ART AND ANARCHISM [1978]

JOHN A. WALKER (COPYRIGHT, 2009)

Gustave Courbet, Portrait of Proudhon and his daughters, 1865.

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All those who have experienced the impulse to resist authority, whether the

authority of parents, teachers or the state, share an affinity with anarchism

because the leitmotif of this political ideology is a detestation of all forms of

authority, rule and government external to the individual. (1) It is not that

anarchists believe in no government at all, they believe in self-government; they

believe that all political decisions should be arrived at by self-sufficient groups

of free individuals inspired by principles of co-operation and mutual aid. The

major anarchist philosophers - William Godwin, Pierre Joseph Proudhon, Max

Stirner and Prince Peter Kropotkin - promoted the values of justice, equality,

freedom and individualism; they sought a society in which the accumulation of

private property would not take place, in which there would be a complete

decentralisation of power and of industry, in which small self-sufficient

communes would constitute the basic units. Central governments,

bureaucracies, and nation states would disappear (the communes would form

themselves into a loose federation).

Anarchist Bomb explosion in a Paris restaurant, 1892.

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It is clear from this brief summary that anarchism is not at all synonymous with

the common conception of 'anarchy' (total chaos, madness, random violence).

There was, it is true, a strain of violence within anarchism: Michael Bakunin,

the professional revolutionary, did not believe that the anarchist utopia could be

achieved by peaceful means and therefore he celebrated destruction as an

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

attacks and assassinations established the stereotype of the mindless anarchist

killer in the common consciousness.

During the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries anarchism, and its

variants anarcho-syndicalism and anarchist communism, were more influential

in France, Italy and Spain than their rival ideology Marxism. A number of

artists and art critics read anarchist theoretical texts and magazines and

supported the social objectives of anarchism; for example, Courbet (a friend of

Proudhon), Camille and Lucien Pissarro, T. A. Steinlen, H. E. Cross,

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

with indifference or a hostile reception and they were branded as radicals

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

of photography, the triumph of bourgeois capitalism alienated them from society

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

a society. Furthermore, the principles of anarchism complemented the artist's

obsession with his individual autonomy, independence and freedom.

Camille Pissarro, The Plough, 1901. Lithograph. Print published by the

anarchist journal Les Temps Nouveaux.

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Two related questions arise: what political and social functions did anarchist

thinkers ascribe to art? How did artists serve the cause of anarchism? Before

answering these questions it is necessary to observe that merely because

artworks depict anarchist subjects, such as the woodcuts of Vallotton showing

the arrest and trial of anarchists dating from the 1890s and early 1900s and the

more recent illustrations by Flavio Costantini showing anarchists killing

politicians and kings, does not by itself make them anarchist artworks; they are

pictures of anarchist subjects; they can be produced by artists who are

sympathetic to, indifferent to, or opposed to anarchism.

Felix Vallotton, The Anarchist, 1892. Woodcut.

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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

inspire the spirit of revolt instead of submission; artists such as Steinlen

produced images of the masses being urged forward by a woman dressed in vivid

red (a female personification of the spirit of revolution).

Flavio Costantini, Italian anarchist Gaetano Bresci assassinating Umberto I King of

Italy in 1900. (1974)

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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

and the benefits of small-scale rural communes as against the evils of

industrialised urban centres; paintings of peasants and of village life by Camille

Pissarro confirmed the validity of these ideas. The need to make visible the

harmonious future possible after a successful transition to anarchism; Signac

produced a watercolour of an anarchist utopia.

Paul Signac, Times of harmony, 1894-95.

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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

vacuous lifestyles of the bourgeoisie. Four - Artistic radicalism: the need to

subvert habitual ways of seeing by challenging the conventions of official,

academic art and to revolutionise art itself by innovations of form and content;

the Realists' elevation of the common people to the same rank as those who

normally populated history paintings and the Impressionists' emphasis on

landscape challenged the orthodox hierarchy of genres; the sketch-like technique

of the Impressionists foregrounded the signifier at the expense of the signified,

and the divisionism of the Neo-Impressionists produced a decomposition of form

that the bourgeois public found disconcerting.

Artists helped anarchists in a directly practical way by organising exhibitions

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

and fostering the artistic activities of the workers themselves.

