MATTHEW HAWKINS relishes the valiant defiance of two gay Scottish painters whose example resists both collectors’ taste and historical fiction
‘The main task is, indeed, to awaken the women’s class consciousness and to incorporate them into the class struggle’ - Clara Zetkin
MICHAL BONCZA rounds up a series of images designed to inspire women
Liberty Leading the People, Eugene Delacroix; Rupert Garcia, Libertad Para Los Prisoneras Politicas! Freedom for political prisoners!, 1971, featuring Angela Davis who was held in a Manhattan prison at the times
[Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives/cc; Rupert Garcia/Smithsonian Institution Archives/CC]
Essays on contemporary Latin American feminism, a poetry debut by a queer Texan of Mexican heritage, and a lush volume of tango and milonga drawings
JOHN McINALLY welcomes a rigorous class analysis of the history and exploitation of sectarianism by the Scottish ruling elite
The bard pays homage to his two muses: his wife and his football club
MARY CONWAY is disappointed by an incoherent show that fails to question stereotypical assumptions about the Soviet Union
WILL STONE, JAMES WALSH and MARIA DUARTE review Souleymane’s Story, Sunlight, Good Fortune, and After The Hunt
ONE of the most enduring revolutionary images in Western art is that of Liberty Leading the People painted by Eugene Delacroix in the Autumn of 1830 as a response to the July revolution of the same year, which saw France swap the House of Bourbon for the House of Orleans, an error that was only corrected in 1848 with the founding of the Second Republic.
The figure of Liberty is popularly referred to as “Marianne,” which symbolises, in popular consciousness, both ordinary people and the manifestation of their political aspirations: the Republic. The boy next to her with two pistols is believed to have inspired Gavroche in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables.
The allegory of the female figure is rooted in language — in French, France, Republic, Liberty and Reason are feminine nouns.
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NICK WRIGHT delicately unpicks the eloquent writings on art of an intellectual pessimist who wears his Marxism lightly
MICHAL BONCZA recommends a compact volume that charts the art of propagating ideas across the 20th century
CHRISTINE LINDEY welcomes a fascinating survey of the work of the communist and socialist artists who founded the AIA in the 1930s