Political Art – from Banksy to Weimar

A reliable source, who happens to be representing him, now informs me that Banksy is to be prosecuted over his RCJ mural. This form of artistic censorship, leads me to consider the important role that art has played in terms of political commentary, and how some of the masterpieces in this genre resonate with contemporary events.

Many of the atrocities of our time are today hidden from view, as computer game technology permits de-humanised genocide. War reporters are often banned from reporting on the ground, or if they do they are generally ’embedded,’ as tools of propaganda. There is no Robert Capa or Don McCullen visible in this age. As a result, death and barbarism are remote, with disinformation omnipresent. Thus we rely on an artist such as Banksy to redress the imbalance, and provoke a moral response.

Today we can, at best, only partially bear witness to our reality. The news media offers up a version akin to a flame throwing shadows on the wall of a cave. Previously art engaged more closely with politics, but today few artists speak to our time.

Many great artists throughout history have of course remained non-political and focused on the human condition. Moreover, political art often veers into dogmatism – recall socialist realism or Italian fascist art. One must carefully distinguish art from propaganda. Satire and caricature walk an uneasy path in this respect.

The origins of European art lie in the depiction of mainly Biblical scenes, which yielded little of an overtly political nature, although the proton-surrealist work of Hieronymus Bosch especially ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’ (1490) speak of a world of chaos and brutality. This is not dissimilar to our present universe. Depictions of hell provide a commentary on social entropy and evil.

Among the pioneers in depicting ordinary human life was the Flemish master Peter Breughal the Elder. Scenes of social gatherings and festivities contain subtle and unobtrusive political messages. So, for example in the ‘Census at Bethlehem’ (1566) you have to look very closely to find Jesus and Mary arriving in on a donkey and trap amid representations of peasant life. His paintings provide hints into the nature of the institutions and practices of the time, and the plight of poor folk.

In Renaissance Italy Titian and Raphael’s Cardinals often show cruelty or majestic temporal power. In those hardened faces one often gets a sense of that time. The demonic religious paintings of Caravaggio are almost a textbook exercise in conspiracy, murder and intrigue. How much fun would he have hid with the Jeffrey Epstein revelations!?

Durer and Beyond

The only Renaissance giant who is markedly different, and often avowedly political by way of mysterious and hidden social commentaries, is the great German painter Albrecht Dürer. It is the woodcuts and the lithographs where the apocalyptic commentary is most evident. The fourth woodcut of his Apocalypse cycle ‘The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse’, (1497) depicts the first four of seven seals that must be opened for the Apocalypse to begin, These are Conquest, War, Famine, and Death. All are now evident internationally.

In the famous engraving ‘Knight Death and Devil’ (1513) the knight seems resigned, and his facial features are downcast with the devil enveloping him. It is believed the portrayal is a literal, though pointed, celebration of the knight’s Christian faith, and of the ideals of humanism threatened or protected by the fox.

The engraving Melancholia (1514) is a magus of ideas, clearly influenced by paganism, alchemy, and astrology – the dark demonological arts. It is also a cold mathematical work and exercise in numerology. It contains a brooding central figure, best represented as an allegory of the limits of reason, and a personal or collective descent into madness when reason no longer makes sense. To anyone scrolling through Twitter on a daily basis this may sound all-too-familiar.

William Hogarth’s tremendous political engravings are also worth mentioning in respect of contemporary afflictions. His most famous print, Gin Lane (1751) graphically depicts infanticide, drunken oblivion, disinterment of corpses, starvation, beggary, poverty, impalement, suicide, debt, debauchery and the collapsing buildings of society. Also notable are his anti-corruption election cartoons such as An Election Entertainment (1757).

Hogarth’s only contemporary competitor was James Gilroy and his famous ‘Plum Pudding in Danger’ (1805), which seems most apt for our present world, dividing into competing trading blocks. In this Napoleon and Pitt divide the world up and gorge themselves. Napoleon is cutting away a slice of land to the east of the British Isles marked ‘Europe’, but his piece of land is much smaller than Pitt’s portion of sea. The inscription reads: ‘state gourmets taking a little supper’. Greenland, Ukraine take your pick.

Goya is the greatest political artist of them all in my view. In his oeuvre we encounter a treasure trove of commentary for our time. First and foremost, there is the incredible execution painting ‘The Third of May’ (1808), revisited by Manet, as well as lithographs of torture and brutality. His work curiously presages contemporary debauchery and cannibalism, societal and solipsistic that is.

French Revolution

In the same period there is the great portrait painter of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era Jacque-Louis David. Some might consider his Neo-Classicisal style a little austere, but it’s nonetheless worthwhile visiting the main gallery in Bruges just to see The Death of Marat (1793).

David was a propagandist for the Jacobins. Marat, the Montagnard faction, was murdered by Charlotte Corday, who supported the opposing Girondins. She blamed Marat for his involvement in numerous executions that had taken place during the Terror quite correctly, but the painting strengthened support for the Montagnards as David successfully presented him as a tireless revolutionary betrayed by conniving forces. A martyr covered in a holy glow, taking his last breaths, with revolutionary pen in hand.

Indeed, the Reign of Terror only heightened after this painting’s release and after the Revolution, Jacques-Louis David shifted allegiance to the Emperor Napoleon, for whom he produced fawning political art including The Coronation of Napoleon (1807). Admirers of the Marat painting should read Albert Camus’s The Rebel (1951) as to the true Marat and the extremist terror.

