090121 UE The Cultural Policy of the Metaxas Dictatorship (2019S)

The module will deal with the cultural policy of the Fourth-of-August regime (1936-1941). Established by former General and royalist politician Ioannis Metaxas on 4 August 1936, the dictatorship has been described by art historians of modern Greece as the ‘Golden Age’ of state patronage. The aim of the course is to explore the cultural activities and initiatives undertaken or promoted by the dictator and by regime functionaries, in order to gain insight into what led to the above description. Culture-related policies will be discussed alongside relevant discourses produced by the dictatorship or by artists and intellectuals. Some of the questions to be addressed are: How did these discourses frame dictatorial policy on culture? What was the expressed or underlying rationale of state patronage under Metaxas? What were the main institutions and figures associated with cultural activity during the dictatorship? At the end of the course, students will have a grasp on the ideological context and the most significant cultural policies of the period, and will be able to comprehend the ways and reasons that culture and the arts were instrumentalised by an autocratic and repressive regime.