Description
This unique and splendid book, the result of many years of study and exploration, offers a major survey of those prints and drawings which, for five centuries, have been created as satire and social protest. Artists have traditionally turned to printmaking to express their dissatisfaction with political and social injustice: the print is better suited than any other medium to a memorable (and easily distributed) rendition of irony, caricature, and exposure of human folly. Ben Shahn has said of the print, “It is to art as the essay is to literature – compact, pointed, and intensive,” and the prints chosen for The Indignant Eye represent the rich diversity of attitude, intention, and achievement that comprise the history of the print as graphic social polemic. Shikes has organized his history and comment chronologically around the main topics of the artists’ concerns. Beginning with the first stirrings of protest art among the late medieval Germanic masters, he goes on to consider the artists of different periods and persuasions who have used their work to comment on the church, the nobility, social persecution, poverty, war, and hypocrisy. The author pays particular attention to the great suges of social art engendered by periods of revolution and political upheaval throughout Europe, and it is here especially that his techniques of contextual historical criticism are most fruitful. In addition to his sensitive appreciation of prints as art, Shikes effectively places each of the works in its historical setting.
