SO FAR PERSONAL actors from the world of politics have held center stage. And rightly so, considering the prominence of personalized social relations in the Soviet polity, with its dictator Stalin towering above all. Now the moment has come to examine the institutional actors (defined broadly as ranging from artist organizations to the art press) and institutional practices (from Stalin portrait competitions to art criticism of the leader portrait in socialist realism) that were involved in the making of the Stalin cult.
During 1933–1935, when the Stalin cult in painting started in earnest, all painters of note were organized in branches of the Union of Soviet Artists. The Moscow Section of the Union of Soviet Artists (MOSSKh, Moskovskoe Otdelenie Soiuza Sovetskikh Khudozhnikov, renamed in 1938 Moscow Union of Soviet Artists, MSSKh [Moskovskii Soiuz Sovetskikh Khudozhnikov]) and its Leningrad mirror organization LOSSKh were the most important. MOSSKh was founded on 25 June 1932 and marked a high point in a process of institutional—as well as material, stylistic, and ideological—centralization.1 Yet it was only a stepping stone toward a countrywide, translocal artists’ union, a development that reached a further stage with the 1939 formation of an organizing committee (orgkomitet), headed by Aleksandr Gerasimov, and culiminated in 1957 with the organization of the USSR Union of Artists (SKh SSSR, Soiuz khudozhnikov SSSR). This final stage was reached much later than in other spheres of the arts—the Soviet Writers’ Union, for example, was formed in August 1934. Under Stalin centralization, unification, and planning were the order of the day in all spheres of social life, from the economy to the arts. But centralization, unification, and planning did not usher in conflictless harmony among the twenty-four thousand persons who defined themselves as artists in the 1939 census.2 The fault lines that traversed monolithic artist unions, the debates about socialist realism and the leader portrait, and the institutional mechanisms of Stalin cult production can only be understood against the background of the history of the art world between the October Revolution and Stalin’s rise to power.3
Painting portraits of political leaders was by and large the domain of artists with realist stylistic preferences. This is not to say that avant-garde artists never produced a leader portrait (Plate 11); in fact, some of the very first portraits of Lenin (painted during his lifetime from 1918 onwards) were by avant-garde artists.4 Artists allied with the realists were by far more numerous after 1917, even if the modernists of various ilk have received more attention and are perceived as emblematic of the experimentalism of the first decade following the Revolution. This is because Russian modernist art was institutionally and personally intertwined with Western modernist movements and because Russian modernism generated artists who have become familiar names—Kandinsky, Malevich, Rodchenko, and Tatlin—in the Western avant-garde canon. Another reason is that both modernists and realists cast their conflicts over art and over limited resources during the 1920s as an epic battle between two diametrically opposed poles, even if in truth there were more commonalities and more movement between the groups than they cared to admit. A final explanation is that modernism ultimately lost out to realism—and there is such a thing as the charm of the loser.
Before turning to the institutional practices it is essential to cut through the maze of the institutional actors. What follows, then, is a list of the artist associations, Party-state organizations, educational institutions, publishers and visual art factories, newspapers and journals, censorship bodies, and the secret police that together constituted the institutional matrix of socialist realist Stalin portraiture.
Artist associations. The Russian realists built on the tradition of the Wanderers. The Wanderers had coalesced in the 1870s around itinerant exhibitions, they painted in realist styles on subjects going beyond the “academism” (institutionally based in the Academy of Arts of St. Petersburg) and ranging from popular peasant scenes to lifelike depictions of Christ. Their source of patronage was partly the court, partly—and increasingly during the twilight of the old regime—the new merchant class represented by such entrepreneurs as Pavel Tretyakov. After the Bolsheviks came to power this group of patrons vanished through expropriation, emigration, and physical annihilation. A new group of private collectors emerged—drawn partly from the Nepmen of the 1920s, partly from the Stalinist elite of Party bosses, Red Army generals, and factory directors, who might privately order portraits of their wives or children—but its share of art commissions or purchases remained insignificant and it operated in the dark because of the prohibition on private trade.5 The Wanderers as an organization continued to exist until 1923, when they joined the 1922-founded Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia (AKhRR), which was renamed Association of Artists of the Revolution (AKhR) in 1928. The painter Evgeny Katsman, who in a 1925 diary entry called the Wanderers “sentimental Populists” who “did not understand the ‘brave ideals’ of the revolution and the beautiful harshness of Bolshevism,” was among the founding members of AKhR on 1 May 1922 together with Pavel Radimov and Aleksandr Grigoriev.6 Between 1923 and 1938 Radimov, we recall, shared a studio with Katsman in the Kremlin and in 1926 Grigoriev had accompanied Katsman and Brodsky on their visit to Repin in Finland.7 AKhR went back not only to the Wanderers, but also to the common experience of the Civil War, when an institutional vacuum forced many painters—lacking not only canvases and commissions but also the barest means of survival—to fight for their existence. The most important new source of patronage during these harrowing years was the Red Army, which commissioned battle scenes and officer portraits, thus feeding a growing group of painters of almost entirely realist orientation. The best known was Mitrofan Grekov, in whose honor in 1934 a famous studio for amateur soldier-painters was named. During the Civil War the bond between realist painters and their later “Pericles,” Voroshilov, was forged. The new Bolshevik festivals became another source of commissions during the chaos of the Civil War.8
AKhR’s immediate function was to organize exhibitions of its members’ artwork, and its overarching aim was to advance their interests. This meant easing access to the new primary source of patronage, the Party-state, and fending off others, among them modernist artists, who were also seeking much-coveted material means for art—such as money, brushes, paints, and easels; exhibition space, studios, and living-space; and trips to Venice and Paris. Opposed to AKhR stood the modernist artists organized in visual arts studios and around exhibitions of the Proletarian Culture movement, Proletkult (founded on 20 January 1918 and subsumed in the Party in November 1922); around the journals LEF (Levyi Front or Left Front, 1923–1925) and New LEF (Novyi LEF, 1927–1928); and around the association of nonfigurative easel painters, OSt (Obshchestvo Stankistov, Society of Easel Painters, 1925–1931). Again, in truth there was more conflict within and interchange between the two factions than they were willing to admit. Artists oscillated in their allegiance to “left” and “right” artist organizations, and changed their styles. Deineka was increasingly painting in realist fashion by 1934 and even the founder of suprematism, Malevich, reverted to impressionist and realist styles between 1927 and his death in 1935.9 There were also kinship ties that linked the two factions: for instance, Katsman’s and Malevich’s wives were sisters, and the women forced their quarreling husbands to socialize in their private lives.10
Party-state organizations. The new Red patrons related to these modernists and realists in varying ways. An initial predilection for the modernists (from 1917 until roughly 1922) by the main organization of the cultural bureaucracy, the arts section of the Commissariat of Enlightenment, Narkompros (Narodnyi komissariat prosveshcheniia), and an initial penchant towards the realists among other sources of Bolshevik patronage, especially the Red Army during the Civil War (1918–1921), gave way to a general favoring of realism by the mid-1920s. There was a certain renaissance of modernism during the early stages of the First Five-Year Plan (1928–1932), which ended in an all-out victory of realism in 1932.11 Let us simply note here that both factions received some support throughout the entire 1920s. Contrary to the claims of both, the game was relatively open until 1932.
Nominally the visual arts were kept within the purview of the state, not the Party. Not to say that the Party in its various incarnations—from the Party organization in AKhR up to the Central Committee, and later, as we have witnessed, increasingly Stalin himself—ever ceased calling the shots. Narkompros (founded on 9 November 1917 and headed by Anatoly Lunacharsky until 4 July 1929), and especially its Izo (Visual Arts) Department (Otdel izobrazitel’nykh izkusstv, set up between January and May 1918), were the primary institutional patrons of the visual arts.12 At different times throughout the 1920s, Narkompros purchased recent paintings for state museums and institutions, organized exhibitions, and provided studio space for artists. But it did not put the relationship with artists on a regularized footing until the 1928 foundation of the Main Administration of Belletristic Literature and the Arts, GlavIskusstvo, a new, better-staffed, and more powerful organization.13 In 1929, GlavIskusstvo was responsible for the widespread introduction of a system known as kontrak-tatsiia, which put the financing of artists’ work on a contractual basis and provided regular, centralized support that greatly helped to draw artists further and further into the first socialist state. From now on, the state financed not only the purchase of finished artwork, but its very production. Two organizations subordinate to GlavIskusstvo administered the new contract system. First, the All-Russian Cooperative Comradeship “Artist,” VseKoKhudozhnik (founded in September 1929), commissioned paintings, assembled exhibitions of the resulting artwork, and distributed trips to vacation resorts.14 It also organized trips to the kolkhozes and factories mushrooming all over the country, in order to acquaint painters with the “new life” developing all around them. Regional branches of VseKoKhudozhnik were set up and by mid-1931 more than fifteen hundred artists had joined the “Comradeship” and paid the small membership dues. Second, the state art publishing house IZOGIZ took over publishing operations from AKhR and began to administer art publishing centrally. Through IZOGIZ artists could make money from reproductions of their artwork.
Figure 5.1. Isaak Brodsky and one of his Stalin portraits, 1934. Photograph by Iakov Khalip. © Muzei-kvartira I.I. Brodskogo, St. Petersburg.
This restructuring of the world of the visual arts during the Great Break fundamentally changed the mechanisms of art production, including the creation of leader portraits. From 1929 onward, most Stalin portraits were produced under the kontraktatsiia system, including the many copies of the celebrated Stalin canvases of Gerasimov, Brodsky, and their peers that started appearing in the mid-1930s. In January 1936, kontraktatsiia was transferred from Narkompros in the newly created All-Union Committee for Arts Affairs (Komitet po delam iskusstv), which remained under the larger umbrella of Sovnarkom and was first chaired by Platon Kerzhentsev. From the late 1930s, inside this new agency the Art Fund (Khudozhestvennyi Fond, abbreviated Khudfond) took over the kontraktatsiia functions of VseKoKhudozhnik. The Stalin Prize right from its establishment in 1939 acted as another powerful institutional force. The last major institutional player appeared toward the end of Stalin’s reign when in August 1947 the USSR Academy of Arts was created. Aleksandr Gerasimov became its first president. The Academy of Arts effectively represented the Party’s arm in the art world, for its full members were appointed directly by the Party rather than elected by the membership (as was the case in MOSSKh) or appointed within the bureaucratic organization (as was the case in VseKoKhudozhnik).
Educational institutions. The institutions of art education went through changes similar to those undergone by the other institutional actors. The hotbed of modernist art education, the Higher Art and Technical Studios, VKhuTeMas (Vysshie Khudozhestvenno-Tekhnicheskie Masterskie, founded in 1920, first directed by none other than Kandinsky and renamed High Art and Technical Institute, VKhuTeIn [Vysshii Khudozhestvenno-Tekhnicheskii Institut] in 1927) shunned traditional teaching in painting technique, but the Leningrad Institute of Proletarian Visual Art was more hesitant to break with tradition. This traditionalist orientation and the full-scale victory of realism during the Great Break was reflected in its October 1932 reorganization into the All-Russian Leningrad Academy of Arts, which now included an art university (Art VUZ), an art history institute, a museum, a library, and laboratories. Isaak Brodsky became its rector in 1934 (Fig. 5.1). Let us remember: a decade earlier the very word “academy” had triggered a series of negative associations. “Academy” stood for precisely the tradition that influential members of the Soviet art world were trying to overcome. Leningrad’s VUZ, called Repin Institute since 1944, was subsumed under the USSR Academy of Arts right after that body was founded in 1947. A year later the Moscow Art Institute was renamed Surikov Institute (it had opened in 1936 as the Moscow Institute of Visual Art and had been called the Moscow State Art Institute from 1940 onward). With the triumph of academism and the symbolic invocation of prerevolutionary realist artist luminaries, in 1949 the main institutions of undergraduate art education changed their names back to their pre-1917 designations: Stroganov Art College (Moscow) and Shtiglits Art College (Leningrad). Thus by the 1940s there was was in place a smoothly running, hierarchical system of art education. It ensured that future Stalin painters would receive a sound training in the painting techniques required to produce portraits of their leader.
