Art and Communism in Postwar France: The Impossible Task of Defining a French Socialist Realism
At the end of the Second World War, the French Communist Party (Parti communiste français, PCF) played not only a major political but also cultural role in France. Between the end of the war in 1945 and the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, the party paid special attention to intellectuals and artists, and attempted to define a specific cultural policy.1 The PCF intended to determine what kind of relationship it should have with artists—whether the party should support and promote a particular aesthetic line and, if so, how to define it. Socialist Realism,2 which starting in 1949 was called Nouveau Réalisme (New Realism),3 was the aesthetic project that the party defined during the first years of the Cold War (1947–1953).
The official history of the PCF’s relationship to the visual arts is based on a totalitarian vision of the party and the Soviet system.4 It speaks of the Communist Party as one homogeneous and monolithic entity, and assumes that the party advocated for the clear and coherent aesthetic program that was Socialist Realism.5 According to this doxa, the party legislated in a proactive manner toward the creation and development of a discursive arsenal through exhibition reviews, theoretical articles, speeches of political leaders and artists, and the masses’ comments on works of art. The party defined its aesthetic line upstream, in congresses, and then determined the proper content and form, while communist art criticism post-edited the artistic production in order to influence future achievements by promoting certain artists, granting them with recognition, educating the public and guiding its understanding of the works.6 According to this official story, the party interfered in all possible ways in the French art scene, commissioned artists and, consequently, was able to dictate artistic themes.
From there, the story splits three ways. The first trend embraces a broader vision of the relationship between art and communism that exceeds the question of Socialist Realism and takes into account the positions of the Surrealists, the existentialists, and those painters who were members of the party but did not follow Socialist Realism, such as Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, and Henri Matisse.7 The second trend considers the art of the communist painters along the main lines of the party’s aesthetic project, and within the broader context of the postwar French art world.8 The third approach takes note of the formal diversity within so-called Socialist Realist works, and explains it as the result of two contradictions between the theoretical project of the party and pictorial practice of the artists.9 On the one hand, the party simply embraced works whose features disagreed with the party’s vision.10 On the other hand, the stylistic diversity within Socialist Realism expressed endogenous contradictions within the PCF’s cultural policy. The fact that artists could create both sordid and epic works is thought to reveal a gap between the ideological triumphalism based on the Soviet discourse and the everyday speech of the PCF addressed to the needy.11
This latter trend of research12 highlights the lack of discourses devoted to stylistic issues and work analysis within the party’s rhetoric, which in turn gave communist artists freedom to follow the legacy of Gustave Courbet and Jacques-Louis David (André Fougeron), the Futurists (Orizi), or the Expressionists (Boris Taslitzky). Yet, it does not question Socialist Realism as a clear aesthetic line.13 This chapter thus has a twofold objective: to stress problems, often implicit, that allowed the coexistence of different views among the communists’ group, and to demonstrate the vagueness of the Socialist Realism project in and of itself.
To reconstruct the problematic development of the PCF’s postwar aesthetic program, we reviewed the monthly communist periodical La nouvelle critique (The New Criticism; 1948–1954), and the literary weekly magazine Les Lettres françaises (The French Letters; 1944–1957), which was controlled by the PCF after 1947. Cultural sections of those journals were the main sites of theoretical and critical discussions on communist art. In addition, to explore different voices among French communists, we reviewed a lesser-known but not less important magazine, Le Musée vivant (The Living Museum; 1946–1969), which was edited by the communist art historian Madeleine Rousseau. We considered these French debates in light of the latest research on Soviet Socialist Realism. These new elements led us to read French interpretations on Socialist Realism from a new point of view.
In the following pages, we shall first debunk the apparent simplicity of the debates inside the French Communist Party. We shall then consider the issues that rose from defining artistic references for French Socialist Realism, and finish by taking apart the blurry terminology related to the social function of art.
