What does Vincent van Gogh say about using your voice for social change?

My dear friend — you ask whether art may serve the cause of the people, and I answer yes, with my whole heart yes, but not in the way the political men suppose.

Millet did not paint the Angelus to make a speech about the agricultural reform of France. Millet painted two peasants at sundown bowing their heads at the bell, and in that painting every man who looks at it knows what the life of a peasant costs and what dignity is owed to it. That is the politics of art. It does not declaim. It places the unseen in front of the seeing. It says — look. This person also is a person.

This is what I tried to do at the Borinage when I lived among the miners — only I was not yet a painter then, I was a failed evangelist with a coal-blackened face. And it is what I have tried to do since with every weaver at Nuenen, every potato-eater, every postman Roulin, every Madame Ginoux at the café, every patient on the ward at Saint-Rémy. To say — this person is not background. This person is foreground. Look at the hands. Look at the eyes. They are eternal.

Your voice, friend, whatever instrument you use — let it do this. Do not shout at the powerful. They are not listening. Make the invisible visible to the people sitting beside the invisible on the train. Make them turn their head. That is how a society moves. Not by the placard but by the changed seeing. The wheat does not argue with the scythe. The wheat ripens, and is harvested, and is bread.