For those who treasure both anarchist and artistic practice, 2007 has been an especially good year, having already seen the release of at least two excellent resources examining the links between the two traditions. Published earlier this year, Realizing the Impossible: Art Against Authority is a collection of essays from the point of view of the creative anti-authoritarian practitioners themselves, mostly artists-as-activists, who generally eschew the artworld-proper of Chelsea and MoMA in favor of direct interventions, street art, and anarchist propaganda.

Allan Antliff’s Anarchy and Art: From the Paris Commune to the Fall of the Berlin Wall, released in late July, takes a somewhat more traditionally academic, art historian approach, filling in some of the gaps in Art Against Authority. Antliff’s investigation is less about self-identified anarchists forging their artistic creations for the purpose of fomenting political revolution, than an uncovering of anarchistic trends or themes overlooked by the usual art-historical narratives. This serves a vital purpose, as Antliff is well aware, because while much has been written about art and politics, any discussion of anarchism by art historians is widely avoided in favor of blanket acknowledgments of general Leftist or Marxist politics.

For example, in my own experience, I remember falling in love with painter Gustave Courbet’s brash style and transgressive subject matter during a 19th Century Painting course – the way he shoved his idealistic depictions of the working class into the faces of the wealthy, self-important aristocratic gatekeepers of high-art style – but I don’t remember hearing too much about his friendship with anarchist philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, or the anarchist politics that informed Courbet’s work. Antliff corrects such oversights and more, detailing Courbet’s connection with the Paris Commune and Proudhon’s anarchist program.

From there, Antliff weaves his way through Neo-Impressionism, Dada, Russian Revolution-era anarchism, and beyond. One of the more revealing passages is a chapter-length interview with political artist Susan Simensky Bietila. Bietila attended art school at Brooklyn College during the politically explosive years of the mid-1960’s, and has much to say about the repressive techniques of art professors at that time (most notably, Ad Reinhardt). Bietila describes an art faculty that was not only slow to support the wave of 60’s campus activism, but that actively discouraged any connection between artistic and political activities, instead forcing their version of aesthetic purity – namely, abstract art – on their students. She is quick to make a connection between such forms of aesthetic censorship and the specter of McCarthyism hovering over that period – not to mention the ways in which the U.S. government used abstract art for its own reactionary purposes – concluding about Reinhardt: “What an angry, thoroughly negative man. Every single thing that he is against, I advocate. Quite extraordinary.”

In the true spirit of anarchism, Antliff’s Anarchy and Art is not an attempt to write an authoritative history of anarchist art. Instead, together with Art Against Authority, we are given a wide-ranging collection of fragmented narratives, which, when pieced together, bring us closer to understanding the often overlooked importance of anarchism in creative artistic practice. As contemporary social movements continue to be influenced by anarchist principles, and artists further blur the line between art making and political activism, one can only hope that more such investigations about art and anarchism continue to appear.