The Art of Liberty in an Uncertain Moment

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Liberty Leading the People by Eugène Delacroix

If you’re dazed and confused, wondering what on earth is happening to the modern world in June of 2020, you’re not alone. If you weren’t reeling right now something would be wrong with you. Let me invite you to take a deep breath, grab your computer or art survey book, and look up Eugene Delacroix’s 1830 painting Liberty Leading the People. Your misery will find good company therein.

The painting is a naked, and as it were, semi-nude, allegory set during the July Revolution in France, with a bare-breasted personification of Liberty guiding a top-hatted, bourgeoisie gentleman with a musket into battle alongside a Gavroch-ey adolescent waving revolvers. The trio surge into the breach, over barricades, through plumes of smoke and fallen revolutionaries. This image reflects the ongoing battle for political authority in the post-aristocratic order following the French Revolution. And in one way or another, we’ve been fighting the same battle ever since that time, which is perversely reassuring.

Somehow, in these murky days of social upheaval, frustration, sadness, indignation, and sacrifice, it’s satisfying to consider that even if the particulars are different, we’re in generally well-tread historical territory. The French could have told you as much, with revolutions in 1848, 1870, two world wars, and May 68. And recall Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai’s disputed 1972 response to a question about the result of the French Revolution: “It’s too early to say.” Eight minutes of video from a disgusting and tragic incident in Minneapolis and the traumas it unleashed tells us that it’s still too early to say. The revolution continues.

Woman of Freedom

If the roles of those two revolutionary men in Delacroix’s time-capsule-of-a-painting have trickled down historically more or less unambiguously—rich/poor; privileged/underprivileged; powerful/powerless—the Woman of Freedom hasn’t. She’s been coopted and exploited for two centuries.

Liberty “…could only exist where exploitation was abolished,” according to Joseph Stalin. George W. Bush claimed that “the liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world; it is God’s gift to humanity.” Liberty conjures images of Chevy trucks for some and Rousseauean oak trees for others. Since the time of Delacroix’s famous painting, liberty has stood for everything from the complete absence of obstacles to self-determination to the total control by the State to create a utopia free from the laws of the jungle.

So, what does any of this mean for art in this tumultuous and uncertain moment? Times like these are the greatest of existential tests for the expressive and creative witnesses of the time. Art is an inherently revolutionary act that is often commandeered in the name of social crusades, at times at the expense of their historical relevance, legitimacy and recognition. The examples of overreaching political interference in social and political uprisings is common to the point of folly, from the Counterreformation to the Communist Revolution to Rudy Guiliani’s attempt to shutter the Brooklyn Museum because of the “Sensation” exhibition in 1999.

According to Vladimir Lenin in 1920:

“All educational work in the Soviet Republic of workers and peasants, in the field of political education in general, and in the field of art in particular, should be imbued with the spirit of the class struggle being waged by the proletariat for the successful achievement of the aims of its dictatorship, i.e., the overthrow of the bourgeoisie...”

Propaganda vs. Creativity

Even if you can stand by Lenin’s rhetoric in terms of social transformation, you’d have a difficult time rescuing the art that it sanctioned. Few look to his preferred brand of Soviet Realism as anything but a stark example of how propaganda annihilates creativity and innovation.

We have to remember that even in the most violent and necessary of social upheavals, we hold some ideals, such as life itself and free expression, sacred. The good revolutionaries often have a difficult time accepting this when their torches are lit, pitchforks are out and support is necessary. Even in the cruelest theaters of war, though, our society stops short of cathedrals because we deem them violations of the principles of Jus in Bello, largely adopted by the world with few exceptions over the past five decades. If we are committed to saving cultural artifacts in war, we shouldn’t we be committed to respecting the autonomies of their makers’ visions as well? 

It’s such a tricky high-wire act; to fight for justice at all costs, without sacrificing the ideals that allow for the possibility of justice in the first place. We all wish for all people to be treated fairly, with dignity, and to ensure these through the right to protest and dissent. Perhaps we should fight rabidly for the preservation of those verbs; but not against their more adverbial cousins: expression, commentary, and curiosity that give those verbs their spiritual legitimacy. Let art do what it does best and be fiercely independent, as we would the Fourth Estate—perhaps art is a Fifth? Note that rescinding this privilege hasn’t worked out well despite the best intentions of Urban VIII, Stalin, McCarthy, Jesse Helms or Tipper Gore.

As I resume my Shepherd Express coverage of art in Milwaukee after a substantial hiatus, I’d like everyone to consider which incarnation of Liberty they’d like on the barricades with them, and to note that the expressions, reflections, and observations about the world through art and art writing will be there in spirit.

Back to that revolutionary painting… turns out Monsieur Delacroix in the middle of revolutionary ferment of 1830 was himself watching vigilantly from the artistic rafters. As he stated in a letter from the year of the painting: “My bad mood is vanishing thanks to hard work. I’ve embarked on a modern subject‚—a barricade. And if I haven’t fought for my country at least I’ll paint for her.” Thankfully he took to the unaffiliated brush rather than the committed musket or revolver. Though the revolutionaries might have rather had him take up arms against Charles X, their children were better served in the long, long run by Delacroix’s liberated witness to the long, sure arc of social history and, eventually, justice.

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