Publishers and visual art factories. The publishing house IZOGIZ has already been mentioned as a significant contractor. In fact, there were other publishing houses—most important, Iskusstvo—and other influential actors responsible for the technical and mechanical reproduction of artwork. Publishing houses commissioned artwork for posters, lithographs, prints, postcards, and much more. They wrote to the secretaries of Party leaders to ask, in the absence of sittings, for photographs and screenings of documentary film material on Stalin (kinokhronika);15 and they paid honoraria and royalties. Artists might publish a portrait with one publishing house and later transfer the rights to another.16 There were also such institutions as the “visual art factory” (izokombinat), responsible for the mass reproduction not only of oil paintings (especially canonical Stalin portraits) and prints and posters, but also busts and statues.
Newspapers and journals. Especially in the 1930s, when cult production was more open-ended and less regularized, the press was a tremendously influential institutional actor. Pravda (and to a lesser extent Izvestia) provided guidance, as the “Don’t you read the papers?” incident shows.17 Pravda was required reading for painters who wanted to remain in tune with the vagaries of Kremlin politics, if only to find out if the subject of the portrait they were painting had been exposed as an “enemy of the people.” Some leading Pravda pronouncements on the arts were republished in the culture newspaper Sovetskoe Iskusstvo, which from 1931 onward appeared twice a week for most of its existence.18 In the early stages of Stalin painting Sovetskoe Iskusstvo also served as a nodal point where different channels of the Stalin cult—announcements of open Stalin portrait competitions, criticism of exemplary Stalin portraits, art-theoretical articles on the portrait in general and the leader portrait in particular—came together. Later these functions were assumed by the art bureaucracy and other institutional actors. The monthly “thick journals” Iskusstvo and Tvorchestvo, both established in 1933 and both edited (at first) by the famous critic Osip Beskin, were also important reading for the Stalin portraitists.19 Iskusstvo was more intellectual and featured long articles on subjects ranging from Rembrandt’s treatment of shading to Nikolai Andreev’s drawings of Lenin, while Tvorcbestvo was more heavily illustrated, featured shorter articles, and generally reached out to a wider audience, including amateur painters.20
Censorship. These newspapers, journals, publishing houses, and visual art factories—in fact all media of reproduction—were heavily controlled by the censorship board Glavlit (founded in 1922) or by Glavlit censors at the publishing outlets themselves. As a rule, when particularly sensitive cult products were under scrutiny—for instance, a coffee table book–like album of Stalin paintings compiled for his sixtieth birthday—regular censorship channels were bypassed and the Glavlit chief had to give the green light personally. This rule can be generalized for all Stalin cult products: the more sensitive the product, the less institutional the actor consulted for judging the product, with Stalin’s secretariat at the top of the pyramid, and the less bureaucratized, the more informal and verbal, the mechanism of judging.
The secret police. Last but not least, the secret police force quietly exerted its chilling influence. During the 1920s its role was not as ominous as it was to become. Together with other Soviet institutions like the Red Army it was in fact a commissioner of paintings, including one of its founder “Iron” Felix Dzerzhinsky. Later it made its influence felt via informers inside the art world, who were widely known and feared among artists;21 via officers at organizations within the art bureaucracy who looked into personnel questions; and as an executive arm of the Party-state once an artist had been found guilty of an offense, for example creating a “counterrevolutionary” representation of Stalin.22
These artists’ organizations, art bureaucracy agencies, art education institutions, outlets of technical reproduction, Party organizations, and repressive Party-state organs were the most important institutional actors involved in the making of the Stalin cult. Together they formed a maddeningly complex field of institutional and personal operators. They interacted multidirectionally, though never on an equal footing as there surely was a hierarchical power gradient involved. This field was so complex that most painters had difficulty navigating within it, and cartographic knowledge became a highly valued skill. Such knowledge was held mostly among the elite group of the Aleksandr Gerasimovs of the art world, and it was of course transmitted orally, if at all. Many of the regular painters made mistakes while operating within this field, for some of which they had to pay dearly.
This relational field deserves a closer look as it changed over time. We first turn to early institutional practices such as the portrait competitions and related exhibitions, then once the canon was established (by 1939 at the latest) to regularized Stalin cult production in painting, and finally to art criticism and the leader portrait.
Competitions on a specific theme, usually leading to large-scale exhibitions, became a regular practice in the making of socialist realist art during the 1930s. In the first half of the decade, the organization of these competitions and exhibitions was quite open-ended and chaotic, and individual artists had greater possibilities for personal input than in later years. Sovetskoe Iskusstvo was a point where the different organizing forces converged in a public arena. A competition for the first major exhibition since the proclamation of the doctrine of socialist realism in 1932, an exhibition entitled “Artists of the RSFSR over the Past Fifteen Years,” was announced in an article on 8 May 1933. This retrospective exhibition of realist art in the Soviet Union was to be monumental and involved three museums. The Tretyakov Gallery was to show caricature, the Historical Museum on Red Square was to show painting, and the Pushkin Fine Arts Museum was to exhibit posters and etchings. The newspaper was clear on the organizing principle of the exhibition: each section was to feature “an introductory subsection” in which “the main lines of development of a given art over fifteen years ought to be illustrated with representative examples.” Above all, the exhibition was to show linear, “natural (zakonomernyi) movement of each art form toward socialist realism” and “the growth of each separate artist.” The “‘Lenin’ and ‘Stalin’ rooms, in which the best artifacts depict with artistic means the image of the leaders,” were to be the telos of this movement and the pinnacle of the exhibition. In closing, the article even pondered opening the exhibition later than planned, since the selection of artwork commissions was yet to be finished—an example of the open-endedness that was characteristic of the early 1930s and so atypical of subsequent years.23 Three weeks later another article published the statistics for the selection of artwork: “Until 23 May in the painting section 1,178 works have been examined, of which about 800 pictures by 175 painters have been preliminarily accepted.”24 Clearly, in 1933 the newspaper fulfilled functions that just a few years later were taken on by artists’ union meetings, cultural functionaries from the Committee for Arts Affairs, publishing houses, and other institutional actors.
Another competition was organized by the publishing house Iskusstvo in 1937, on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the October Revolution. By then the situation was quite different from that of 1932. This competition was closed: the jury only commissioned contributions from a select number of invited artists. In the 1937 competition, Iskusstvo sent out letters to fifteen artists, in which it explained the conditions of the competition: each artist was to receive photographs of Stalin (ordered by Iskusstvo from the newspaper Izvestia); and a screening of movies with Stalin themes as well as the more documentary kinokhronika was to be organized. This time the financial rewards were remarkable; the first prize was fifteen thousand rubles. Additional fees certainly followed, earned from reproductions: the two prizewinning portraits had print runs of over one million and the two winners received 5 percent of the earnings).25
Twelve artists then signed contracts with Iskusstvo. Three (Igor Grabar, Boris Ioganson, and Georgy Riazhsky) declined, citing their involvement in other projects (the language of their rejections was full of anxiety that this might be interpreted as an affront to Stalin). The contracts were signed in early April and the deadline was set for 1 July. On May 1, June 1, and July 1 each artist received a thousand-ruble advance. At first the artists themselves seem not to have known the names of the other participants, for Isaak Brodsky asked the organizers: “If possible, let me know who signed the contracts, who are my competitors?”26 The portraits had to be painted in oil, watercolor, or pastel, and were to be at least one meter in height.27 Despite the short time allowed for production of the paintings, most of the twelve artists managed to submit them on or around July 1. Star painter Aleksandr Gerasimov was five days late, but compensated for his lateness with a surprise submission of two portraits.
The portraits were then exhibited in a specially prepared, closed room of the Tretyakov Gallery for the members of the jury, which included well-known artists like the Kukryniksy, as well as Aleksandr Poskryobyshev (the head of Stalin’s secretariat), Platon Kerzhentsev (chairman of the Committee for Arts Affairs), and Glavlit chief Sergei Ingulov.28 The participating artists were the cream of the official Soviet art world and included Isaak Brodsky, Aleksandr Gerasimov, and Evgeny Katsman. The jury decided not to bestow a first prize but rather to divide the fifteen thousand rubles into a second prize of ten thousand rubles, awarded to Aleksandr Gerasimov, and a third prize of 5,000 rubles, awarded to P. V. Malkov. The jury commented on Gerasimov’s portrait: “The simple working atmosphere of an office, a table with books, journals, and letters. Comrade Stalin in an armchair at the table. The portrait is painted in an expressive, lively fashion. The artist succeeded in avoiding the dryness and boredom of an official portrait.”29 By contrast, Brodsky’s standing and style were already rapidly eroding, and his “large, official portrait” was charged with being painted “in Brodsky’s usual manner—painstaking and cold mimesis (protokol’nost’) in general and in the details” (Plate 12). Another painter, Mashkov, was criticized even more harshly: “The artist, who deservedly has the reputation of a great painter, presented for the competition the helpless work of an autodidact, a dead and tasteless lubok, without any signs of painterly craftsmanship or quality.” Nonetheless, Iskusstvo concluded, “competitions for portraits and thematic pictures are one of the most effective methods of increasing the quality of our art publishing.”30
Also in 1937, there was a parallel competition for Stalin portraits by Iskusstvo’s rival IZOGIZ, located on Moscow’s Tsvetnoy Bulvar, a mere fifteen-minute walk from Iskusstvo’s Kuznetsky Most location. Indeed, it is quite possible that the two portrait drives were in “socialist competition” (sotssorevno-vanie) with one another, as these were the prime years of socialist competition and Stakhanovism. With a first prize of twenty thousand rubles, a second of ten thousand, and a third of five thousand, this competition was even more lucrative. Like its Iskusstvo twin, this competition was closed, but no list of invited artists has yet surfaced. Some of the painters must have been identical, for Brodsky pressured IZOGIZ to return his contribution in timely fashion so that he would be able to submit it to the second, slightly later, competition— after it had failed to receive a prize at the first one. Four people served on both competition juries. The artists in the IZOGIZ competition also received a list of the themes they should focus on. The list began with “the portrait or bust,” continued with “on the tribune of the mausoleum” and “among children, aviators, heroes of the Soviet Union,” and finished with “J. V. Stalin and Yezhov.” Portraits were supposed to be fifty by sixty centimeters in size and “had to satisfy the demands of mass reproduction”—rougher brushwork, we know, was more suitable than fine brush strokes.31 And of course “the publishing house supplies all photographic materials on the planned themes for every participant in the competition and also organizes a showing of relevant movies.”32
The late 1930s were the years of monumental art exhibitions. Apart from those that we have already examined, other large-scale exhibitions in the sec- ond half of the 1930s included a thematic Komsomol one and Lavrenty Beria’s exhibition, “Art of the Georgian SSR,” which opened in November 1937. The same year, the Soviet pavilion at the Paris World’s Fair (followed in 1939 by the pavilion at the New York World’s Fair) opened with numerous commissions from socialist realist artists. An exhibition in honor of the twentieth anniversary of the Red Army commenced in 1938. The exhibition “Industry of Socialism,” originally organized by Sergo Ordzhonikidze’s Commissariat for Heavy Industry, was also supposed to open in 1937, but its beginning was delayed until spring 1939 because of infighting among various artist factions and by the Great Terror, which affected Ordzhonikidze’s organization particularly deeply.33 Also two years behind schedule, the permanent All-Union Agricultural Exhibition opened in 1939.
