Facebook Note to A Professor Dragging Reluctant Poli Sci Students to a Picasso Show.

As a painter who left politics, I have rarely done overtly political subject matter-  but I would argue that human experience cannot be understood without a social class of artists- living artists, mind you- working at the limits of the human capacity to understand and perceive what it is.

There is a reason that extreme religious cultures often discourage or ban art, and that China has both an explosion of contemporary art and a strong suppression of political paintings. (I've been fascinated that Middle East universities hire oodles of Graphic Design professors but rarely, if ever, Art professors.)

Goya's etchings of the horrors of the Napoleonic wars in Spain were censored until Franco died.

Picasso had a small sculpture- a brass skull, stylized, squashed. The weight of the whole room bears down on it. It is a poetic indictment of fascism, more timeless about any brutality than Guernica. (Fascinating too that the Nazis didn't touch him in Paris.) The only problem with Picasso is the warm fuzzy haze around him - it's too easy to see him in safe, romantic haze.

I would also direct your students to the (late) Leon Golub, Cindy Sherman, Anselm Kiefer, contemporary artists exploring directly contemporary experience with the understanding that this moment is also part of a timeless historical moment. Golub takes on the raw horror of torture with an unsettling combination of ugliness and formal beauty. Sherman puts herself inside cultural constructs of gender.  Kiefer remakes in massive paintings the very ground of the Holocaust, plowing a field of rebirth.

Art, like religion, and sometimes instead of it, is a powerful cultural tool that develops what human values are.

"It is as though he responds to the observation that what we see is not real with the further observation that something solid lies beneath our sensations."  (Your comment on Picasso) is a key part of your argument, and lies exactly at the point where language fails to describe experience and Art must begin.

I intend to introduce the feeling of scale in war to propogate and explore my political values.  But I emphasize that it is in the physical creation of the forms and illusions that I begin to understand not only the history, but my own (expression.)