course

2. Module 5
Art Creates
Synergy and
Change

4. Art influences society by changing opinions, by creating new
narratives and by facilitating how people understand themselves and
each other. Art is often a vehicle for social change.
Artists have changed society throughout history. The power of art has
been understood since the dawn of humanity. The images in the caves
are as powerful today as they were when they were painted.
Art is a universal language that crosses cultural barriers and gives
people an understanding of other cultures and improves their
understanding of one another. All societies and the cultures have
been shaped by art, because it engages people emotionally.
Only art preserves how it felt to exist in a particular place at a
particular time. This is a unique ability of art, is what gives it its
transformational power.

5. Theodore Gericault, The Raft of
the Medusa, 1818-1819. Oil on
canvas. 13.75 × 23.5 feet. Louvre
Museum, Paris
THEODORE GERICAULT
Géricault’s painting The Raft of the Medusa
was hung at the Salon in Paris in 1819,
originally under the title of Shipwreck Scene.
The visitors quickly recognised its reference,
the wreck of the French frigate Medusa off
the coast of Senegal in 1816, with over 150
soldiers on board.
The critics were divided but it had a great
impact on the public, becomig the most
discussed artwork of that year.
In this painting Gericault not only exposed
the corruption that led to this catastrophe,
he also depicted ordinary people struggling
to survive in extraordinary circumstances.

6. The shipwreck had scandalous political
implications in France. The incompetent
captain, who had not sailed for over
twenty years, and who had gained the
position through his connections, ran
aground on a sand bank off the coast of
Senegal on July 2, 1816.
He saved himself and senior officers
while leaving the lower ranks to fend for
themselves. On 5 July 1816, about 150
people were set adrift on a quickly made
raft. Only 15 survived the 13 days ordeal
before they were rescued.
Those who survived endured starvation
and dehydration and were forced by
circumstances to practice cannibalism.
Theodore Gericault, The Raft of the
Medusa, 1818-1819. Oil on canvas.
Detail from the lower left corner of the
canvas showing two dying figures

7. Géricault’s artwork depicting the raft
and the people on it, was greeted
with hostility by the government
because it was an international
scandal.
The painting was included in the
1819 Salon, an annual exhibition of
contemporary French art at the
Louvre. It was awarded a gold
medal, but it was not purchased for
the Louvre as it was customary.
The work’s macabre realistic
portrayal of the dead and dying
addressed a contemporary subject
with remarkable conviction.
Cannibalism on the Raft of the Medusa,
mixed media on paper, 11.5 × 15.5 in,
Louvre. This study is darker than the final
work, and the positions of the figures differ
from those of the later painting.

8. Jean Jérôme Baugean - An Illustration of the French
frigate Méduse, 1810 - Image via wikimedia.org
The Méduse was a 40-gun
Pallas-class frigate of the
French Navy, launched in
1810. The ship took part in
the Napoleonic wars.
The story of the wreck and
gericaul’t painting of the
raft stirred considerable
public emotion., making it
one of the most infamous
ship wrecks in the history
of sailing.
After the wreck, French
society was in an uproar
over the royal appointment
that led to French frigate
Medusa's demise.

9. The Raft of the Medusa depicts
an event whose human and
political aspects greatly
interested Géricault: The
painter researched the story in
detail and made numerous
sketches.
The Death of Marat by
Jacques-Louis David had an
enormous political impact
during the time of the
revolution in France, and it
influenced Géricault's decision
to also paint a current event.
Théodore Géricault - The Raft of the Medusa,
1818-19, on view in Louvre – Image
savagemythology.com.
This image shows the over-life-size painting

10. Jacques Louis David. The
Death of Marat, 1793,
JAQUES LOUIS DAVID
The painting The Death of Marat, 1793, by
French artist Jacques Louis David, could be
considered the first truly political artwork.
The artists depicted the aftermath of
revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat’s murder,
who was stabbed in his bathtub.
Jean-Paul Marat was a French journalist and
politician during the French Revolution. He
widely published his views. He was renowned
for his advocacy of basic human rights.
Marat was assassinated by Charlotte Corday, a
Girondin sympathizer, while taking a medicinal
bath for his debilitating skin condition.

