Harvard Club of New Mexico

Lecture March 19th - Art, Architecture, and Authoritarianism: How Antiquity is Recast to Serve Power

Art historian and Club President Diana McDonald, PhD presents this lecture for the Albuquerque International Association

Reichskanzellerei, Berlin 1936
 

AIA’s March lecture will discuss how ancient forms of temples, palaces, and sculpture in the Ancient Near East, Greece and Rome, and elsewhere were reused and reconfigured in modern architecture and art in the 20th and 21st centuries.

In the 1930s, in particular, the fascist states of Italy and Germany were adept at creating forms based on the past that served their purposes of intimidation and glorification of the leader and the state. The Nazi architect Albert Speer was steeped in ancient architecture, and the Italians used Roman forms to recall a glorious past.

The use of monumental buildings, oversized socialist realist sculpture, and “realism” characterized the totalitarian states. Soviet art and architecture served propagandistic purposes, and all totalitarian states used such art and architecture as a weapon of oppression. Forms rooted in the past were often adopted and then subverted for political ends.
 

Dr. McDonald will examine how these forms served the state and the effects they had on the populace.