The apparent simplicity of the debates
Various studies have, to date, pointed at the difficult establishment of Socialist Realism as the only aesthetic program of the PCF.14 Looking back at the chronology of events, especially through the lenses of communist journals and magazines as we did, allows the main debates to be highlighted, open or latent, which animated the PCF. Through our systematic reviews, it becomes obvious that the opinions and reactions of painters and critics were numerous and did not conform to a univocal realist aesthetic.
At the end of the war, realism encompassed a variety of formal and theoretical definitions. Within the PCF, the conflicts of the 1930s15 re-emerged between realists, abstracts, and Surrealists. The main debate took place in 1945, at the 10th party convention. On this occasion, the philosopher Roger Garaudy encouraged communist painters to get closer to the masses by choosing more appropriate subject matters and to avoid abstraction (considered individualistic and aristocratic); thereby he explicitly opposed realism and abstraction.16
These controversies were widely relayed in both the communist and non-communist press, but it was a false debate in many ways.17 First, no one would disagree that the leaders of the PCF had confirmed the need for a specific communist aesthetic, and that it was called realism. Next, it should be noted that the realist and abstract groups were far from being homogeneous and that their boundaries were not clearly delineated. Thus, the debate “pro or against abstract art” poorly concealed other oppositions and contradictions concerning mostly the very definition of the concept of “reality”—as vague and omnipresent as it may be, and to which we will return later on.
The years 1947–1948 constitute a turning point in the promotion of Socialist Realism, which was ardently defended by two major figures of the PCF: the head of artistic affairs within the party, Laurent Casanova,18 and the poet and writer Louis Aragon.19 The latter, who had been one of the founders of Surrealism, became, after the war, the “poet laureate” of the PCF and his influence on the leaders of the party and its painters would not cease to grow. In 1947, the ideologist and Russian politician Andrej Aleksandrovič Ždanov (Andrei Zhdanov; 1896–1948), a fervent promoter of Socialist Realism, outlined his two camps theory, whereby he formalized the beginning of the Cold War. From that point on, the leaders of the PCF, with its secretary general Maurice Thorez at the forefront, took Zhdanov as a reference point and spared no efforts to impose Socialist Realism as the official aesthetic of the PCF. In 1948, André Fougeron became the leader of French Socialist Realism when his manifesto painting, Parisiennes au marché (1947–1948), was exhibited at the Salon d’Automne. This painting represents in the foreground a stall of fish and behind this anxious housewives. Their empty baskets, the fixity of their bodies, their clasped hands and lowered eyes indicate both their desire and their inability to acquire these products. The direct gaze of the woman in the center takes the spectator as witness. A harsh critique of the expensive life, the image was considered vulgar by mainstream art criticism but praised by communists for its subject matter and figurative treatment.
When Thorez went on recovery leave in 1950, Auguste Lecoeur succeeded him and hardened the cultural policy of the party in an anti-intellectualism way, through a campaign for André Fougeron at the expense of Picasso, who was previously protected by Thorez. With Stalin’s death in 1953, a complete shift occurred in the Soviet Union, which coincided with the disavowal of Auguste Lecoeur’s policy and an attack on André Fougeron. His painting, Civilisation atlantique (1953), which was exhibited at the Salon d’Automne of 1953, intended to denounce the Americanization of Europe and the colonial wars in Korea and Indochina. In the composition, Fougeron made use of emblematic elements for his critical purposes. He stigmatized capitalism (a Cadillac and a big man in a suit, at the center) and its consequences (families and immigrants living on the streets, on the left). He showed other aspects of American society, such as violence (the electric chair, a soldier pointing his gun), segregation (the African American boy shining shoes), and obscenity (the man reading a pornographic magazine in the center). This painting became the subject of strong criticism from Louis Aragon who judged it schematic, allegorical, and antirealist. According to him, Fougeron juxtaposed too many elements and the spectator was lost in the composition and unable to identify the main idea.20 Furthermore, this painting was considered atypical because it reduced the American brutality in several clichés. Meanwhile, the portrait of Stalin by Picasso published in the pages of Les Lettres françaises (on March 12, 1953), by Aragon, scandalized Lecoeur and the direction of the PCF, and divided the party.21 The drawing of a young Stalin was considered incompatible with the image of the leader of the Communist Party, usually associated with that of a wise and benevolent old man.
