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Showing posts with the label Socialist mural painting

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The Slave Market and the Theatre of European Anxiety

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Author Brian Hawkeswood.                                                                                                   Nach unten scrollen für die deutsche Übersetzung https://artelbestudio.blogspot.com/2025/04/orientalist-beautiful-form-of-realism.html When Jean-Léon Gérôme exhibited The Slave Market in 1871, Europe was not an innocent observer of slavery. The Atlantic system had only recently been dismantled in parts of the Western world; Brazil would abolish slavery in 1888. European empires were expanding across Africa and the Middle East. Racial hierarchies were being codified in pseudo-scientific language. Anthropology, colonial administration, and academic painting shared an overlapping visual culture.         ...
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The Wall That Remembered the Future: A Reflection on the Socialist Mural in Dresden’s Library.

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  Author - Brian Hawkeswood.                                              Nach unten scrollen für die deutsche Übersetzung. Heinz Drache und Walter Rehn , Malerei auf Holz - Unser sozialistisches Leben 1969. As I ascended the carpeted stairs of Dresden’s Hauptbibliothek, the late light of an East German afternoon filtering through the glazed modernist panes, it appeared—silent yet declarative, like a recitation that no longer needed voice—the great mural of socialist triumph that stretches, horizon-like, across the entrance hall’s wall. It neither whispered nor shouted, and yet I heard it speak. A fresco of the collective dream, lacquered in idealism and discipline, in utopia and surveillance, its chromatic fervor and compositional ambition seemed to swell beyond its surface. One could not enter the library without first passing beneath its doctrinal gaze, as though h...
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