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More than a century on, the Venice Biennale remains a stage for soft-power plays, where art and propaganda are inseparable
\n\n\n\n‘Germany, a conquering country is, I would say, almost aggressive in her paintings: one can see the desire, nay the firm willingness, to gain the upper hand. And her paintings are vigorous, if vulgar at times.’ This was the assessment of Italian critic Arturo Lancellotti on viewing the work by the group of Bavarian artists representing Germany at the 1909 Venice Biennale. After Belgium had pioneered the model in 1907, the exhibition was only the second to include discrete national pavilions, built by the Hungarians, Germans and British, all in the Napoleon-era Giardini di Castello. It doesn’t take much reading between the lines to deduce that Lancellotti’s review was coloured by the world beyond the gardens: Italy was militarily weak, relatively newly unified and a junior partner with Germany in the Triple Alliance at the time. Meanwhile, Lancellotti, still under the guise of art criticism, seemed to be gazing at the other imperial European power with greater admiration. ‘England, which has already reached the height of prosperity, is looking even higher in her paintings. She is not preoccupied with overtaking others and succeeds with elegance and delicacy.’
\n\n\n\nWhile not all art should be read through the prism of politics, it takes an extra leap of faith to ignore when approaching the Venice Biennale: while the nineteenth-century model of the sprawling group show is maintained in the Central Pavilion and Arsenale (this year displaying the exhibition conceived by curator Koyo Kouoh prior to her death in 2025), half the event is now organised around the structures of nation-states, and the number of countries taking part grows each year. With armed conflicts also on the rise globally, the highest since the Second World War, recent editions of the Biennale have proved increasingly contentious, with the Russian, Israeli and now the US pavilions the focus of particular protest and ire. All three nations have been accused of committing or threatening genocide, and in April a group of 74 artists and curators participating in Kouoh’s show demanded that these countries’ national representations be excluded, writing: ‘there is a threshold [of aggression] beyond which participation in La Biennale should not be normalised’. The mayor of Venice, Luigi Brugnaro, responded to criticism that Russia is being allowed back into the event, having been absent since 2022, by promising that if the government, via its artists and curators, were ‘to carry out propaganda, we would be the first to close the pavilion’. It is an absurd statement. Whatever the individual artists’ intentions, for every nation, the national pavilion at Venice has always been, as plenty of others have pointed out, about propaganda and soft power. It might be benign, often in the cases of smaller countries or those with less high-profile art scenes showing for first time, among them Guinea, Equatorial Guinea, Sierra Leone and Somalia this year, but there’s a reason that the British Pavilion, to name just one example, is coordinated by a public body sponsored by the UK government’s foreign office and not its culture department.
\n\n\n\nIsrael and Russia own their own buildings in the Giardini, and while the Guggenheim Foundation owns the US Pavilion, its exhibitions are currently co-organised with US Department of State: the US opened its pavilion in 1930 under private patronage after years of unsuccessful lobbying for public funds at home, its presence in the European showcase cooked up during a ‘pleasant luncheon’ the previous year between sculptor Antonio Mariani and the art dealer Walter L. Clark. It was only later that ownership of the Palladian building was transferred from Clark’s commercial cooperative Grand Central Art Galleries, first to MoMA in 1954, and then to the Guggenheim Foundation in 1986. The MoMA years correspond with the height of the Cold War, and it was no coincidence that it was brought under the governance of the New York institution at that particular moment: MoMA had long been a proxy for the US government to conduct cultural diplomacy. That same year it installed 27 paintings and drawings by the Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning in the pavilion; Nelson Rockefeller, who had left the museum presidency in 1953, was starting his ‘special assistant’ role, coordinating psychological warfare, with the Eisenhower administration. By now, any pleasant repasts still being enjoyed hid the more important aim of demonstrating to the world that the US was not the cultural backwater Russia often made it out to be, the freedom of Abstract Expressionism historically promoted by way of active contrast to the regimentation of Soviet Socialist Realism.
