Along with the patriotic parades, fireworks, and cooking hotdogs on the grill, celebrating the Fourth of July always makes me think of four distinctively American paintings. Three of them are, perhaps, to be expected. The first one is John Trumbull‘s famous painting of the Declaration of Independence being presented to the Continental Congress. The second one is Emmanuel Leutze‘s stirring scene of George Washington crossing the Delaware. The third is John Singleton Copley’s 1768 portrait of a pensive Paul Revere. And the fourth one—well, we’ll come back to that.
Ironically, the holiday also makes me think of the work of the great Russian abstractionist Kasimir Malevich. Of all the artists of the Russian avant-garde, none was more serious than he was about there being a transcendent spirituality in art, and nobody pressed a minimalist kind of abstraction further. He worked his way through a series of different styles before really hitting his stride around 1915. But suddenly, the last paintings he did toward the end of his life were heavy-handed pictures of Soviet peasants tilling the soil. The state was telling him what he had to paint.
Many of the generation of abstract painters to which Malevich belonged had to flee the Soviet Union for their lives. Under Joseph Stalin, Modernism was condemned as degenerate and those painters who didn’t fall in line were shipped off to a Siberian Gulag, or simply shot.
After being interrogated and tossed in jail for two years, Malevich avoided a grimmer fate by abandoning the abstraction about which he felt so strongly and following the line of Socialist Realism—the only style that met with official approval. Being forced by the government to abandon his creativity and instead serve the ideals of the state, or forfeit his life, was a horrible abuse of both art and artist.
This sad culmination of Malevich’s career is the reason I think of the fourth painting on my July 4th list: Jackson Pollock‘s Lavender Mist, my favorite of his controversial drip paintings. While Pollock wasn’t political with his art, the freedom evident by the splattered paint on the huge canvas is testimony for me of the absolute value of American freedom.
We’re all familiar with the occasional controversies over censorship that sometimes erupt when government and art nudge up against each other in the United States. Most of us have also seen a painting or two that we think is an affront to decency, good taste, or art in general.
But such episodes aside, the freedom that American artists enjoy is another cause for us to celebrate the birth of the United States on July 4th.