Political Work

There is a story that an officer of the Nazi occupation forces visited Picasso in his studio, where Guernica was hanging. The officer asked, "Did you do that?" to which Picasso replied, "No, you did".

The painting may be one of the most famous examples of political art, and yet stands aloof from the debate on whether art is guilty of glorifying those atrocities that it chooses to depict. We have all seen work that through its intention to 'never forget for a single instant' somehow slides into uncertain ground through its stylization, commercial aspirations, and aesthetic sanctimony. From this discomfort stemmed the question whether art should exist after Auschwitz. We can all be grateful to Hans Enzensberger for the retort that art's continued existence is not a surrender to cynicism. Art must resist such arguments, accepting that its situation is one of paradox. Art can present suffering, but this suffering can not be ignored nor dismissed, Adorno explains in his essay "Commitment". Hegel's consciousness of adversity allows continued growth of the consciousness; in the lecture on Jacob Boehme, Hegel quotes him as saying: "without adversity life would have no sensibility nor will nor efficacy, neither understanding nor science".

The problem with work that only presents the suffering is that it makes no motion. Kant insisted that art could not have an end. A work of art that only presents the artist's particular notion of horror does not acknowledge the other quality of art, which is that its very expression points to life in all its available fullness. It is therefore an ineffective work of art, even if an effective work of political dismay, or at worst propaganda.

Picasso's work succeeds–as let us face it, does most of his work because the man was after all a bloody genius–by depicting the atrocities of fascism while also presenting the freedom that art permits. He was neither shy of his political outrage nor the possibility his work offered beyond that limited scope.