Those attitudes towards Fougeron and Picasso reveal the complex relationships that the leaders of the PCF had with intellectuals and the fact that opposite theoretical currents coexisted within the party throughout that period.22 Communist advocates of abstract art, Surrealism, as well as painters of the Cobra group did not yield. Despite his communist engagement, the leader of Surrealism André Breton always rejected the Communist Party’s stylistic guidelines. According to him, Socialist Realism was a dogmatic art unable to express the revolution.23 Similarly, the Cobra group, founded in Paris in 1948 by Belgian (Christian Dotremont and Joseph Noiret), Danish (Asger Jorn) and Dutch artists (Karel Appel, Corneille, Constant), once close to the party, distanced themselves from the PCF because they did not want to follow orders and claimed freedom of critical thinking.
In regard to communism and abstraction, the art historian Madeleine Rousseau (1895–1980) provides an interesting case study.24 In 1946, in Le Musée vivant, she defended painters close to the PCF like Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, Charles Lapicque, and Jean Bazaine, as well as the abstract paintings of Jean-Michel Atlan, Jean Deyrolle, Jean Dewasne, Hans Hartung, Alberto Magnelli, Gérard Schneider, Pierre Soulages, etc., thus attempting to overcome the division between realism and abstraction. In addition, she did not fail to denounce the danger of the dogmatism that the party applied to the visual arts. She condemned the Communist Party’s attacks against abstract art, which—in Rousseau’s own words—evoked painful memories: “People ask for a national art that must regenerate France, and this brings back the too well-known and unfortunate echoes: one used the same words to attack the same art; did we forget the Hitlerian campaigns against degenerate art?”25
Additionally, if the PCF did aspire to promote a clear and realistic aesthetic line, it does not mean that this aspiration was achieved. Scholars have mentioned two factors that affected the clearness of the communist aesthetic line. First, the PCF leaders’ attitude appeared ambiguous. Indeed, they officially promoted Socialist Realism and rejected abstract art and Modernism as expressions of bourgeois ideology. It may seem contradictory that they supported Picasso, Léger, and Matisse—all internationally renowned artists and party members who openly refused to be part of Socialist Realism.26 This became particularly obvious in August 1947, when Maurice Thorez was photographed in front of a Matisse painting for the newspaper L’Humanité, while the artist had just been attacked by Pravda, the official newspaper of the Soviet Communist Party; and, in 1950, when the communist press relayed praise for Picasso by Laurent Casanova, at the presentation of his sculpture with expressive gestures and proportions L’Homme au mouton (1943) to the city of Vallauris.27
Second, Socialist Realist art and artists were part and parcel of the French art scene. Thus, these artists often participated in shows other than those dedicated to that trend or organized by the party.28 The PCF was at times critical of these shows, but at times also tried to rally them. The party, for instance, did not organize the annual exhibitions of Les peintres témoins de leur temps, the first of which opened in 1951, and was entitled “Work,” or those devoted to the peace movement. The communist press nonetheless praised the works on display, despite their pluralist styles. Overlooking its great stylistic diversity, the daily communist newspaper L’Humanité interpreted Les peintres témoins de leur temps (1951) as evidence of the party leadership position in the art field. Owing to the paintings’ subject matter, it concluded that artists took the side of the workers.29 Content was as much a marker of Socialist Realism as style.
The outlines of the Socialist Realist practice are thus difficult to accurately grasp. And it seems that the problem of the definition of communist art resulted in no small part from the lack of solid theoretical foundation and consensual definitions of basic terms.