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In 1948 the USA had a new neighbour in what was now the Giardini della Biennale. The State of Israel, declared as such that May, was invited to stage a show: originally the presentation was titled Artisti della Palestina (Artists of Palestine), organisers landing on Artisti Ebraici della Palestina (Hebrew Artists of Palestine), before agreeing to the final title Artisti di Erez Israel, Palestina (Artists of Eretz Israel, Palestine). The gardens were filling up and, over the following two decades, national participation more than doubled, with Venezuela (in 1954), Japan and Finland (1956) and Canada (1958) opening pavilions. Israel, barely three years old, got there first however, designing itself a permanent home, a pavilion in the International Style on a patch of land out the back of the US Pavilion. This opened in time for the 1952 edition of the Biennale with the work of artists Marcel Janco, Moshe Mokady and Reuven Rubin, the architecture advertising the new nation’s Western Europeanness and ‘civilised’ proclivities. A 1923 triptych by Rubin, titled First Fruits, opened the exhibition; except, as art historian Chelsea Haines has pointed out, only the central panel was shown, in which the Romanian-born painter depicts a Jewish family harvesting the bounty of the land. Missing from the show, we might assume for political reasons, were the flanking depictions of an Arab Palestinian shepherd and a Bedouin resting with his camel. In the catalogue to that edition of the Biennale, its secretary, Rodolfo Pallucchini, celebrated the addition of ‘extra-European’ nations to the event. Even today, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, where Rubin’s work hangs, describes the Arab subjects in the two side panels as ‘essentially part of the landscape: secondary characters in this drama, they do not participate in the productive work that drives the world’.
\n\n\n\nUnder the Biennale’s current constitution, any country that is recognised by the Italian government is eligible to organise a national pavilion – Palestine is therefore not invited, though this year the Palestine Museum US, Connecticut, will stage an exhibition as an official collateral event in rented premises. The Israeli Pavilion this year is being renovated, organisers claim, but the Biennale has found space for them in the Arsenale: a move those protesting artists warn not only goes against Kouoh’s concept of ‘radical solidarity’, but, more practically after 2024 saw Italian police stationed outside the Israeli Pavilion, ‘will also introduce conditions of violence and fear through the military and police presence that will accompany the Israeli pavilion’.
\n\n\n\nThe pavilions obviously aren’t quite ‘extraterritorial spaces’, like embassies or foreign military bases, with all their legal protections, but they have a similar feel, and the countries can pretty much walk in. Those countries that own their sites don’t pay any rent or fee to the Biennale organisers. Russia bought its patch of land in the gardens in time for the 1914 edition, an important insurance for the country at a time now when international sanctions, the type that have otherwise isolated its art market, could otherwise confound any exhibition. In 2022, after Russia launched its fullscale invasion of Ukraine, the two artists who were scheduled to show in its pavilion the following May, Alexandra Sukhareva and Kirill Savchenkov, pulled out in protest, and it remained shuttered. In 2024 the Russian government handed its keys to friendly Bolivia to exhibit. The past years aren’t the first time the pavilion has lain empty. From 1938 to 1954, the Soviet Union under Stalin eschewed the show; in the last year of the boycott The New York Times reported with some glee that ‘the Russian Pavilion, a melancholy Bakst-like erection, is closed and shabby’, though the newspaper’s critic admitted ‘some of the other Iron Curtain countries have taken unusual trouble to exhibit art with a political moral’. With Stalin dead, the pavilion was unlocked and given a dust down, in time for the 1956 edition.
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Two decades of shows ensued, with artists including the Kyiv-born Misha Brusilovsky and Russian-Livonian ‘Queen of Soviet Sculpture’ Vera Mukhina, but Russia quit the gardens again after the so-called 1977 ‘Biennale of Dissent’: a special exhibition, encompassing nonconformist art, cinema and literature, organised by the Biennale in the Arsenale during an off year, ostensibly to mark the 60th anniversary of the October Revolution. Those featured in this provocation were exclusively from the Soviet Bloc, and all made work outside that which was officially sanctioned by Moscow and the other Communist regimes. Then president of the Biennale, Carlo Ripa di Meana, a socialist, wrote that the exhibition was an acknowledgment that the Biennale was embedded in the friction between art and geopolitics: ‘How a society absorbs these tensions, how it deals with the defiance posed both by art and ideas – these are questions that have been of concern to the Venice Biennale.’ They remain so half a century later, as its organisers should know.
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