Revolutionary Tides

Revolutionary Tides explores the decisive importance of large gatherings of people and its correlative, the mass medium of poster art, in politics and art between World War I and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
Revolutionary Tides examines the artistic consequences of the triumph of popular sovereignty as a political ideal more than one hundred years after the French Revolution (1789).
The exhibition and accompanying catalogue track the changing face of revolution from World War I (1914–18) through the year of the fall of the Berlin wall (1989) by means of more than one hundred political posters from twenty countries, drawn from the collections of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, the Wolfsonian–Florida International University, and the Cantor Art Center, Stanford University.
Whereas the conventional approach to poster art emphasizes classifications based on artist, period, political ideology, and nationality; patterns of influence; or the development of specific technical practices, Revolutionary Tides is instead concerned with the emergence of a common graphic vernacular for depicting multitudes as political actors on a worldwide scale and in a multiplicity of only loosely interconnected artistic, political, and historical settings. The catalogue proposes a macro-history of the political poster, high and low, east and west, north and south, with micro-historical texture provided by the annotated entries assembled in the concluding section of the catalogue.
Jeffrey T. Schnapp is holder of the Rosina Pierotti Chair at Stanford University and Director of Stanford’s Humanities Laboratory.
He is the author of several books, including The Transfiguration of History at the Center of Dante’s Paradise (1986) and Staging Fascism: 18BL and the Theater of Masses for Masses (1996).
Stanford, Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University
Sept 14 – Dec 31 2005
Miami Beach, The Wolfsonian–Florida International University
Feb 24 – Jun 25 2006