Indeed, various bureaucratic organizations initiated and financed these exhibitions in order to solidify their share of power through symbolic means. At the head of each organization stood a vozhd’—Ordzhonikidze in the case of “Industry of Socialism,” Beria in the case of the Georgian exhibition, and Voroshilov in the case of the Red Army exhibition—who personified his institution and was celebrated in the exhibition concerned with a display of cult products. At the same time, the vozhd’ was involved in everyday organization through very real patronage, as the preceding chapter has shown.
After 1937, competitions with subsequent exhibitions served much less often as vehicles for producing new Stalin cult art.34 Stalin’s sixtieth birthday in 1939 prompted several exhibitions that simply displayed extant art devoted to the Stalin theme. Only the less spectacular 1939 sculpture exhibition “V. I. Lenin and J. V. Stalin in Sculpture” began with a competition. Despite the overwhelming role of the state in the organization of all these exhibitions, they were represented as spontaneous products of popular initiative. Thus “the initiative to organize the ail-Union exhibition, ‘Lenin and Stalin in the Visual Folk Arts,’ belongs to the people,” according to an article in Iskusstvo.35
The stellar exhibition in 1939, “J. V. Stalin and the People of the Soviet Land in the Fine Arts,” opened on Stalin’s birthday, 21 December. It offers a good perspective on both the large exhibitions of the 1930s and the Stalin cult itself. The exhibition began not with a competition—a call for creative production— but in a retrospective key. The visual section of the Committee for Arts Affairs sent out a barrage of letters to individual artists, to local artist unions in places as far away as Leningrad, Turkmenistan, and Kiev, to museums and publishing houses, and to the directors of the “Industry of Socialism” exhibition and the Pushkin Fine Arts Museum, asking about any artistic representations of Stalin that the artist or institution might have on hand.36 The original letter by the Committee for Arts Affairs went out in April 1939, eight months before the exhibition,37 but the actual organization of the exhibition began only in Septem- ber and turned into a race against time.38 It is unclear why the exhibition was organized so late. Did the Terror play a role, since many depicted heroes were relegated to the dustbin of history as “enemies of the people?” Or was an unambiguous signal by Stalin necessary in order to go ahead with the exhibition?
At any rate, after the initial inquiry by the Committee for Arts Affairs various individuals and institutions submitted lists of finished and unfinished Stalin art. The sculptor Marina Ryndziunskaia, whom we encountered in Chapter 4 as the designer of a 1926 Stalin sculpture, wrote from Moscow of “a 1933 sculpture in wood,” and the chairman of the Urals Artists’ Union sent “a list of Sverdlovsk artists who are working on the subject of Comrade Stalin’s life and activity: 1. Zaitsev Ya. P. (sculptor) Comrade Stalin with Pioneers. 1 meter 30 centimeters tall, plaster . . . 2. Melentiev G. A. (painter) Comrade Stalin at the Meeting of the Constitutional Commission. Oil, size 4 × 2 meters. Property of the Sverdlovsk Museum of the Revolution.”39 During the late spring and summer the Committee for Arts Affairs then sent cultural functionaries to the studios of individual Moscow artists and to the Soviet periphery to check what kind of Stalin art was in progress. But the overall organization of the exhibition remained chaotic. As late as September, it was not yet decided whether the exhibition would take place at the Tretyakov Gallery, the Pushkin Fine Arts Museum, or in several rooms of the “Industry of Socialism” exhibition. At the same time, Moscow’s Museum of the Revolution and the Lenin Museum were planning their own more historically oriented Stalin exhibitions, and were vying for some of the same pieces of artwork. The socialist competition between the different museums was described as something positive.40
As far as substance is concerned, the exhibition roster was also far from settled in the early fall. At an organizational meeting, one participant demanded that “all the artwork at this exhibition ought to be directly connected with Stalin.”41 Another wanted to add to artwork “about the life and activity of Comrade Stalin,” artwork showing “themes of somewhat allegorical character, such as the Stalin Constitution, where the image of Comrade Stalin will not be shown directly, but where the entire picture will give an idea of the era of the Stalin Constitution.”42 Moreover, there were different opinions as to whether the exhibition should show as many objects involving Stalin from as many parts of the Soviet Union in as many techniques as possible (from traditional easel painting to ceramics and walrus ivory carvings), or whether quality ought to overrule quantity. The latter principle seems to have won, as many art functionaries emphasized how “responsible” this exhibition was—with Stalin’s power at its height and the Terror fresh in everyone’s mind.
In the end, the Tretyakov Gallery was chosen as the single location for the exhibition. To pool resources, another initially separate exhibition on “Famous People of the Country,” devoted to images of Stakhanovites and other “heroes” of the 1930s, was fused with the Stalin exhibition. The artwork was to be assembled from existing Stalin iconography “plus a small number of works (about 30) that the Committee for Arts Affairs commissioned from leading masters.” “Apart from these commissioned works,” the functionary of the Committee for Arts Affairs continued, “we have collected information in the Union republics—Central Asia, Georgia, Armenia, Ukraine.”43
Indeed, the involvement of places far from Moscow in this exhibition was significant.44 The exhibition was instrumental in promoting Stalin’s image as “father of the peoples.” The mechanics of involving the periphery were as follows: in the spring central art functionaries visited artists in the Caucasus republics, in Leningrad, in Siberia, in Central Asia, and in Ukraine. Everywhere the central functionaries communicated with local artists through the regional artists’ unions, all of which were subordinate to the Moscow Union MOSSKh anyway. On return to Moscow from these trips, the functionaries reported, for example:
I recently was in Armenia and had a chance to look at the materials there. I must say that we have never seen Armenian visual arts, despite the fact that a large exhibition devoted to the Stalin Constitution took place in the Armenian Republic two years ago. . . . After looking at the paintings, which are partly finished, partly still in an unfinished state, after looking at the artwork of the sculptors, and after looking at what they (the jewelers, carpet-makers, and embroideresses) have in the sphere of folk arts, I came up with about 45 pieces of artwork.45
In October Moscow again wrote to local artists’ unions, inquiring, for instance, if paintings by a number of Kiev artists (inspected during the spring) were nearing completion; Moscow “asked to send photographs of these works as soon as possible.”46 Or an individual Leningrad artist received the following advance notice: “The State Tretyakov Gallery informs you that after 9 November the commission for the selection of artwork for the Stalin exhibition will be in Leningrad. This commission will visit your studio and inspect your paintings.”47 This was in line with the organizers’ goal of “convincing the [artists] that this [exhibition] is a very important political enterprise”; it was also consonant with the intention to “implement stricter control.”48 “On the one hand it is indispensable to prod the artists,” echoed Aleksandr Gerasimov, “on the other hand we need to offer them help when they encounter difficulties. What, for example, if we have commissioned a portrait but the painter has no model?”49
Artists responded to the committee’s October inquiries with letters and photographs, showing the state of completion of their work. After the news of the exhibition had spread widely among artistic circles, some artists who were not invited proposed to submit Stalin busts and paintings at their own initiative.50 In late November and early December a jury, composed of famous artists and cultural bureaucrats, met in Moscow and judged the art that had been gathered. Certain works were accepted unconditionally, others were designated for alterations, and yet others were rejected outright.51 As was to be expected, given the short notice, many works were submitted late.52
Patronage in the highest reaches of power resolved conflicts over the exhibition or availability of specific paintings. If a famous work was on display at a different exhibition, powerful forces made it available to the Stalin birthday exhibition. Thus the director of the Tretyakov Gallery wrote to Voroshilov in early November, asking that the commissar of defense allow the transfer of Aleksandr Gerasimov’s Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin to the Stalin birthday exhibition directly after its return from the New York World’s Fair.53
One of the complaints of participating artists was the difficulty of getting the “notable people” (znatnye liudi)—the Stakhanovites, Arctic explorers, biologists, and kolkhoz milkmaids—to pose. “I was ordered to do a portrait of Os-tuzhev,” ventured one artist. “He came to my studio, I tried to win him over. . . . He looked at everything and left—I do not know why, but perhaps my art did not convince him. . . . Then I was supposed to do Shchukin, but he unfortunately died.”54 Another artist was just as pessimistic: “I had a commission for a portrait of Lysenko.” After several attempts to paint the quack biologist, Lysenko disappeared—“no answer, and when I visited him twice he was not there.”55 A certain Isaev of the Committee for Arts Affairs agreed that getting znatnye liudi to pose often was problematic: famous scientists or Bolsheviks “believe that if they sit, they will be accused of laziness, of wasting time on modeling, therefore they escape sitting or do so at their desks.” Sitting for one’s portrait was considered frivolous, as we saw in Chapter 3. It was hard to reconcile with Bolshevik notions of modesty and relentless, around-the-clock work for the Party cause. The Stakhanovites and decorated kolkhoz farmers were “easier to get to sit, but they want to keep the painting as a memento. That is why the Committee . . . must give a public explanation.”56 Often the artists were unhappy with the micromanagement by the Committee for Arts Affairs. Katsman complained:
I was supposed to do a portrait of Gudov. I know Gudov, he is a very interesting person. I wrote a note to Bykov [the responsible functionary at the Committee for Arts Affairs, with whom the artists corresponded] that it would be a pleasure to do a portrait of Gudov, but an even greater pleasure to do a portrait of my favorite Dzhambul [Dzhabaev, the celebrated Kazakh folklore performer]. After this I received a reply that this is impossible since Dzhambul is being portrayed in sculpture. I think this is not right, and if I get Dzhambul, I am prepared to fly to him by airplane or by whatever means, because as an artist I want to portray him. And this is important, because we are talking about art here.57
Meanwhile artists accused artists—and art functionaries accused artists—of not trying hard enough to get their intended models to sit. “As far as Fadeev [the writer] is concerned,” sniped one artist, “I suspect that Yakovlev did not look for him seriously. He is such a man of culture, understands so much, that he is always helpful.”58
Right before the opening of the exhibition, powerful cultural functionaries and Party members probably walked the rooms to see if anything needed to be changed at the last minute. This is conjecture based on our knowledge that the chairman of the Committee for Arts Affairs, Platon Kerzhentsev, made last-minute changes in the way pictures were hung at the 1937 “Art of the Georgian SSR” exhibition. He removed several pictures from the exhibition, and had details changed in others.59 As the director of the Tretyakov Gallery reported to Kerzhentsev, “On the basis of the remarks that you made when inspecting the exhibition of art of the Georgian SSR, we have removed the painting of M. I. Toidze, Stalin with Lenin in Gorki. . . . The artist U. M. Dzhaparidze has been ordered to correct the position of the hand of Comrade Stalin in his picture Comrade Stalin and V. Ketskhoveli, and I. A. Vepkhvadze has been told to change the chin in his Portrait of S. M. Kirov. From the pictures that we had rejected we have returned Bagrationi’s painting Abundant Harvest.”60
At the Stalin exhibition several artists asked the organizing commission why their pictures had been rejected. Exhibiting artists were interested in the success of their paintings in the show: “Is the exhibition well attended? Do you have a visitor comment book and do they criticize me a lot there? Were there any remarks from the government commission? These questions interest every painter, not just me, so please do not think that I am an exceptionally ambitious painter.”61
Once the Stalin exhibition was scheduled, the Tretyakov Gallery was actively involved in propagandizing it. In general, many efforts were made to reach as many people as possible, from all stretches of the vast Soviet state. Not only were people brought in organized groups from the periphery to the exhibitions in the center, but also the main provincial towns organized their own exhibitions or hosted mobile exhibitions that had traveled from the center.62 The Tretyakov’s public relations even included sending its own press release to Pravda: “THE SUCCESS OF THE EXHIBITION STALIN AND THE PEOPLE OF THE SOVIET LAND IN THE FINE ARTS. The exhibition devoted to the life and activity of Stalin, and to the people of the Soviet land, was opened at the State Tretyakov Gallery in connection with Stalin’s sixtieth birthday and is very successful. The exhibition has already been visited by more than 150,000 people.”63 One sure way to boost an exhibition’s visitor statistics, according to the artists, was to get Stalin himself to visit it.64 But Stalin did not make an appearance at his birthday exhibition.
