Coups, Repression and Chaos: Art Inspired by Democracy – and the Despots Who Overthrew It | Art & Design

NOTNo place on Earth should have more authority to speak to the enduring appeal of democracy than the place that invented it. But a new art exhibition in Athens seems reluctant to make loud claims about its legitimacy. You have to walk all the way through the exhibition at the National Gallery of Greece, past 137 works by 54 artists, before you come across any claim to authority—and even then, it’s far from triumphant.

Rika Pana’s paintings of the Parthenon, set against a melancholy blue and muddy green background, emphasize not the solidity of the ultimate symbol of Athenian democracy, but its final ruin. In three paintings from the series The Erosion of Civilization, the pillars of the temple—commissioned by the radical democratic reformer Pericles in the fifth century BCE—resemble plumes of black smoke, the uncertainty of its iconic silhouette underscoring its own perishability.

The somber tone seems fitting: Democracy, as the series is titled, opens in the middle of a year filled with pivotal plebiscites that are grimly terminal and raise troubling questions. In its liberal, representative version, democracy may have established itself as the norm of governance in much of Europe, the Americas, large parts of sub-Saharan Africa, and Oceania. Yet in countries once considered democratic bastions, many voters seem tempted to trade it in for a version run by authoritarian leaders eager to eschew constitutional checks and balances. What happens to democracy when democrats no longer want it?

Syrago Tsiara, the exhibition’s curator, presents democracy not as a final stage of history set in stone, but as something that was forcibly snatched from the hands of autocratic rulers only half a century ago – not just in Greece, but almost simultaneously in Portugal and Spain. The fascism of the 1930s in Italy and Germany, as well as the autocratic rulers of the Soviet bloc, have such a hold on memories that these southern European military dictatorships are often forgotten in the rest of the continent, despite their obvious commonalities.

António de Oliveira Salazar, Georgios Papadopoulos and Francisco Franco were all military men who repressed civil liberties and used torture against their enemies, but their fervor was more that of traditionalist Christians than of revolutionary fascists. During the Cold War, their virulent anticommunism earned them recognition or direct support from the United States and, in the case of Greece and Portugal, membership in NATO.

The dictatorships all ended within 18 months in the mid-1970s, but democracy triumphed differently in each country. In Portugal, the military coup of April 1974 marked a turning point, while in Spain democracy was gradually restored after Franco’s death in November 1975. In Greece, the junta’s power collapsed more quickly: student protests sparked internal divisions within Papadopoulos’ entourage. Then came a coup in Cyprus, followed by Turkey’s invasion of the island, and the seven-year military dictatorship finally collapsed.

For artists who continued to produce work despite strict censorship, the face of repression in these countries is remarkably similar. The Athens exhibition features a 1972 sculpture by the Spanish art collective Equipo Crónica, depicting one of the covert spies of Franco’s secret police, alongside a nearly identical work depicting the faceless informants of the Greek surveillance state, made around the same time by the artist Yannis Gaïtis.

The symbols of protest were shared: red carnations are not only ubiquitous in the graffiti and protest banners of the peaceful “carnation revolution” captured in Revolução, Ana Hatherly’s 1975 cinematic collage, but also in Greek artist Vlassis Caniaris’s untitled grid of plaster-cast flowers from 1969. Papadopoulos, the military officer who led the 1967 coup and then installed himself as Greece’s prime minister until 1973, used to say that his dictatorship was just a “plaster,” there to protect the patient during the “operation” needed to repair democracy.

Dimitris Alithinos’ sculpture Happening II seems to refer to this metaphor, except that the patient here is a man strapped to the roof of a car and suffocating under a plastic sheet. In Nikias Skapinakis’ paintings, bodies dare to breathe again, naked and without curvature. Democracy, for artists like him, was a physical act of liberation of the entire body politic.

The most notable images in the exhibition surprise with their choice of artistic style. Pop art is generally considered an Anglo-American genre, celebrating the substance and veneer of consumer culture. Yet for artists like the Spaniard Alberto Solsona and the Greek Alekos V Levidis, it was the ideal way to denounce political violence – even if it was, as the title of the latter’s 1969 monotype on paper states, “Made in the USA.”

Pop art is also the style with which the artist Giorgos Ioannou recounted the events that triggered the fall of the junta. In November 1973, law students barricaded themselves inside the Polytechnic University in the capital, demanding its dismantling. This demonstration derailed a false liberalization process initiated a few weeks earlier by the dictator Papadopoulos, who had brutally repressed the occupation.

Ioannou’s comic strips look like a macabre homage to Roy Lichtenstein’s famous diptych Whaam!, except here we see bullets tearing through the bodies of young people. At least 40 students died in the Polytechnic uprisings, and thousands more were injured.

The diversity of art forms on display in Democracy ultimately appears as a kind of commentary on the general theme: there may well be no such thing as a “democratic” style in art. In fact, in some cases, the visual language deployed by some southern European artists to tell the story of their democratic liberation has a strangely anti-egalitarian edge. In a 1975 painting by Marios Vatzias at the National Technical University of Athens, the slain protesters are picked up off the street by angels and taken to the gods. They are no longer part of the masses but are elevated to the ranks of the few.

Martyrdom is a surprisingly common theme, especially in the works of the Greek printmaker Tassos, whose vision was celebrated in the first exhibition at the National Gallery after the fall of the junta. The freedom fighters are here depicted as ordinary citizens but stylised as machine-gun-toting archangels, while the executed communist resistance fighter Ilektra Apostolou becomes Jesus on the cross.

The exhibition’s opening message is disconcerting: the path to democracy, the wall panel proclaims, “begins with the identification of the adversary,” which sounds more like a statement by the illiberal political theorist Carl Schmitt than a formula for a functioning modern democracy. The street protests that accompanied Portugal and Greece’s transition to democracy are given their due place, though the geopolitical circumstances that made dictatorships fragile enough to be overthrown by protest are largely absent from these works—namely, the colonial wars that exhausted the Estado Novo’s armies, the Turkish invasion of Cyprus that undermined the junta’s claims to competence, and the rise of the European Economic Community.

Societies that repress free speech are doomed to failure, this exhibition argues. In this respect at least, art and the interests of democracy dovetail. But it is important to understand that they do not always overlap, even if one disagrees with the critic Kenneth Clark, who concluded in his 1945 essay Art and Democracy that art was “incurably aristocratic” in its tendency to illustrate “the rule of the many by the few.”

The exhibition opens and closes with a large portrait of Alexandros Papanastiou by Konstantinos Parthenis, whose term as prime minister in 1924 paved the way for the Second Hellenic Republic. There is also a small painting by the same artist of the head of the goddess Athena, which served as the emblem of the Republican Party. But as one moves through the exhibition, these tributes to parliamentary democracy are quickly forgotten. Revolutions make better images than institutions.