Our secret buyer turns his attention to political artworks

Art and politics have always gone hand in hand. Politicians have always exploited art, and artists, in turn, have learnt how to exploit politics. This symbiosis has produced artworks of outstanding significance, and much that has become highly collectible.

The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, in a lecture in 1970, said that ‘art has one function for the artist, another for the patron’. The artist’s interest may be aesthetic, expressing a ‘Platonic conception of beauty or personal conviction’, but for the patron it can also represent propaganda, pride and prestige. The commissioning and public display of works portraying chosen subjects, or the acquisition of masterpieces, has long enhanced the social and political standing of collectors and the status of their communities. Napoleon and Hitler both sought to assemble national collections – by looting where necessary – for precisely this purpose. In contrast, Hitler’s notorious exhibition of ‘degenerate art’, condemning many outstanding Modernists, had an equally political motive. Earlier iconoclasts, from Byzantium to the Puritans, recognised the influence of religious art, and destroyed it.

Artists have always understood this. Jacques-Louis David’s famous portrait of Napoleon traversing the Alps on a rearing horse is one of history’s great pieces of political myth-making: Napoleon actually crossed the pass on a mule. The Soviet period in Russia produced works of great artistic merit dominated by raw, sometimes brutal politics. Today, for trenchant criticism of China, think of Ai Weiwei.

Collectors of English art, particularly of prints and engravings, have been well served by politically motivated artists, especially satirical printmakers. James Gillray (1756–1815) has been acknowledged by modern masters including Brighton resident Steve Bell, Martin Rowson and the late David Low as the outstanding practitioner in the field. His predecessor William Hogarth (1697–1764), with his savage commentaries on the social conditions, fashions and politics of his age, showed the way.

Original versions of Hogarth’s Humours of an Election I and II can be seen at one of my favourite museums, Sir John Soane’s in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Few works offer a sharper indictment of a corrupt electoral system. Excellent engravings made in Hogarth’s own lifetime, together with later coloured prints of his political and social satires, can still be found through reputable dealers such as Abbott and Holder in London, and high quality art prints from King & McGaw in Newhaven, often at highly affordable prices.

The same is true of Gillray. Many of the hand-coloured originals sold by his friend and publisher Hannah Humphrey survive in excellent condition and still appear on the market for low four-figure sums. A ferocious nationalist and chronicler of ‘John Bull’, one of his best-known works is The Plumb-pudding in danger, showing Pitt and Napoleon carving up a globe-shaped pudding. Have times changed so much? His John Bull Swamped in a Flood of New Taxes showing Henry Petty, the Chancellor of the Exchequer of the day, was recently snapped up at Abbott and Holder. Its message still resonates.

It is one thing to collect such works, but another to hang them on the wall. They remain political statements and their message inevitably reflects upon the owner. We can all think of present-day politicians and supporters who would happily display Gillray’s nationalist, anti-French and anti-tax imagery. But how do you handle Soviet art? Must you be a Marxist-Leninist?

The Soviet period produced countless vibrant posters: smiling workers, clenched fists, hammer and sickle emblems, abundant harvests, astronauts, Stalin and Lenin. For collectors on the left they remain affordable and visually striking acquisitions, readily available from numerous online sources, particularly and perhaps surprisingly in the United States.

Yet Soviet art was far more than propaganda. Constructivism made a lasting contribution to abstract art, exemplified by El Lissitzky’s celebrated lithographic poster Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge (1919), now widely available in excellent reproductions. The Comrade Gallery, online, also offers exceptional original works from the Soviet period, including paintings by members of the dissident ‘Group of Nine’. Around £25,000 will secure Nikonov’s superb Portrait of the Artist’s Friend. The graphic portrayal of politics and social life remains all around us. In the footsteps of Low, Martin Rowson, Steve Bell, Matt, (Nicholas) Newman and Peter Brookes continue the tradition of the court jester – witty, irreverent and often savagely critical. Platonic idealists they are not. The Chris Beetles Gallery in Mayfair, the Political Cartoon Gallery in Putney and the artists’ own websites offer collectors some of the best opportunities to acquire original contemporary political cartoons and, in the process, one of the sharpest visual chronicles of our age. Collectors can buy according to their own political sympathies, while the politicians themselves, from vanity or alarm, are often among the first to acquire the originals.