girls who have loved this work so much. It captures romantic dreams so completely. These are some examples of his work interpreted by artists on the web:
A hero of mine is Julia Morgan (1872-1957) an amazing architect and a woman waaaay ahead of her time. She was a student of the Arts and Crafts movement and was very much influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright's mathematical approach to the visual in architecture. She is best known as the architect who created Hearst Castle for William Randolph Hearst. Her own designs more typify her love for both Arts and Crafts and California Mission styles of design. She was an amazingly gifted person who followed a very tough road to get to her place in history.
In closing, I'd like to tell you about a strange coincidence. I was reading the Alphabet and the Goddess - la,la,la,la - and when I grabbed my bookmark, something about it looked familiar. I don't know where it came from and I don't remember seeing it before but below you will see a photo of it. It has on it an illustration by Alphonse Mucha.
Here's an on-line gallery of the Mucha Museum
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