Now a Legitimate Art Style

 “Social Realism & Socialist Realism in Ukraine,”1930s-1970s, Georgia Museum of Art

This unlikely exhibit in Athens, Georgia, USA presents a selection of social realist and socialist realist painting from Ukraine when it was a workers’ state.  It shows large construction projects, kolkhoz workers, WWII images, Victory Day illustrations, depictions of buildings going up, factory canvases, portraits, still lives, landscapes, children, old people and Lenin with Krupskaya. 

As a socialist, it is always interesting to see how a museum frames the paintings in their text descriptions.  Most of the descriptions indicate how the paintings were ‘subtly subversive’ to Soviet dogma, which is appropriate language for a museum in present-day Georgia.  Socialist realism changed during this period, from the so-called ‘Grand’ style (?) during Stalin’s reign to the so-called ‘Severe’ style (?) afterwards.  Most of these paintings were done after 1953, so there is that. The museum does admit that the value of socialist realism is being reevaluated now that the USSR has fallen.  Is it now a legitimate trend for U.S. art critics, when before it was a propaganda tool against the USSR?  High-end abstract, pop, digital, post-modernist and shock art in the U.S. never depicts the working class or work in any form, so this admission by the curators might reflect something. 

Outside the halls, as an intro, were 3 examples of social realist paintings from the U.S., including the most contorted, depressed welder ever by a painter named Bender.  Another was a dark image of a blast furnace of some kind by a painter named Marsh and a Minneapolis flour mill / factory depiction by Mac le Sueur. None of these paintings were described as subtly subversive by the curators.

So back to Ukrainian painting in most of the 1900s. All of these works are done in oil paint, sometimes impressionist, sometimes the oils thickly put on.  The styles are mostly loose as it is rarely a straight, photo-realist depiction.  One of the most outstanding canvases is a huge ‘reddish’ work of a young woman at a train station waiting for her soldier to return from WWII.  Welcome bunting litters the platform, the train and everyone else has left and she is alone on the platform, stunned.  It is by Andrej Babenko.  Another is a small landscape by Konstantin Synytskyi depicting the raw, dark soil of Ukraine, with yellow-green shoots coming up. Anyone who has lived in farm country recognizes this.  Particularly vivid is a painting of a huge ship being built in dry-dock on the Black Sea, probably in Odessa, with one small worker shown down below, done by Ivan Petrov.  There is another impressionistic sketch of prisoners in WWII with battered faces, guarded.  There is a portrait of a strong but ambiguous Ukrainian woman shown with a man’s hat on, reflecting the goal of sexual equality.  Another large one is of Lenin and Krupskaya at their dacha outside Moscow, having tea and reading at a table, illustrated by Andrei Lysenko.  As the curator said, it humanizes Lenin, which would be a shock to the majority of the U.S. population.

The curators admit that the Bolsheviks treasured past art, even from ‘the West.’ This is obvious from any tour of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg/Leningrad.   Some of these paintings reflect that, including a haystack in snow that reminds one of Monet’s many haystack compositions around Giverny. Others are similar to classical paintings in the Italian tradition or from earlier socialist realist Ukrainian works.

This collection is similar to the paintings in the galleries at the Russian Art Museum in Minneapolis, which might like to borrow some of them.  They are not ‘Russian’ in the nationalist sense, they are part of the Soviet labor realist tradition that was common in the many countries that made up the former USSR.  It might be said that, unlike the U.S., the Soviet Union was a more ‘painterly,’ classical society, given images were not primarily transmitted to the population by a TV picture tube until later.  This show is a reflection of that. 

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “socialist realism,” “Soviet Art,” ‘art’ or ‘social realist.’

Kultur Kommissar / February 21, 2025 / This is the last year of the blog.