Echo Of a Scream, David Alfaro

David Alfaro was a very politically aware muralist in the 1930’s. He made no attempt to hide his beliefs, as he was an active militant and communist (2). His artwork, which shows chaos, social revolution and war, and fascism. Many say that that his painting Echo Of a Scream was his most symbolic work that he painted in the time he was involved in the Spanish Civil War (2). The painting depicts the bleakness, despair, and destruction of war. It shows a child who is crying because his future is uncertain due to the instability of his home country. It also shows swirls of smoke, which given the circumstances, can be looked at as hopes of the people which are floating away because there is no way that they will come true under the current status of their environment (2). Due to the lack of hope in the piece, it is directly related to the theme of silence because under all the paintings, there is an obvious lack of hope or possibility for any of the subjects.

Die Uberlebenden, Kathe Kollwitz

      Kathe Kollwitz grew up in Germany during the First and Second World Wars. She was directly effected and frustrated by the corruption of the German government as a girl and brought it out through her artwork. Her piece Die Überlebenden, which means “the survivors”, shows children being swept up by a menacing figure with disproportional sized hands. Through much research, many psychologists believe that she suffered from a childhood neurological disorder, commonly called “Alice in Wonderland syndrome”, which causes migraines and sensory hallucinations (3). However, these children, while they are “survivors”, seem to be negatively effected by what they have gone through. Namely in this image, based on the date, it seems that it was World War One that affected them. There are also people in the background with blindfolds on. This represents the people’s ignorance to the power of the government and the terrible things they were doing at the time. The children look terrified, but like in Speechless their mouths are closed, showing silence. As in Speechless, there is an extraordinary lack of color, which shows bleakness and a loss of hope. These two completely different time periods and places have the same theme – silence, forced by the government, and accepted by the people. This image is directly related to the theme of silence because it shows that even when someone survives an extraordinarily scarring ordeal such as living under a seriously corrupt monarchy, it scars someone and changes the way they used to be.

Speechless

    In different types of societies, namely totalitarian and communist regimes, people are forced into silence by the government. This is due to the government’s need to control the people in radical ways so that they will always be in power. These high ranking government officials believe that if they keep the populace ignorant by giving them a corrupt educational system and misguided beliefs, they will stomp out any possibility of uprising.

    Speechless shows a woman with a gun peeking from her head scarf. She looks miserable and terrified, but she doesn’t look like she is about to scream in fear. The bags under her eyes indicate that she can’t sleep because of the fear that she faces every day. However, she looks like she is going to keep quiet because that is what the government wants from her, or they will kill her. This shows that because of the people’s willingness to comply with the government’s demands, the government wins in many cases until a large majority of the people have had enough and demand reform.

    This piece of art was influenced by the Iranian revolution and the changes that were brought on by it. Shirin Neshat was born in Iran, but couldn’t return until eleven years after she had graduated from high school due to the instability of her home country (1). The Iran that she returned to was nothing like the home that she had left fifteen years earlier. "Persian culture is based on quite different values to the Islamic one. It is less stiff, more poetic and bookish and very old. The new government brought a very strict, pure form of Islam into the country. They wished to erase Persian history and to replace it with a general Islamic culture.” (1) She explored her sense of homelessness through art and made many Islamic influenced paintings.