As a cultural historian, I’m always fascinated by how a nation’s creative spirit shapes an age.  For ARTES Magazine this Spring, I described how Helen Frankenthaler and other Abstract Expressionists created works that captured the cataclysmic potential of America’s Atomic Age. (AH, ‘Fierce Poise,’ ARTES Magazine)  Recently, New York Times critic-at-large Jason Farago has described how the art of Berthe Morisot and other Impressionists reflected France’s transformation into modernity. “The world she observes,” Farago writes, “seems to be dissolving. All that is solid melts into brushstrokes” (Farago, “The Impressionist Art of Seeing and Being Seen,”  NYT, 6/4/21).

This past pandemic year, the rise of the social justice movement has been captured in street art–notably, in the “Black Lives Matter” mural painted along two blocks of Sixteenth Street near the White House.  On June 1, 2020,  police forcibly removed street demonstrators from nearby LaFayette Park and surrounding streets.  People demonstrating against the Memorial Day killing of George Floyd had been protesting peacefully when they were suddenly confronted by mounted police, National Guardsmen in riot gear, and clouds of tear gas. The area was being cleared so that President Trump could be seen standing in front of St. John’s Church for a photo op showing him holding a Bible.

Four days later, Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser declared that two blocks of Sixteenth Street would officially be named ‘Black Lives Matter Plaza’ (right)  and artists with MuralsDC and volunteers painted the new name on the street in giant yellow capital letters. Congressman John Lewis visited the BLM Plaza with Mayor Bowser shortly before he died, and called the street mural a “powerful work of art” that was “very moving, very impressive…a message to the world that WE WILL GET THERE.” Mayor Bowser has said that the street mural will become “a permanent art installation.”

“Picasso completed his mural in three weeks. His fury at the brutality of the raid is clear in his depiction of how people and animals were made to suffer.”

The  BLM mural is much in the spirit of earlier major artist statements capturing disruptive historic moments.  Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica” (1937)  is one of the best-known.  Picasso created his monumental anti-war mural when he was in Paris, where he had been commissioned to paint a mural for the 1937 Paris International Exposition. He reacted with horror at the news of Guernica’s bombing in April 1937: Guernica was a small Basque town that opposed General Francisco Franco’s right-wing Nationalists, and Franco had authorized his Nazi allies to attack the Basques to set an example. Led by Luftwaffe Colonel Wolfram von Richthofen, the Germans used the attack to experiment with carpet bombing raids that targeted civilians and infrastructures. Over 1,000 residents of Guernica were killed in the three-hour-long attack.

Picasso completed his mural—11.5 feet by 25.5 feet–in three weeks. His fury at the brutality of the raid is clear in his depiction of how people and animals were made to suffer—the vast canvas is a horrific nightmare assemblage of gored animals, screaming women, death, flames.  Because Franco remained in power until his death in 1975, “Guernica” would not be exhibited in Spain for decades. From 1939 to 1952, the mural traveled throughout the U.S., followed by various travels for three more decades until 1981, when it finally arrived in Spain—eight years after Picasso’s death. Today, “Guernica” is housed in the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid.

Auguste Rodin’s monumental sculpture ”The Burghers of Calais” is another example of history-captured art. It commemorates a 1347 episode during the Hundred Years’ War between England and France, when the French port Calais surrendered to the English after an eleven-months sierge.  Rodin was inspired by the account of French chronicler Jean Froissart (c.1337-c.1405), who described how English King Edward III (1312-1377) said he would spare the people of Calais if six of the city leaders/burghers would surrender to him. Six volunteered, and he ordered them to be “stripped to their shirts with their heads and feet bare and a cord around their necks.”  He then ordered them to be beheaded—though they would ultimately be saved because Queen Philipa interceded to prevent their deaths.

In 1884, Calais commissioned Rodin to make a commemorative monument to the burghers. But instead of depicting them in glorious nobility as they faced death, Rodin sculpted the six burghers in their intense anguish as each confronted his death in desperate isolation. He argue that instead of falsely glorifying them, he would convey the burghers heroic struggle by showing “how much the body, weakened by the most cruel sufferings, still holds on to life, how much power it still has over the spirit that is consumed with bravery.” (Quoted in Millicent Bell, “Auguste Roden,” RARITAN (1995)).  To art historian John Canaday, “The burghers are living presences; their common humanity is not smothered by their heroism, which makes the heroism all the more impressive” (Canaday, “Rodin,: Mainstreams of Modern Art (1981), 298-300).

Another mural that vividly captures history is Marc Chagall’s highly-personal mosaic “Orphee.”  Chagall stayed with his friends  and patrons Evelyn and John Nef while visiting  Washington in 1968. To thank them for their hospitality, he created a large mosaic (10 by 17 feet) for their Georgetown garden.  He designed the work in his studio in France, and hired Italian craftsman Lino Melano to create it using Murano glass, Carrara marble, and natural-colored stones from Italy.  It was installed in the family’s garden on a 30-foot brick wall, and Chagall came to celebrate its completion in 1971, when he was 84.

The mosaic has ten individual panels mounted on concrete, and features colorful figures loosely drawn from Greek mythology—Orpheus with his lute, the Three Graces, and the winged horse Pegasus.  In the lower left corner, a group of people wait to cross a large body of water. Chagall described this scene as alluding to his own past, when he was smuggled out of Nazi-occupied France. He and his family were living in Marseille and Chagall, absorbed by his work, had remained in Vichy France dangerously long. The American Vice-Consul in Marseille, Hiram Bingham IV, provided forged visas for the Chagalls, and they arrived safely in New York in 1941. While in New York he created important works, including spectacular stage settings and backdrops for the New York Ballet Theatre, and the Museum of Modern Art organized a huge retrospective exhibition of Chagall’s work in 1946. He returned to Europe in 1948,  where he lived on the Cote d’Azur.
The Georgetown owner of Chagall’s “Orphee”, Evelyn Nef, bequeathed the mosaic to the National Gallery upon her death in 2009.  It was installed in the NGA’s Sculpture Garden in 2013.

All of these works—murals, canvas, and sculpture–radiate the intersection of history and art. Most importantly, each conveys a deep optimism that despite discrimination, savagery, and death, art remains–and hope never dies.

By Amy Henderson, Contributing Editor