American Progress is an 1872 painting by John Gast, a Prussian-born painter, printer, and lithographer who lived and worked most of his life during 1870s in Brooklyn, New York. American Progress, an allegory of manifest destiny, was widely disseminated in chromolithographic prints.
It’s total propaganda, but viewing it now, I see it as a picture of the story Americans tell. Their shitty ideas of progress are highlighted - pollution, cars, use and abuse of the land.
In the shadow of all this, hidden in the dark on the corner of the painting that they’re all moving towards, is genocide, murder, killing of buffalos, and the eradication of wildlife.
“American Progress” sounds like a dark joke - like a greasy canteen pizza being labeleld “American vegetable”.
Of course, this was not the intention of the painter, and generations of white Americans have looked at this painting and completely ignored the story that is really being told. But it’s all there, laid bare, and there’s no use pretending they weren’t aware of what they were doing.
And for that, at least it has some value. It’s like gathering evidence of war crimes from the offenders bragging about their atrocities. Anyone who proudly hung this on their wall you know what they knew, and you know where they stood.
That said, what a shitty piece of work. It’s a crime against good taste depicting a crime against humanity.