The concept of official art is essential not only by the observation of an exclusive promotion of works which answer the taste of the cultural institutions of a State, but with the analysis of the system set up to promote them.
A history of the bonds between the State and the Art.
Intervention of the State in the world of Article.
The official art, if he “is issued” openly under totalitarian modes , appears more subtly in Démocratie.
When an official art is adopted, devoted, recognized, supported, proposed by the State and, in the more extreme cases, only authorized, it becomes an instrument of Propagande and Idéologie.
This occupation of ground of the artistic scene tends to erase and make invisible the art which does not correspond to the criteria of the official art.
Engagement of the State. cultural Radiation.
Manifestations of the official art in the democracies and its effects.
Art under influence.
Analyzes great historical examples of official art. Relation between the State, the Artist S and the Public , role of the Media. Stakes and means implemented by the State.
Sets of themes
The revision of the history
August 1st
Didactic/allegorical art
August 1st
History
Religions
August 1st- the Church
- the Enquiry
High Antiquity
As of the most moved back times, the Art had as an aim of crowned glorifier. Also is not it astonishing to see developing an official art as of the beginnings of the Histoire, intended to celebrate the divinities, and the men who represent them on Earth, in the first States where the chief always had a religious dignity. The official art was born with the first historical civilizations (Perse, Babylon, Egypt…), often appearing in the form of a colossal and spectacular architecture, whose elements arrived such as they are until our days (Egyptian temples and obelisks for example).
Antiquity gréco-Roman
Generalized in the great empires, the official art is not abandoned in the Greek cities, where the monuments do not celebrate any more the monarch, but the very whole City and its guardian gods. Sometimes, certain works radiate through the whole of Greece, in particular close to the sanctuaries (temple of Apollon to Delphes…), where the men of all the country gather, all quoted confused.
Rome quite naturally will take again the architecture inherited the Greeks on his account, to celebrate its own civilization and its own values (the cities of the Mediterranean basin will cover monuments such as thermal baths, circuses, forums…, built according to the official model).
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Périclès : the radiation of an Athenian imperialism passes by architecture and the sculpture.
The art of the Omeyades
August 1st
The competition enters the European cities
As from the Gothic time , art becomes a stake of competition between the concurrent cities. The local middle-class finances mainly churches and cathedrals with the formats increasingly more extraordinary (because it is necessary that they by far are seen), where the religion is a pretext to prove its financial power. This feature is represented in a caricatural way in the town of Venice or each corporation makes build and decorate richly its church. The artistic competition between the cities perduré a long time in the countries without state like the Italy or the Germany. It is of this middle-class art that was born the statute from artist, since it is at the time Gothic that the works started to be signed nominally (to evaluate the workload, in the case of the craftsmen, but also to assert the paternity of their works in the case of architects).
The reform
The Protestantism, religion often carried by the Middle-class, against the nobility, separates art from the religious pretext. After a few periods of Aniconisme forced by an interpretation of the Bible (periods which will extend to the catholic field, with Jerome Savonarole), the protesting world produced a new art which shows nothing any more but its silent partners (portraits of private individuals), their possessions and their art of living (nature-dead, indoor scenes, landscapes). Under the mask of an art " of the people for the peuple" , protesting art (the Dutch painting of the 17th century, typically) is the very precise assertion of the financial and political capacity of the middle-class.
Louis XIV
François Ier and Louis XIII, in particular, is the initiators of an art of state in France. Attracting the best Italian artists, they cause an important production of buildings, paintings and sculptures, in order to establish the power of the country. The obsession of centralization of Louis XIV will push it with going still further, preceding the practices of great totalitarianisms of the 20th century. Initially, with the imitation of its predecessors, it tries to attract in Paris the large artists of the time, like the Cavalier Bernin and recovers the artists of the entourage of Nicolas Fouquet. During work of modernization of the Louvre and during the construction of the castle and the field of Versailles, he seeks to register his reign in the history in particular by ordering from Charles Le Brun the creation of a “French order” which would be added to the three Greek traditional orders: doric, ionic and Corinthian. The king in addition creates institutions which perdurent today, like the Académie of the Art schools (formerly royal), and which very precisely define the circuit of training of the artists (Prix of Rome, voyage in Italy, etc), but also their sets of themes, drawn from the history and mythology greco-Roman, in particular, in addition to the glorification of the capacity (portraits, scenes of war).
The French revolution and Empire
August 1st
Restoration
Under Charles X, the artists are integrated into a vast program of legitimation of the monarchy, which seeks to point out its seniority by a very important return of the religion but also by the generalization of a “courteous style”, nostalgic of the idealized Middle Ages. Painters like Dominique Ingres and even Eugene Delacroix will let themselves there take a time - it is not for works of this style that they marked the history of Article the time will have had the merit to push with a scientific study of this historical period (Prosper Mérimée, Purple-the-Duke). Notre-Dame de Paris , of Victor Hugo, is also marked by this return of the Middle Ages, but without idealizing it, on the contrary.
The Second Empire
August 1st Defense of the values morals. This tendency is incarnated in works of the painters firemen.
Soviet art
Initially, the Revolution trains many artists known as of avant-garde, like Kasimir Malevitch, Sergei Eisenstein or Dziga Vertov. Enough quickly, the Soviet artists is recadrés by the mode, and is seen imposing an academic work exclusively dedicated to the glorification of the figures of the party and its topics, as testify some for example the monumental sculptures to Vera Moukhina.
Fascism
The fascistic mode wants to be “modern at the same time” and passeist, it will especially try in particular the Futuristes by a taking into account of the media of mass like the radio, the Cartoon and especially the cinema, definitely favoured (it is the golden age of Cinecitta), where is distilled the fascistic ideology: apology for the virile force with " super-héros" as Maciste and Dick Fulminates, nostalgia of the Roman Empire (Péplum S).
