First, let me show you the painting this pastel is modeled after, Eugene Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, completed in 1830. This historical painting is massive in scale, 9.8 by 11.9 feet, and depicts France’s July Revolution of 1830 (not the French Revolution). Delacroix finished it in Autumn of that year.
This painting celebrates Liberty as Marianne, the goddess of liberty who symbolizes the French Republic and the values for which it stands––liberty, equality, and fraternity. She is leading a conglomerate army of bourgeoisie, students, and urban workers over corpses and wreckage while brandishing the French flag. Considering the painting’s massive size, she is practically leaping out of the canvas! In the background a second flag waves from the towers of the Notre Dame, the spiritual center of France.
The exhibition history of this painting is deeply political. According to Wikipedia, the French governement actually bought it from Delacroix for 3000 francs “with the intention of displaying it in the throne room of the Palais du Luxembourg as a reminder to the “citizen-king” Louis-Philippe of the July Revolution, through which he had come to power.” Instead it hung in the palace’s gallery for only a few months, after which it was removed due to its inflammatory message. Two years later the government returned the piece to Delacroix, though still as the property of France. Except for a showing here or there, always when it was politically astute to pay homage to that Left, it remained hidden away. Not so small a feat, considering its size. In 1874 it was acquired by the Louvre.
For our bicentennial celebrations, France gifted the United States with the rare opportunity to display the painting, along with 148 other works, underscoring the unique relationship between France and the United States. We are nations who share the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity, and France has been generous with repeated gifts of Marianne, as a symbol of Liberty, to the United States.
Indigenous American writers and historians have long held that it the stage was set for the ideas of the American Revolution by British settlers’ exposure to American cultures and their emphasis on freedom and balance of power. These ideas are also foundational to the Constitution. I first read about this decades ago in Marilou Awiakta’s book Selu, Seeking the Corn Mother’s Wisdom, which has since held an honorary spot on my bookshelf, along with other books that have changed my life or my thinking.
Recently I came across a further exploration of this historical theory in The Dawn of Everything by David Graebor and David Wengrow. They argue that it was exposure to Indigenous American’s critique of European cultures that challenged European thinking about how a society could be organized. Conversations about whether a society could hold liberty and equality as a principle of natural law ricocheted through books published at the time.
The question of whether equality and liberty arose as deeply American principles, from Indigenous nations, will perhaps never be fully decided, but the impact of Indigenous American culture still reverberates today as a counterpoint to capitalist, European culture. It shows us a different path forward, and deserves more than just an honorary spot on our bookshelves. We have to be willing to change.
Change is revolutionary. It requires a willingness to sacrifice the status quo for something that serves us more deeply. The yearning for something new, and the willingness to sacrifice the old, is a difficult place to come to. The underground must be saturated with potential that cannot break through until the sacrifice is made.
Theirs is something hard about killing a national symbol–a living symbol at that, of a regal, spectacular bird–in a work of art. A symbol is a powerful thing; it reaches deep into our psyches. It is more than just an equation of meaning–more than just Marianne equals liberty, equality, and fraternity, or bald eagle equals United States–a symbol is a reservoir for potent, activating energy, and when it is shared on a collective scale, that is no small thing. I would argue that symbols have a potency akin to livingness. So it was not easy to depict a dead bald eagle. Nor was it easy to depict corn rotten with fungal disease. But as an artist in conversation with the Otherworld, I feel as if these symbols were asking this of me. That their death needed to be accounted for so that they can be restored to proper livingness.
First, let me show you the painting this pastel is modeled after, Eugene Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, completed in 1830. This historical painting is massive in scale, 9.8 by 11.9 feet, and depicts France’s July Revolution of 1830 (not the French Revolution). Delacroix finished it in Autumn of that year.
This painting celebrates Liberty as Marianne, the goddess of liberty who symbolizes the French Republic and the values for which it stands––liberty, equality, and fraternity. She is leading a conglomerate army of bourgeoisie, students, and urban workers over corpses and wreckage while brandishing the French flag. Considering the painting’s massive size, she is practically leaping out of the canvas! In the background a second flag waves from the towers of the Notre Dame, the spiritual center of France.
The exhibition history of this painting is deeply political. According to Wikipedia, the French governement actually bought it from Delacroix for 3000 francs “with the intention of displaying it in the throne room of the Palais du Luxembourg as a reminder to the “citizen-king” Louis-Philippe of the July Revolution, through which he had come to power.” Instead it hung in the palace’s gallery for only a few months, after which it was removed due to its inflammatory message. Two years later the government returned the piece to Delacroix, though still as the property of France. Except for a showing here or there, always when it was politically astute to pay homage to that Left, it remained hidden away. Not so small a feat, considering its size. In 1874 it was acquired by the Louvre.
For our bicentennial celebrations, France gifted the United States with the rare opportunity to display the painting, along with 148 other works, underscoring the unique relationship between France and the United States. We are nations who share the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity, and France has been generous with repeated gifts of Marianne, as a symbol of Liberty, to the United States.
Indigenous American writers and historians have long held that it the stage was set for the ideas of the American Revolution by British settlers’ exposure to American cultures and their emphasis on freedom and balance of power. These ideas are also foundational to the Constitution. I first read about this decades ago in Marilou Awiakta’s book Selu, Seeking the Corn Mother’s Wisdom, which has since held an honorary spot on my bookshelf, along with other books that have changed my life or my thinking.
Recently I came across a further exploration of this historical theory in The Dawn of Everything by David Graebor and David Wengrow. They argue that it was exposure to Indigenous American’s critique of European cultures that challenged European thinking about how a society could be organized. Conversations about whether a society could hold liberty and equality as a principle of natural law ricocheted through books published at the time.
The question of whether equality and liberty arose as deeply American principles, from Indigenous nations, will perhaps never be fully decided, but the impact of Indigenous American culture still reverberates today as a counterpoint to capitalist, European culture. It shows us a different path forward, and deserves more than just an honorary spot on our bookshelves. We have to be willing to change.
Change is revolutionary. It requires a willingness to sacrifice the status quo for something that serves us more deeply. The yearning for something new, and the willingness to sacrifice the old, is a difficult place to come to. The underground must be saturated with potential that cannot break through until the sacrifice is made.
Theirs is something hard about killing a national symbol–a living symbol at that, of a regal, spectacular bird–in a work of art. A symbol is a powerful thing; it reaches deep into our psyches. It is more than just an equation of meaning–more than just Marianne equals liberty, equality, and fraternity, or bald eagle equals United States–a symbol is a reservoir for potent, activating energy, and when it is shared on a collective scale, that is no small thing. I would argue that symbols have a potency akin to livingness. So it was not easy to depict a dead bald eagle. Nor was it easy to depict corn rotten with fungal disease. But as an artist in conversation with the Otherworld, I feel as if these symbols were asking this of me. That their death needed to be accounted for so that they can be restored to proper livingness.