A thought-provoking show brings together art from three countries — Greece, Spain and Portugal — created under oppressive regimes
“A charming form of government, full of variety and disorder.” Those were the patronising words ascribed to Socrates in Plato’s Republic in discussion of classical Athens’s trending subject of the time: democracy. The charm seems a little faded today, the disorder more pronounced. Western liberalism is fighting off challenges that question the efficacy of democratic rule. Some detractors come from among its most hitherto enthusiastic supporters. What gives?
A new exhibition, Democracy, at the revivified National Gallery of Greece, explores the subject with a stress test for our times. The gallery, elegantly freshened in 2021 after a seven-year refurbishment, boasts a lovely collection of modern Greek art, but this show puts aside the ruminations of the past and asks: what lessons, if any, can modern art teach us about modern democracy?
The exhibition focuses on a dark period from Greece’s recent past, when democracy briefly floundered. In common with its southern European neighbours, Spain and Portugal, Greece found itself, in the seven years between 1967 and 1974, ruled by a military regime. The junta clamped down on basic freedoms and rights; artists fought back through their art.
Syrago Tsiara, the gallery’s director since 2022 and curator of the show, says she wanted to examine the common factors, and the differences, present in the artistic output of all three countries. “I realised that there had never been an exhibition that looked specifically at the visual art produced during the dictatorships of the European south,” she says. “And, of course, the same themes came out: exile, oppression, the need to address the human and democratic values that they had in common.”
The timeline of resistance in the three countries hints at the mutuality of their concerns: Portugal’s regime fell in the Carnation Revolution of 1974, the same year as the demise of the Greek colonels, while Spain began its transition towards democratic reform the following year, after the death of General Franco.
The exhibition, consisting of 140 works from Greek, Spanish and Portuguese artists, is split into four parts: “Facing the Enemy”, “Resistance”, “Uprising” and “Arousal”. Its narrative is stirring, chronicling the impassioned and revolutionary journeys of the 1960s and 1970s, and creating the icons of radical social change that became so influential in popular culture. Few of the works were seen in their countries of origin at the time of their creation. The artists were either in exile, or suppressed their pieces in basements and attics.
The “enemy” is defined in a variety of guises, some straightforwardly satirical, such as Fernando Botero’s cartoon-like depiction of “Franco” (1986), others expressing the disconcerting facelessness of the artists’ political antagonists. In the gallery’s opening room, Yannis Gaitis’s sculpture “Five or Six” (1970), a cut-out set of identikit oppressors in pinstripes, directly faces Equipo Crónica’s “Espectador de espectadores” (1972), a papier-mâché rendition of a secret police agent, one of a set that were surreptitiously placed in the audience of a theatrical performance in Pamplona. It makes for an almost comic confrontation, belying the sinister intent of the anonymous eavesdropper in authoritarian societies.
The responses in the “Resistance” section are similarly tonally diverse. Greece’s Vlassis Caniaris, in 1968’s “Carnations and Belt”, embeds flowers and barbed wire respectively into solid walls of plaster; both symbols were also used in Portugal. Those metaphors of political dissent are familiar to us today; less so are the striking woodcuts, laden with Byzantine imagery, of Tassos, whose images of mourning women capture the grief and resignation that are the unlauded flipside of heroic defiance.
The prints of Tassos — he described them as “emotive records between two strings, of black and white” — were among the first to be displayed in the National Gallery in the metapolitefsi, the return to democratic government, in a 1975 show. It was notable for two reasons, says Tsiara: first, for its dramatic and much-needed portrayal of the “collective trauma” the country had experienced in the preceding years; but also for its expression of solidarity with the European protest movements that had flourished in the meantime. It was, she says, “a sigh of relief . . . an act of democratic achievement” in itself.
Tassos’s works reference revolutionary figures such as Che Guevara and Angela Davis, proof that the art of revolution was going global at a bewildering pace. In the “Uprising” part of the show, a more localised event in Greece is powerfully represented. The demonstrations at the Athens Polytechnic in November 1973, brutally put down by the government, are the focus of Marios Vatzias’s multi-levelled “Polytechnic” (1975).
Here the artist makes explicit his homage to Byzantine iconography, as the souls of stricken protesters are carried into the heavens by angels, taking their slogan “Bread, Education, Freedom” into a heavenly vision of their former place of study. Another transcendent vision of the event comes in the form of Manolis Tzobanakis’s sculpture “Archangel no 2” (1976), a remarkable and rarely seen piece, in which a cubist human form is hurled — or is launching itself? — through the window of a wooden frame.
The final part of the exhibition is improbably titled “Arousal”, giving the muscular language of revolt something of a soft landing. There is a celebration here, as Tsiara says in the exhibition catalogue, of “pleasure, sexuality, liberation and the pulsing sensuality of the spring of democracy”.
The bold colours of the Greek-Portuguese Nikias Skapinakis, and Paula Rego’s distorted bodies, seem like they belong to a different show, but provide a credible coda to what precedes them.
“We have the male gaze [in the exhibition], and even if it was hidden at the time, it is part of our culture and our visual identity,” Tsiara says. “The female approach, which is more sensitive, more critical, not so robust — I think we need it.”
The end of authoritarianism is seen here as a challenge to patriarchy in general. By the time we get to Leda Papaconstantinou’s video performance Votive (1969), in which a naked woman draws symbols in ink around her breasts and genital area, we can’t help but wonder whether this is, among other things, simply an art work which would have caused the maximum moral offence to all those colonels and generals whose days were numbered, and should today be celebrated for that reason alone.
More than anything, Tsiara says she wants the exhibition to act as a launch pad for the discussion of democracy in today’s times. “We [in Greece] have had 50 years of uninterrupted democratic life. But there are threats to democracy all around. The rise of the extreme right is something we cannot close our eyes to. I believe that cultural institutions have, in their DNA, cultural values to protect. And democracy is one of them.”
To February 2, nationalgallery.gr