No place on earth should have more authority to speak of the enduring appeal of democracy than the place that first came up with it. But a new art exhibition in Athens seems reluctant to shout about its credentials. You have to walk all the way to the end of the National Gallery of Greece show, past 137 works by 54 artists, before you encounter anything resembling a claim to authority—and even then it’s far from triumphant.
Rika Pana’s paintings of the Parthenon, set against a backdrop of melancholic blue and muddy green, accentuate not the steadfastness of the ultimate symbol of Athenian democracy, but its eventual demise. In three paintings from the series The Erosion of Civilisation, the pillars of the temple – commissioned by the radical democratic reformer Pericles in the 5th century BC – resemble plumes of black smoke, the uncertainty of the iconic outline emphasising its own transience.
The somber tone feels timely: Democracy, as the show is called, opens midway through a year of watershed referendums that have an ominous final feel and raise uncomfortable questions. In its liberal, representative version, democracy may have established itself as the norm of governance in most of Europe, the Americas, large swaths of sub-Saharan Africa and Oceania. But in countries once considered democratic strongholds, many voters seem inclined to trade it in for a version led by strong leaders eager to break with constitutional checks and balances. What happens to democracy when democrats no longer want it?
The show’s curator, Syrago Tsiara, fittingly presents democracy not as a final phase of history set in stone, but as something that was violently wrested from the hands of autocratic rulers only half a century ago – not just in Greece, but almost simultaneously in Portugal and Spain. The fascism that emerged in Italy and Germany in the 1930s, alongside the autocratic rulers of the Soviet bloc, has such a strong hold on memory that these military dictatorships of southern Europe are often forgotten on the rest of the continent, despite their obvious similarities.
António de Oliveira Salazar, Georgios Papadopoulos and Francisco Franco were all military men who curtailed civil liberties and tortured their enemies, but in their passion they were more Christian traditionalist than fascist revolutionary. In the Cold War, their fierce anti-communism guaranteed them recognition or direct support from the United States, and in the cases of Greece and Portugal, membership in NATO.
Their dictatorships all ended within an 18-month period in the mid-1970s, but democracy triumphed in different ways in each country. In Portugal, the turning point came with a military coup in April 1974, while in Spain democracy was gradually restored after Franco’s death in November 1975. In Greece, the junta’s rule unraveled more quickly, as student protests caused internal divisions within Papadopoulos’ inner circle. Then came a coup in Cyprus, followed by the Turkish invasion of the island, and the seven-year military dictatorship finally collapsed.
For the artists who continued to produce art despite strict censorship, the face of repression in these countries was remarkably similar. The Athens show juxtaposes a 1972 sculpture by Spanish art collective Equipo Crónica depicting one of the stealthy spies of Franco’s secret police with a nearly identical artwork showing the faceless informants of Greece’s surveillance state, produced by artist Yannis Gaïtis at the same time.
Symbols of protest were shared: red carnations are ubiquitous not only in the graffiti and protest banners of the peaceful “Carnation Revolution” captured by Revolução, Ana Hatherly’s 1975 film collage, but also in Greek artist Vlassis Caniaris’s untitled grid of flowers, cast in plaster, made in 1969. Papadopoulos, the military man who led the 1967 coup and subsequently installed himself as Greece’s prime minister until 1973, always said that his dictatorship was merely “a plaster cast” there to protect the patient during the “surgery” needed to restore democracy.
Dimitris Alithinos’ sculpture Happening II seems to refer to this metaphor, except that the patient here is a man tied to the roof of a car, suffocating under a piece of plastic. In Nikias Skapinakis’ paintings, bodies dare to breathe again, naked and unbent. Democracy, for artists like him, was a physical act of liberation for the entire body politic.
The most remarkable pictures in the show are surprising for their choice of artistic style. Pop art is generally thought of as an Anglo-American genre, celebrating the substance and veneer of consumer culture. Yet for artists like Alberto Solsona of Spain and Alekos V Levidis of Greece, it was the perfect way to expose political violence—even if, as the title of his 1969 monotype on paper puts it, “Made in the USA.”
Pop art is also the style in which artist Giorgos Ioannou captured the events that heralded the junta’s downfall. In November 1973, law students barricaded themselves in the capital’s Polytechnic University, demanding its removal. The protest thwarted a sham process of liberalization that had been initiated weeks earlier by dictator Papadopoulos, who had brutally cracked down on the occupation.
Ioannou’s comical panel paintings seem like a macabre homage to Roy Lichtenstein’s famous Whaam! diptych, except here we see the bullets tearing through the bodies of young people. At least 40 students died during the Polytechnic uprisings, with thousands more wounded.
The diversity of artistic forms on display in Democracy ultimately comes across as a kind of commentary on the overarching theme: that there may be no such thing as a ‘democratic’ style in art. Indeed, in some cases the visual language that some Southern European artists use to tell the story of their democratic liberation has a strangely anti-egalitarian slant. In The National Technical University of Athens, a 1975 painting by Marios Vatzias, the slain protesters are plucked from the street by angels and carried to the gods. They are no longer part of the masses, but elevated to the few.
Martyrdom is a surprisingly common theme, especially in the works of the Greek engraver Tassos, whose vision was celebrated in the first National Gallery show after the fall of the junta. Freedom fighters are depicted as ordinary citizens here, but stylized as archangels with machine guns, while the executed communist resistance fighter Ilektra Apostolou becomes Jesus on the cross.
The show’s opening statement is jarring: the journey to democracy, the wall panel claims, “begins with identifying the opponent”—which sounds more like a dictum from the anti-liberal political theorist Carl Schmitt than a formula for a functioning modern democracy. The street protests that accompanied Portugal’s and Greece’s transitions to democracy are given their rightful place, however, even if the geopolitical circumstances that made dictatorships fragile enough to be overthrown by the demos are largely absent from these artworks—namely, the colonial wars that had worn down the armies of the Estado Novo, the Turkish invasion of Cyprus that shattered the junta’s claim to competence, and the rise of the European Economic Community.
Societies that suppress freedom of expression, this exhibition argues, are doomed to fall. In this respect at least, art and the interests of democracy are parallel. But that they do not always overlap should be clear, even if you disagree with critic Kenneth Clark, who concluded in his 1945 essay Art and Democracy that art was “incurably aristocratic” in its tendency to exemplify the “rule of the many by the few.”
The show begins and ends with Konstantinos Parthenis’s large portrait of Alexandros Papanastiou, whose time 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 you walk through the show, these tributes to parliamentary democracy are quickly forgotten. Revolutions make better paintings than institutions.
• Democracy can be seen at the National Gallery in Athens until February 2