Police State?
A fresco painting from Rosie Hastings and Hannah Quinlan’s exhibition, ‘Tulips’, Art Now, Tate Britain.
While I was in London I visited Tate Britain and saw an exhibition of recent fresco paintings by Rose Hastings and Hannah Quinlan. The works were pretty good, but I was put off when I read on a wall label that they were justified by the duo of artists as a reaction to living in Britain’s ‘police state’.
Really? Britain is most certainly very far from paradise, but it is absurd to describe it as a ‘police state’. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, whose hazy mountains I glimpse in the distance as I walk my dog in the morning, is a ‘police state’. Do these feted British artists think the masters of a real ‘police state’ would permit them to show their work in a public institution and have it discussed in the media? Of course not. Britain is a ‘police state’ only for those who has a very melodramatic sense of the dysfunctional nature of their local social reality. Britain is a fuck-up in many ways – not least because of Brexit and increased policing powers - but it’s also an extraordinary place in which people have a degree of freedom that is the envy of millions in less fortunate nations.
I also saw the wonderful Alice Neel exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery. Here is one of her works:
Alice Neel, ‘Rita and Herbert’ (1954).
I didn’t know much about Neel beforehand, and was surprised to discover that she was a paid up member of the American Communist Party. In 1981 she was the first living artist to have a retrospective in the Soviet Union, and in an interview in 1983 said, ‘the whole 20th century has been a struggle between communism and capitalism’. Neel was a fantastically penetrating and empathetic portraitist but was clearly ideologically myopic. In this, of course, she was very far from alone amongst artists and writers.
This is what Picasso wrote in 1944, after having recently joined the French Communist Party:
I would have liked better to have replied to you by means of a picture’, he told us; ‘I am not a writer, but since it is not very easy to send my colours by cable, I am going to try to tell you.’ ‘My membership of the Communist Party is the logical consequence of my whole life, of my whole work. For, I am proud to say, I have never considered painting as an art of simple amusement, of recreation; I have wished, by drawing and by colour, since those are my weapons, to reach ever further into an understanding of the world and of men, in order that this understanding might bring us each day an increase in liberation; I have tried to say, in my own way, that which I considered to be truest, most accurate, best, and this was naturally always the most beautiful, as the greatest artists know well. Yes, I am aware of having always struggled by means of my painting, like a genuine revolutionary. But I have come to understand, now, that that alone is not enough; these years of terrible oppression have shown me that I must fight not only through my art, but with all of myself. And so, I have come to the Communist Party without the least hesitation, since in reality I was with it all along. Aragon, Eluard, Cassou, Fougeron, all my friends know well; if I have not joined officially before now, it has been through ‘innocence’ of a sort, because I believed that my work and my membership at heart were sufficient; but it was already my Party. Is it not the Communist Party which works the hardest to know and to construct the world, to render the men of today and tomorrow clearer-headed, freer, happier? Is it not the Communists who have been the most courageous in France as in the USSR or in my own Spain? How could I have hesitated? For fear of committing myself? But on the contrary I have never felt freer, more complete! And then I was in such a hurry to rediscover a home country: I have always been an exile, now I am one no longer; until the time when Spain may finally receive me, the French Communist Party has opened its arms to me; there I have found all that which I most value: the greatest scholars, the greatest poets, and all those beautiful faces of Parisian insurgents. (1)
Wow! Poor old Picasso. ‘Is it not the Communist Party which works the hardest to know and to construct the world, to render the men of today and tomorrow clearer-headed, freer, happier?’ What a dupe! We should probably re-write this as: ‘Is it not the Communist Party which works the hardest to know and to construct the world, to render the men of today and tomorrow less clearer-headed, less free, despairing?’ But Picasso was very far from alone in his delusion, as he himself noted.
I’m sure this essentially emotional response to injustice and the belief that the most powerful force struggling against this injustice was communism was also what lay behind Alice Neel’s commitment, which went back to the 1930s. It certainly wasn’t obvious in 1944, and still wasn’t in 1983, prior to the end of the Cold War, that the struggle that Picasso saw as between revolution and reaction, and Neel as between communism and capitalism was actually between the utopians who wanted change now, and the pragmatic social reformers who saw change as occurring one small step at a time. Of course, the former types seem much more glamorous and dynamic. Slow social reform is so very dull. So very bourgeois.
If you reflect on the history of modern art, you soon get the impression that the artists we nominate as the progressive voices of our times are mostly in the revolutionary ‘change now’ camp. They wanted things to get better immediately. This isn’t surprising, as there’s so much wrong in past and present society that the visceral response of any sensitive soul is bound to be one of deep disgust and the desire to right wrongs without delay. But the sad fact is that history shows that revolutionary radicalism never works in practice. In fact, it tends to make things worse not better, because it alienates so many people – for instance, all those justifiably anxious about the new, the unknown, the untested.
As time went by, being a communist required more and more self-deception. Maybe being a communist before the Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact of 1939 was possible on the basis of a sound appraisal of available evidence. Maybe in 1944 it was possible because of the central role played by European communist parties in the struggle against Nazism. But after the Korean War of 1950 -53, the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, the Prague Spring of 1968? To still be a communist in the 1980s required a very high level of dissemblance, of ignoring many awkward facts. But where faith is concerned, facts are of small importance.
NOTES
(1) Published in L’Humanité, 29-30 October 1944. https://theoria.art-zoo.com/why-i-joined-the-communist-party-pablo-picasso/
Rosie Hastings and Hannah Quinlan, ‘Tulips’ is at Art Now, Tate Britain, 24 Sep 2022-7 May 2023. Image courtesy of Tate. https://www.newexhibitions.com/e/60066
Alice Neel: Hot Off The Griddle is at Barbican Art Gallery, 16 February - 21 May 2023. Alice Neel image courtesy of The The Estate of Alice Neel.