In May 1940 the Tretyakov Gallery began to prepare a public discussion of the exhibition with some of the most famous representatives of the Soviet artistic intelligentsia. It invited such artists as Gerasimov, Grabar, and Mukhina; the writers Pogodin, Tolstoy, and Fadeev; the composers Khachaturian and Khrennikov; the movie directors Kapler, Romm, and Ermler; as well as actors and Heroes of the Soviet Union, among them, the Arctic explorer Papanin. The evening was to take place on 28 May and the Committee for Arts Affairs insisted that each invited participant receive a list of questions that should preferably be touched upon:
1. Collection of materials. Selection of the most typical, studying the atmosphere, surroundings, and facts characteristic of the life and activity of Lenin and Stalin. 2. Which ideas, facts, and details impress through their artistic concreteness and how did you use them? 3. Questions about the physical likeness and its expression in artistic images. 4. The creation of an artistic image: the poetic, heroic, and lyrical in the image. 5. Which image do you consider the most successful? In literature, theater, painting, sculpture, and cinema. . . . 6. Recount your personal creative work on the image. 7. How do you think the unity of the vozhd’ or hero with the people can be expressed more deeply and truthfully in works of art?65
There was a postscript to the 1939 Stalin exhibition. Ten years later Stalin celebrated his seventieth birthday. By that time, exhibitions were mounted not only in Moscow and the Soviet provinces but also in the Eastern European satellite states, each of which had acquired its own Stalin cult. The iconography was imported from Moscow, to be sure, but the Hungarians, Poles, East Germans, Romanians, and others all executed the Soviet templates in the vernacular, so that distinctly “Polish,” “German,” or “Romanian” Stalins emerged. Here they were similar to the Central Asian Soviet republics, which earlier had created their Stalins with slight, yet noticeable Kazakh, Tadzhik, Uzhek, or Kirgiz features. In 1949 Moscow too put on another large Stalin exhibition, “Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin in the Visual Arts.” The preparations for this exhibition were less haphazard than those for its 1939 predecessor. The organizers were able to draw on the 1939 experience and on the even larger body of existing Stalin pictures created in the preceding decade.
The cult, then, was in a state of flux during the early 1930s, when its mechanisms were still being consolidated and its canon was still evolving. Hence the greater importance of portrait competitions in the first half of the decade; these allowed for more creativity than in later years. But they were also typical of production-raising practices of the Second Five-Year Plan, such as socialist competition and Stakhanovism. This also explains the role of the press as an organizing tool for the earliest competitions. In the absence of strong institutions and a developed interplay between them, the press functioned as the central public vehicle through which Stalin portrait competitions were organized. The competitions had another function: in the early 1930s different publishing houses were still competing against each other and each was trying to win its own original depictions of Stalin. Later, for example in the exhibitions connected with Stalin’s sixtieth and seventieth birthdays in 1939 and 1949, there was a much greater sense of images and procedures being settled and unified. What is more, there were enormous financial stimuli for artists who participated in portrait competitions. Both prize money and royalties from reproductions allowed artists to increase their income and in fact enabled a standard of living that was comparable with that enjoyed by the highest Party nomenklatura. Unlike the Party members, the painters had the license to flaunt their wealth. This was because of residual preevolutionary cultural expectations for artists to act Bohemian. Dmitry Nalbandian had the celebrated Georgian restaurant, Aragvi, deliver meals to his Gorky Street apartment. Aleksandr Gerasimov built a Spanish Colonial–style mansion according to his own design and owned several cars (including a Buick), complete with chauffeurs. To be sure, and true to Bolshevik values of modesty, Gerasimov occasionally affected the “simple country bumpkin” and dressed up in sheepskins when the Party bosses arrived.
While the Stalin portrait was the most lucrative kind of painting an artist could create, not all artists produced Stalin portraits. And of those who did, not all were paid as well as Gerasimov and Nalbandian. As members of the artists’ union, the mass of artists received salaries comparable to those of an engineer with average qualifications. Average writers are believed to have lived better than average artists.66 On top of their regular salaries, artists earned money through the kontraktatsiia system. The majority of Stalin painters got their commissions from the Art Fund (from VseKoKhudozhnik until the mid-1930s). Most commissions were issued on the basis of a sketch (eskiz—famous artists were exempt from having to submit one) in the context of the many thematic semiannual exhibitions organized by artists’ unions, all of which were modeled on the monumental exhibitions of the 1930s (the 1933 exhibition “Artists of the RSFSR over the Past Fifteen Years” serving as the ur-model).67 It was also possible to offer to the Art Fund a finished Stalin portrait, but this was less common.
And, as we have seen, some of these exhibitions originated in either open or closed competitions. The thematic organization of the exhibition—in such rooms as “Stalin as Military Commander,” “Stalin as Marxist Theoretician,” and “Stalin Among Kolkhoz Farmers”—structured Stalin portrait production in advance. This thematic taxonomy, closely tied to the obrazy, the stock images of Stalin (which we examine below), had solidified by the late 1930s. Once a contract for a commission had been concluded between a painter and the institution organizing the exhibition, the painter received a portion of the honorarium as an advance payment, and once the painting was more than half finished, another advance was paid. Letters asking for the postponement of deadlines for paintings were often met with positive replies, unless the deadline was truly pressing (such as that of an important exhibition). After submitting the completed painting, the artist received the remainder of the honorarium.68 The amount of the honorarium varied greatly. As the Georgian artist V. V. Dugladze recounted, “I worked exclusively on the image of ‘the young Stalin’ and got paid a lot. For example, for the picture The Young Stalin in the Gori Citadel I received forty-five thousand rubles. This was at a time when a bottle of vodka cost twenty rubles!”69
The economics of Stalin portrait production pivoted around planning. There were supply-demand aspects to planning, but these were structured very specifically. On one hand there was of course “true” demand for Stalin portraits, as when a Red Director of a factory desired (or deemed it appropriate) to hang one behind his desk, as was customary for Soviet officials. On the other hand, a theoretical physics institute in Ukraine, a reindeer kolkhoz in northeastern Siberia, and a rubber boot factory in Leningrad all had a small allowance in their budgets for “cultural-everyday expenses” (kulturno-bytovye raskhody, abbreviated kultbytraskhody).70 Toward the end of the financial year, they were especially interested in spending this part of the budget because unspent money would be omitted from the next plan. They spent some of the money on new furniture or Red corners, and some on Stalin portraits purchased from the Art Fund. Demand also affected the Art Fund. It too worked according to plan and had to overfulfill its sales quota of Stalin portraits during a given year. To sell its production it made use of informal “plenipotentiaries” (upolnomochennye) around the Soviet Union. These “plenipotentiaries” collected commissions from institutions for specific artwork. Since the artists were dependent on sales of their artwork, they clandestinely paid the “plenipotentiaries” io to 25 percent of the honorarium they received from the commissioning institution via the Art Fund. In artists’ lore, tales about men like Ostap Bender abounded. They worked “according to the saying, ‘they kick him out the door but he comes back through the window.’”71 In general, since no one ever counted true demand, there was a constant surplus of artwork, Stalin portraits included. These “nonliquidated assets” (nelikvidy) tended to pile up in the storage rooms of the Art Fund.72
Once a Stalin portrait was finished, it entered a whole new phase, often of technical reproduction. Original, oil-painted Stalin portraits were reproduced— independently or in books and other print media—as lithographs, posters, photographs, and postcards. A number of organizations were responsible for disbursing the resulting royalty payments to artists—among them, for primary reproduction, the publisher itself, and for further reproduction, the Bureau for the Protection of Authors’ Rights (Biuro po okhrane avtorskikh prav).73 And of course, organizations were often late in paying honoraria.74
During the process of reproduction, the Stalin portraits were retouched. The publishing houses specializing in art reproduction had an “art workshop” (khudozhestvennaia masterskaia) responsible for retouching. “We are enclosing thirty-two portraits of J. V. Stalin by the artist A. Gerasimov for corrections,” wrote the senior editor for technical reproduction to the art workshop at Iskusstvo publishers in 1938.75 The amount and detail of documentation on retouching (and the entire reproduction process, for that matter) is astounding. At every step the names of everyone involved were painstakingly recorded.76 This reflects a heightened concern to fix on paper clear responsibilities—and tremendous anxiety, lest something go awry.77 Apparently artists had to consent to the retouched versions of their Stalin depictions. In a letter to the “editorial team of the photo album ‘Comrade Stalin in Photography’” one “artist I. Rerberg” wrote of a series of retouched photographs that “such excessive retouching completely destroys the vitality of the photographs and everything most important in photographs, namely the rendering of the body, mannerisms, etc.” He concluded with typical candor, “One gets the impression that the entire face is made of a single material—rubber or wax.”78
The actual printing process of Stalin portraits was also highly sensitive and pressroom jobs must have been among the most stressful. As in retouching, here too the responsibility for each step in the typographical process was meticulously recorded. Often the proofs of a printed product were harshly criticized. “The proofs of the J. V. Stalin portrait,” wrote the Iskusstvo department of reproductions to VseKoKhudozhnik’s printing shop, “cannot be accepted; they require serious corrections: 1. soften the large-grained dots in the painted area. 2. Accentuate more strongly the lines of the nose and cheeks. 3. Redo hair and eyes.”79 Money was also an issue. A press that had printed a Lenin portrait with “red dots on the face” and a Kirov portrait with “a glaring spot in the background” was ordered to “redo the entire order at the press’s expense.”80
At different stages in the production process the censorship board Glavlit interfered routinely. It seems that the Glavlit representative at a publishing house had to approve the plate (klishe) for typographic reproduction, the proof, and the finished product. Sometimes the director of the publishing house wrote to the chief of Glavlit personally in order to override the on-site Glavlit representative’s decision.81 Besides this prepublication censorship, there were various forms of postpublication censorship. First, a Stalin portrait could be withheld from circulation (for example, it went to press but was destroyed rather than delivered to stores). Second, portraits already in circulation might be recalled. Third, restrictions might be placed on access to products already in circulation (a portrait went into “special storage” [spetskbran] at libraries).82
At some point during the 1930s, the production of Stalin sculptures must have been put on a more industrial footing.83 Visual art factories were set up. The early phases of these factories were poorly documented; the only sources available today are newspaper articles, which may bear little relation to real-life practices. On 11 May 1935 Sovetskoe Iskusstvo, under the headline “Construction of a Visual Art Factory” featured the following report:
