Visual art, like other forms of creative expression, has enjoyed an extensive and polarised relationship with politics. It has been, and continues to be, employed for heated political propaganda and equally fierce resistance to it. The potential of the image to move and influence, deify and vilify, complicate and over-simplify, was very early on acknowledged and utilised by machineries of power such as religious institutions, secular houses and dynasties (that required the aegis of religious institutions to thrive) to stay meaningful and, therefore, powerful.

Artists, famous or obscure, would be commissioned by religious bodies, individual monarchs and whole regimes to glorify their agendas and paint pretty their war-scarred and wolfish faces. Many of art’s most touted achievements are works that were sponsored by the papacy or the monarchy. Artists, for a long stretch of time, were not creatures of free will, reliant as they were on courtly or papal stipends and imperial patronage. Michelangelo was a vehicle of the Roman Catholic Church during his most productive years. Bichitr was court painter to Jahangir as Francisco Goya was, at one point in his illustrious career, to Charles IV. Works by these artists do betray the individuality, even irreverence, that immortalises them as bold and original masters but the origins of many of these works remain rooted in official demands that had to be met.

These days, artists’ livelihoods no longer depend exclusively on political benefaction but they are still keen to address politics through their art, incorporate regional and global political debates into their work and raise outcries at policies that adversely affect people and the planet. Activism is an essential part of contemporary art practices such as Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s and Icelandic-Danish artist and inventor Olafur Eliasson’s. Although such artists may not be entirely safe from the reactions of those they criticise (Ai Weiwei was arrested by Chinese authorities in 2011 and his passport was confiscated and only returned in 2015), the artists are still less vulnerable to the vicissitudes of power than their predecessors.

Art and power have had an eventful shared history. The question is: how vulnerable have artists been to politics?

Going through a recent publication of Hans Holbein the Younger’s 16th century woodcuts on ‘The Dance of Death’, which included a commentary by historian Ulinka Rublack on the life and works of the German artist, I was fascinated in particular to read about Holbein’s time in England, at the court of Henry VIII, where he was the portraitist of choice. Holbein’s first patron in this foreign country was Sir Thomas More, whom he assiduously preserved in paint around 1527.

More and his humanist friend Desiderius Erasmus were responsible for introducing Holbein to his important, English clientele. Yet on his second visit to England, Holbein seems to have indifferently busied himself with portraits of the very figures who orchestrated More’s downfall and execution.

Holbein’s portrait of Thomas Cromwell, More’s chief adversary, now hangs across his portrait of More in the Frick Collection in New York. The coincidence not only illustrates the fickleness of power but the fickleness of artists who, as beneficiaries of power, had to shift allegiances to survive.

Holbein is not the only artist to have jumped ship and not looked back. In 1483, Leonardo da Vinci famously secured a job with the Milanese Duke Ludovico Sforza, who was looking for military engineers, by adjusting his resume to read like a weapon designer’s (bent on highly imaginative destruction) rather than an artist’s. When the Duke was captured by invading French armies in 1499, da Vinci lost no time in securing for himself the favour of the French. He even went on to work on a commission for Gian Giacomo Trivulzio, Sforza’s nemesis. Of course, genius cannot help itself from being noticed and craved and, just as artists required material support, rulers required creative advertising and the more creative and awe-inspiring, the better. So the pursuit was mutual.

But it would be unfair to propose that artists have never been loyal or suffered for their causes or fealties. The French realist Gustave Courbet backed the short-lived revolution of the Paris Commune, spending six months in prison as a result and being charged with a fine that he was unable to pay.

In 1977, Pakistani painter Ijaz ul Hassan was incarcerated at the Lahore Fort for opposing the military regime of Ziaul Haq. It is interesting to note that the paintings produced by the two artists during and after their stints in prison (separated by almost a century) are mostly non-figurative works of great poignancy that represent bondage (in the form, for example, of a hooked trout, in Courbet’s case, and the motif of a barred window in Hassan’s) or celebrate nature — a free and resilient force beyond walls and bars.

What is it that artists are loyal to today? The government sponsorship of the arts is no longer in vogue, and to work for the state as an artist is to alienate oneself, perhaps forever, from the contemporary art market that ostensibly advocates autonomy and dissidence and goes out of its way to circumvent references to the very thing that is its cornerstone: money. Galleries and museums, auction houses and art fairs, private collectors and art dealers are the forces that make up the market, and successful artists today, it can be argued, are loyal primarily to the image of themselves that is in tune with the demands of this market.

Published in Dawn, EOS, July 29th, 2018