Liberty Leading the People
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This painting was meant to celebrate the day of 28 July 1830, when the people rose and dethroned the Bourbon king.
Although the painting is filled with rhetoric, Delacroix's spirit is fully involved in its execution: in the outstretched figure of Liberty, in the bold attitudes of the people following her contrasted with the lifeless figures of the dead heaped up in the foreground, in the heroic poses of the people fighting for liberty, there is without a doubt a sense of full participation on the part of the artist, which led Argan to define this canvas as the first political work of modern painting.
Liberty Leading the People caused quite disturbance.
It shows the allegorical figure of Liberty as a half-draped woman wearing the traditional Phrygian cap of liberty and holding a gun in one hand and the tricolor in the other.
Delacroix, the young man in the painting wearing the opera hat, was present on the barricades in July 1830.
Allegory helps achieve universality in the painting: Liberty is not a woman; she is an abstract force.
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It seems to me that what unites the people involved with LastSuperpower is that we all see the centrality of standing for global democratic revolution and the enlightenment against the forces of reaction and darkness.
To me it seems to draw a good line of demarcation between us and the pseudo left.
However it doesn't really exclude what I'd call "the radical right" - or does it?
What do people think?
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