The artists in authoritarian and totalitarian regimes

Résumé du document

Art has always provided an outlet to express feelings, creation or freedom, to denounce abuses, to throw light on human nature or natural phenomenon. That's why most of the time it gets controversial because it always implies subjective judgments and critical opinions. If we take the example of authoritarian regimes (which are regimes that reduce freedom by imposing censorship and killing the opponents), we will notice that some artists had been won over to the dictatorship through the propaganda that brings indoctrination. We analyze the effects of art and the expression of feelings that created positive and negative feedback from the society in this document.

Extraits

[...] Both features are shown in the Life of the Others; Dreyman embodies the intellectual man who sees his fellow-artists being banned from practising because of their opinions and who decided to struggle against this pressure by his talent. But the question of freedom for the artists is still current in the world, we can think about Roberto Saviano who has been threatened by the Camorra who imposed a kind of terror, for writing a book which denounced their cruelty or about Salman Rushdie whom Islamist governments punished to death sentence for criticizing the Koran. [...]

[...] In this sense, we understand that creativity was narrowed during those regimes. Some artists based their career on this specific art that worshiped the dictator as the well-known Soviet realism which showed dedicated workers or which is devoted to the Head of the State. (We can think of the portraits of Stalin which exhibited him as a loving But even in regimes that were not supposed to be authoritarian benefited from this art; the Eastern communist Germany, as it is shown in Life of the Others” in which Dreyman writes plays about the relationship between united workers. [...]

[...] The painters and sculptors developed propaganda through advertisings and exhibition of the greatness of their leader. But artists also could be dangerous for a totalitarian regime since they have a very specific vision of the world and open-mindedness. In this sense, they can feel when their creativity is being reduced. That's why they can contradict the State through their art in which are exposed their inner thoughts and feelings. Furthermore, art was the most subtle way to denounce the regime since it is easy to avoid censorship if opinions are hidden behind creativity and beauty. [...]

[...] That's also why they were a target for the political police who urged everyone who might disagree with the State. Thus, some other artists sacrificed themselves to gain back freedom by exposing their ideas through their talent even though they were hunted up and persecuted. Books were the most discreet way to spread information about the situation they underwent. Thus, two reactions are noticeable in artists' behaviours during authoritarian regimes; on one hand, some try to follow the State's will which provided them the right to practise their art more easily and in a glorifying way. [...]

[...] Indeed, we can wonder how artists side with the government or with the resistance and how their work can be a glorification of the regime or a hidden denunciation. To answer more thoroughly this question, we will divide the artists by their opinions towards the government by analysing their way of promoting or questioning the state. First of all, we should remember that art has always been a way to glorify freedom, imagination and creativity but also it has always been something ordered; in fact, the patrons of the arts asked for a work that would illustrate their power, their ownership We can think of the portraits of Napoleon painted by David or the Versailles Castle, ordered by Louis the XIVth to embody his greatness whose main architect was Le Vau. [...]