Issues in defining a communist aesthetic: in search of references
Two main issues made it hard for the PCF to define a coherent aesthetic. Firstly, there are very few references to the visual arts in Marxist texts and, secondly, the doctrines coming from Moscow were anything but clear. In fact, the problem was as much the little influence Soviet ideas had in France as the vagueness of these ideas.
The writings of Marx and Engels dedicated to artistic questions are few and scattered.30 If Marx considered art as a social factor, he nevertheless noted the difficulty in explaining that Greek art and the epic “linked to certain forms of social development … can still give us aesthetic satisfaction and be considered to some extent a standard and unattainable model.”31 He highlighted the problem of the aesthetic value of the works of art that goes beyond the historical, economic, and social (superstructure) conditions from which they rise, though not providing any solution to that conundrum.
The philosopher Henri Lefebvre attempted to answer Marx’s aporia in his text “Introduction à l’esthétique”32 published in 1948 in the philosophico-communist magazine Arts de France. There he advocated for historical and dialectical materialism, as a system capable of handling the metaphysical dimension of artworks and their historical backgrounds. Lefebvre denied therefore art as an idealist essence and claimed the need to study art’s historical and social links through a dialectic method rather than a schematic one.
The ambiguity also applies to the question of the Soviet model being imported in France. To date, scholars have postulated that French Socialist Realism was essentially based on Zhdanov’s texts, particularly his speech at the first Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934 and his brief formulation of Socialist Realism.33 Scholars have also argued that, if the Zhdanovian theory had a great impact in France, it was difficult to turn it into concrete, influential policies. His ideas constituted reference points, authoritative arguments that were integrated within the discursive arsenal of the French communists. In other words, the influence of Soviet Socialist Realism is being relativized as the authoritative model of French Socialist Realism; but it is not called into question.
To the Zhdanovian corpus that reached France, one should add translations of Lenin’s writings on art, as well as texts by Plekhanov, Gorky, and Stalin.34 With the exception of a few reviews from Soviet art critics on exhibitions of Russian art that took place in Moscow, almost all these texts deal with literature. Even though they claimed to have a more general application, their adaptation to the visual arts was not straightforward.
The systematic use by French communist intellectuals and leaders of phrases and terms including “Socialist Realism,” “Revolutionary Romanticism,” “typical,” “party spirit,” “engineer of souls,” and “critical assimilation of the artistic heritage” gave the impression of a united front and a consensus on the definition of the PCF’s aesthetic line. Yet, as recent scholarship on the visual arts in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe has shown, these theoretical discourses could never impose themselves as a clear communist dogma for they were fraught with problems and raised more questions than they provided answers.35 By importing Soviet terminology, the PCF also integrated inaccuracies and contradictions inherent to that vocabulary, without exposing them. Did Socialist Realism mean a trend, a style, a set of iconographic themes, a vision of the world according to the Marxist theory, or rather a method of creation as Zhdanov would have claimed?36 And what is to be understood by the phrase “method of creation”? Behind the appearance of a unified discourse, a series of taboos, unspoken ideas, and latent conflicts emerge.
Yet, the benefits of using such a terminology were numerous. Through it, the party claimed its ties with the USSR and showed its participation in the international communist movement. It also gave the impression of a doctrinal coherence. By taking part in the creation of labels to describe literary and artistic productions (be it “Socialist Realism,” “French Realism” in 1937, or “New Realism” in 1949), its intention was to legitimize its intervention upon the world of art. Communist artists also profited from it: united under a common label, they could overcome their isolation, access greater recognition37 and participate in the writing of a national history of the arts.38 This last aspect was important. While French political leaders and intellectuals swore allegiance to Soviet concepts, they also insisted on the autonomy of French artists, especially in favor of Stalin’s dictum that art should be “socialist in content, national in form.”
