Les chataigniers a Osny (1888) by anarchist painter Camille Pissarro, an example of blending anarchism and art
Anarchism has long had an association with the arts, particularly with visual art, music and literature.[1] This can be dated back to the start of anarchism as a named political concept, and the writings of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon on the French realist painter Gustave Courbet. In an essay on Courbet of 1857 Proudhon had set out a principle for art, which he saw in the work of Courbet, that it should show the real lives of the working classes and the injustices working people face at the hands of the bourgeoisie.[2]
The French novelist Émile Zola objected to Proudhon advocating freedom for all in the name of anarchism, but then placing stipulations on artists as to what they should depict in their works.[3] This opened up a division in thinking on anarchist art which is still apparent today, with some anarchist writers and artists advocating a view that art should be propagandistic and used to further the anarchist cause, and others that anarchism should free the artist from the requirements to serve a patron and master, allowing the artist to pursue their own interests and agendas. In recent years the first of these approaches has been argued by writers such as Patricia Leighten[4] and the second by Michael Paraskos.[3]
Significant writers on the relationship between art and anarchism include Proudhon, Peter Kropotkin, Herbert Read, Alex Comfort, George Woodcock, David Goodway, Allan Antliff and Cindy Milstein. Despite this history of a close relationship between art and anarchism some anarchist writers such as Kropotkin and Read have argued that in an anarchist society the role of the artist would disappear completely as all human activity would become, in itself, artistic. This is a view of art in society that sees creativity as intrinsic to all human activity whereas the effect of bourgeois capitalism has been to strip human life of its creative aspects through industrial standardisation, the atomisation of production processes and the professionalisation of art through the education system.[5]
For some writers, art and anarchism artists would not disappear as they would continue to provide an anarchist society with a space in which to continue to imagine new ways of understanding and organising reality as well as a space in which to face possible fears.[6] This is similar to Noël Carroll's theory of the function of horror stories and films in current society: "Art-horror is the price we are willing to pay for the revelation of that which is impossible and unknown, of that which violates our conceptual schema."[7]
^Donald Drew Egbert, Social Radicalism and the Arts (New York: Alfred J. Knopf, 1970) p. 714f
^Joshua Charles Taylor, Nineteenth-century Theories of Art (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1987) p.384f
^ abMichael Paraskos, Four Essays on Art and Anarchism (Mitcham: Orage Press, 2015) p.26f
^Patricia Leighten, ’Réveil anarchiste: Salon Painting, Political Satire, Modernist Art’, in Josh MacPhee and Erik Reuland (eds.), Realizing the Impossible: Art Against Authority (Oakland: AK Press, 2007) p. 39
^John Farquhar McLay, Anarchism and Art (Glasgow: Autonomy Press, 1982) p.10
^Michael Paraskos, Four Essays on Art and Anarchism (Mitcham: Orage Press, 2015)
^Noel Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart (New York: Routledge, 1990) p. 186
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