Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Art and Anarchism
Art and Anarchism
Art and Anarchism
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
All those who have experienced the impulse to resist authority, whether the
authority, rule and government external to the individual. (1) It is not that
private property would not take place, in which there would be a complete
bureaucracies, and nation states would disappear (the communes would form
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It is clear from this brief summary that anarchism is not at all synonymous with
the professional revolutionary, did not believe that the anarchist utopia could be
essential wiping clean of the slate. Other anarchist thinkers deplored violence as
a means and disowned the European terrorists of the 1890s whose wave of bomb
During the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries anarchism, and its
in France, Italy and Spain than their rival ideology Marxism. A number of
artists and art critics read anarchist theoretical texts and magazines and
Maximillien Luce, Theo van Rysselberghe, Charles Angrand, Paul Signac, Felix
Vallotton, and Felix Feneon. (2) Besides their altruistic reasons for supporting
anarchism, artists had selfish reasons: their avant-garde work frequently met
whether they were or not; they often found it as difficult to survive as the
poorest workers (factors such as the loss of aristocratic patronage, the invention
and subjected them to the pressures and humiliations of the market place).
These artists were in favour of an anarchist utopia because they believed they
would be more secure financially and that they would be more respected in such
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Two related questions arise: what political and social functions did anarchist
thinkers ascribe to art? How did artists serve the cause of anarchism? Before
the arrest and trial of anarchists dating from the 1890s and early 1900s and the
politicians and kings, does not by itself make them anarchist artworks; they are
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Anarchist theorists ascribed the following functions to art (though they did not
necessarily use the headings I have given them). First - Agitation: the need to
produced images of the masses being urged forward by a woman dressed in vivid
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Second - Propaganda: the need to glorify the worker, to give labour dignity, to
present the workers as the hope of the future; paintings by Luce, sculptures by
the Belgian artist Constantin Meunier, and drawings by Camille Pissarro and
Paul Signac, fulfilled this demand. The need to show the virtues of peasant life
Pissarro confirmed the validity of these ideas. The need to make visible the
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Third - Critical realism: the need to expose the ugliness of contemporary life and
the shortcomings of the existing social order; Steinlen depicted the evils of
poverty and homelessness in the big cities and the crimes of colonialism in
Africa; his paintings also attacked the established church and satirised the
the Realists' elevation of the common people to the same rank as those who
of work for sale in order to raise funds for anarchist political prisoners and to
assist anarchist political activities. Anarchists and artists also encouraged what
Edmond Picard called 'the socialisation of art', that is, taking art to the workers
From the above it is evident that anarchist political theory and anarchist
and politics was not achieved in the 1890s. All too often there were discrepancies
between form, content and the subject treated, and between the aesthetic
programmes of the artists and their political ideology. For example, peasant
painting was populist rather than popular: it was 'about' the people rather than
'for' the people. In his letters to his son Camille Pissarro justified his pre-
occupation with landscape by quoting Proudhon's book 'La Justice' to the effect
that 'love of the earth is linked with revolution, and consequently the artistic
ideal' but the political message of his canvases was a faint one, while the few
and political radicalism in terms of subject, form and content, in 1902 he wrote:
"The anarchist painter is not one who will show anarchist paintings, but one
who without regard for lucre, without desire for reward, will struggle with all
conventions ... The subject is nothing, or at least is only one part of the work of
art, not more important than the other elements, colour, drawing, composition
… when the eye is educated, the people will see something other than the subject
in pictures. When the society we dream of exists, the worker, freed from the
exploiters who brutalise him, will have time to think and to learn." (4)
Dada, the anti-art, anti-bourgeois movement that began in the quiet eye of the
storm that was Zurich during the First World War is often described as
"we were all propelled by the same powerful vital impulse. It drove us to the
Dadaist visual artworks, poems and manifestoes that they had studied in any
serious manner the major philosophers of anarchism. In other words, they knew
little of the 'positive' proposals of anarchism and had no interest in the political
and social organisational problems of a future anarchist society; the following
quote from Richter explains their indifference: "Dada not only had no
programme, it was against all programmes. Dada's only programme was to have
no programme ... and, at that moment in history, it was just this that gave the
Dada was, therefore, anarchistic only in the sense that its participants
glorified extreme individualism and hated order, authority, rulers and bourgeois
society, only in the sense that it was an ideological bomb designed to destroy
bourgeois art and culture equivalent to the real bombs thrown by the violent
Auto-Destructive art
Gustav Metzger (b. 1926) originated Auto-Destructive art in the late 1950s in
bombs, the constant danger that the Cold War between East and West would
member of the splinter group of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament known
as the Committee of 100. Like any other adult citizen an artist can participate in
as an artist? Metzger answered this question by placing his art entirely in the
service of the CND.
using nylon and acid in place of canvas and pigment - he developed a form of
South Bank in July 1961 Metzger used acid as a pictorial medium by spraying it
onto stretched sheets of nylon; the acid immediately attacked the sheet creating
rapidly changing ragged shapes until the support was completely consumed.
form of art there was not a finished product, only the process of change
transformation, and public participation. His aims were: first, to use a violent
Metzger's anti-art ritual owed something to the spirit of Dada but also to the
also a creative passion". While the Italian anarchist Carol Pisacane forwarded
the notion 'propaganda of the deed' (one public act of violence is worth years of
exemplified in the South Bank work, i.e., in its mode of production and
political action that had eluded the anarchist artists of the 1890s.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
ideas and movements, (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1962) and J. Joll's The
description, Adolphe Retté, for example, claims "Anarchism is the very negation
anarchism: unpublished letters of Pissarro, Signac and others' Part (1), The
Burlington magazine' 102 (692) November 1960, pp. 473-482; part (2) The
The artist and social reform: France and Belgium, 1885-1898, (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1961); D. D. Egbert, Social radicalism and the arts: Western
(3) C. Pissarro, Letters to his son Lucien, ed by John Rewald, 2nd edn (London:
(5) H. Richter, Dada: art and anti-art, (London: Thames & Hudson, 1965), p. 35.
Summer 1962, pp. 7-8. Further information on Metzger and DIAS can be found
and destruction in art, Art & artists, 1 (5) August 1966; 'Excerpts from selected
international, 172 (884) December 1966, pp. 282-83; Art into society, society into
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This article was first published in Art & Artists May 1978. John A. Walker is a
painter and art historian. He is the author of several books about contemporary