However, before I begin my search for contemporary artist philanthropists and altogether “do-gooders” and what philanthropy means, this blog will be about their predecessors: Artist who were known for their genius and who witnessed something they believed to be unjust during their time and did something about it. People that I aspire to and will be the backbone in my research of the art-philanthropy romance and hopeful marriage.
The first artist that came to my mind was Francesco Goya. Goya was a Spanish painter and printmaker during the romanticism era. He had the misfortune of being the royal painter in Spain during the Napoleonic regime.
In November 1807, French troupes entered Spain. A year of the French military rule, the Spanish people became resentful and there was an uprising on the second of May 1808. However, by dawn of the next day, hundreds of Spanish civilians were rounded up and shot in order to stop any opposition.
The Third of May, 1814
Even though Goya was not a supporter of the Spanish aristocracy, (other than being employed by them) he quickly became disenchanted by the French and their original ideals, which had been the catalyst for the French Revolution a decade earlier. With Goya’s suggestion, the government of Spain commissioned him to paint something that would depict the horrors that had been inflicted upon the Spanish people. Throughout his career Goya would also print illustrations speaking out against not only the French, but also against the Spanish government and the Spanish Inquisition.
Not long after, a different horrific event occurred regarding a French ship called “The Medusa”. The Medusa set sail with a retired viscount as their captain, who hadn’t sailed for twenty years. He aimed to make good time and pushed the ship to go faster than normal and ran it aground off the West African coast. Being that there were few lifeboats and four hundred passengers, they made a crudely constructed raft and piled 146 people on it. After two weeks of starvation, insanity and cannibalism, a ship finally rescued the survivors. However, out of the 146 people, 15 men had survived.
The Raft of the Medusa, 1818-1819
An artist who was at that time unknown named Theodore Gericault heard about this incident when it arrived to Paris and became an international scandal. Shocked by such a horrific event mainly caused by the concept concept of a hierarchy in class, Gericault commissioned himself, an act rarely done amongst artists, to paint his romanticized version of this event. His larger than life-sized painting was displayed in the famous Paris Salon and established his reputation.
After the genre of Romanticism came Realism with the master artist Gustave Courbet. Although he came from a wealthy family he himself became anti-monarchical and chose to live simply. A subject matter that was of particular interest to him was the conditions of the serfs or working class of that time. Before his time, art was limited to four subject matters: History, portraits, still life and landscape. No one ever dared to paint the lower classes for they were not of interest, nor did the higher classes wish to know the hardships of the poor. To the rich, or more importantly, the patrons, they were perfectly happy to keep things the way they were.
The Stone Breakers, 1850
The Stone Breakers was Courbet’s depiction of the hardships of the serf’s life. This painting could not have been painted during a more opportune time being that only two years before the second French Revolution broke out due to injustices placed upon people just because the station they were born into. Hardships like having jobs of breaking stones to fill potholes in the streets as depicted in this painting.
Skipping ahead nearly one hundred years later and to an artist who was a master of photography and difficulties of the American Great Depression. During this time Migrant workers were trekking down to California for some hope of a job in picking fruit. However they received barely any income to survive. Dorothea Lang was a photographer who captured the consequences of the Depression.
Migrant Mother, 1936
The best way to describe this image is through Dorothea Lang’s own words:
“I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.”
To conclude, these artists and many others like J.M.W. Turner who painted the ugly truths of slavery, Arthur Szyk who painted the horrors of the holocaust, Kathe Kollwitz who did prints and sculptures of the poor and oppressed in Germany and Pablo Picasso who’s famous painting Guernica depicted the oppression of the fascist on the Spanish people, and many others where leaders for artists of today to continue in their footsteps.
