Anarchism has long had an association with the arts, particularly with visual art, music and literature.Donald Drew Egbert, Social Radicalism and the Arts (New York: Alfred J. Knopf, 1970) p. 714f 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 1857 essay on Courbet, Proudhon 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.Joshua Charles Taylor, Nineteenth-century Theories of Art (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1987) p.384f
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.Michael Paraskos, Four Essays on Art and Anarchism (Mitcham: Orage Press, 2015) p.26f 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 LeightenPatricia 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 and the second by Michael Paraskos.
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.John Farquhar McLay, Anarchism and Art (Glasgow: Autonomy Press, 1982) p.10
For some writers, under anarchism artists would not disappear as they would continue to provide an anarchist society with a space in which to continue imagining new ways of understanding and organising reality as well as a space in which to face possible fears.Michael Paraskos, Four Essays on Art and Anarchism (Mitcham: Orage Press, 2015) 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."Noel Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart (New York: Routledge, 1990) p. 186
Overview About anarchism and the arts, historian David Goodway wrote:
Anarchism had a significant influence on French Symbolism of the late 19th century, such as that of Stéphane Mallarmé, who was quoted as saying, "Je ne sais pas d'autre bombe, qu'un livre." (I know of no bomb other than a book.) Its ideas infiltrated the cafes and cabarets of turn-of-the-century Paris (see the Drunken Boat #2).
Oscar Wilde's 1891 essay "The Soul of Man under Socialism" has been seen as advocating anarchism. Oscar Wilde "stated in an interview that he believed he was 'something of an Anarchist', but previously said, 'In the past I was a poet and a tyrant. Now I am an anarchist and artist.David Goodway (2006) Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow: Left-Libertarian Thought and British Writers from William Morris to Colin Ward. Liverpool University Press. 2006 p. 11
Many American artists of the early 20th century came under the influence of anarchist ideas, while others embraced anarchism as an ideology. The Ashcan School of American realism included anarchist artists, as well as artists such as Rockwell Kent (1882–1971) and George Bellows (1882–1925) who were influenced by anarchist ideas. Abstract expressionism also included anarchist artists such as Mark Rothko and painters such as Jackson Pollock, who had adopted radical ideas during his experience as a muralist for the Works Progress Administration. Pollock's father had also been a Wobbly.
David Weir has argued in Anarchy and Culture that anarchism only had some success in the sphere of cultural avant-gardism because of its failure as a political movement; cognizant of anarchism's claims to overcome the barrier between art and political activism, he nevertheless suggests that this is not achieved in reality. Weir suggests that for the "ideologue" it might be possible to adapt "aesthetics to politics," but that "from the perspective of the poet" a solution might be to "adapt the politics to the aesthetics." He identifies this latter strategy with anarchism, on account of its individualism. Weir has also suggested that "the contemporary critical strategy of aestheticizing politics" among Marxists such as Fredric Jameson likewise results from the demise of Marxism as a state ideology. "The situation whereby ideology attempts to operate outside of politics has already pointed Marxism toward postmodernist culture, just as anarchism moved into the culture of modernism when it ceased to have political validity."
Late 20th century examples of anarchism and the arts include the collage works by James Koehnline, Freddie Baer, Johan Humyn Being, and others whose work was being published in anarchist magazines such as Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed and Fifth Estate. The Living Theatre, a theatrical troupe headed by Judith Malina and Julian Beck, were outspoken about their anarchism, often incorporating anarchistic themes into their performances.
In the 1990s, anarchist interest in the DIY movement and anarcho-punk subcultures also led to the rise of anarchist involvement in creating mail art – "art which uses the postal service in some way" – as well as in the zine movement. Some contemporary anarchists make art in the form of flyposters, stencils, and radical puppets.
