Suffer the Poor: Shameful, Cowardly European Art

[Judi Lynn]

Weekend Edition March 21-23, 2014
Suffer the Poor

Shameful, Cowardly European Art

by ANDRE VLTCHEK


I searched for pain, and I found none.

In those enormous halls of the Louvre, I searched for reminders of the agony of the people from the Caribbean, from islands like Grenada, where the native people were entirely exterminated during the French colonial onslaught. I searched for at least one tear, one moan, one canvas saturated with sadness and remorse. I searched for confessions.

But I found none.

I was trying to catch a glimpse of the desperate, terrified facial expressions of North African women, dragged into some empty rooms, and raped brutally by French soldiers. I was looking for paintings depicting the torture of Vietnamese patriots, and their execution by decapitation, for nothing else other than fighting for freedom and for their fatherland, against the appalling French colonial rule.

No – I found nothing, nothing at all in the Louvre, or in any other major French museums.

I stood in front of bizarre, sick and cold religious artwork, full of adult looking, perverse baby Jesus’s, or of some saints with daggers sticking out grotesquely from their heads. It was mostly total kitsch, created to order from the Christian church – a morally corrupt religious entity responsible for the extermination of entire nations, of entire races, worldwide!

I could find no paintings depicting the destroyed people of Rapa Nui, no killing of Southeast Asians, Africans and the islanders from both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/03/21/shameful-cowardly-european-art/

[geckosfeet]

1. Last I heard Guernica was at the MOMA in NYC.

But not a lot of late 20th century art dealing with political violence hangs in major museums. You will have to look elsewhere for now.

On edit; The evils of war and economic disparity are not being documented by todays painters or printmakers. Aside from a few iconic images drafted from photo or film or video sources, which are the contemporary media. Painting of course, used to be humanities way of recording history and important cultural mythologies. Then came the camera. Then motion film. Video. Digital. And so on.

Our records of political and economic violence exist on electronic media. It is those records that must be preserved so that future generations will have a relatively accurate vision of history.

[Warpy]

2. Francisco de Goya

http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/francisco-goya

While there are a few Moors here and there in his paintings, many of his darker paintings, oil studies and drawings chronicle the human misery of the Spanish Enlightenment.

[frazzled]

3. At the Louvre

 

Press release 
 
 
November 3, 2011 – 
February 6, 2012 
 
 
The Louvre invites                      
J. M. G. Le Clézio 
Museums are Worlds 
 
Following in the footsteps of Patrice Chéreau, Umberto Eco and
Pierre Boulez, among others, the museum’s guest of honor this
season is Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, who will be offering his
own fresh perspective on the Louvre’s collections, through a
multi-disciplinary program of events in the museum’s galleries
and its auditorium. In an attempt to open up dialogue across a
broad variety of issues, Le Clézio takes as the starting point of his
intervention the assertion that “museums are worlds.”


                                                        
Museum‐World 
An exhibition presented in the Salle de la Chapelle  
(Sully Wing, rooms 20 to 23) 
November 5, 2011–February 6, 2012 
 
In keeping with the theme “museums are worlds,” the selection of
works displayed in this exhibition ranges widely, embodying the
intentions and wishes of J.-M. G. Le Clézio, for whom there is no
hierarchy when it comes to art, and includes hand-woven mats from
Vanuatu, paintings from Haiti, Ife heads from Nigeria, eighteenth-
century paintings on the French Revolution, and Mexican ex-votos,
thus breaking down boundaries between periods and civilizations as
well as the divide between art and artifact. Connections drawn
between the expansive array of works on view and the centuries-old
history of the Louvre, which was home until 1879 to numerous
ethnographic treasures previously held at the Musée Dauphin and
then at the Musée de la Marine, enable visitors to better grasp the
cohesive nature of the selection presented. This event also revisits the
Renaissance notion of a “cabinet of curiosities” and, closely entwined
with the literary universe crafted by J.-M. G. Le Clézio, focuses in
particular on four geographic areas: Africa, Mexico, Vanuatu and
Haiti. Each of the exhibition’s sections takes its bearings from a
historical or comparative perspective on the Louvre’s collections,
those of the Musée du Quai Branly, or pertinent twentieth-century
works, and is also punctuated by contemporary counterpoints
(Camille Henrot, Bertrand Lavier, Pascale Marthine Tayou,
Telemaque and Basquiat).

http://www.louvre.fr/sites/default/files/medias/medias_fichiers/fichiers/pdf/louvre-louvre-invites-clezio.pdf

If all this guy saw at the Louvre was religious art, he wasn't looking all that closely. Or never even went. At any rate, don't look to art to solve the world's problems or tell its history: that's a job for governments and academics. I'm not sure what the rant is even about.