Term Paper on
Marxism and Contemporary Art
Well we all are aware that Marx is a man of economics and its rare that his
economic theories would depict such realism as visual art. This has raised the
question that may be of greater concern to the contemporary artists as they have
queried whether Marxism can explain the 'Genius' of great artists like Picasso
or Gough. This is the kind of query has always been asked by Marxist historians,
and is meant to intimate that Marxist history is obsessed with rigid economic
causes, and cannot contend with real people. A Marxist historian would generally
answer negatively, in the sense that human beings are all-different and always
have been. It would simply be an obsolete thought that people were simply
created by their environments, as many theorists, both from left and the right
wing, talked about in the first half of the 20th century.
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Here in this paper, I shall be discussing about a contemporary painting of
“Roses for Stalin” (Stalin-era, 1949), painted by Boris Ieremeevich Vladimirski,
that depicts the eventualities of that time, that is an artistic and literary
doctrine of political censorship in the Soviet Union. After Stalin's death the
custom of Socialist Realism opened tremendously and censorship progressively
relaxed all through the following decades, where as censorship in the U.S. had
successively begun to fail in the 1960s, Soviet censorship continued to some
extent strongly. In this case a face of socialist realism is shown. Aleksandr
Gerasimov puts it as a "Realistic in form, Socialist in content." Maxim Gorky
had earlier abridged that Socialist Realism engages theory to portray the
significance of social movement in shaping humans. Socialist Realism is
essentially pollyannaish about life, Gorky explained, and is informed of the
enhancing education role of art, even if portraying information through images,
sounds or text.
Marxism proclaims strikingly a different environmental form from Socialist
Realism; the Mexican Muralists represent capitalist society, and the despotism
of the working class inside it. Both forms of art identify the educational role
of art, and the Mexican Muralists put this into practice by painting enormous
artistic scenes on the nearly all public of buildings in order to reach and
transmit realistically to the largest contingent audience. The stronger addition
the work of art of these Mexican Muralists is portraying not only the importance
of social activity but also making copiously clear the significance of material
conditions, making for a more unsharpened practice of theoretical Marxism, that
is the historical materialism.
As Karl Marx puts it:
"No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there
is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never
appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the
womb of the old society itself. Therefore mankind always sets itself only such
tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, it will always
be found that the tasks itself arises only when the material conditions of its
solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation”. (Karl Marx)
Both forms of art see the futurity as full of expectation and optimism; however,
they contrast in their perspective on the present.
While talking about not so contemporary of an art, Picasso had his own special
talent as a painter which would have been his in any century, although the way
he saw and developed painting came out of his particular training and experience
in the 1900s and onwards. His painting would assuredly have looked very
different in 1500 or 1700. But the way Picasso lived as a painter can certainly
be explained in Marxist terms, for he could not have lived like that in 1500 or
1700.
Picasso was, to an extent made possible by an art market. In this context, he
sold his paintings to dealers and collectors all over the world, who highly
regarded his skills, and also his recurrent changes of style, much like the
buyers of the ever-changing lofty fashions in clothes do. However, during the
time from or 1500 - 1700, painters could not bear to do this. Hence, they were
painters, not the romantically autonomous artists of the late centuries. They
were hired directly by buyers, who occasionally paid them by the yard. They
fabricated what patrons desired, and nothing different. They customarily spent
their lives as the true wards of a single employer, or else moved restlessly
from one to another.
Change was though possible, but unsafe and thus was slow. Any artisan, who
depend on just selling in the open market would remain poor and undiscovered,
for that market was very restrained. Just the progress of a broader middle class
in the 19th century West, in the course of industrialization, produced a buying
market that was big and anonymous enough to buy art in the marketplace. At that
time only could painters and other intellectual could create first, and sell
only subsequently, thereby making the concept of art and artist possible.
In truth, the independence of 'the artist' has all the time been an awl of a
myth. In this riddle, even Picasso had his important patrons, whom he sought to
please, and so did all his successors. But economic, not just cultural,
historians can explain the essence of truth to it. Picasso could be so creative,
so frequently, as people who not ever met him, and lived thousands of miles
away, could buy his paintings. Leonardo, Titian or Van Dyck could never have
thought of this, and painted otherwise as a result.
References
Marx, Karl, “The German Ideology”, Chapter I: Idealism and Materialism.
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