Political

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Art has served power and challenged it in almost equal measure. Rulers commissioned images to make authority visible, but cheap printing gave dissenters fast weapons. Honoré Daumier's lithograph Gargantua (1831), showing King Louis-Philippe swallowing taxes wrung from the poor, earned him six months in prison. John Heartfield cut up press photographs for anti-Nazi magazine covers in the 1930s, and Diego Rivera's mural Man at the Crossroads (1933) was destroyed after he refused to paint out a portrait of Lenin.

From the 1970s political art often took the form of campaigns and collective action. Leon Golub's Mercenaries canvases confront torture and proxy war, and the collective Gran Fury carried AIDS activism onto buses and billboards. In a 2009 performance of Tatlin's Whisper, Tania Bruguera gave members of the public in Havana one minute each at an open microphone. Look for slogans, caricature and symbols of the state turned against themselves.