by No place on Earth should have more authority to speak of the enduring appeal of democracy than where it first came up. But a new art exhibition in Athens seems reluctant to shout about its credentials. You have to walk right to the end of the National Gallery of Greece show, 137 works by 54 past artists, before you come across anything like a claim to authority – and even then it’s far from triumphant.
Rika Pana’s paintings of the Parthenon, set against a background of melancholy blue and muddy green, emphasize not the persistence of the ultimate symbol of Athenian democracy, but its eventual destruction. In three paintings, from the series The Erosion of Civilisation, the pillars of the temple – commissioned by the radical democratic reformer Pericles in the 5th century BC – appear.
The somber tone feels timely: Democracy, as the show is called, opens halfway through the year full of portal polls that feel ominously terminal and ask unsettling questions. In its representative liberal iteration, democracy may have established itself as the norm of governance in most of Europe, the Americas, large parts of sub-Saharan Africa and Oceania. But in countries once considered democratic strongholds, many voters seem tempted to swap it for a version led by strong-willed leaders eager to break free of constitutional checks and balances. What happens to democracy when the Democrats don’t want it anymore?
Fittingly, the show’s curator Syrago Tsiara presents democracy not as a final phase of history etched in stone but as something that was only forcefully returned from the hands of autocratic leaders half a century ago – not only in Greece, but almost simultaneously in Portugal and Spain. The fascism of the 1930s in Italy and Germany, along with the autocratic rulers of the Soviet bloc, are so vividly remembered that the military dictatorships of southern Europe are often overlooked by the rest of the continent, despite their similarities. clarity.
António de Oliveira Salazar, Georgios Papadopoulos and Francisco Franco were military men who fought for civil liberties and used torture on their enemies, but they were traditionalist Christian rather than fascist-revolutionary in their zeal. In the cold war, their staunch anti-communism led to recognition or direct support from the US, and in the case of Greece and Portugal membership of NATO.
All their dictatorships ended within an 18-month period in the mid-1970s, but democracy triumphed in different ways in each country. In Portugal, the climax came with a military coup in April 1974, and in Spain democracy was gradually restored after Franco’s death in November 1975. In Greece, the junta’s rule ended more quickly: student protests sparked internal divisions within the Papadopoulos circle. There was a coup in Cyprus and the subsequent Turkish invasion of the island, and the seven-year military dictatorship fell.
For the artists who continued to produce art despite heavy censorship, the face of oppression in these countries looked very similar. The Athens show features a 1972 sculpture by the Spanish art collector Equipo Crónica, depicting one of the invisible spies of Franco’s secret police, flanked by an almost identical artwork depicting faceless informants of the Greek surveillance state, produced by the artist Yannis Gaïtis at the same time. .
Symbols of protest were shared: not only are red carnations ubiquitous on the graffiti and protest banners of the peaceful “carnation revolution” captured by Revolução, Ana Hatherly’s 1975 film collage, but also in the Greek artist Vlassis Caniaris’s untitled floral grid modeled from plaster, which was made in 1969. Papadopoulos, the military officer who led the coup in 1967, used himself as prime minister of Greece until 1973 to say that his dictatorship was only a “plaster cast”, then to protect the patient during the required “operation”. repair democracy.
Dimitris Alithinos sculpture Happening II seems to refer to this metaphor, except the patient here is a man tied to the roof of a car and suffocating under a plastic sheet. In the paintings of Nikias Skapinakis, bodies dared to breathe again, exposed and unbowed. For artists like him, democracy was a physical act of liberation for the entire body politic.
The most striking paintings in the show are surprising in their choice of art style. Pop art is commonly thought of as an Anglo-American genre, celebrating the substance and veneer of consumer culture. But for artists such as Spain’s Alberto Solsona and Greece’s Alekos V Levidis, it was the perfect way to expose political violence – even if, as the title of the 1969 monotype on paper says, “Made in the USA” .
Pop art is also the style in which the artist Giorgos Ioannou chronicled the events that led to the overthrow of the junta. In November 1973, law students barricaded themselves inside the capital’s Polytechnic University, demanding his removal from office. The protest scuppered sham process of liberalization initiated by the dictator Papadopoulos weeks before, which brutally cracked down on the way of life.
Ioannou’s comic panel paintings look like a macabre homage to Roy Lichtenstein’s famous Whaam! Diptych, but here we see the bullets ripped into the bodies of young people. At least 40 students died during the Polytechnic uprising, and thousands were injured.
The variety of art forms on display in Democracy finally comes across as a kind of commentary on the overarching theme: that there might be no such thing as a “democratic” style in art. In fact, in some cases the visual language used by some Southern European artists to tell the story of their democratic freedom has an anti-egalitarian tendency. In the National Technical University of Athens, a painting by Marios Vatzias from 1975, angels gather the protesters killed from the streets and carry them to the gods. They are no longer part of the masses but are elevated to the few.
Martyrdom is a strikingly common theme, especially in the works of Greek engravings by Tassos, whose vision was celebrated in the first show at the National Gallery after the fall of the junta. Freedom fighters are depicted here as ordinary citizens but stylized as archangels toting machine guns, and the executed communist resistance fighter Ilektra Apostolou is Jesus on the cross.
The opening statement of the show claims: the journey towards democracy, according to the wall panel, “begins with the recognition of the opposition” – which sounds more like a pronouncement from the anti-liberal political theorist Carl Schmitt than a formula for a functioning democracy. However, the street protests that accompanied the transition of Portugal and Greece to democracy are given their rightful place, even if the geopolitical circumstances that made the dictatorships vexed enough to be subject to the demonstration are not omitted. from these works of art – those are the colonial wars that have lapsed. the Estado Novo army, the Turkish invasion of Cyprus which claimed the junta’s claim to competence, and the expansion of the European Economic Community.
Societies that suppress free speech, this exhibition claims, look set to collapse. In this respect, at least, art and the interests of democracy align. But it should be clear that they do not always overlap, even if you disagree with the critic Kenneth Clark, who concluded in his 1945 essay Art and Democracy that art was “incurably aristocratic” in its tendency to “rule the decision” to represent. much for little”.
The show begins and ends with Konstantinos Parthenis’ large portrait of Alexandros Papanastiou, whose tenure as prime minister in 1924 paved the way for the Second Hellenic Republic. There is also a small picture, by the same artist, of the head of the goddess Athena, which was the emblem of the Republican party. But as you walk through the show, those homages to parliamentary democracy are quickly forgotten. Revolutions make better pictures than institutions.
• Democracy is in the National Gallery, Athens, until 2 February
