My subject is the meaning and the use of the term ‘revolutionary’ art or a ‘revolution’ in art, especially as applied to painting. But to begin we must acknowledge that we are usually speaking in metaphors when we use these words, and metaphors that would not have been meaningful before the French Revolution. People may subsequently have called phenomena prior to the French Revolution revolutionary, but the participants did not. After, and indeed during, the French Revolution we find artists using the term to designate activities they considered analogous to the political phenomenon – or which they wanted to privilege by association with the honorific term. The central meaning ‘was political.’

When we turn to the practical implementation of the metaphor, we have to ask what in practice is ‘revolutionary’ art and/or a ‘revolution’ in art? Presumably any overthrow of previous practice or doctrine in art may be regarded as revolutionary.

A related issue is the representation of political ‘revolution’ in art, as in historical writing, whether from a friendly or a hostile point of view. When hostile, though patently counter-revolutionary, it may quite possibly be more ‘revolutionary’ as art than the orthodox pro-revolutionary art, which is trapped in a system of rhetoric that must, in order to serve its political purpose, be (or become) conservative, that is easily understood, constructed out of a lexicon of familiar images.

Trotsky makes the crucial point, that revolutionary art is a transitional art, or the art of a transitional phase between reaction and consolidation (and his formulation would apply as well to counter-revolutionary art that attacks the political revolution as it represents it): ‘Revolutionary art, which inevitably reflects all the contradictions of a revolutionary social system, should not be confused with socialist art for which no basis has as yet been made. On the other hand, one must not forget that socialist art will grow out of the art of this transitional period’.