11. Marat became a revolutionary martyr.
David took a political moment, Marat’s
assassination, and painted it with near-
photographic precision.
The painting of Marat’s death became an
important piece of political propaganda.
The painting was reproduced as an
engraving which was widely circulated
among the public.
The most famous painter in Paris,
Jacques-Louis David, immortalized Marat
in The Death of Marat. Both, David and
Marat were part of the Paris Commune
leadership.
Joseph Boze,
Jean-Paul Marat, 1793

12. DADAISM
Dada, and Dadaism, was an anti-war movement
in Europe and New York. It was an artistic revolt
and protest against traditional beliefs of a pro-
war society.
In 1916 Europe was two years into an
apocalyptic war. That same year, Hugo Ball and
his companion Emmy Hennings, opened Cabaret
Voltaire, an artistic nightclub in Zürich,
Switzerland. Other founding members were
Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco, Richard
Huelsenbeck, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Jean
Arp. Its leaders would soon be joined by groups
all over Europe and New York, who shared their
contempt for the war, death, and destruction.
Man Ray, Dada Group
Bruce Silverstein Gallery

13. The Dada artists were also profoundly
disillusioned with traditional modes of art
making, therefore they often turned to
experimentations with chance and
spontaneity.
Dada essentially declared war against war,
criticizing the establishment’s descent into
chaos. And of course, art takes the form
of protest, when addressing political and
social issues. Hannah Hoch’s collage
epitomizes the Dada attitude towards war:
that it is chaos.
Hannah Hoch - Cut with the Kitchen Knife
Through the First Epoch of the Weimar Beer-
Belly Culture, 1919, collage.

14. Dada was a world view, a philosophy, adopted by a
loose international network of artists aiming to create
alternative visions of the world opposed to the
destructive world they lived in at the time. The artists
affiliated with Dada did not share a common style or
approach.
Though the cabaret was to be the birthplace of the
Dadaist movement, it featured avant-garde artists,
including Marinetti, the founder of Futurism. The
cabaret exhibited also Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee,
Giorgio de Chirico, and Max Ernst.
The New York Dada art movement arose almost
independently. The New York counterpart tended to be
more whimsical and less about the violence that was
happening overseas.
Hugo Ball performing at
Cabaret Voltaire in 1916

15. Jean Arp explored the art of collage and the potential
for randomness in its creation. Profoundly affected
by the trauma of modern warfare, Arp and his fellow
Dadaists held reason and rationality responsible for
World War I, which they expressed by employing
new, antirational aesthetic strategies, including the
use of chance.
Arp made a series of collages according to the laws
of chance by tearing paper into pieces, letting them
fall to the floor, and pasting each scrap where it
happened to land. He ceded control to the
randomness of chance as a way of accepting what
was happening in the world during WWI.
Jean (Hans) Arp. Untitled (Collage with Squares Arranged according to the Laws
of Chance), 1917. Torn-and-pasted paper and colored paper on colored paper, 19
1/8 x 13 5/8"

16. One of the most influential Dada
practices, one that continues to this day,
was the invention of mixed media
installations. This began with the First
International Dada Fair in 1920, which
featured an assortment of paintings,
posters, photographs, and two- and three-
dimensional mixed media art.
Dada, and Dadaism, was a means of
exploring the role that art, and the artist,
played in a society that was undergoing a
seismic shift.
Before Dada fine art was struggling with
technological change.
First International Dada Fair, Galerie
Otto Burchard, Berlin, 1920
(Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz,
Berlin)

17. New York groups and Paris Dada was less
overtly political than Dada in Germany. The
group’s performances, photographs, mixed
media collage, and installations emphasized
the absurd and challenged social norms.
These interests, combined with imagery
that reflects psychological states, led many
of the Paris Dada group to join the
Surrealists.
Raoul Hausmann, A Bourgeois Precision
Brain Incites a World Movement, also
known as Dada siegt (Dada Triumphs),
1920, photomontage and collage with
watercolor on paper, 33.5 x 27.5 cm (private
collection)

18. PABLO PICASSO
He was the most influential artist of the first
half of the 20th century, for co-founding the
Cubist movement and the co-invention of
collage, and for the wide range of styles that
he explored.
Picasso was born in southern Spain.
Although he lived most of his adult life in
France, he remained a Spaniard.
Although Picasso was living in France at the
outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, he
was deeply affected by it.

