“Art of the Soviets – Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in a One-Party State, 1917-1992” edited by M.C. Bown, B. Taylor, 1993 Part 2 of the review:
1937 Soviet Pavilion in Paris
The author describes the Soviet pavilion at the 1937 Paris Exhibition, the first time anything major was shown outside the USSR. It was a soaring construction along the walk to the Eiffel Tower, topped by a familiar and massive male worker with a hammer and a female peasant with a sickle raising their tools together. Across the lawn was the Nazi pavilion, also gigantic in size. Inside the structure, which implied Utopian dynamism, were statutes of Stalin and Lenin, a model of the unbuilt Palace of the Soviets, a full-bodied display of socialist realist art in massive frescoes and paintings along with wood sculptures, water colors of Soviet construction, theater designs and textiles from Tajikistan. Images of Stalin dominated many paintings, giving visual proof to the 'personality cult.' Soviet modernists like Tatlin, Rodchenko, Malevich and others were not included. The author says the pavilion showed Soviet art to be “developing backwards... to a nineteenth Century Beaux-Arts tradition.”
 |
| Soviet Pavilion in Paris, 1937 |
At the same time the show trials of the opposite groupings in the CPSU were going on, as Zinoviev and Kamenev had been executed. Tukhachevsky, two military marshals, 11 Commissars of Defense, 13 of 15 Army generals and 35,000 officers were executed during the exhibition. Victor Serge, Andre Gide, Andre Breton, Max Ernst and other Surrealists, Boris Souvarine and Trotsky used the occasion of the pavilion to denounce the murders of the Bolshevik old guard and the military staff. Henri Barbusse and Louis Aragon defended them.
Alexandr Gerasimov
The most prominent traditionalist painter in the USSR was Alexandr Gerasimov. He was born in Kozlov, a small rural town in southern Russia, a town with no artists. He had skills as a sketch artist and a portrait painter. After moving to Moscow, he attended art school where he still felt the country-bumpkin and was perhaps treated like one. In 1927 he met the People's Commissar of Defense, Clement Voroshilov, did his portrait, and began his career rise. He did a series of paintings of banya bathers, Russia's version of the Finnish sauna. He painted the famous 'Lenin on the Rostrum,' Red Army soldiers, fellow artists, construction sites, political meetings, peasant gatherings, street scenes – a good number still influenced by Impressionism. His own Rembrandt-like self-portrait shows his skill incorporating light and shade, a style that never changed.
Gerasimov also painted many portraits of Stalin over 17 years and waged battles against any modernist art forms, including non-Russian ones. He decried Spanish Communist Picasso as a 'formalist,' for instance. Gerasimov was a member of the AKhRR, then a key bureaucrat in the Artists' Union in 1937. In 1947 he was appointed President of the official socialist realist art organization, the USSR Academy of Arts. Art outside the USSR was declared knowledge 'not needed' – though Gersimov had taken foreign trips. 'Cosmopolitanism' was denounced and some artists were arrested and died in prison. In the 1950s Gerasimov fell out of favor and after arguing with Khrushchev in 1956, he resigned.
The USSR encompassed a vast area and dozens of ethnic groups. The author of this article uses anti-communist verbiage, declaring the USSR an 'imperialist' without understanding the economic roots of the term. Re: culture, the Stalinized CPSU did try to homogenize culture across various lands, but prior to that the Soviets made diverse cultural efforts.
 |
| Lenin at the Rostrum - Gerasimov |
The author looks at various painters from the Soviet republics and their styles, some of which broke from Soviet convention. The same squashing of modernists happened in Kiev, Tbilisi, Minsk and Armenia. Some artists in the Muslim republics hid their styles by describing them in acceptable terms. Others in Georgia promoted the realist style, and one became another court painter to Stalin. In 1946 specifically Russian art was promoted across the Union as the model by Andrei Zhdanov and the USSR Academy of Arts - dispensing with 'great Russian chauvinism' by ignoring it. After WWII Zhdanovshchina enforced socialist realism in every republic, to the point where nearly all art was homogenized.
