Conservative Artists

[OvidsExile]

I was having a discussion the other day and someone said that there are no good conservative artists. I was able to come up with dozens of actors and writers, since frankly I know more about film and literature than I do about fine art.

Film: Mel Gibson, Clint Eastwood, Howard Hawks, Frank Capra, Cecil B. Demille, Jimmy Stewart, Sylvester Stallone, Charlton Heston, John Wayne, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dennis Hopper, Chuck Norris, Bruce Willis, Gary Sinise, Gary Cooper, James Woods, R. Lee Ermey, Frank Sinatra, Robert Duvall, Clark Gable, Dwayne Johnson, Tom Selleck, David Mamet, John Milius, Kelsey Grammer, Jerry Bruckheimer, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, Kurt Russell, Noel Coward.

Sci-fi: Robert A. Heinlein, Orson Scott Card, Larry Niven, Vernor Vinge, Frank Herbert, or Poul Anderson.

Literature: Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, T.S. Eliot, Dante Alighieri, Knut Hamson, Ezra Pound, P.G. Wodehouse, G.K. Chesterton, Evelyn Waugh, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Jorge Luis Borges, Rudyard Kipling, William Butler Yeats, Ayn Rand, Ford Maddox Ford, Wyndham Lewis, Virgil, Horace, Calderon, Racine, Jane Austen, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Samuel Johnson, Saul Bellow, Balzac, William Thackeray, Yukio Mishima, Dostoyevsky, Henryk Sienkiewicz, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Chateaubriand, Walter Scott, The Bronte Sisters, Matthew Arnold, Robert Frost.

But I struggled when it came to painters and sculptors. Here's what I was able to come up with: Edgar Degas, Edward Hopper, William Bouguereau, Paul Cezanne. Possibly Norman Rockwell and George Seurat. While initially I dismissed Salvador Dali for his early communist activism, a friend of mine informed me that he became a fascist later in life and might even have informed against Federico Lorca. Also, Dali does appear to have become religious and illustrated a Bible. It's difficult to pin a lot of guys down because artists are so often apolitical and silent on those matters. You have guys like Jacques-Louis David who is a monarchist, then a French Revolutionary, then a Napoleon monarchist again. It seems like he supported whichever side was in power and could pay him. I couldn't make heads or tails of Joshua Reynolds even if he was a lifelong friend of Edmund Burke's. A lot of the time, I would look for clues in their art, but experimental doesn't necessarily mean liberal and traditional style doesn't necessarily mean that their lifestyle was conservative either. Usually, I think sharp well defined boundaries, certain subjects depicted in certain lights can give a hint as to the artist's internal life, but that's still a gamble. A lot of the renaissance artists were just religious for hire without any genuine faith and even if they believed as most people did back then, there's still a difference between belief and living the life. They weren't all monks like Fra Angelico or Andrei Rublev. So what do you guys think? Who were the greatest conservative artists of all time?

 

[Artyczar]

That's a lot of data. Do you have a reason for gathering it? I just mean, do you have a point of wanting to make this a subject of discussion? It is politically charged, is it not? I suppose it could be discussed without contention, but I just don't see it going down that road. Seems challenging. That's all. Just a friendly word and an honest inquiry as to your intention. What do you think?

 

[E.J.H.]

I am with Arty on this one. I don't research the political views of artists I Iike.

Writers is a bit different though. Nature of the artform, it presents you with a lot of information about how the writer ticks. For instance I don't care much anymore for Orson Scott Card, one of the writers you list.

Anyway, one of the very attractive thing about this forum is the absence of political and religious quarrels. I would really prefer it to stay that way.

 

[snoball]

I don't do politics nor religion online at all.

 

[OvidsExile]

That's a lot of data. Do you have a reason for gathering it? I just mean, do you have a point of wanting to make this a subject of discussion? It is politically charged, is it not? I suppose it could be discussed without contention, but I just don't see it going down that road. Seems challenging. That's all. Just a friendly word and an honest inquiry as to your intention. What do you think?

My reason for gathering the data? Curiosity. I'm interested because it's a question nobody seems to be asking. There's so little data on the subject that I can't help but wonder why. The prospect of a new frontier and unexplored territory is tantalizing. It's seductive by dint of it's corresponding challenges. There's something about a blank spot on a map that calls to me, makes me wonder what is there. On the surface, it seems like such a perfectly straight forward and easily answered question. The fact that it isn't being discussed by anybody that I can see is another layer to the mystery. I figured that I had a cracking question people could bend their brains around, a game they hadn't played before, that might appeal to the more adventurous among you.

There are so many facets and sides to the question to be considered. First and foremost, the definitions: what constitutes conservative and what constitutes liberal, especially since the philosophies of conservatism and liberalism only date back to the late eighteenth and seventeenth centuries? Even the republican and democrat parties of the United States only date to the nineteenth century; so are there other markers, or constants by which one may distinguish a common theme or personality type down through the ages? Is a republican in the present time equivalent to a British Tory or a Roman Optimate in outlook? What are the different defining characteristics of a liberal or a conservative personality down through time? By what major issues are they divided at given points in history? Say, the defining event liberals and conservatives found themselves on either side of in the twentieth century was the Bolshevik revolution and Communism, whereas from the late eighteenth to nineteenth it was the French Revolution. Before that, it was probably something like Ultramontanism and the Protestant Reformation. For the Romans, land reform, suffrage, and naturalization were the issues of their day.

I suppose it could be politically charged, but it needn't be any more than asking who your favorite women artists are. It's worth investigating for the same reasons, namely because there is a marginalized group within the artistic community and it's worth studying and celebrating their contributions. It's worth studying because, as E.J.H. said, gleaning knowledge into an artist's life gives us insight into their work.

 

[Artyczar]

RULES: ...this is not a place to debate politics, religion...