19. Picasso had been a quiet supporter of the Republicans, but he did not
insert his political views into his art. After the start of the civil war, the
artist created a series of powerful satirical pieces, such as Dream and
Lie of Franco, (I and II) to support the Republicans. To further support
to the Republicans, the artwork was made to be printed and sold in
postcard format as propaganda.
Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica is one of the best-known works of
social commentary art of all time. The painting brought to light the
brutality and absurdity of war in a way that has always provoked
powerful reactions. The scene is based on a journalist’s first-hand
account of the bombing of Guernica by Fascist troops, which took
place during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s.
The way it was painted created a powerful image of the horrors of war.
The painting allowed its content to cross cultural and linguistic
divides. The painting is a message to a world-widel audience — the
first artwork intended as a global appeal for peace.

20. Guernica in ruins, 1937, photograph
(German Federal Archives, bild 183-H25224)
In 1936, a civil war erupted in Spain
between the democratic Republican
government and fascist forces, led
by General Francisco Franco, who
attempted to overthrow them.
Twenty five bombers dropped
100,000 pounds of explosive and
incendiary bombs on the village for
more than three hours.
Twenty more fighter planes killed
civilians trying to flee.

21. Fires burned for three days.
Seventy percent of the city was
destroyed. A third of the
population were wounded or
killed.
The attack outraged the world
because it involved the bombing
of civilians by a military air force.
Guernica is an "appalling drama
of a great people abandoned to
the tyrants of the Dark Ages . . .All
the world can see, can
understand, this immense
Spanish tragedy." (Amedé
Ozenfant)
Guernica in ruins, 1937,
photograph AP.

22. In 1936, the newly elected Spanish Republican
government asked Picasso to paint an artwork
for the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 Paris
World’s Fair. The theme of the Exposition was a
celebration of modern technology.
Picasso painted Guernica, an overtly political
painting. The painting depicts the events of April
27, 1937, when Hitler’s German air force, acting
in support of Franco, bombed the village of
Guernica in northern Spain.
The city had no strategic military value. This was
the first time in history an aerial bombing of a
civilian population was carried out.
The Spanish Pavilion at the Paris International
World’s Fair, 1937.

23. Picasso said the painting
was simply an appeal to
people about massacred
people and animals. ”In the
panel on which I am
working, which I call
Guernica, I clearly express
my abhorrence of the
military caste which has
sunk Spain into an ocean of
pain and death.”
The Spanish Pavilion at the
Paris International World’s
Fair, 1937.

24. Pablo Picasso, Guernica, 1937, oil on canvas, 11 x 25 feet. Museo Reina Sofia,
Madrid, Spain.

25. Guernica, which Picasso painted in 1937,
is an expression of his outrage against
war and his most political work. The
artist decided on a stark monochromatic
palette of gray, black and white which
may be a reference to the original
newspaper reports and photographs in
black and white. The compositions has a
dramatic intensity, and a visual kinetic
energy of jagged movement.
Millions of visitors at the Paris World’s
Fair have seen it. The painting has since
become the twentieth century’s most
iconic representation of destruction and
war. Picasso painting Guernica; photo by
Dora Maar

26. Pablo Picasso, The Horse in its new
position, after revisions. 1937
The painting is a complex work with
layers of antiwar symbolism as a
protest against the fascist coup led
by General Francisco Franco.
No artwork has become as important
a symbol of anti-war movements as
Guernica.
From the late 1940s through the ’60s,
Picasso’s creative energy never
waned. Living in the south of France,
he continued to paint, make
ceramics, and experiment with
printmaking.