Tractors and Non-Tractors
The next author looks down on the plethora of realist and cheery 'tractor' art. The problem throughout this book is that socialist realist art is a legitimate style, though certainly bastardized by hagiography of 'the leaders' and a relentless positivity. If you find yourself offended by pictures of workers, soldiers and peasants, or a construction site or farm and prefer Christian icon painting or violent abstraction, then your taste is also being dictated by the 'ideas' of the social structure you live in. Certainly in the 1960s the CIA favored a-political abstract art and promoted it world-wide. The problem in the USSR was complete state control of the arts scene, not socialist realism. Present U.S. art for instance rarely pictures proletarian people doing anything, including working. This invisibility is part of the cultural attitudes of a class system.
After Zhdanov was dethroned in 1954, a more open period started, including a less realistic, darker and less decorative 'severe' art. Another was 'socialist humanist' art centered on humans doing human things. In a way it was a reaction to what had come prior. Under Brezhnev artists in the 1960s and 1970s began to look back at the history of the USSR and world art. Foreign sources were no longer off-limits. Valdislav Zimenko, a critic, pointed out that Lenin had called for links to the great art of the past, but not as imitation or nostalgia. The period was predictably declared 'developed socialism,' and every person could be a Renaissance man. Some began to paint inspired by Renaissance styles, Russo-Byzantine art, naive, primitivist and Christian themes. Montage, photo-realism and surrealist influences appeared, along with a new kind of historical painting. Tatyana Nazarenko was one of the most versatile of this group while Bakhtin was one of the chief promoters of the poly-stylist method. And predictably, conservative and nationalist critics resisted this eclectic view.
 |
| Glazunov - Allegories in Leninsburg |
Ilya Glazunov
The artist Glazunov (b. 1930, d. 2017) did not become popular through official channels. He saw the end of the Zhdanov restrictions and became the portrait painter to the famous, the prominent and the official, extending far beyond the Soviet Union. He painted Gina Lollobrigida, Leonid Brezhnev, Fellini, Gandhi, Allende, Kurt Waldheim and so on. He was the Andy Warhol of the USSR, not quite as original, but accused of being a thief of others' styles, creating Russian kitsch on a massive scale. He painted a wide range of traditional panegyrics to Soviet achievements and so evaded official condemnation, even after a painting of Stalin soaked in blood. His partly traditional, partly popular and partly original style made him the most popular Soviet artist of his time.
Non-Conformist Art
The 1950s thaw provided a hotbed for young artists, especially in Leningrad, the intellectual capital of the Union and a perennial source of dissent. The experimental art center GInKhuK was closed in 1927 and its director Malevich arrested for a time. All of the leaders of the defense of Leningrad in WWII were liquidated, which tells you what Moscow thought of that city. Modernist art was rediscovered in the '50s by a new generation, with guidance from the old. With the example of artists like Aleksandr Arefiev, they developed the 'severe' style. In the '60s and '70s an alternative underground called “Gaza Nevski,” used collage, Suprematism, neo-realism and conceptualism to show the darker truths of life in the USSR. They were connected to rock music, protests and housing evictions. By the 1980s their styles became more solid and sophisticated.
Predictably art in the declining USSR adopted characteristics of the declining art in the central capitalist countries – a post-modernist mash of styles, intent and lack of purpose. The author says they were 'impossible combinations' of 'complex ambivalence' showing the “insanity of common sense.” As he puts it “There is no certainty about right and wrong, possible and impossible, true and false.” After the fall of the USSR in 1991, these artists, along with others, became less political. The author guesses they will be absorbed into the world art market. As Philip Roth said, in the West “everything goes and nothing matters” while in Sovietized Czechoslovakia “nothing goes and everything matters.” The same was true in Russia, but now that has changed again.
P.S. - Please visit the Museum of Russian Art in Minneapolis, which holds the best collection of socialist realist and Russian art in the U.S. It is, appropriately, in a former church.
P.P.S. - Red Frog used to paint in a surrealist style, but now limits himself to colored hand-drawings of cheery, abstract or strange subjects.
Prior reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms: “Art of the Soviets” (Part 1); “Adios Utopia,” “Women in Soviet Art,” “9.5 Thesis on Art and Class,” “Ways of Seeing” (Berger); “Desert of Forbidden Art,” “The Marxist Theory of Art,” “Elizabeth Olds and Wanda Gag,” “Art is DEAD,” “The Hermitage and Winter Palace,” “How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin,” “The Red Atlantis” and for reading the “Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art” by Trotsky, Breton and Rivera.”
And I got it at May Day's excellent cut-out / used section!
Red Frog
4 20 2023
No comments:
Post a Comment