On a 12-hectare lot . . . in the village of Vsekhsviatskoe extensive construction of a visual art factory has started. The factory is going to consist of separate buildings that are intended for various production shops (the making of brushes, colors, art puppets, the preparation of sculptural stone, a bronze foundry, and so on). A special building will be reserved for individual studios of 60 artists and sculptors. A special pavilion for plein-air work is being built on the territory of the factory as well. The walls and cupola of the pavilion are of glass. A special factory building will be allotted for the manufacturing of monumental sculptures for the Palace of Soviets.84
At least one visual art factory must have reached completion, for on 17 October 1937 Sovetskoe Iskusstvo carried an advertisement: “VseKoKhudozhnik. Sculpture production factory. Moscow, 96, Baltic Village, house 42-a, telephone D 3–27–26 is accepting orders for architectural-stucco works and for sculpture: political, athletic, military, domestic, and children’s. We have in stock figures, busts and bas-reliefs for the adornment of new buildings, clubs, reading rooms, sports arenas, and so forth. We will send you photographs and price lists upon demand.”85 Moreover, some production statements have survived: in 1940, another sculpture factory in Moscow oblast produced 449 Stalin statues, 136 Stalin busts, 168 Lenin busts, 54 Kirov busts, 50 Beria busts, 36 Marx busts, 32 Engels busts, and 15 Kuibyshev statues.86
Later on paintings were added and we know for sure that by 1949 a new technical reproduction establishment, the Painting-Sculpture Factory of the Moscow Association of Artists, existed.87 This visual art factory (re)produced art as follows. Its art soviet ordered a sketch, which was then turned in by the artist. The soviet could either reject this sketch outright or mark it for reworking, sometimes with concrete suggestions on how to change it. The soviet could issue several of these decrees one after the other, or accept the sketch. An order could then be placed, either with or without an advance payment. After the artist turned in the finished order, the work could again be either directly rejected, recommended for reworking, or accepted. Once accepted, the work of art often had to undergo an appraisal to determine the price it ought to receive. Some artists were paid forty thousand rubles (such as the first prize winner of a 1949 Stalin portrait competition), others only three hundred rubles. For the most expensive paintings, the advance payment could exceed the price paid for the finished painting.88
On one occasion (19 April 1948) art soviet members received payment at the rate of forty-five rubles for each meeting; the art soviet chairman received seventy-five rubles.89 A jury could also go on inspection tours and see, on site,what works of art needed to be changed. In July 1949, for example, the two members of the jury traveled to Savelev train station and “in the presence of the station master and the artist Antipov” inspected Antipov’s seven easel paintings (oil on canvas): “1. Full-length portrait of J. V. Stalin inside his office, 2. A copy of artist A. M. Gerasimov’s painting J. V. Stalin and A. M. Gorky, 3. A copy of artist F. A. Modorov’s painting J. V. Stalin and M. I. Kalinin, 4. Guarding the Sea Borders. View of the sea with a naval ship, 5. Portrait of J. V. Stalin, 6. Portrait of V. I. Lenin, 7. Portrait of V. M. Molotov.” The jury members found “that all paintings mentioned have been considerably improved in comparison with the last inspection along the lines of the suggestions earlier given to the artist and can, however, be accepted overall only after artist Antipov . . . makes the following corrections on site: 1. In the painting/. V. Stalin in His Office (full-length portrait) the perspectival arrangement of the desk needs to be corrected and the light falling on the figure’s chest needs to be strengthened, in equal proportion to the light’s strength on the face and legs.” In “the portrait of J. V. Stalin the shoulders ought to be very slightly widened,” but “the remaining paintings did not require changes.”90
The more routine examination of pictures took place at the art factory itself. A typical 1949 meeting of the “Great Art Soviet for Painting” (Bolshoi khudo-zhestvennyi so vet po zhivopisi) was attended by the chairman, the well-known artist Pavel Sokolov-Skalia; a (female) secretary; four standing members of the art soviet (all artists); two “art historians–consultants”; a member of the artists’ union; and the director of the art factory. Five art soviet members were missing—“ill,” “outside Moscow,” “for unknown reasons.”91 The summary of this meeting’s decisions is shown on the following page.
As can be seen from the second item in the summary, some artists owed paintings from earlier commissions—apparently having received an advance payment on the basis of their sketches but never having delivered the final product—and paid the art factory back by means of a new, unpaid-for work.
Summaries of decisions were one thing, detailed stenographic records of art soviet meetings were another. The latter were products of intense contestation, much like the stenographic records of Politburo or other Party meetings. The stenogram was circulated to the jury members (not the artists) present at the art soviet meeting according to a—changing and disputed—hierarchy, so that the member next in line would get the stenogram with the comments of the preceding member worked in, making it impossible to discern what differences from the original had emerged. The art soviet jury members last in the line were least able to shape the written record of the meeting. One can only imagine the amount of informal lobbying of artists and jury members to achieve the kind of depiction of the meeting that suited them.92
A full-scale meeting of the Painting-sculpture Factory’s “ Great Art Soviet for Painting” is an excellent window on this key institutional practice in Stalin cult art production.93 In some ways the atmosphere of the art soviet resembled that of a workshop; one artist, for example, demonstrated a sketch, At the Sculptor’s Studio, and asked the soviet to provide him with a sculptor for specific advice on the reality of a sculptor’s art practice.94 Generally the artist whose work was being discussed was expected to be present.95 Often the other artists at the soviet had already seen the work under review in the studio and presumably made comments there. Thus Fyodor Shurpin remarked about one painting: “I have seen this painting many times and must say that, to my surprise, it looks much better than in the studio. It is rare that you take a painting to a different location and it seems better.”96
A typical art soviet discussion was of a work by the painter N. N. Yerushev, V. I. Lenin’s Funeral on Red Square, submitted after another commissioned painting, The Stalin Harvest had been declined. The visual art factory had forgiven half of Yerushev’s debt for the failed first painting and Yerushev was attempting to pay off the other half by presenting the painting of Lenin’s funeral.97 The obligatory chairperson and several artists gathered for the first discussion of this painting on 27 April 1949. They opened a first round of devastating criticisms by condemning the depiction of GUM in the background. They next turned to the portrayal of persons in the painting. In answer to one artist’s complaint that the “figure of Dzerzhinsky is awfully tall, and it has a small head,” Yerushev defended himself: “But Dzerzhinsky was very tall. I got photographs from the Lenin Museum, and our laureates—Sokolov-Skalia, Bubnov, Moravov, Nalbandian—met with me three days ago. . . . Of course this is a difficult painting. I have been sitting over it for nine years.” Thus Yerushev tried to fend off criticism by invoking the photographic templates representing the “real” Lenin and by alluding to his connections in the upper echelons of the Soviet art world. But the critics were not convinced. They went on:
POKARZHEVSKY: Don’t you have eyes? Then there is Stalin’s face. You should have shown the face and the body in the center, but you have the balustrade and snow-covered fir tree branches at front center. That is your center. And no people to be seen. . . . Lenin can hardly be made out. After all, this is a picture, you should remember that Lenin is surrounded by people, friends, you should have made them stand out. Tone down the snow, you should have made a gray day and more light on the faces.—The picture is unsuccessful. Its main flaw is that there are no people and no faces. . . .
PLASTOV: Comrade Yerushev, what happened on that woeful day? The leader died, next to him stands another leader, Stalin, stand comrades, comrades-in-arms, soldiers, stands the entire Russian people. . . . And how are you solving this question? You are solving it, it seems to me, without an understanding of the moment and the faces that you are depicting. How are you composing? In the foreground, you devote one-third of the composition to the most motionless [element] in the composition—the balustrade, the branches, the smoke, etc. The main, key elements—Stalin, Kalinin, Dzerzhinsky, and other comrades-in-arms of Lenin— cannot be seen. . . . It is confusing. Then you begin searching—who is standing there? That is probably Stalin—yes, it is him. . . . And altogether you get neither the people, nor the atmosphere in which this is taking place, nor the people behind these leaders, nor the leaders in front of the people. . . . Furthermore, regarding the psychology of those present: Stalin’s face should express the sorrow of a great man about a genius who has passed away, and how have you expressed this? You have not. All we see is a man with a lowered head, and so forth. On to Dzerzhinsky. It is impossible to see his face, how he looked. Even his felt boots are better drawn than his head. The people who are coming up, the simple people, how have you painted them? Very superficially, very dryly, without any details of what they felt, with what kinds of eyes they looked at the terrible grief that had struck the country. Whichever spot you look at, you find low-quality drawing, a lack of precision, or an inability to express the emotion that you undoubtedly felt in the most authentic and sincere way. I think it would help if you worked on this theme more thoroughly. . . . Do keep in mind that you have chosen an exceptional moment in the history of the country, in the history of mankind, and all of a sudden you approach this moment somewhat mechanically. I do not think this is right.
This is an impressive concrete example of a well-known painter, Arkady Plastov, explaining—“in comradely fashion,” as another member of the art soviet put it—to a younger painter how to put into practice the principles of socialist realism. Yerushev’s subject was a moment of truly mythic proportions in the history of the first socialist society: the transfer of power from the founding leader Lenin to his successor Stalin.98 This transfer meant nothing less than the progression of a Hegel-like world spirit from one body to another. Encapsulated in the new leader, Stalin, this spirit would march on toward the Marxian goal of socialism, the kingdom of freedom. To depict this crucial moment, realism as the style of choice was never in doubt. Yet this realism should move beyond mimesis. The task of this kind of realism—socialist realism—was to express on canvas a time better characterized as kairos than chronos. A depiction of an event like Lenin’s funeral had to show more than just Lenin’s funeral. It had to show not just history as it was, but history as it ought to be and indeed would be. It had to give an inkling of a place mankind had not yet been to but was inexorably moving towards—utopia. Plastov’s comments for his fellow painter come as close to an elaboration of the principles of socialist realism in the case of a concrete painting as one will find. This was socialist realism in situ.99
Yerushev was desperate. “Comrades,” he said, “I have been painting this picture for a long time and am getting confused, because I am one student and have a lot of teachers. During those nine years [the painting] spent one and a half months at the Lenin Museum, everyone looked at it, at the balustrade, at the columns. I wanted to remove them and the artists recommended that I do so, but [the Lenin Museum] said that it would be historically false, ‘you have to show it the way it was.’” Yerushev had failed to grasp the synthetic nature of socialist realism. He had failed to understand that he could drop the balustrade and show Stalin with a larger-than-life face on which the forces of history were inscribed. He had failed to understand that he should paint the columns smaller than they had been and instead direct Stalin’s gaze at a point outside the picture, so as to express the leader’s foreknowledge of the future of socialism.100 Yet the art soviet gave Yerushev a second chance: “You should draw sketches,” said the chairperson. “We have decided that you should perfect this painting.”101
Four months later, on 29 August 1949, Yerushev presented a new version of his painting of Lenin’s funeral. The painting now moved to a stage where the art soviet was supposed to make a decision about accepting or rejecting it.