Visual art
19th-century realism Visual art was considered one of the most important aspects of anarchist activity from the birth of anarchism, with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon writing on his friend and contemporary Gustave Courbet in the essay "Du Principe de l'art", published 1865, that "The task of art is to warn us, to praise us, to teach us, to make us blush by confronting us with the mirror of our own conscience." Courbet also went on to paint Proudhon on several occasions.Alan Bowness, 'Courbet's Proudhon' in The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 120, No. 900, 1978, p.123f Similarly Courbet himself wrote in 1850:
Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism
Among the Impressionists, the artist Camille Pissarro is known to have had strong anarchist sympathies which led him to recommend to his children that they change their surnames to avoid being associated with his political beliefs.Kristen Erickson, 'The Art of Orovida: Looking beyond the Pissarro Family Legacy', in Woman's Art Journal, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Autumn, 1994 - Winter, 1995), p.14 Pissarro's anarchism brought him into contact with the younger artists who formed the Neo-Impressionist group, particularly Paul Signac, Henri-Edmond Cross, Charles Angrand, Théo van Rysselberghe and Maximillien Luce, who were active in anarchist circles, particularly those of the political activist Jean Grave, who encouraged other anarchist activists to embrace the potential of art to further their cause. In their collaborations they established a tripartite relationship between art and anarchism, still debated to this day,See Michael Paraskos, Four Essays on Art and Anarchism (London: Orage Press, 2015) p.27f) in which the artist could be employed for direct propagandistic purposes, or could show images of the true condition of the proletariat, or, more controversially, envision future realities towards which an anarchist revolution might aspire.See Robert L. Herbert and Eugenia W. Herbert, 'Artists and Anarchism: Unpublished Letters of Pissarro, Signac and Others' in The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 102, No. 692 (Nov., 1960), p. 472f It is in this latter context that the bucolic images of the south of France by artists such as Cross and Signac can be viewed as anarchist paintings.See Anne Dymond, 'A Politicized Pastoral: Signac and the Cultural Geography of Mediterranean France' in The Art Bulletin, vol. 85, No. 2 (Jun., 2003), p. 353f
Cubism and futurism Patricia Leighten has shown that Spanish cubist painter Juan Gris was an artist with strong anarchist sympathies, although she argues this is only evident in his overtly political cartoons. She suggests his cubist still lives deliberately eschewed anarchist subject matter so that he "self-consciously drained his paintings of political import, avoiding such anarchist subjects as prostitutes and neutralised his radical style."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 However, drawing on the principle established by Neo-Impressionist artists such as Cross and Signac, that anarchist art can also involve visualising alternative realities for an anarchist society, Michael Paraskos has criticised this reading of Gris's paintings, saying that this form of anarchism seems to demand that "artists conform to a predetermined template to define their work as radical. Cartoons of prostitutes are anarchist; paintings of bottles, playing cards and fruit are not."Michael Paraskos, Four Essays on Art and Anarchism (London: Orage Press, 2015) p. 28)
Though typically not associated with futurism, anarchism had some minor influence on Futurism. Carlo Carrà's best known work was The Funeral of the Anarchist Galli, painted in 1911. In the 1912 catalogue for the Futurists' first Parisian exhibition, Umberto Boccioni remarked "the sheaves of lines corresponding to all the conflicting forces, following the general law of violence" which he labeled force lines encapsulating the Futurist idea of physical transcendentalism. Mark Antliff has suggested that this futurist aesthetic was "designed to involve the spectator in the very politics that led to Italy's intervention in World War I and, ultimately, to the rise of Fascism in Italy." The art historian Giovanni Lista has identified this aesthetic as first appearing in the anarcho-syndicalist current, where Marinetti encountered the Sorelian "myths of action and violence".
The individualist anarchist philosopher and poet Renzo Novatore belonged to the leftist section of futurismNovatore: una biografia alongside other individualist anarcho-futurists such as Dante Carnesecchi, Leda Rafanelli, Auro d'Arcola, and Giovanni Governato.
Surrealism