Recently I completed a paper for my art history class in which I compared two pieces of art that I felt were used for political propaganda. This paper pushed me to consider the real impact of images and how each one can create its own conversations and encourage rhetoric about current issues. Most of the time, artists have this incredible ability to notice and capture a fleeting moment of kairos and preserve it in a nation or world’s memory.
The two pieces I analyzed in my paper were The Death of Marat by Jacques-Louis David
and Migrant Mother, California by Dorothea Lange.
These two pieces amaze me because they capture a single moment, but there is so much history and thought behind them. In David’s Death of Marat, the well-known (at the time) Marat’s assassination is turned into a martyrdom through David’s incredible portrayal of Marat and the anguish and seeming tragedy of his death in such a horrible way (despite the reality that Marat himself was calling for the heads of many). The bleeding, grieving, and even vaguely Christ-like Marat is depicted as a helpless victim; David used pathos to create drama over the death of a single man, thus inciting more support for the French Revolution that was surrounding him at the time.
Lange took an extremely similar path with the purpose of her photograph. She chose to depict a mother and her children with a bleak coloring and clear distress in their faces and body language. The strength of the mother, despite the concern in her eyes, spoke to the American people and this photograph would spark major public concern over the continuing Great Depression. (Ultimately, this photograph brought food and other support to the state of California itself.)
Throughout this class there has been a bit of an emphasis on vocal or performance rhetoric, at least recently, since we have looked at some advertisements. These two pieces of art are drastically different in their existence—David and Lange are not trying to get people to buy a product or support a football team, they are trying to encourage people to buy into a revolution and to support families around America. The pathos that these artists are able to provoke is amazing and hard to avoid, even if one wanted to ignore the situation. It is incredible the power that an artist can have within a society, and I think we sometimes forget that.
The first painting “Death of Marat” defintiely caught my eye as I started to read your post. I agree with you when you say that the pathos used in art and specifically these paintings are hard to ignore. The perfect image always has that intensely powerful affect on an audience as well. Great post Emily!
I agree with you wholeheartedly that showing the public an image that encapsulates certain ideas and promotes those ideas can be extraordinarily powerful. Showing, rather than telling, an audience something can often times make it that much more impactful.
Will makes a great point — the “showing” does more than often just “telling” can achieve. As our culture gets more and more saturated with provocative images, though, I wonder if we’re already more desensitized to the visual power of pathos.