CHAIRPERSON: . . . I think we can ask whether to accept this piece. (The painter: “I was told to get rid of the smoke to the right, to make GUM lower, to lighten up J. V. Stalin’s face, and to tone down the yellow of the snow on the platform.”)
ANTONOV: If we are going to talk about what was said, which critical remarks were made—we spoke of the quality of the drawing, we said that the proportions of J. V. Stalin’s head and all proportions of human figures are not right, that the entire crowd is not on the right plane, that everything is done poorly, unprofession-ally. The painting has stayed on this level. I think that it is impossible to accept this thing the way it is . . .
CHAIRPERSON: In my opinion we cannot demand more from this painter, we know his capabilities.
KOTOV: We can discuss if Yerushev is a professional or if this is amateur art. . . . If he owes something, one could petition that his debt be written off. That would be correct, but it is wrong to accept a painting which should not be accepted. . . . I must say that the worst here are the figures in the center—the figure of J. V. Stalin and the coffin with the body of V. I. Lenin. . . . Concretely, the figure of J. V. Stalin is too short, the head too large, the figure too small in relation to those behind it. . . .
BUBNOV: I would not like to reject this painting entirely. I agree that there are a lot of awkward elements here, for example, the figure of J. V. Stalin. It needs to be [seriously] drawn and painted, especially since it is in the center of the painting. What do I like in this painting? It captures the mood of the time, it is somehow warm, it is painted with great feeling. . . . I think this painting needs more work and someone should help Yerushev with this.102
Even at this point in the appraisal process, it turned out, there existed a range of opinions and the art soviet could not make up its mind. It is unclear what happened to Yerushev’s painting. Its whereabouts are unknown and no reproductions have surfaced, therefore it is likely that it was never accepted.
As can be seen from the discussion of Yerushev’s painting, the criticism of artistic representations of Stalin often concerned concrete physical details, as other examples also show. In one painting his “left arm up to the elbow” was described as “too long,” his “hands too poorly illuminated”; “Stalin has small hands. They need light and must be brought to life.”103 In another, “the ear needs a close look, it is small, it is out of place” and “the lower part of the nose is too dark and appears like a nostril, therefore the nose seems short.”104 A third painting was criticized for featuring “too pointed a head, even though Stalin has a round head”; “the entire head is too pointed, it should be slightly enlarged by making the chin rounder.”105 Finally, one painting was inspected for the third time and evoked such comments as, “it has become a lot better!” “Except for Stalin’s hand,” remarked one artist, and the painting was accepted only with the condition of “fixing the hand.”106
The commissioning institution of a work of art could substantially influence the final outcome. In the highest reaches of power, Voroshilov changed the places of the personages depicted in Gerasimov’s First Cavalry during an informal visit to the artist’s studio.107 Lower-level institutions exercised similar control. The Kalinin Museum ordered a painting by M. G. Sokolov, M. I. Kalinin Speaks with Delegates at the All-Union Congress of Female Workers and Farm Women, and directed exactly who was to stand where in the picture. However, unlike in the upper reaches of power in the case of the Kalinin Museum this clashed with the standardized process of the verification of paintings by the art soviet, which saw its own prerogative of upholding general standards for paintings violated by the museum. The art soviet complained: “The painter showed us this picture twice in the form of drawings and said in regard to our instructions and objections that this was precisely how the museum wanted the figures arranged.”108 In fact, at the heart of this conflict was not only the clash between personalized patronage and modern, standardized, bureaucratized forms of power. This conflict also revealed tensions over who, at the lower end of the power hierarchy, had the authority over the Soviet canon (how to represent Kalinin, in this case), as well as tensions between the seemingly single “correct” artistic representation of a leader and the mundane exigencies of a mass art industry that operated to a certain extent in response to market-like supply and demand forces.109 At the very top of the power pyramid, these tensions were unthinkable since there was no mediating institution between the commissioning person, Stalin, the decisive voice on what was a “correct” representation, and the executing painter. At most, Voroshilov shuttled between star painters to convey the demands of Stalin orally and personally.
As always, a critical issue in art soviet discussions was Stalin’s relationship with other figures in pictorial representations. By 1949, for example, Stalin was to be depicted as listening to Lenin with great attention and respect, invariably in a conflict-free, harmonious situation, and never from the inferior position of a schoolchild. A. I. Makarov’s Stalin and Gorky with Lenin, which featured a scene of Stalin and Gorky listening to Lenin in the latter’s office, was criticized for its untypical depiction of Stalin in relation to Lenin: “the interaction of Lenin with Stalin is not convincing. The impression that they are arguing is particularly underlined by Stalin’s facial expression, which needs to be improved psychologically.” As another artist elaborated, Stalin was portrayed as too agitated, “but Stalin always listens very calmly and intelligently. According to witnesses, when he spoke with Lenin he was always very attentive, even somehow acted like a military officer with his superior, with great dignity. . . . He might have behaved like this at the Batumi demonstration, but not with Lenin.”110 Similarly, there were conventions as to the place of a Stalin portrait in a picture. Arkady Plastov criticized N. P. Kucherov’s painting In the Classroom for violating the canon in this respect: “You have placed a Stalin portrait here, but it is usually located in a more respected place. Moreover, you hung it below the blackboard.” Fyodor Shurpin, who was also present, interjected: “That’s no problem!” Kucherov offered an explanation of his spatial arrangement: “I thought allegorically,” only to be outwitted by Plastov: “But this is already thought in touch with reality (a eto uzhe real’no myslitsia).” Shurpin intervened again: “He doesn’t need to take down the portrait!” But Plastov had the final word: “He simply needs to give this brains (nado prosto obmozgovat’ eto)!”111 Finally, there was critical talk of a case where “V. M. Molotov and J. V. Stalin are of lesser height, and Kaganovich is a lot taller.”112 It seemed to be clear to everyone involved that Stalin—with some rare exceptions—was to be depicted as being taller than other Bolshevik luminaries. This was never a mere issue of convention or of power, Stalin’s height was always indexical of his outstanding position as “locomotive of the revolution,” as incarnation of the revolutionary world spirit in an inexorable movement of history toward the telos of socialism.
Critics were also concerned that paintings might be ambiguous, where an unrelated object, person, or body part might be viewed as belonging to Stalin. In one painting Maxim Gorky’s hat and cane “seem like Stalin’s!” but “belong to Gorky,” as Pavel Sokolov-Skalia exclaimed.113 In a similar case, it was feared that an elderly lady in Lenin’s proximity would be seen by contemporary viewers as Nadezhda Krupskaia, Lenin’s wife. The art soviet bemoaned the anachronistic reading this elderly lady was likely to produce among viewers, who remembered Lenin as having died young but were used to seeing Krupskaia as an elderly lady from the 1930s onward. In truth, they figured, Krupskaia had been young in the historical scene depicted. “This old woman, she remotely resembles Krupskaia and that is unfortunate, because at the museum the visitor will go up to the painting and say: ahh, Krupskaia! She is so much older than him! But Krupskaia was young and beautiful then. Maybe she should be given a shawl or her face should somehow be changed so that she no longer reminds one of Krupskaia. My first thought, for example, was ‘Krupskaia’! Even though I know this episode very well. It is bad when the viewer thinks this way, he ought to interpret these things painlessly.”114
So much for discussions of Stalin portraits at the art soviet. But on what theoretical foundations did these discussions rest?115 A precondition for the development of art-critical theory about the leader portrait was the reevaluation of the portrait.116 In modernism broadly understood, the portrait had undergone a process of devaluation. During the 1920s, realist artists and their critics restored the portrait to its former important place because it allowed them to celebrate the Soviet new man, by which they had in mind not a specific individual but a generic person who stood in for an entire social group. “The ‘social portrait,’ according to Lunacharsky, was one in which the artists should ‘in a particular face, in a particular individual see and show us a whole layer of society.’”117 This was the concept of “typicality” (tipazhnosf). But pragmatic reasons also played a role: many of the commissions for realist art during the 1920s came from such institutions as the Red Army, and portraits of leading soldiers were extremely popular. Not surprisingly, “the 1923 Red Army show was three-quarters portraits.” And in 1928, “the critic A. Mikhailov, reviewing the tenth AKhR exhibition, counted 121 portraits out of 283 works.”118 By decade’s end the portrait had returned to the top of the hierarchy of painting genres, a place it had firmly occupied in the realist art of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There it remained until at least Stalin’s death, even if the justification for its position at the top changed: during the 1930s “personality” (lichnost’) replaced 1920s tipazhnost’ and it became entirely acceptable to portray individuals for the sake of their personal achievements rather than as anonymous proxies for social groups.119
The portrait was not only elevated to the master genre of socialist realist art, it was also presented as a sign of Soviet humanism, of Bolshevik care for man. Conversely, the decline of portraiture in Western art was portrayed as a symptom of the West’s antihumanism. “[The portrait] is the point of departure from which realist art emerges,” declared Aleksandr Gerasimov in 1950. He continued: “in one of the French journals there was a story about the attempt to organize an exhibition of the modern portrait in Paris, and this exhibition was a complete failure.” Gerasimov concluded that “it apparently was a failure because the artists have no respect for man, whom they portray. This respect for man disappeared in the age of bourgeois art, and together with it disappeared the portrait.”120 Similarly, the journal Iskusstvo argued in 1947 that individual portraiture had been effaced with the mid-nineteenth-century arrival of capitalism in the bourgeois West, while portraiture was rising to new heights in socialist Russia. Capitalism reduced the human person to a cog in the machine, while the Bolshevik Revolution had ushered in the flowering of the individual.121
Art criticism of Stalin portraits revolved around a taxonomy of canonical obrazy vozhdia, images of the leader (a similar taxonomy prevailed in other sectors of the arts). These images were not only schematic and the boundaries between them fluid, but also rather crude from today’s perspective. They were the result of an interactive process between the artists, the art-critical press, and the general press. No matter how crude, for painters these images confined and configured the thematic range of pictorial possibilities for their Stalins. They were also congruous with the thematic rooms of the Stalin exhibitions.122 They included the “leader” (vozhd’), the “people’s tribune” (narodnyi tribun), the “father of peoples” (otets narodov), the “builder of communism” (stroitel’ kommunizma), the wartime “commander” (polkovodets), and the postwar “generalissimo” (generalissimus). Each of these verbal designations triggered a cascade of pictorial associations: Stalin as the “father of peoples” invariably was shown with representatives of different Soviet nationalities; Stalin as the “builder of communism” was depicted amidst the factories and tractors of the First Five-Year Plan; Stalin as the “commander” was placed either in the Kremlin over a map, planning the war, or on the battlefield with binoculars; and Stalin in the role of “generalissimo” was unimaginable without his white uniform.
