Anarchy and Art: From the Paris Commune to the Fall of the Berlin Wall

The coupling of Anarchist political movements and art is not a topic likely to attract broad interest, yet the issues dealt with by author and art historian Antliff (Anarchist Modernism) in this collection of essays have greater range than the politics of the extreme left. One typically enlivening chapter is devoted to the personal reminiscences of Susan Simensky Bietila, a painter on the scene of the American student movement of the 1960s; among stories of student strikes and absurdist, performance art-like protests, she relates her struggle with art professors at Brooklyn College, who insisted that fine art could not have explicit political content. That debate is central to Antliff's work, and the implications he draws in these eight scholarly essays carry resonance beyond the political questions used to frame it. Bookended by an argument between French 19th century leftists Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Emile Zola and the fall of the Berlin wall (overlapped by the first Gulf War), with stops in 1880s Paris, New York during WWI, post-Revolution Russia and McCarthy-era America, among others. Antliff's latest will prove lively and thought-provoking work for art students and scholars. 16 color plates.