A near contemporary of David, Delacroix of course creates the famous painting of the flag and revolution Liberty Leading the People (1830), but we should be cautious about that French notion in its unrestrained form, certainly at this juncture, although the argument for protest and change are greater than ever.

Greatest Epoch

The greatest epoch in my view for political art was just after World War I. Many artists experienced the devastation of the trenches, and used this to condemn bellicose militarism. In the Weimar Republic we find the apogee of political art and social commentary through caricaturists such as George Grosz, and Otto Dix. No wonder the Nazis considered this degenerate art.

If you look at Grosz’s inelegantly titled Pillars of Society (1926) – with the superior subtitle Shit for Brains – you will see one of the paragons of virtue, with, well, shit for brains. It anticipates disaster as the economy collapses, while the Nazi judges and commissars worked hand-in-glove with their jackboot associates.

The etchings and paintings of Otto Dix also perfectly capture the collapse, most obviously The Match Seller (1920), The War Triptych or the engraving Stormtroopers Advance Under Gas (1924). These are among the greatest anti-war works. He survived the Somme and intellectual pretentiousness to produce paintings of the calibre of Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden (1926).

Close to the Prada hangs the most monumental work of political art. To see it in the flesh is extraordinary. That is Picasso’s fatal depiction of the massacre of the innocents during the Spanish Civil War Guernica (1937). It now hangs symbolically now over Gaza or The Ukraine as a rebuke, as is the core symbol the dove of peace.

The Spanish Civil War produced many other great works of art particularly the photography of Robert Capa, which is disturbing in its brutality, as are the later pictures of Cartier Bresson after the liberation of Paris where collaborators were made examples of. Likewise, the extremism of our time cuts in all sorts of ways, as does the demonisation of those we disagree with.

Other great war photographs show the aftermath of Hiroshima and the liberation of the Concentration Camps, documented in Resnais documentary Night and Fog (1945). Unforgettable also is the photography of the bullet to the head of the Viet Kong activist. Even in this de-sensitised social media age that still has the capacity to shock.

Animation and Cartoons

Animation substantively begins with Walt Disney, and his films are at times wonderful and at other times an expression of crass American values. The figure of Cruella de Ville from The Dalmatians appears crucial to our time, conveying the theme of the murder of the innocent for personal self-aggrandisement. A few contemporary figures would appear well equipped for the role, Ghislaine Maxwell in particular.

The greatest cartoonist of all was the Belgian Hergé (George Prosper Remi), who has been accused, unfairly, of fascism for writing for Le Soir during wartime. This is an accusation almost as absurd as that levelled against P.G. Wodehouse, which is not to say that the character of the creator of the immortal Tintin is unimpeachable.

Literary critic Jean-Marie Apostolidès identifies the character of Tintin as representing a personification of the ‘New Youth’ concept promoted by the European far-right. Indeed, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets (1930) was a work of anti-socialist propaganda, but then, in fairness, Tintin in America was designed as a work of anti-Americanism, highly critical of capitalism, commercialism, and industrialisation.

Many would counter that Hergé was far from right-wing, as exemplified by his condemnation of racism in the United States in the introduction to Tintin in America (1932), and that the wonderful The Blue Lotus (1936) took a distinctly anti-imperialist stance, unlike Tintin in The Congo (1931), which has shades of Colonel Kurz. During the fascist era he did not join the far-right Rexist Party, later asserting that he ‘had always had an aversion to it’ and that ‘to throw my heart and soul into an ideology is the opposite of who I am.’

From his earliest years, Hergé was openly critical of racism. He lambasted the pervasive racism of U.S. society in the prelude to Tintin in America published in Le Petit Vingtième on 20 August 1931, and ridiculed racist attitudes toward the Chinese in The Blue Lotus.

Whatever the ambiguity, the art is riveting as Vietnamese-American novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen observed: ‘Hergé’s work is deeply flawed, and yet riveting narratively and aesthetically. I have forgotten all the well-intentioned, moralistic children’s literature that I have read, but I haven’t forgotten Hergé.’

Of moralism and cartoons Roald Dahls illustrated by Quentin Blakes books are less ambiguous and more unsettling as portrayals of human evil and the macabre. not least the character of Willie Wonka. His character anticipates the soma-induced greed of our age.

Animation has of course transmogrified into manga and anime, where the master is Miyzaki. In My Neighbour Totora (1988) the forest is warding off the evil spirits. Gai regenerating as when the industrial demons are confronted and beaten in his ecological masterpiece Princess Mononoke (1997). A little spring blossoms.

Preserve his Anonymity!

“Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.” David Langwallner discusses the recent Banksy memorial in terms of the right to protest and its limitations.https://t.co/nBLYDJpWGp

— CassandraVoices (@VoicesCassandra) October 9, 2025

The important role of art as a form of political commentary should be re-asserted, and the forthcoming prosecution (if my source is to be believed) of Banksy sets a very dangerous precedent. It sends out a clear message to other artists, and will have a chilling effect in all likelihood. At the very least Banksy’s anonymity should be preserved in the event of him being prosecuted. Very few comment in a visual form so presciently on our times. He is the greatest political muralist since Diego Riveria, and the world needs more, not less, political art as a way of vitalising people and as an antidote to propaganda.

Feature Image: The Plumb-pudding in danger; – or – State Epicures taking un Petit Souper by James Gillray