Nazism
The Nazi regime is directed by a man who does not hesitate to present himself in Mein Kampf like an artist and who Miss upon the departure of esthetics, announcing in his program which type of art is valid and which type of art is not it, while basing itself on the “common direction” populist (an artist which paints blue grass is a liar…) and on the personal tastes of Hitler, which appreciated Caspar David Friedrich but also Gustav Klimt, two artists however far away from the dogmatic positions from Führer, the first being undoubtedly a precursor of the expressionnism and the second having defended by his work all that the Nazi regime presented like unhealthy: cosmopolitanism, sexual ambiguity, freedom of morals, technical freedom, etc Beside the stigmatization of a degenerated Art, the Nazi regime, under the decisive impulse of Joseph Goebbels, seeks to be surrounded of the best plastics technicians, but those quickly flee the country (like Fritz Lang) or refuse to engage politically (like Leni Riefenstahl, which will carry out two films of order to the glory of the mode but will not engage in the Nazi party), leaving the free field to a quantity of sometimes poor artists to the traditional topics and monumental works whose history especially retained the names of the sculptor Arno Breker and of the architect Albert Speer.
Communist China
China of Mao Zedong glorifie the popular art, opposed to middle-class art, and it is the médiums of the people (posts and cartoon especially) to which are affected the largest artists of the country. The forms middle-class woman such as painting and the sculpture are seen assigning artists without creativity particular to which it is required to flood the country of various allegorical works. In each district, they are popular assemblies which explain to the artists what they must create, offering appearance absurdity of a “democratic” art. At the time of the Cultural revolution, many representatives of the middle-class culture will be persecuted, rehabilitated, even worse.
France with XXe and XXIe centuries
August 1st
Official art and the totalitarian State
Art and capacity
August 1st Instrumentalisation of Article.
Propaganda and Censures
- the Censure
In 1933 east creates a " Room of Culture" which the artists must be registered and take part in the new esthetics of IIIe Reich. In 1937, Hitler inaugurates in Munich an exposure which will be attended by two million visitors, the Gross Deutsche Kunstausstellung 1937. The exposure will still accommodate a million visitors during a three years round in Germany and Austria. Promotion of a German art of eternal value, founded on people, works presented exaltent work, the family, the fatherland and heroism.
" Kubismus, Dadaismus, Futurismus, Impressionismus, Expressionismus, ales völlig wertlos für das deutsche Volk" , Hitler during the inauguration declares: " The Cubism, Dadaism, Impressionism, Expressionnisme are completely without value for the people allemand." The presentation with the public of works of mentally ills and modern painters beside official works of art shown in parallel was to convince the public of the degeneration of the modern art. For " protéger" the minors, the entry with the exposure was prohibited to them. More than 16.000 modern works of art were " dégénérées" in 1937 by a " commission of degenerated Art " , (entartete Kunst) under the presidency of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels and Frick, then destroyed, burned or sold.
Many artists, scientists and writers left Germany and Austria: Paul Klee, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Bertold Brecht and Kurt Weill, Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse.
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Institution, organization, proceeded
- Illustrations
An art under influence
In democracy
August 1st The French example. The place of art in the contemporary world, the statute of the artist, the Institution and his administrative machinery.
Independence and dependence of Art
- artistic creation
- Avant-garde, Modernity, Contemporary art. The paradox.
- Promotion, cultural Radiation.
- the choice of the State
- Polemic on the official art in France.
- cinematographic censure in France and in the United States
Actors
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the statute of the artist
- the Culture and the artists
- cultural Choice of the State
- Communication
- Media
- the Public
- Gone of Art
The pressure of the official art influences the artistic production desired to meet the needs for an international market.
Intervention of the State
Stakes and means
Institution and administrative machinery.The State is before a a whole institution. Composed of Ministry S, directions, of Prefecture S, various delegations and administrations, the State has body of civils servant employed in the administrations of State and the territorial collectivities like in the public corporations.
The areas, the common departments and
The Ministry for the Culture
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Organization, missions and delegations, recommendations, diffusion
- Creations of places, residences of artists, funds, price
- Education artistic and cultural
- Subsidy, order, attribution, artistic 1%, support, incentive with Directive creation
- , missions, diffusion, council, sensitizing
- Visibility of the official art
- Media, relay of information, Internet
- Legibility of the action of the State and the creators in places emblematic
- Place of the artist, condition or profession
- choices of the State, contemporary art, modernity, exclusion
- " Fabrication" of a market of art
Quotations
- The State is our servant and we do not have to be the slaves about it - Albert Einstein, How I see the world
- It is necessary that the Independent ones answer the Official ones. The debate could be elsewhere only in the opposition between these two terms. Especially it would not know to consist of quarrels on the notions of the Beau , the Fini , the Parfait and the Mesuré . Nor on the artisanal virtues that the President of the Republic glorifie of a red ribbon. The debate is between those which seek unceasingly (...) and those which having found the perfection (see it with the Large palace) teaches the receipt of it. This debate, one can slice it of a joke: it there with the Official art, and it there with Art - Rene Iché, Proclamation two arts published in Art schools on May 17th, 1938.
- The State, it is coldest of the cold monsters. He lies coldly and here the lie which crawls of its mouth: " Me, the State, I am the peuple." - Friedrich Nietzsche, Ainsi spoke Zarathoustra
- The poets try to graft with the men of other eyes and to thus transform reality. Also are dangerous elements for the State, since they want to transform. However the State and its devoted servants aspire, them, to only last - Franz Kafka
- I disapprove what you have just said, but I will defend until my death your right to say it - Voltaire (apocryphal book)
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