Censored Art: The Return of the Repressed
The politics of art, and specifically the politics of art suppression, remains a perennial topic of controversy and public attention. Most recently, Paul LePage, newly elected Republican governor of Maine, has been in the news for ordering the removal of a mural from the lobby of the Maine Department of Labor because—surprise!—it portrayed labor organizers, striking workers, and even the iconic World War II image of “Rosie the Riveter.” LePage’s spokesman explained that the governor had received a complaint that the mural evoked North Korean brainwashing techniques. The artist, Judy Taylor, who won a 2007 competition by the Maine Arts Commission to paint the mural, found this criticism particularly offensive, since her father had won a Bronze Star for heroism in the Korean War.
LePage is in good company—or at least noteworthy company. In 1933, the Mexican artist Diego Rivera slipped a tiny, unauthorized image of Lenin into a mural John D. Rockefeller Jr. had commissioned for the newly constructed Rockefeller Center. Outraged, Rockefeller ordered Lenin’s removal. Rivera refused, negotiations to move the mural elsewhere failed, and on the night of February 10, 1934, hatchet-wielding workmen, on Rockefeller’s orders, demolished the mural. Rivera re-created it (adding an image of Rockefeller carousing in a nightclub) at the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City, where it enjoys an honored place today.
But there are other, less spectacular ways to prevent the public from seeing controversial art. A case in point is the large 1885 painting “The Strike,” portraying a group of angry factory workers walking off the job and confronting their grim, top-hatted boss and his frightened assistant. As a woman seeks to restrain one worker, another worker stoops to pick up a rock, foreshadowing violence ahead. The painting was by Robert Koehler, a young Milwaukee artist of German immigrant origins who at the time was enrolled at Munich’s Royal Academy of Art. “The Strike” conformed to a familiar late nineteenth-century genre: large-scale “history paintings” realistically portraying notable historical events. But his subject matter was explosive, particularly in a decade marked by bitter labor conflict in Europe and America, including a violent railway workers’ strike in the U.S. in 1877. Indeed, the painting’s first U.S. exhibition, at New York’s National Academy of Design, came within days of a bloody explosion of violence during an anarchist-led rally in Chicago’s Haymarket Square on May 4, 1886.
In the decades that followed, “The Strike” experienced no such overt suppression as Diego Rivera’s Rockefeller Center mural or Judy Taylor’s labor mural in Maine. But Koehler’s radical, politically engaged painting did undergo more subtle forms of discrimination. Although accepted for display at the famed 1889 Paris Exposition, the Exposition’s art curators hung it high above a doorway in a remote part of the gallery. Later, when Koehler was director of an art school in Minneapolis, the Minneapolis Public Library displayed it for a time in a dark hallway, and then relegated it to a storage room, where it languished for years, its canvas torn and deteriorating. Though there is no “smoking gun” in this case—no Rockefeller or LePage specifically ordering the painting’s suppression—the neglect in Minnesota is almost certainly linked to the fact that labor tensions ran high in the state; corporate anti-union organizations wielded great influence; and the city’s leading art patron, Thomas B. Walker, was also a wealthy and powerful timber baron.
In this instance the story has a happy ending. While Koehler’s “The Strike” lay neglected and forgotten, a wood engraving of the painting appeared from time to time in labor and leftist publications. In 1970 a University of Wisconsin graduate student and radical activist, Lee Baxandall, ran across a reproduction of the work in an antiwar newspaper. His curiosity aroused, Baxandall traced the painting to its storage facility in Minneapolis. He purchased it for $750, had it restored, and contributed it on a long-term loan to the art gallery of the Hospital Workers Union headquarters in New York City, where it was featured as part of Moe Foner’s “Bread and Roses” project of adding a cultural component to the union’s mission.
During a European tour “The Strike” came to the notice of Berlin’s Deutsches Historisches Museum, which purchased it in 1990 for $450,000. Returned after a century’s absence to the nation where it was painted, “The Strike” now dominates a gallery of the imposing Deutsches Historisches Museum on Berlin’s premier boulevard, Unter den Linden, not far from the Reichstag and the Brandenburg Gate. James Dennis, a retired art historian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, tells the whole fascinating story in his new book, Robert Kohler’s The Strike: The Improbable Story of an Iconic Painting of Labor Protest, just published by the University of Wisconsin Press.
So beware, Governor LePage. Repressed or destroyed art has a way of surging back to public visibility, even after the would-be censors have faded to obscurity.