I wanted to write about Occupy Wall Street  (OWS) and what it means for painters, but before I jump in I thought I would lay some groundwork. The point I would like to make is that art and politics are always intertwined and to be a free artist one must be aware of political and economic forces that might impinge on one’s freedom. But let me come at this subject from a different angle.

Long before the internet got going, it was all the rage for young single men like myself (at the time) to try out the “personal ads.” Pithy, cryptic ads about how wonderful I was. Whoopi! What a challenge!!

I eventually had a response. I called the number and the following conversation ensued: “So what do you do?” “I’m an artist, a painter.” Five minutes later. “So what do you do?” “I’m a painter, an artist.” Minutes more go by. “So what do you really do?”  Sensing that it might be the time to be ruthlessly brutal, I put it right out there, “I’M AN ARTIST!” “Well,” said my prospective date, “I’m thinking of having children, so this is not going to work.” I wanted to tell her that the sperm bank was down the street but decided against adding insult to injury.

The concept of what an artist is has really taken a tumble. I attribute it mostly to the Abstract Expressionists. Well, maybe not to them exactly, but to the people who engineered that movement. It used to be that artists were thought of as worldly. It used to be expected that an artist would take positions on various international events. Think Picasso, unveiling his Guernica at the 1937 World’s Fair. Art movements, rooted in the politics of both the left and right, were steeped in systemic critiques, generally urged social responsibility and advanced prescriptions of the good life. With the construction of Abstract Expressionism, however (in part by means of an insistence on abstraction and thus the elimination of any link to the social-aesthetic art movements of Europe), the tie between art and social activism was severed. Accordingly, many American painters like Adolph Gottlieb, to mention one well-known painter, urged a depoliticized “middle road” (making reference to Arthur Schlesinger’s concept of the period, the “vital center”). American art critic Harold Rosenberg celebrated the “liberation from Value – political, esthetic, moral…The lone artist did not want the world to be different, he wanted his canvas to be a world.”[1] And quick as wink, a number of ambitious artists, on their way to becoming big time (Adolph Gottlieb, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock for example), abandoned representative painting altogether and jumped aboard the abstract bandwagon. Funny how that happens.[2]

So what does this have to do with my personal ad and the OWS? Quite a bit. The need for artists to divorce themselves from social activism, if they were serious about a career, meant that in post-WWII America there would be no fundamental critique of ruling classes coming from the visual art world, no sense that a powerful few run the show, no inveighing against Salon type monopolies, or aristocracies, or bankers or international corporations. There would be no Diego Rivera’s pointing to the dignity of the worker. This was an enormous achievement by America’s ruling class especially as Abstract Expressionism was part and parcel of a burgeoning American empire. In the context of the cold war, there would be no critiques of capitalism (virtually no one would know what it was), just a celebration of individual freedom.

As politics was pushed off stage, psychology was brought in front and center. Good-bye outer landscape. Hello inner landscape. Gone too was the studio of social interaction. Artists were now, especially the good ones, thought of as terribly troubled, inhabiting isolated studios, working through inner conflicts, expressing angst, the indelible sine qua non of true artistry. Jackson Pollock, drunk out of his mind, pissing into fireplaces at dinner parties in the Hamptons? Sheer genius. Bingo. There it is. You have to give that woman on the phone some credit. After all, would you want your daughter to date an artist? Never mind poor. She probably saw herself careening down a highway with an artistic drunk. An early end. No childbirth. Nothing.[3]

French artists of the late 19^th century were also supposed to make the French ruling class look good, to make the terrible inequality of that period not only appear as natural, but as moral, as in a moral order. Many artists, including the Impressionists, refused to play along. They were part of a larger democratic uprising. They felt that only institutional change could ensure their freedom. And so they devised a way to control the exhibition of their work and their aesthetic as well. And here’s the key point: absent a rich understanding of politics, the various critiques that were in the air, and visions of alternative ways of living their lives, both practiced and imagined, they never would have been able to make the contribution that they did. And without the larger social movement and the institutional change it fostered, artists such as Monet, no doubt, would have kept painting. But I doubt very much that Monet would have ever become the Monet he was most.

Note how Monet recalled the experience of participating in prolonged conversations often organized by Manet over the years in cafés with fellow artists, writers, and political activists.

From the first meeting, he invited me to join him every evening in a café of the ‘Batignolles’ where he and his friends would gather to talk at the end of a day spent at their studios. I would meet there Fantin-Latour and Cézanne, Degas – who arrived shortly afterwards from Italy, the art critic Duranty, Emile Zola who was just starting off in the literary world, and a number of others. I would take Sisley, Bazille and Renoir. There was nothing more interesting than these discussions with their perpetual differences of opinion. Our minds and souls were stimulated. We would encourage each other to make unbiased and sincere researches. We would nourish each other with enthusiasm, which had the power to sustain us for weeks on end, until we were able to give definite form to the idea. One would always leave all the better immersed, the will stronger, our thinking more defined and clear.

My teacher’s teacher, Robert Brackman, also expressed gratitude for an immersion into competing political viewpoints. Brackman, when he arrived as an immigrant in New York City early in the 20^th century, studied with both Robert Henri and George Bellows at the Modern School, which was organized by the well-known anarchist Emma Goldman. Noted Brackman:

Henri was a wonderful teacher. He talked about literature, philosophy, and religion as well as art. I also heard Emma Goldman lecture on economics. I used to study everything there. That’s where I got all my education. It made a big impression on me. It made me think.[4]

The separation of the teaching of painting from discussions of politics or literature or philosophy or whatever is entirely artificial and, I would add, harmful to the growth of anyone seeking truly free expression. In order to teach art, one has to be free to move seamlessly across disciplinary boundaries.  In order to make art, one has to be free to “let go of many common and overestimated things” (Henri) such as stale, grade school, thread-bare justifications of power and privilege that also have the effect of limiting what art we make and how we make it.

One last thought: my very first teaching job (in political science) was at Clark University in 1982. I had been assigned a course on American government. However, at the same time I was also involved in a group that was organizing against US intervention in El Salvador. A brilliant new documentary on El Salvador had just come out and in those days such films, wound on big metal reels, were often distributed by activists. I wanted my class to see the film, but because it wasn’t directly related to the subject I was teaching, I felt that I would have to sneak the film into class and make sure that department heads wouldn’t notice. On the chosen day, I purposely walked to my class via a long and circuitous back way, with the big reel half hidden under my coat. But as fate would have it, I ran smack dab into the Chair of the Government Department, one Cynthia Enloe. “What do you have there, Jerry?” I gulped. “It’s a film on El Salvador,” I sheepishly responded. In a rather sweeping movement of her hand, effecting a grand gesture, she said, “Ah…it’s all related.” And with that she was off.

So you see. It’s all related. How else can you possibly connect the dots?

Smart woman, that Cynthia.