12 / Conflict and Resistance

• • CZECHOSLOVAKIA. Prague. August 1968. Warsaw Pact Troops invade Prague. In front of the Radio Headquarters.Josef Koudelka (Czech/French, b. 1938)	Guernica Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881–1973)	Y no hai Remedio (And There’s Nothing to Be Done)Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (Spanish, 1746–1828)	The Execution of Emperor MaximilianÉdouard Manet (French, 1832–1883)	Afghan soldiers from the ruling Taliban movement and visiting journalists stand in front of one of the destroyed Buddha statues in the central province of Bamiyan, March 26, 2001.Sayed Salahuddin (Afghan, b. 1970)	The Legislative BellyHonoré Daumier (French, 1808–1879)
    Books!Aleksandr (Alexander) Mikhailovich Rodchenko, (Russian, 1891–1956)	Chairman Mao en Route to AnyuanChinese School	Converging Territories #30Lalla Essaydi (Moroccan, b. 1956)	Hagia Sophia (exterior)Anthemius of Tralles (Greek, active 6th c.) and Isidorus of Miletus (Greek, active 6th c.) (architects)	The Earth Spider Creating Monsters in the Mansion of Minamoto no YorimitsuUtagawa Kuniyoshi (Japanese, 1797–1861)	Battle of Til-Tuba (Battle of the River Ulai) (detail)Unknown artist(s), Nineveh, Iraq
    Fish and RocksBada Shanren (Zhu Da) (Chinese, 1626–1705)	Calvinist IconoclasmFranz Hogenberg (German, ca. 1540– ca. 1590)	La quema de los Judas (The Burning of the Judases)Diego Rivera (Mexican, 1886–1957)	Alabama Loyalists Greeting the Federal Gun-Boats from Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated)Kara Walker (American, b. 1969)	The Third of May, 1808Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (Spanish, 1746–1828)

expert perspective

Jane Ashton Sharp Associate Professor of Art History, Rutgers University

“

The pre-revolutionary avant-garde experienced a tremendous sense of resistance to the Czarist state in the last years of the Russian Empire. So that when the revolution occurs, many of these artists are thrilled, elated, and view it as their mission to really join their forces in a way that had never existed previously—a kind of unity of leftist political fervor together with artists who had resisted all institutions of power prior to the revolution.

Rodchenko exhibited with the artists or students without a master, who became the ‘Society of Young Artists.’ That’s what they called themselves in 1920 and ’21 when they exhibited the works that we associate with Constructivism. These artists really desired a mass audience. That was the entire purpose, and to have viewers critically engaged in the process of looking at art and understanding art. The Constructivists in their production of these mass-distributed images could be really contained by the State.

It would have been very hard, I think, for someone like Rodchenko to oppose and have his work gain the kind of public visibility that it ultimately did gain if he had been resistant in some way.”