27. THE PHOTOGRAPHY
PROJECT
The Resettlement Administration (RA) was
a federal agency created May 1, 1935, as
part of the New Deal. The agency, planned
by the federal government, included the
relocation of struggling urban and rural
families to specifically created
communities.
The Resettlement Administration also
funded projects recording aspects of its
work, including, The Film Project, The
Photography Project, and the Sidney
Robertson Cowell's recordings of folk
songs.
Dorothea Lange.
Abandoned farm north of Dalhart,
Texas. 1938.
Credits: Dorothea Lange; The Library
of Congress, Prints & Photographs
Division

28. The Farm Security Administration
(FSA) succeeded the Resettlement
Administration in 1937.
The Resettlement Administration
(RA) and The Farm Security Agency
(FSA) hired photographers for The
Photography Project to document the
rural poverty of the Great
Depression. Both RA and FSA are
well known for the influence of their
photography program which ran
between 1935 and 1944.
Dorothea Lange, Eighteen-year-old
mother from Oklahoma, now a California
migrant, 1937. Gelatin silver print. Library
of Congress

29. DOROTHEA LANGE
The Farm Security Agency (FSA) used the
pictures as a powerful tool to show the
problems the nation was facing, and what the
government was doing about them.
Over the course of seven years a talented
group of photographers, including Walker
Evans, Russell Lee, Marion Post Walcott, John
Vachon, and Dorothea Lange, took more than
200,000 images.
Dorothea Lange, one of the photographers
hired to document the plight of poor farmers,
contributed to humanizing the consequences
of the Great Depression.
Lange in 1936 holding a Graflex
4×5 camera atop a Ford Model 40
in California, photographed by
her assistant Rondal Partridge.

30. Dorothea Lange, White Angel Breadline,
1933, printed ca. 1950. Gelatin silver print
Early in her career, Lange established a
portrait studio. Her work mostly involved
photographing the social elite in San
Francisco.
At the start of the Great Depression Lange
changed her focus and started to
photograph struggling people.
White Angel Breadline is one of the first
photographs outside of her studio. The
photograph depicts a group of men lined up
outside White Angel Jungle food bank,
familiar scene during the Great Depression.
During the decade of the 1930s about
300,000 impoverished people moved to
California.

31. Lange documented the lives of many
displaced people and the social and
economic upheaval of the
Depression in powerful images.
Lange became the best known
documentary photographer of the
era.
Dorothea Lange. On U.S. 99. Near
Browley, Imperial County. Homeless
mother and youngest child of seven
walikng the highway from Phoenix,
where they picked cotton. Bound for
San Diego, where the father hope to
get on relief “because he once lived
there”. November 1939. Gelatin silver
print.

32. Dorothea Lange. Oklahoma mother of five
children, now picking cotton in California, near
Fresno. November 1936. Gelatin silver print.
Lange’s photographs did more
than any other media to
humanize the cost of the Great
Depression.
She documented the suffering
and uncertainty of the
economic hardships, and she
captured the hopelessness in
people’s empty stares.
The people in her photographs
are on the move which looks
more as if they are trying to
escape. Their old vehicles look
as if they are themselves on the
verge of collapse.

33. Dorothea Lange. During the cotton
strike, the father, a cotton picker,
has left his wife and child in the car
while he applies to the Farm
Security Administration for an
emergency food grant. Shafter,
California 1938. Gelatin silver print.
Library of Congress.
The documentation of the extreme
poverty helped raise awareness
about the disastrous living
conditions the migrant families lived
in during the Depression.
The program also employed out-of-
work writers and photographers.

34. By 1932, things deteriorated further
and many American men lost their
jobs and were unable to find
employment.
In addition to the economic
devastation brought on by the
Recession, in 1934 the Great Plains
were experiencing severe droughts
and dust storms.
Repeated windstorms created huge
clouds of dust, killing livestock, and
destroying crops. These poor
conditions drove an estimated 60
percent of families out of the Midwest,
that became known as the Dust Bowl.
Dorothea Lange, Mother and child of
flood refugee family, near Memphis.
Gelatin silver print. Library of Congress.

