Art and Propaganda

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This volume focuses on the uses and abuses of art as propaganda in the 20th century, but starts by setting the scene using precedents from the past. It then explores protest art to 1939, including Social Realism and its links with communism and the left wing, Dada, artists' reactions to the Spanish Civil War, culminating in Guernica and Picasso's portrait of Stalin, and the mural movement in Mexico and the US. It discusses propaganda in the communist state - agit'prop and Stalin's Socialist Realism, and in the fascist state, where the ceremonial architecture of Albert Speer rubbed shoulders with the neoclassicism of Sironi, with Teutonic myths of the medieval and a new view of the body as political metaphor. A look at the propaganda of war and the gathering momentum of nationalist art in the post-colonial period leads on to the protest art of recent years, dealing with the Vietnam War, feminism, AIDS and sexuality.