John Keane

John Keane with his painting, The Moment, (1990-91)
--the dying-color, blood and guts version of Picasso's Guernica.
Warfare brought to the pristine, white walls of the art gallery.

In writing daily about "Art Now and Then" I don't often spent much time writing about the "now" part past the first or second paragraph. There are several good reasons for this, but chief among them is the fact that "art now" is a moving target, important to relate to, but a minefield when it comes to separating the "wheat" from the "chaff." John Keane knows a lot about minefields. He's often painted among them, or their symbolic equivalent. John Keane is (not was) a British Social Realist painter. When we talk about Social Realism as an art movement we are usually referring to the Americans Robert Henri, George Luks, the Ashcan School or John Sloan and his "Group of Eight" from the first decades of the 20th-century. All of which is fine, though it barely scratches the surface. There were Social Realists in virtually every country on earth before the "Great War," even stretching far to the East where Stalin made the style (if not its political ends) the official style of Mother Russia until his death in 1953.

 

A John Keane war photo: decimated palms like wounded warriors
among pristine streetlamps.

The Lie Cafe, 1989, John Keane

Insofar as painting goes, conventional wisdom would suggest that Stalin's death pretty much closed the book on the Social Realism movement in art. It didn't. So long as there is social injustice and those high-minded (or naive) artists who think they can combat it through there work, Social Realism art will persist, though probably not so much using canvas and paint as through other, more valid media such as photography in much the same manner as Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, or Lewis Hine aroused the Great Depression era to action. Though John Keane is quite handy with a camera (above), especially in the high-stress world of war, terrorism, and civil insurrection ripped from the the social media headlines of military conflict "now"; he still knows how to sling paint (literally) as his style sometimes suggests. He's not a photo-journalist, not even an art-journalist. His work is relevant, vibrant, and fresh, but not that fresh. He was an history painting artist covering the Gulf War in 1990-91, but without the deadlines of his mass media cohorts.

 

The Other Cheek, 1989, John Keane

John Keane is sixty years old, which means he was born in 1954. Born in Hertfordshire, England, he was educated at Wellington College and Camberwell School of Art. Trained as a painter, Keane finished college in 1976 and has always been a political activist in the traditional, Social Realist sense of the word. He was of the British baby-boomer generation out to change the world, in his case, one brushstroke at a time. His early work depicted the violence of 1980s Northern Ireland in all its grizzly detail as seen in his 1989 The Other Cheek (above). But it wasn't until the 1990s that he made much of a dent in that goal, and even at that, the anti-war pacifist found what would seem a strange employer--the British Imperial War Museum. They sent him to the Mid-East to cover the relatively short prologue to the continuous unrest, death, and destruction we see there today. Judging from his work sent home (or created afterwards) they got their money's worth, and likely a good deal more than they bargained for. Keane, in his The Moment (top) depicted at close range the horrendous, unsurvivable instant a bomb explodes in Jerusalem's The Moment Cafe jettisoning mangled limbs, internal organs, and the massive spray of body fluids normally encountered only by those wearing red crosses or red crescents.

Ramallah, Ramallah , 2003, John Keane

Hopeless in Gaza 2, 2003, John Keane

Keane's Ramallah, Ramallah (above), is equally telling, though in a more symbolic manner, depicting two bloodstained hands in the window of the Ramallah police station where two Israeli reservists were torn to pieces by a mob. Keane did not stop with the end of the first Gulf War. He returned twice to document the plight of the Palestinians, this time bringing with him more than just his camera in using video, his laptop, and inkjet printers as he digitally composed, collaged, and painted his images. Even though there was no active fighting in the area, the footprints and hand prints of war were everywhere, especially in the war-torn Gaza area whence came his Hopeless in Gaza 2 (left), a nativity as deeply moving as any ever painted by Giotto, Correggio, or El Greco.

Children in Conflict, 2006, John Keane

More than a painting.

In more recent years, Keane has worked with Greenpeace, while also turning his multi-media paintings into traveling shows, such as "57 Hours in the House of Culture," dealing with the Chechen war, "Children in Conflict," (above) and "The Inconvenience of History," (below) dealing with the West Bank and Gaza, and most recently, "Guantanamerica" dealing with representation and dehumanization of detainees at Guantánamo Bay. Thanks to John Keane, Social Realism is not dead, only its original artists. Though dealing incessantly with death, and employing a style and working techniques far removed from Sloan, Henri, or Luks, in many ways, his form of "realism" is more powerful than anything these first "art socialists" could ever have imagined in their worst nightmares.

The Inconvenience of History, 2003, John Keane