Abstract
In three critical studies of the 1940s Lindsay rejects the notion that an artwork can be neutral. Unity is a key concept that Lindsay uses to understand and value some of the modernist work he has formerly rejected, but also to insist that the artist accepts the responsibility to be not only aesthetically but also socially and politically aware. At the same time, he argues that the artist must be free to make their own judgments not tied to any political or other ideology. For Lindsay the artwork is a form of activism: its form uniting tensions and contradictions that arise in creating a work; its content the artist’s own perspective on their world, which may be as complex and contradictory as the work itself.
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Notes
- 1.
The New Apocalyptics was a group of poets in the United Kingdom mostly active between 1939 and 1945 who took their name from the anthology The New Apocalypse (1940), which was edited by J. F. Hendry and Henry Treece. Two more anthologies followed: The White Horseman (1941) and The Crown and Sickle (1944). Their work was a reaction against the political realism of much of the Thirties poetry and included work inspired by surrealism, myth and expressionism. Contributors included Dylan Thomas, George Sutherland Fraser, Norman Alexander MacCaig, Robert Melville, Vernon Watkins, Thomas McLaughlin Scott, Terence Hanbury White and Alex Comfort.
- 2.
Later published in revised and expanded form as The Elephant and the Lotus: A Study of the Novels of Mulk Raj Anand, 2nd ed. revised (Bombay: Kutub Popular, 1965), and in the collection of Lindsay’s essays, Decay and Renewal (1976), pp. 139–66, from which references here are taken.
- 3.
The Security Services intercepted and microfilmed a letter from Lindsay to a CPGB comrade in which he sets out in point form the arguments in the discussion paper that was the basis of Marxism and Contemporary Science: NAUK, KV 2/3252.
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Cranny-Francis, A. (2024). Art as Political Activism. In: Jack Lindsay. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39646-5_7
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