Social Protest and Affirmation Protests against Military Action

Social Protest and Affirmation
Protests against Military Action
Prior to the 19 th Century, artists were commissioned to do works of art
for political and religious leaders and the aristocracy.
The beginning of the 19 th marked a new time for artists because
a middle class was developing and they wanted to purchase art
that only the leaders and the affluent were commissioning.
Artists for the first time were able to create works with their own voice
and not to worry about a commission or the effects of their work.
It began with the artistic movement of Romanticism in the early 1800s
and has continued ever since.
It is artists who will address issues of social protest and affirmation
in thoughtful and conscientious ways bearing many truths in symbolic representations.
Many artists lived through wars, fought in wars or left their homeland to avoid persecution.
There have been many wars fought on our soil and beyond
and many current conflicts exist throughout the world today.

The Second of May 1808
The Charge of the Mamelukes
1814 Oil 8’ 27”x 11’ 13”
There have been many wars fought between
the French and the Spanish. Here are a few:
French Wars of Religion 1562-1598
Franco-Spanish War 1635-1659
War of the Spanish Succession 1701-1714
War of the Pyrenees 1793-1795
The Peninsular War 1807-1814
The Napoleonic Wars 1803-1815
These two paintings by Romanticist,
Francisco de Goya in 1814 about the
rebellion of the people of Madrid against
French occupation, which triggered the
Peninsular War.
The Third of May 1808
1814 oil 8’ 9” x 13’ 4”

Expressionist, Käthe Kollwitz
lived through two wars and
lost a son and a grandson to war.
Her images express universal symbols
about inhumanity, injustices and
humankind’s destruction of itself.
The Prisoners 1908 etching
The Outbreak 1903 etching
#5 from the series The Peasant’s War

Käthe Kollwitz
Conspiracy 1898
lithograph
Never Again War 1924

John Heartfield
Goering the Executioner
9/13/1933
Goering was a hated man and at one time
was second in command to Hitler.
Goering started the SS Gestapo and many
saw Goering as the one who saw through
the Jewish Holocaust during WWII.
Heartfield was on the run after this magazine
cover was published.

Pablo Picasso painted Guernica in response to the bombing of this northern Spain village in the
Basque region by German and Italian warplanes at the behest of General Franco and the
Spanish Nationalist forces on April 26, 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. Many women and
children were killed. Men were off in war.
Pablo Picasso
Guernica
1937 Oil 25.5’ x 11.5’

David Alfaro Siqueiros
Echo of a Scream
1937
Enamel on wood 48” x 36”
As an outspoken Communist in Mexico,
Siqueiros joined revolutionary efforts and
painted emotional depictions of strife and
anguish of the Mexican people as they
fought for independence.
In thinking about war,
do children come to your mind?

David Alfaro Siqueiros
The Revolutionaries
from the Dictatorship of Portirio Diaz to the Revolution 1957-1965
Hall of the Revolution, National History Museum, Mexico City

La Marcha de la Humanidad
David Alfaro Siqueiros
Del porfirismo al la Revolucion 1957-1965

Shōmei Tōmatsu
Woman with Keloidal Scars
Hiroshima–Nagasaki Document 1961
photograph 11 ½” x 16”
Tōmatsu photographed survivors of the atomic bombings dropped on their cities in 1945
by the United States. These two events are the only use of nuclear weapons in war to date.

Bomb and Victims
Search and Destroy
Effected by the daily
images seen on
television during the
Vietnam War, Nancy
Spero painted
War Series 1965-1969.
These small gouache
and inks on paper
drawings, executed
rapidly, represented the
obscenity and
destruction of war.
The War Series is
among the most
sustained and powerful
group of works in the
genre of history
painting that condemns
war and its real and
lasting consequences.
Victims
Eagles, Swastikas and Victims
Images from War Series 1965 –1968

Leon Golub Mercenaries 1976 acrylic
Golub’s large-scale works were often pulled directly from a huge database he assembled of journalistic images
from the mass media. Early series include Napalm and Vietnam. In the 1980s, Golub turned his attention to
terrorism in a variety of forms, from the subversive operations of governments to urban street violence.
Among the work produced in this period are the series Mercenaries, Interrogation, Riot, and Horsing Around.

Leon Golub
Interrogation III 1981 Interrogation II 1981
Killing fields, torture chambers, bars, and brothels became inspiration and subject
for work that dealt with such themes as violent aggression, racial inequality, gender
ambiguity, oppression, and exclusion.
Interrogation was another series by Golub

Leon Golub working in his studio.

A well-known photograph from 1967 of students in front of military police on
a college campus protesting the use of violence in Vietnam.
Bernie Boston
Flower Power 1967

Pop artist James Rosenquist
took as his subject the F-111
fighter bomber plane, the
newest, most technologically
advanced weapon in
development at the time, and
positioned it, as he later
explained, “flying through the
flak of consumer society to
question the collusion
between the Vietnam death
machine, consumerism, the
media, and advertising.”
F-111
1965 23 panels oil on aluminum 10’ x 86’

James Rosenquist
F-111
1965
one
continuous panel
10’ h x 86’ l

James Rosenquist
Other example of consumer products as military weaponry.
Maybe Rosenquist was speaking out about the military industrial complex and its need for war.
House of Fire II
1982 Oil
78” x 198 ½”

Fernando Botero has been outspoken about
the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib during the Bush Administration
and its policy in not following the Geneva Convention.
Fernando Botero
Abu Ghraib series
2004-2005