12 / Conflict and Resistance

• • CZECHOSLOVAKIA. Prague. August 1968. Warsaw Pact Troops invade Prague. In front of the Radio Headquarters.Josef Koudelka (Czech/French, b. 1938)	Guernica Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881–1973)	Y no hai Remedio (And There’s Nothing to Be Done)Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (Spanish, 1746–1828)	The Execution of Emperor MaximilianÉdouard Manet (French, 1832–1883)	Afghan soldiers from the ruling Taliban movement and visiting journalists stand in front of one of the destroyed Buddha statues in the central province of Bamiyan, March 26, 2001.Sayed Salahuddin (Afghan, b. 1970)	The Legislative BellyHonoré Daumier (French, 1808–1879)
    Books!Aleksandr (Alexander) Mikhailovich Rodchenko, (Russian, 1891–1956)	Chairman Mao en Route to AnyuanChinese School	Converging Territories #30Lalla Essaydi (Moroccan, b. 1956)	Hagia Sophia (exterior)Anthemius of Tralles (Greek, active 6th c.) and Isidorus of Miletus (Greek, active 6th c.) (architects)	The Earth Spider Creating Monsters in the Mansion of Minamoto no YorimitsuUtagawa Kuniyoshi (Japanese, 1797–1861)	Battle of Til-Tuba (Battle of the River Ulai) (detail)Unknown artist(s), Nineveh, Iraq
    Fish and RocksBada Shanren (Zhu Da) (Chinese, 1626–1705)	Calvinist IconoclasmFranz Hogenberg (German, ca. 1540– ca. 1590)	La quema de los Judas (The Burning of the Judases)Diego Rivera (Mexican, 1886–1957)	Alabama Loyalists Greeting the Federal Gun-Boats from Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated)Kara Walker (American, b. 1969)	The Third of May, 1808Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (Spanish, 1746–1828)

expert perspective

John Elderfield Chief Curator Emeritus of Painting and Sculpture, Museum of Modern Art, New York

“

When the news came out that Juárez had executed Maximilian, all the criticism was against Juárez. It took a while for the liberal sentiment to prevail. And I think even it was directed against not poor Maximilian, but against Napoleon III. But, still, actually Juárez was amazingly brave in a sense for having done this and realized that he was going to be criticized and that nonetheless, given the history of Mexico and the way in which people are deposed and then come back or form governments in exile, that he absolutely had to do this. Everybody knows that he did the right thing.

The painting seems a twenty-first-century painting. I mean it absolutely seems of the present. But the context from which it came has actually receded from the painting. And I think that’s the hard thing to recover. What was it like? We have Manet’s letters. We know how he was contemptuous of Napoleon III and thought he was just a terrible person, and that what happened here was clearly something he judged to be entirely in character to this person who was just hopeless and actually made him angry enough to want to paint these huge pictures, as well as being a painter who cared about his career, thinking, ‘Great, I’ve got a subject, which is going to wow people’—that part of the job of the artist is also actually to provide something which is in the expanded notion of the word entertainment. And that’s what this is as well.”