From the above it is evident that anarchist political theory and anarchist

artistic practice interpenetrated to a considerable extent, yet a full unity of art

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

illustrations he contributed to anarchist journals were peripheral to his central

artistic concerns. (3) Even Signac could not see the need for a unity of artistic

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

his individuality, with a personal effort against bourgeois and official

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 and anarchism

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

'anarchic'. For instance, Hans Richter, a participant in the movement, writes:

"we were all propelled by the same powerful vital impulse. It drove us to the

fragmentation or destruction of all artistic forms, and to rebellion for rebellion's

sake; to an anarchistic negation of all values." (5) Richter also describes Dr

Walter Serner, another participant, as a "nihilist", "a cynic", and "declared

anarchist". However, in spite of such remarks, there is no indication in 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

movement its explosive power to unfold in all directions, free of aesthetic or

social constraints." (6)

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

anarchists of the 1890s designed to destroy the rulers of bourgeois society.

Auto-Destructive art

Gustav Metzger (b. 1926) originated Auto-Destructive art in the late 1950s in

response to a crisis in World politics: the spread of nuclear weapons, the

pollution of the Earth's atmosphere by the above-ground testing of atomic

bombs, the constant danger that the Cold War between East and West would

become a hot one. Metzger, a fiercely committed individual, was a founder

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

politics as a private individual but how can he or she participate professionally,

as an artist? Metzger answered this question by placing his art entirely in the

service of the CND.

Adopting the automatic techniques of Surrealism and Action painting - but

using nylon and acid in place of canvas and pigment - he developed a form of

destructive art similar in concept to the self-destroying machines of Jean

Tinguely dating from the same period. At a public demonstration on London's

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.

Thus the work was simultaneously auto-creative and auto-destructive. In this

form of art there was not a finished product, only the process of change

witnessed by the spectators. Metzger's art emphasised performance, transience,

transformation, and public participation. His aims were: first, to use a violent

and destructive artistic technique as a protest against nuclear weapons; second,

to provide a cathartic spectacle of destruction as a model of a socially acceptable

outlet for human aggression; and third, to attack the notion of art as a

commodity by leaving nothing that could be bought or sold. (7)

Metzger's anti-art ritual owed something to the spirit of Dada but also to the

strain of violence in anarchist theory: Bakunin asserted the reciprocal relation

of creation and destruction when he declared "The passion for destruction is

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

pamphlets in terms of publicity). It is clear that these anarchist ideas were

exemplified in the South Bank work, i.e., in its mode of production and

presentation; hence, Metzger's work achieved a unity of artistic practice and

political action that had eluded the anarchist artists of the 1890s.

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Notes and references:

(1) I wish to make it clear that I am not an anarchist. My information on

anarchism is derived from G. Woodcock's Anarchism: a history of libertarian

ideas and movements, (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1962) and J. Joll's The

anarchists, (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1964). Although I have characterised

anarchism as a 'political ideology' not all anarchists would accept this

description, Adolphe Retté, for example, claims "Anarchism is the very negation

of politics. It is a purely human philosophy”.

(2) More detailed information on the relation between the Neo-Impressionists

and anarchism is to be found in B. Nicholson's ‘The anarchism of Camille

Pissarro' The arts, (2) (1947), pp. 43-51; R. L. and E. W. Herbert 'Artists and

anarchism: unpublished letters of Pissarro, Signac and others' Part (1), The

Burlington magazine' 102 (692) November 1960, pp. 473-482; part (2) The

Burlington magazine, 102 (693) December, 1960, pp. 517-552; E. W. Herbert

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

Europe, (London: Duckworth, 1970).

(3) C. Pissarro, Letters to his son Lucien, ed by John Rewald, 2nd edn (London:

Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1943), p. 179.

(4) Signac is quoted in Joll The anarchists, p. 168.

(5) H. Richter, Dada: art and anti-art, (London: Thames & Hudson, 1965), p. 35.

(6) Op cit (5) p. 34.

(7) G. Metzger 'Machine, Auto-creative and Auto-destructive art' ARK (32)

Summer 1962, pp. 7-8. Further information on Metzger and DIAS can be found

in Auto-Destructive art (Destruction/Creation 1965); Special issue on violence

and destruction in art, Art & artists, 1 (5) August 1966; 'Excerpts from selected

papers presented at the 1966 Destruction in Art Symposium,' Studio

international, 172 (884) December 1966, pp. 282-83; Art into society, society into

art: seven German artists, (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1974).

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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

art and mass media.