35. Farmers created the
environmental disaster by
cutting large swaths of forest to
plant. Inclement weather and
huge wildfires made the land
even less yielding.
By 1940 well over two million
people had left the Midwest,
nearly 10 percent of them moved
permanently to California.
Russell Lee. Government sign promoting land
terracing to prevent erosion. Taylor, Texas.
April 1939. Gelatin silver print. Credits: Russell
Lee; The Library of Congress, Prints &
Photographs Division

36. Dorothea Lange. Mother and
children on the road, Tulelake,
Siskyyou County, California. 1939.
Gelatin silver print.
During the Depression it was
common to for families to put their
possessions piled up high in their
vehicles. As they drove, sometimes
the cars broke or ran out of gas,
and they would be stuck on the
side of the road. Some were stuck
for a hours. Other were stuck for
days if their vehicles broke beyond
repair or they didn’t have money
for gas. Some ended up living on
the side of the road for weeks.

37. Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, Nipomo,
California, 1936. Gelatin silver print, 11 1/8 x
8 9/16 in.
“I saw and approached the hungry and
desperate mother in the sparse lean-to
tent, as if drawn by a magnet,” Lange later
wrote.
Lange, an experienced portraitist, believed
that one could understand the plight of
migrants by getting closer through tightly
framed images of children and the
mothers, whose faces are showing worry
and resignation.

38. © Keith Haring Foundation Photo
by Tseng Kwong Chi | © Muna
Tseng Dance Projects, Inc., New
York
KEITH HARING AND
THE AIDS EPIDEMIC
Haring completed numerous
public projects in the first half of
the 80’s, a time a new illness
began spreading among the gay
community in the United States.
Today, we know this illness as
HIV/AIDS, but at the time, there
was very little known about it.

39. Keith Haring’s artworks were displayed in
public places on street corners, and public
buildings, breaking down the barriers
between high and low art.
In the early 1980s Keith Haring created
hundreds of chalk drawings in New York
subway stations. He drew on unused
advertising space, which was covered with
black sheets of paper.
Although Haring was not a graffiti artist he
was fined and arrested many times for
defacing property. The artist’s subway
drawings are a combination of studio and
public art.

40. Keith Haring
embraced the
subway system as
a laboratory for
communication
and engagement.
His work was
exposed to more
people than it
would have been
in a museum, and
to people that
never went to a
museum or gallery.

41. © Keith Haring Foundation Photo by Tseng
Kwong Chi | © Muna Tseng Dance Projects,
Inc., New York
In 1986 Keith Haring opened the Pop Shop in
downtown Manhattan. Haring considered the
Pop Shop as an extension of his work, a fun
store where his art could be accessible to
everyone.
“The use of commercial projects has enabled
me to reach millions of people whom I would
not have reached by remaining an unknown
artist. I assumed, after all, that the point of
making art was to communicate and contribute
to culture.” (Keith Haring)

42. Keith Haring. Stop AIDS, 1989. poster
artwork © Keith Haring Foundation
In mod 1980s, a number of artists and
activists started to speak up, to help
spread awareness about AIDS. Their art
fought stigmatization, and encouraged
more funding for life-saving drugs.
Haring’s artworks are full of energy
generated by fear, anger, or action. They
engage the viewer visually and
conceptually, while some are direct calls
to action.
The artist used his talent to raise
awareness and to affect change.

43. Without words, Haring’s work looks fun and
cheerful. However, the words Ignorance=Fear,
Silence = Death change everything. They
change the whole meaning of the artwork. The
painting confronted people about the stigma
and disease and the need to fight. The words
ad a level of anxiety that pull the viewer in.
By the late 1980s, AIDS was a clear threat to
life in America. The statistics were the reason
people experienced high levels of anxiety.
When Haring created Ignorance = Fear, one
American was being diagnosed with HIV every
minute. Four people were dying of AIDS every
hour. By 1991, 100,000 Americans died of
AIDS.
Ignorance=Fear, Silence=Death,
1989. Poster for ACT UP, 24x43
Keith Haring artwork © Keith
Haring Foundation

44. Haring, among others artists, was able
to raise awareness about AIDS in a way
that led to dramatic changes, including
better public information about the
disease and more funding for treatment.
By the early 1990s, AIDS drugs were
widely available in the US, making it so
that AIDS was no longer a death
sentence.
Their art also challenged people to
question their own discrimination of gay
and lesbian individuals, which has
contributed to the incredible progress
we see today.