This might have been one of the reasons why Soviet art never completely imposed itself as a model to French artists. Their ignorance and indifference to Soviet artists’ production have often been emphasized in the literature.39 But it is also important to stress that the Soviet model was a problematic reference, and embracing it was not a straightforward process. In 1950 when Maurice Thorez called artists to “take inspiration from Socialist Realism,” he provided little information on the aspects to take into consideration. Although historians have relativized the impact of Soviet Socialist Realism, they have not considered the vagueness of its definition as an essential factor in its limited impact. Communist leaders and intellectuals faced the complex theoretical interpretation of communist aesthetics and its elaboration of a communist art, according to which they had to answer the three fundamental questions pertaining to art: What is an artist? What is the function of art criticism? And finally, how are the functions of art defined, particularly its social function?
Communist aesthetics and the social function of art: A terminological blur
In postwar France, three major issues pertaining to the functions of art were being given serious thought: the definition of realism, the relationship between art and the people, and the appropriation of a national artistic heritage. Since these last two have already been the object of many studies and interesting contextualization,40 we wish to focus here on the question of realism, and put forth some additional elements to the study of this concept.
The term “realism” refers to a wide variety of designs and practices. The problem with the definition of this term is that it far exceeds discussions of form, as it extends itself to philosophical considerations that appear twofold. The notion of “realism” questions the definition of the real and, subsequently, the relationship that the artist, the image, and the viewer must maintain with the so-called real.41 These two issues have become increasingly complex since the nineteenth century, and even more so after the word “realism” was used to describe an artistic movement.42
Marxist theory was developed in the nineteenth century in a context where reality was conceived as accessible by human reason and senses. According to this positivist view, the real corresponds to the sensible features of the outside world.43 In Russia and subsequently in the USSR, the articulation between the notions of reality and truth proved fundamental. From the early twentieth century on, the real has also been conceived in its relation to time. For advocates of Socialist Realism in the 1930s, the real corresponded to the time in which the artwork emerged, along with some element coming from the past and seeds of the future. An easy temptation was then to confuse reality with presentness. Simultaneously, abstract art was condemned because it was understood as favoring the expression of the eternal and timeless. During the first half of the twentieth century a paradigm change occurred: a shift from the materialistic acceptation of the real to a claim that the real is not something that already is, but something that must be constructed. Inevitably, the hesitations and contradictions inherent to this general evolution of the definition of reality had repercussions on the communist aesthetic project.44
From the question of which relationship art should maintain with reality, two major positions emerged: either art is to be conceived as the construction of a new reality,45 or it is to be understood as a reflection thereof. The concept of reflection is a complex one, since according to Marxist theory artworks objectively reflect both the social conditions that gave birth to them, and the vision of the world of the social class to which the author or artist belongs. It is then to be determined what, for the artist, constitutes part of a conscious or unconscious process, what constitutes his or her commitment, and more broadly what defines the figure of the artist-activist.46 The Marxist painter, as a member of the party, had to express a proletarian vision of the world and the values of the working class.
According to Marxist theory, art is a way to acquire knowledge of reality.47 The problem for communist abstract artists was that their works were not mirrors of reality but rather its transposition or transfiguration. Yet, as Jean Dewasne, an abstract painter and a member of the Communist Party, said, “abstract art is eminently materialistic” because it consists of “color and form only.”48 In 1946, he co-founded the Salon des réalités nouvelles (Salon of the new realities), devoted to abstract art. There Dewasne defended abstract art as “a universal language”49 and fought for its integration in society through architecture and urban planning.50
Madeleine Rousseau similarly argued that abstract art is realist to the extent that it reveals the dominant reality of the moment. Rousseau interpreted abstract art emancipation from the figurative as the symptom of a radical transformation of the old bourgeois and capitalist system. Elements behind this change were, in her view, at once political and social (colonialism, totalitarianism, war); technical (photography, cinema, press, radio, transportation improvements, telephone, etc.), and scientific (the discovery of the theory of relativity and the atom). In her mind, Hans Hartung’s abstract paintings, as a system of signs, shapes, and colors, not only express a simple individualistic point of view, but also the forces of a new world free of any nationalist ties, thereby being a vehicle for universal values.