Art criticism often did not go beyond identifying the obraz that a particular picture or sculpture was trying to convey. The Stalin obraz appears to have been the functional equivalent of the podlinnik, the collection of model drawings from which icons were painted. Indeed, art-historical dissertations were written in this vein.123 The art-historical “expertise” of these dissertations boiled down to recognizing one obraz or another, or several obrazy in a single work of art. Thus the sculptor A. V. Protopopov in his 1953 dissertation’s review of existing Stalin sculptures credited S. D. Merkurov with realizing, in his Yerevan Stalin statue, the obrazy of “strategist of genius” and “wise commander.” The sculptor N. V. Tomsky, according to Protopopov, “wants to show the figure of the leader in his generalissimo’s uniform, with which the artist managed to personify the wisdom of the leader, the genius of the commander.” M. G. Manizer’s Stalin bust is treated as follows: “The calmly looking, expressive eyes convey the image of the statesman, the wise leader and teacher.”124 Another sculptor wrote in a dissertation about his own statue, J. V. Stalin in His Youth: “I did not want to show an individual episode of his activity, but to do a synthetic solution of the theme, to show the young leader of the revolutionary proletariat, who was already an important theorist, a thinker and revolutionary-praktik.”125 One painter described the “main goal” of his picture in the following terms: “To create a synthetic image of the great Stalin—the great Bolshevik strategist and commander of the Soviet land.”126 And the painter V. G. Valtsev in 1953 summarized as the “main idea of his picture,” J. V. Stalin among the Yenisei Fishermen, the “more truthful portrayal of the relationship between Stalin and simple people—fishermen.”127 Noticeably, the “synthetic” fusion of more than one obraz in a single work of art was valued highly. Aleksandr Gerasimov was lauded for showing in his Stalin portraits several obrazy at the same time: “The great value of Gerasimov the portraitist lies in his ability to convey in the images of the leaders the unity of the features of the state leader, the tribune of the people, and the man.”128
Art criticism regarding the leader portrait was constructed around the poles of mimesis on the one hand and psychologism on the other. Both harked back to nineteenth-century intelligentsia discussions about the arts, but as far as mimesis was concerned, photography was the major new element.129 As Ivan Gronsky wrote to Central Committee member Aleksei Stetsky in 1933, “the difference between the artist and the photographer lies in the fact that the photographer records the object, whereas the artist notices typical, characteristic features of people and things and gives, in his work of art, an artistic image which is composed of separate traits and details, taken from a multitude of people or things. This is the fundamental difference between realism and naturalism, between art and simple photography.”130 In other words, the doctrine of socialist realism was budding in Gronsky’s letter—the artist fulfilled both the photographer’s function of mimetic representation and took care of the painter’s task of interpretation. An article in Iskusstvo, also published in 1933, spelled out more clearly this aim of socialist realism, synthesis: “Here we need authenticity (podlinnost’) and likeness (skhozhes’), which can only be attained through a realistic perception of reality, synthesized through socialist realism. Nothing in the portrait can be indifferent, neither the pose, nor the setting, nor the dress. [The portrait] must be truthful, reflect the inner life, and give a profound social synthesis of the person.”131 Compact theoretical statements like this one strove to serve as orientation for portraitists in the early 1930s, when the doctrine of socialist realism had only recently been proclaimed and when there was still a great deal of uncertainty about how to carry it out.
Artists were one thing, but how were such theoretical statements put into practice by art critics? In other words, how did art critics apply the theoretical proclamations to specific pictures? Consider how one art critic closed a journal discussion of Sergei Gerasimov’s Stalin Among the Cadets ( 1932): “All in all, despite a certain portretnost’ [“portraitism”] of individual faces that were painted from life, the painting is solved with a fair amount of generalization and the flatness of monumental murals.”132 Both naturalism (“a certain portretnost’ of individual faces that were painted from life”) and abstraction (“a fair amount of generalization”) were present in the painting. Thanks to this dual presence, the painting was considered “solved.” Sergei Gerasimov had produced a successful synthesis that truly deserved the hybrid label “socialist realist.”
An article such as this one, in a thick journal on an individual artist and his realization of socialist realism, constituted one approach to educating artists on how to put the new doctrine into practice. Another approach was used by the artists’ union MOSSKh during the first half of the 1930s: the holding of meetings to discuss the portrait as a socialist art form, at which artists listened to exegesis of socialist realist tenets by different critics (and some artists). The critics used many examples of existing paintings by artists present at these meetings. (Here one can detect parallels to the “criticism” and “self-criticism” rituals, borrowed from the communicative culture of Party cells.) The newspaper Sovetskoe Iskusstvo then described and summarized the meetings and guided the artists as to who had been wrong and who had been right among the critics, thereby mapping the route to be followed for the benefit of the wider artist public outside Moscow.
More specifically, under the title, “Discussion of the Portrait,” Sovetskoe Iskusstvo in November 1935 published its own treatment of such a MOSSKh meeting. Any artist anywhere in the Soviet Union reading this article would have come away with a sense of which paintings to emulate and which critics and artists to listen to, since all were given individual assessments. The article started by recapitulating its verdict on a first meeting in the spring of 1935: “As we noted earlier, the discussion in the spring about the Soviet portrait, organized by MOSSKh, ended in failure. I. E. Grabar’s talk at the first meeting on the portrait was too abstract, it did not mention a single Soviet artist. Therefore this talk did not serve as a basis for any fruitful discussions.” This criticism must have been voiced earlier and have struck a chord, for MOSSKh organized a second meeting:
The packed room in the Tretyakov Gallery, which assembled the main Moscow painters, graphic artists, sculptors, and art historians, was testimony to the huge interest in the subject of the meeting. Igor Grabar repeated the points of his spring lecture and emphasized that portrait painters ought to convey a living image of a given person with his exterior and interior content, that the portrait ought to be similar to the original, and that the artist’s work on the portrait ought not to be obscured by scholastic theorizing. . . . Even though he pointed out a photographic quality (fotografichnost’) and a naturalistic approach to the depicted people in the portraits of Brodsky and Kosmin, Comrade Grabar still thought that their works completely satisfy the main criterion of a true portrait—they resemble the original. Comrade Grabar contests the claim that Katsman is a naturalist. On the contrary, there is not the slightest illusiveness in his portraits. . . . In Konchalovsky’s portraits Comrade Grabar sees vestiges of the still-life approach to the living person. Aleksandr Gerasimov and Denisovsky made enormous progress in the area of the portrait. But no one comes close to the achievements of the seventy-year-old Nesterov.
Yet Grabar was the critic to turn a deaf ear to, while Beskin deserved to be listened to: “The vagueness of the criteria that I. E. Grabar proposed was the basis of O. M. Beskin’s criticism of his points in a great speech that the audience listened to with enormous interest. . . . ‘Of course,’ says Beskin, ‘the portrait must resemble the original: this is indisputable. But this is only the first stage in the work of the portraitist, who, without violating the individual characteristics of the model, must elevate reality to some level of generalization that will elicit a whole series of associations. At the same time the portrait must represent what the artist thinks of the depicted person, because art is the fusion of the subjective with the objective, as Hegel put it.’” This was one of many times that Hegel was cited as the direct inspiration for the dialectics of the portrait.
Beskin next turned to the background against which the person was portrayed. Because this environment had been created by the new Soviet person during the construction of socialism this background could be shown more cheerfully than was conventionally done. This meant using brighter colors than “the conventional bluish or grayish background.” Finally Beskin appraised concrete artists, surely one of the most reliable ways of guiding other artists: “In evaluating individual masters of Soviet painting, Comrade Beskin emphasizes that the portraits of Katsman and Kosmin cannot serve as positive examples. To be sure, Comrade Katsman has attained virtuosity, but this virtuosity is only exterior and does not contribute to progress.”133
Meanwhile the purely theoretical discussions of the dialectics of the portrait progressed. As L. Gutman elaborated in the thick journal Iskusstvo in 1935, with the October Revolution the demands on the portrait had changed: no hidden reality had to be exposed, but this did not mean that pure realism was needed—too many portraits were realistic-naturalistic. What was needed was to show both the real traits of the leader and his inner genius, his idea. To prove his point, Gutman quoted Hegel at length and concluded that portraits had yet to become genuinely dialectical. He used the following sets of binaries that truly socialist realist portraiture of the leaders was to overcome: “the factographic record of the appearance of a leader” vs. “the solution of formalistic problems of the portrait genre”;134 “content” vs. “form”;135 “the concretization of individual features” vs. “deep and broad generalizations”;136 and finally, a “double view of reality,” that is “from outside” vs. “from inside.”137
By 1937, thanks to the portrait competitions and the general emphasis on portraits, many more representations of Stalin in this genre had been produced. Consequently an article in Iskusstvo did not dwell on telling artists in abstract fashion how to portray Stalin, but rather critiqued existing Stalin portraits in order to give artists practical advice. To be sure, the article also quoted a well-worn dictum by Marx and Engels about Rembrandt, but its main source of verbal inspiration was the hagio-biographical accounts of Stalin’s life. Henri Barbusse was credited with conflating Stalin with history, and his personal development with historical development. Thus the task of the ideal Stalin portrait was to depict “society” and “history” through the personal: “‘The ‘personal’ (lichnoe) and the ‘social’ (obshchestvennoe) flow together. The image of the leader comes to light in historical reality, in the manifold situations of the revolutionary past and present, in his contact with people and with the masses.”138
A 1940 assessment of the leader portrait sounded as though progress had been made since the early 1930s:
When working on a portrait, the artist increasingly and with growing confidence takes the path of a synthetic-generalized image, tries to combine personal and “social” elements, and strives to fill the generalized image of the leader with living and expressive concrete features of his character. . . . In each of these pictures the action unfolds while being in deep and intrinsic connection with the telos of the most significant political events. Stalin as the leader who realized his idea of building socialism through his guidance, Stalin as the teacher and friend, the embodiment of constant love and care for the masses—this, in essence, is the basic theme to which these pictures are devoted.139
Similarly, a 1941 article positively noted that “The image of the leader in the imagination of the people lives and becomes richer depending on the spiritual growth of that very people. Straightforwardness and hyperbolization for a long time seemed the only way of realizing the image of the leader. But now the image of the leader is unthinkable outside of his portrait, outside of the uncovering of the whole richness of the individuality of the person portrayed.”140
Throughout the 1930s, then, art criticism regarding the leader portrait retained its basic dialectical structure. Over the course of the decade the antagonism of the two poles realism vs. abstraction (or their many subsequent incarnations) lessened and the “versus” that separated them changed into an “and” that bridged them. In 1933 Ivan Gronsky counterposed “realism” to “naturalism” and “photography” to “art,” yet in the same year Sergei Romov had already claimed that a combination of “authenticity” (“likeness”) and “reflection of inner life” constituted the radiant path to a higher “synthesis of socialist realism.” In 1934 S. Razumovskaia spoke of portretnost’ vs. “generalization,” whereas a year later Osip Beskin pleaded, “the portrait must resemble the original” and have “some level of generalization.” Why? “Because art is the fusion of the subjective with the objective, as Hegel put it.” In 1935, L. Gutman identified a whole battery of binary oppositions, beginning with “the photographic record of the appearance of a leader” vs. “the solution of formalistic problems of the portrait genre” and ending with “from outside” vs. “from inside.” By 1937 the synthetic “and” clearly outweighed the oppositional “versus.” Mark Neiman spoke of how the “personal” and “the social” must “flow together.” By 1939 Osip Beskin’s ideal portrait had to “reflect reality” and “reveal the inner truth of a phenomenon,” it had to feature both “nature” and “illusiveness,” and in 1940 F. S. Maltsev clamored for a fusion of “the personal” and “the social.”141 By the mid-1940s, art criticism of the leader portrait practically disappeared from the pages of cultural journals and newspapers. Was there nothing left to say, since the portrait had become truly “synthetic” and entered the realm of socialist realist harmony?
