Warrington Colescott’s “The Hunt: First Dawn Stake Out,“ 1981.
One of the latest exhibits to open at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art was planned long before Donald Trump became president. But according to senior curator Richard H. Axsom, Taking Sides: Social Critique in Modern and Contemporary Art has become “more and more timely because of the threat to the press now.”
“That kind of free speech — the freedom of the press, where you’re able to assemble publicly and ask for the government to address your grievances? That’s this show,” says Axsom.
“This is a show that champions political protest. It is a First Amendment show in all of its complexities.”
Starting with art from the 1700s and going up to the modern day, the new exhibit is as fresh as the latest editorial cartoon.
The show, which runs through Oct. 15, includes pieces by superstar Andy Warhol and whimsical Wisconsin living treasure Warrington Colescott, as well as the UW’s regionalist John Steuart Curry, who was, in the 1930s and ’40s, the first artist in residence at any college or university anywhere.
Axsom, a nationally recognized arts historian and writer, and professor emeritus of art history at the University of Michigan, points out a quotation on the wall from author Salman Rushdie, which inspired the exhibit’s title: “A poet’s work is to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it from going to sleep.”
The earliest featured works date from the Enlightenment. In the 1750s, William Hogarth pioneered graphic commentary in England, setting the modern model for countless cartoonists and illustrators since. His quartet of engravings illustrating “Four Stages of Cruelty” are pointed and uncharacteristically bold for the artist, though they retain his eye for deep perspective and grayscale.
In the 1860s Honoré-Victorin Daumier took on the imperialism of his home country, France. A caricaturist, seven of his lithograph vignettes range from “Project for a Statue of Peace” to “The Disasters of War.”
In Spain, Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes’ harsh satires of Napoleonic war predate those of Daumier by 50 years but, because of their outrageous nature, were circulated only privately. Four elegantly etched examples drawn from Goya’s “Disasters of War” series are included in the exhibit. Their lurid subjects combine with the artist’s trademark style to shock, even in 2017. At times they suggest “Guernica,” created in 1937 by his celebrated countryman, Pablo Picasso.
“Don’t think that Picasso wasn’t totally conversant in Goya’s prints,” notes Axsom, who says he felt it was important to bring together Goya, Daumier and Hogarth for the show. “Not only is it a natural gathering of pioneers in political critique, but the backstory here historically lands us in three different countries in Europe, each of which has a different relationship with the press.”
The master trio’s prints were borrowed from the Chazen Museum of Art. Most of Taking Sides, however, is drawn from MMoCA’s permanent collection.
The work of early modern artist Käthe Kollwitz displays powerful and flawless composition, particularly in her “Peasant War” series. Axsom calls Kollwitz, a German printmaker/etcher who emerged in the 1890s, “one of the great artists of political activism, pointing out the weaknesses of the social fabric that leads to oppression.”
Curry’s 1938 “Progressive Party Rally” is just plain creepy. It’s a candy-colored tribute to Progressives’ horrible misstep, when they not only acknowledged the power of Nazi symbolism but purposefully mimicked it.
Looming large is Andy Warhol, ever re-creating pop culture, and parodied in Taking Sides by the activist feminist artist collective, Guerilla Girls. Warhol is also represented in the exhibit by his 1982 “1” portfolio. Variations on a theme, the collected images work together to create wonder, but individually are blunt.
Axsom points out that people in the United States should be aware of the fragility of freedom of expression here. “I think there are 127 countries in the world,” he says. “Only 30 have a free press. And of those that have a free press, the United States is not in the top rank. My eyes were opened by that. The freest presses in the West are in Scandinavia.”