The Napoleonic Wars ushered in Romanticism and the birth of the Bohemians, the first to create the notion of artists as liberals, leftists or anarchists.
From the social unrest of a series of riots in European capital cities, between the late 1840s & early 1850s, sprang Marx & Engels and the Communist Manifesto. For idealistic / utopian minded artists, this signaled a cure-all for political evils.
The Franco-Prussian War in 1870 reignited these revolutionary beliefs and sparked the commune tragedy in Paris. Going forward, liberal & artistic sympathies embraced the communist agenda.
WWI was the catalyst of the lost, or Beat, generation. By the 50s, when Russia was launching its similarly named ship, the group earned the nickname, "Beatnik."
The non-leftist, early 20th century movement, futurism, began in Paris with Italian artist, Marinette. The intended message was that man is inferior to machines, and reflected the ideology of fascism. The movement was inspirational to Mussolini and Hitler, later on.
Another exception to leftist art was Salvador Dali who was thrown out of the surrealist movement as a result of his praise for Spanish dictator, Generalissimo Franco, as well as Dali's supposed tolerance for Hitler.
While bikers lean naturally toward conservative beliefs, they are also proud to live the lives of libertines, and thus fall into the category of Bohemian culture. An example of this paradoxical type is Von Dutch who enjoyed an existential life of drunkenness, drug use and lechery, while simultaneously espousing a social policy of population control:
"Anyone who is incapable of creating something for society should be executed."
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