Seeing History Through Artists' Eyes

Artists such as Picasso, David, and Goya came to grips with the political upheavals of their day with heroic and searing images that elicit our admiration or moral outrage. Picasso’s Guernica is more than a fractured scene of the horror, pain, and chaos during the bombing of a Basque town. It is also an indelible political statement about the tragedies of modern technological warfare, especially the indiscriminate killing of civilians. Jacques-Louis David’s Death of Marat and Napoleon Crossing the Alps paint the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars in heroic, mythic terms. But Francisco Goya’s The Third of May, 1808, is a scathing indictment of those wars. This interplay between artistic expression and social and political content is a complex one.

In this class we’ll focus on five historical turning points and see how artists interpret their times in ways that can both inspire patriotic sentiment and, as in the recent cases of toppled confederate statues, provoke political debate about the meaning of history and national identity.