45. FIGHT FOR
EQUALITY
The Guerilla Girls are an
anonymous group of artists
that has spent the last thirty
years vocally fighting racism
and sexism in the art world.
They do this bringing the facts
to people’s attention - in this
case that “less than 5% of the
artists in the Modern art section
of the Metropolitan Museum in
New York are women, but 85%
of the nudes are female”. This
poster has become a symbol of
advancing female
representation in art
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
La Grande Odalisque, 1814
Oil on canvas. Louvre, Paris.

46. The group formed in response to the
International Survey of Painting and Sculpture
exhibition held in 1984 at the Museum of
Modern Art, New York.
The exhibition included 169 artists, less than
10% of whom were women. Female artists had
played an important role in American art of the
1970s. But in the early 1980s when artwork
prices rose steeply, women were almost
eliminated from museum and gallery
exhibitions.
In 1985 the Guerrilla Girls began a poster
campaign that targeted museums, dealers,
curators, and critics, to expose the exclusion of
women and non-white artists from mainstream
exhibitions and publications.
The Guerilla Girls

47. BARBARA KRUGER is known for her
combination of type and image that
conveys a cultural critique. Her works
examine stereotypes and consumerism,
layering text over mass-media images.
Her artworks are black-and-white, red
accented, in Futura Bold Oblique font.
Kruger uses language to convey her
ideas. “I'm fascinated with the difference
between supposedly private and
supposedly public and I try to engage the
issue of what it means to live in a society
that's seemingly shock-proof, yet still is
compelled to exercise secrecy,” she
explained of her work.
"Untitled (I shop therefore I am)" by
Barbara Kruger, 1987. Image via Mary
Boone Gallery

48. JENNY HOLZER is an American l
artist whose work focuses on the
delivery of words and ideas in public
spaces.
In the late 1970s, she used about 300
commonly held truths and clichés, she
titled Truisms, printing them on
stickers, T-shirts and posters. Later
Holzer started using electronics.
In the 1980s she was an active member
of Colab, participating in the famous
The Times Square Show. Her goal is to
sharpen people's awareness of the
platitudes they are fed daily.
Jenny Holzer, Truisms, 1984
Metal, light emitting diode units and plastic

49. ART AND TECHNOLOGY
CAN CHANGE THE WORLD
Overt the past several decades artists
increasingly used emerging forms of media
and technology to match the way we
experience the world. They used mass
media, and new technologies to raise
questions and shape our understanding of
the future, as well as the potential of
technology to change the world.
Nam June Paik was born in Seoul, Korea on
20 July 1932. The family fled the Korean
War, travelling first to Hong Kong and then
to Japan. Nam June Paik. Bakelite Robot,
2002. Video, 5 monitors and radios.

50. In 1953 Nam June Paik started his studies in
musicology at the University of Tokyo. He moved to
Germany in 1956 where he continued his studies in
musicology, philosophy and art history in Munich,
Freiberg and Cologne.
Paik worked in the studio of the West German radio
station WDR. There he was exposed to the work of
avant-garde composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen
and Mary Bauermeister.
In 1958 Paik attended the Darmstadt International
Summer School Course for New Music where he
had met John Cage who was experimenting with
audio synthesizers. Later he met in Cologne
Joseph Beuys, and others. These encounters
greatly influenced Paik’s career.
Nam June Paik, Global
Encoder, 1994

51. In 1964 year Paik moved to New York and began
working on projects with the cellist Charlotte
Moorman. They collaborated until Moorman’s
death in 1991.
Technology became one of the primary subjects
of his art, which he regarded as instrumental in
global communication. Paik worked with , laser
artist Horst H. Baumann to create Laser Video
Space in 1982.
As technology continues to shape our future,
many artists today are using technology to
change the world.
Charlotte Moorman performs Nam June Paik's
"TV Cello Wearing TV Glasses" in New York in
1971. (Takahiko Iimura photo)

52. Art has the power to effect real change in the world.
Pablo Picasso once even went so far as to declare, “Painting
is not made to decorate apartments; it is an offensive and
defensive instrument of war against the enemy.”
Some artworks throughout history have revolutionized the
way we think about politics, social issues and even art itself.
From cave paintings to soup cans, these are the paintings
that have had an undeniable, impact on the art world and
beyond.