Behind the Velvet Curtain in search of Socialist Realism
Twenty years after the pulling down of the Berlin Wall (although, happily, bits of it remain for tourists to speculate over), German museums and art galleries have begun to take a new interest in the ideologically inspired art of the former Soviet Union. No Holidaymakers can track down special exhibitions in many of the big cities, such as Berlin, Bonn and Frankfurt.
Paintings, statues and films were needed both to celebrate and to create the pure spirit of the new egalitarian, joyful communism. They started as early as the famous steps scene in Battleship Potemkin, but went on for another eighty or so years peaking, naturally enough, in the 1950s with the period of Stalinist mass compulsory collectivization and purges.
Socialist art, in contrast to Western galleries, with their penchant for nobles on horseback and Renaissance nudes, consists of heroic workers, and paintings of Stalin and Lenin in revolutionary poses. In “Unforgettable Encounter,” for instance, painted at the high point of the purges in 1936-7, Stalin is shown graciously smiling and receiving a bouquet of flowers from a Russian female worker. Still exploring the same imagery, the painting “Collective Farm Workers Greeting a Tank” (by Katerina Sernova) portrays an everyday scene from the farm, as a group of men, women and a child wave their caps at a tank and bedeck it with flowers. Such works are obviously of merit, but so too are ones with coded messages, such as the otherwise uninspiring representation of a suitably concerned looking Stalin “at Gorky's sick bed” (by Vassili Yefanov). This is noteworthy because Gorky, a celebrated writer, had been assassinated on Stalin's orders.
In the period immediately following the 1917 October Revolution, under Lenin, many artists enthusiastically rushed to place their skills at the service of the State, which responded by making special provision for them even in the bleak economic conditions of the times. Works by Tatlin, Malevich and Rodchenko date from this optimistic period. An early sketch by Isaac Brodsky shows Lenin at work in the revolutionary HQ, scribbling on papers on his lap, while next to him there is a table covered in newspapers. The piece later became Lenin's widow's favorite image when he turned it into a full-scale paining.
Alas, soon after Lenin's death (in 1924) the approach became more “dirigiste,” and artists were now policed to ensure their works carried the appropriate political message. Even Brodsky's painting of Lenin was singled out for revolutionary criticism, although it was not actually added to a new art collection of “forbidden art.”
Trotsky himself wrote a book on Art and Politics in Our Epoch shortly before Stalin had him killed with the ice pick, which explains:
The style of present-day official Soviet Painting is called “socialist realism”... It is impossible to read Soviet verse and prose without physical disgust, mixed with horror, or to look at reproductions of paintings and sculpture in which functionaries armed with pens, brushes and scissors, under the supervision of functionaries armed with Mausers, glorify the “great” and “brilliant” leaders... The art of the Stalinist period will remain as the frankest expression of the profound decline of the proletarian revolution.
Evidently some risk of physical disgust, mixed with horror.