The sum of canonical representations of Stalin was called “iconography” (ikonografiia). This term was part of Soviet art criticism of the 1930s and 1940s and was stripped of previous religious connotations.142 The existing iconography of leaders caused serious tensions in art crticism about leader portraits: how could portraiture further change and develop, if it was supposed to conform to existing portraits? In other words, how could the Marxist demand for historical progress, for linear, forward development, be reconciled with an immutable canon? And what if, after all, portraits needed to be changed according to the political vagaries of the time?143
A concrete case makes plain the dilemma that Soviet art criticism faced. The case concerns a Lenin portrait, but the pattern applies to the Stalin iconography as well. In November 1955 an artist by the name of Denisov, who did not belong to the top tier of Soviet artists but had previously copied Stalin portraits by stars like Gerasimov and Nalbandian, wrote to the chairman of the Central Committee Cultural Department, A. M. Rumiantsev, about a Lenin portrait he had been painting for the Lenin Museum since 1947. This portrait had been rejected at various levels and by various institutions of the cultural bureaucracy. The main reason was that it did not conform to the canonical image of Lenin. “My attempts to get my painting through the so-called ‘Great Art Soviet’ of the visual art factory,” wrote an offended Denisov, “came up against statements of artists, such as that of Comrade Nalbandian—’millions are used to seeing Lenin differently.’”144
Denisov then tried to make his case. His greatest weapons were patronage and the visual memories of people who had seen Lenin. Thus he added three written comments by well-known Soviet celebrities. Olga Lepeshinskaia, an Old Bolshevik and deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the RFSFR, wrote: “I was delighted by the artist K. A. Denisov’s portrait of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Before me was the living Vladimir Ilyich, just the way he stayed in my memory. I believe that we must distribute this portrait among the masses, so that they get a vivid impression of the living Lenin.”145 Another Old Bolshevik, Tsetsilia Bobrovskaia, concurred: “A living V. I. Lenin—the Sovnarkom president is looking from this portrait, painted by the artist Comrade Denisov, and the eyes are particularly good. These are the eyes of V. I. Lenin. A great success for the artist.”146 Apart from the “affidavits” of these witnesses and guardians of Lenin’s memory, Denisov had also secured Voroshilov’s support:
He acknowledged the portrait’s quality and was irritated when he heard that artists are forced to paint Lenin portraits from only one or two widely distributed photographs. “How can one,” said Kliment Yefremovich, “reduce to clichés a man as alive (zhivoi) as Lenin, a man who was someone else every minute, while always remaining himself!” That was said on 31 December 1953 to a whole group of old Communists, whom Comrade Voroshilov hosted. He immediately ordered that A. M. Gerasimov be called so that the portrait could be shown to the people, that is, to accept the portrait. After looking at the portrait, Comrade Gerasimov told me that he would call the visual art factory for approval. But I did not hurry to sell the portrait and later improved it further and further, testing my visual memory (I worked and often met with Lenin myself)—with Comrades G. I. Petrovsky, O. B. Lepeshinskaia, and finally with Comrade Krzhizhanovsky.147
After trying since 1947 to bring “Vladimir Ilyich closer to the viewer and the viewer closer to him,” Denisov’s final plea was to “protect my aspirations against the hollow, cold wall of the stencilers (trafaretchikov), that is those people who fear taking the slightest responsibility for something that is unusual or new to them.”148
A deputy at the Central Committee Culture Department then produced a note that was discussed and accepted at a session of the Central Committee. In this note, he argued that Denisov’s Lenin portrait had been evaluated by the Moscow visual art factory’s art soviet and “was rejected because of its poor professional realization. The painter of the portrait received comments and advice from the artist-members of the art soviet, but Comrade Denisov did not agree with their opinion and is asking to organize a viewing of the portrait with comrades who knew V. I. Lenin closely.” Most importantly, “the portrait at hand differs significantly from the well-known photographs and the established popular image of V. I. Lenin.” Like other institutions before it, the Central Committee hammered home the point that Denisov had violated the Lenin iconography. “We think it makes sense to recommend that the painter take these comments into account and continue work on the portrait,” it concluded.149
The memory wars over the iconography of Lenin went on. In October 1957 Denisov complained in a letter to the Old Bolshevik Otto Kuusinen about the “callous attitude of some Central Committee workers towards the sincere work of a person for the good of the Party.” “Judge for yourself,” Denisov wrote. “A man strove to create, and did create, a portrait of V. I. Lenin for more than ten years with his left hand alone (the right one is missing), about which O. B. Lepeshinskaia writes: ‘I was delighted.’”
In the meantime Denisov must have also organized a public protest against the rejection of his Lenin portrait: “Sixteen old communists, who knew and saw Lenin alive, wrote in a letter to the newspaper Sovetskaia kul’tura that ‘the image of Lenin must not be reduced to clichés (nel’zia zatrafarechivaf obraz Lenina)’ and that they ‘consider the keeping of the artist Denisov’s portrait of V. I. Lenin from public showing incorrect.’” Similarly, Literaturnaia gazeta carried an appeal by Old Bolsheviks in favor of Denisov’s Lenin portrait.
Finally, Denisov reported receiving a note from the Central Committee, which read as follows: “Many have looked at your portrait, even secretaries have looked at it. Some like it, others do not. Therefore pick up your portrait and take it to the exhibition [at the Lenin Museum] through the usual channels.” “If they had at least said,” Denisov concluded, “who does not like his painting and what is bad in it. After all, we are not talking about canons that have been established by painting for the sake of painting, but about a different image of Vladimir Ilyich—about the question of the life of an artist, a comrade-in-arms of Ilyich.”150
The archival record next has a letter by Denisov to “Comrade [Petr] Pospelov” of the Central Committee, who had once “cut this Gordian knot and ordered the Lenin Museum to acquire my portrait for their exhibition and to publish it through the Ministry of Culture.” Yet the knot must have miraculously refastened, for the director of the Lenin Museum enlisted various representatives of the artistic intelligentsia to give Denisov further advice on how to change his painting. After that the director of the Lenin Museum sent Denisov on a Kafkaesque journey from one bureaucratic institution to another. The one-armed artist ended up feeling as though he had “turned into a soccer ball.”
The story ends with the following communication, an appeal to Denisov’s patron at the Central Committee to renew his pressure on the Lenin Museum to buy his portrait: “Comrade Krzhizhanovsky wrote in his comment on my portrait: ‘I think that the reactions of our society will undoubtedly be positive.’ Just like the deep conviction expressed in the letters of Lenin’s comrades-inarms, this opinion could, it seems to me, be enough grounds for the director of any museum to take the small risk connected with exhibiting a portrait of V. I. Lenin—a new interpretation that everyone who knew him alive likes so much.”151
We do not know what subsequently happened to Denisov’s Lenin portrait, nor has a copy of the controversial picture come to the surface. But the case highlights some of the inherent tensions of art criticism of the leader portrait genre. On the one hand, depictions of a leader were supposed to be “truthful,” and those people who had personally seen a leader were one of the sources of “truth,” especially after his death. On the other hand, a canon of leader portraits developed over the years, and this canon was firmly implanted in the collective imagination. Violating this canon came close to iconoclasm. Denisov had been a lowly kopiist, who had done little but keep up the canon by painting oil copies of masterpieces like Gerasimov’s Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin for the spot on the wall behind the desks of regional Party bosses. It was ironic that he at last broke out of the canon with his Lenin portrait. The Khrushchev years must have played a role—the Stalin cult had been discredited and the Party claimed to be returning to its Leninist origins. De-Stalinization demanded a de-Stalinized Lenin and made the Party insecure about the established Lenin iconography. It is a combination of this sense of insecurity, of patronage (Voroshilov), and of the renewed power of Old Bolsheviks during the Khrushchev era that allowed Denisov’s case—a case that began (unrelated to the times) in 1947 under Stalin and that was motivated by a desire to restore the “real Lenin”—to enter the archival record of the highest reaches of Soviet power.
Had Denisov’s painting materialized and been released into mass production, the art criticism surrounding it would have been fraught with further serious and generic tensions. The Romantic doctrine of original, autonomous authorship and a process of spontaneous, inspirational creation clashed with the reality of a multiplicity of “authors” in a system of mass production organized around socialist planning. “Masterpieces” had an aura—they were presented as unique and their exhibition in the main museums of the country was treated as a singular experience, a pilgrimage site to be visited by as many Soviet citizens as possible. Yet in truth these very paintings were copied for local Party offices, houses of culture, and factory cafeterias by the artists themselves and an army of impecunious colleagues, copyists like Denisov. This tension in art criticism was almost as prominent as the tension between the existing canon and new paintings (as in the case of Denisov’s Lenin portrait) or between the ideal of painting a leader from life and the reality of painting from photographic and cinematic templates.
The Denisov case was not isolated. Between 1953 and 1961, Stalin’s body lay next to Lenin’s in the mausoleum on Red Square. According to one member of the embalming team, Yury Romakov, the guiding principle of the embalming process was to achieve the greatest possible likeness between the corpse and the established image of Stalin in art, photographs, and film—to avoid shocking the people.152 Here too, the march of time, which left its traces even on Soviet leaders, was the canon’s great source of contamination. How to reconcile current images of Stalin with pictures whose subject was in the distant past? To be sure, the Soviet painters worked out a Stalin iconography showing the leader at different ages. Sometimes, however, the current image was superimposed onto paintings with historical subjects, as in a painting reproduced in Pravda depicting the Wrangel front during the Civil War, when Stalin should have actually looked much younger.153 Time and again, questions of temporality and mimesis moved to the center of the search for the perfect image of the leader.
If photography failed to deliver the utterly mimetic representation, were there other media that could do so? There was an earnest suggestion to use a plaster molder to create an archive of life masks of the leaders. A death mask already was a distorted representation of the leader, whereas a life mask would furnish the “real,” perfectly mimetic template for an endless stream of works of art. Thus Voroshilov received a letter from Anna Ellinskaia: “I live at the dermatology hospital, where the well-known molder Sergei Pavlovich Fiveisky has created a huge museum of casts of very high quality. S. P. Fiveisky has grown old and almost blind, but his son Sergei Sergeevich Fiveisky works just as well, if not better than him. Now, this molder could assemble a gallery not of portraits, but of precise depictions of our dear leaders in their lifetime. Not only we, but also posterity would appreciate this gallery.” “I have not,” she finished, “told anyone of my thought and am first turning to you as a countryman, since I am also from Lugansk and approximately your age. My name will tell you nothing, I am merely a housewife, but I love my country and my leaders no less than any worker.”154 Anna Ellinskaia’s letter seems to have been taken quite seriously, for Voroshilov’s archive contains a note with her main proposition and pencil remarks (“we ought to take a look at the work of these molders and then decide”—Voroshilov). Did this note circulate at a Politburo meeting?155
Life masks of the Bolshevik pantheon, Stalin’s embalmed body, and Denisov’s Lenin portrait—they all point to deep and large problems of socialist realism. Artists may have been able to synthetically bridge the seemingly irreconcilable prescriptions of representing the world as it was and as it ought to be, of fusing realism and socialism. Here socialism—the “ought-to-be,” future, or utopia— was in fact less challenging, precisely because it was nonexistent and therefore allowed for a wider range of approximations. Realism—the “as is” or the present—proved to be the real challenge. For as time moved on, the perception of what was, of reality, changed. The Lenin of Khrushchev’s time was no longer identical with the Lenin of Stalin’s time. Yet when Khrushchev came to power a collective visual memory had formed—“millions are used to seeing Lenin differently.” It was this chronological vector that posed one of the greatest threats to representations of the leader, to socialist realism, and indeed to socialism.