Madeleine Rousseau also defended communist abstract art in Le Musée vivant. In her articles and reviews, she developed a Marxist and Universalist conception of art that was shaped both by the experience of the Front populaire51 and her time working at the Musée de l’homme in Paris. Knowledge of the non-Western collections exhibited at the museum acquainted Rousseau with a social vision of art, and made her think differently about abstraction. Just as African art inscribes itself in the collective life without necessarily supporting a mimetic relationship with reality, abstract art could have a political function within the West, which had been profoundly shaken by the horrors of the Second World War. True to what she defined as “the art of the present,” Rousseau condemned ethnocentrism and supported abstract artists such as Jean-Michel Atlan, Jean Deyrolle, and above all Hans Hartung—whom she designated as an artist capable of revealing the “Reality” of the human drama that stemmed from totalitarianism and wars.52
Rousseau’s interpretation of Picasso was also part of her vision of the West as a world in transformation. She celebrated him as the artist who expressed in his Cubist paintings the disintegration of an uncertain social order. She compared his work Le Charnier (1944–1945) to Hartung’s pastel T1946–14 (1946); both were, in her view, the expression “of a new order […]: the nightmare of war that dissipates to let shine the hope for better days.”53
According to Rousseau, Marxism must be transposed from:
the plane of social forces (such as Marx conceived it a hundred years ago) to that of cosmic forces introduced in our world through a century of scientific discoveries: to conceive a dynamic universe which will include in its new rhythm the recently conquered forces and where mankind will find its place as both a dependent and conquering force.54
This original design of Marxism that linked the social to the cosmic was connected to her commitment to decolonization and was in line with emerging voices of this movement such as the poet Aimé Césaire and the historian Cheikh Anta Diop. Discours sur le colonialisme (Speech on Colonialism, 1950) of Césaire and Nations nègres et culture (Negro Nations and Culture, 1954) of Anta Diop55 are among the seminal works of postcolonial studies: they denounce racism and colonialism in the Western world and celebrate the rebirth of the African people.
As we can see, the relationship of art with reality and the fact that, according to Marxist theory, art is a way of acquiring knowledge of reality, received very different interpretations among French communists, so much so that Dewasne and Rousseau could defend abstraction in the name of realism. Yet, the PCF was officially rejecting abstract art, and so it proceeded to Rousseau’s excommunication in 1949. Excommunications, however, did not eliminate diverging opinions within the party and most importantly did not clarify the debate.
However, the main reproach addressed to abstraction by the advocates of Socialist Realism was its lack of content.56 Communist theory claims that the shape of the work is dictated by its content. But this statement remained elusive, and the definition of “content” vague. The term sometimes referred to the subject or to the emotion that the subject matter provides to the artist and then to the viewer.57 The Russian theorist Georgi Plekhanov defined it as “the representation that the artist has about reality, his or her experience and the ideology he or she expresses.”58 During the 12th congress of the PCF in 1950, Thorez spoke of “the social content of our time,” that he characterized as “the great rise of popular forces, the struggle between the new and the old, the latter which recesses everywhere before the surge of the forms inherent to the new life.”59 The term “content” thus seems to hold different meanings and to refer equally to the artwork’s relationship to reality, to its creator, and to its recipient. The issues pertaining to the choice of a subject matter to express content were then paramount.
On this subject, French Socialist Realists were facing the same problems as their Soviet colleagues: what subjects could be considered Socialist Realist? The ideological aspect of a landscape or a still life, for example, had to be debated. When a work displayed industrial elements or bore traces of the action of the working class, critics praised the artist for working in true contact with reality. See, for instance, the reception of the André Fougeron’s exhibition, Le pays des mines (The Mines Region) in 1951.60
This show was the result of a commission to Fougeron by the Confédération générale du travail (CGT; The General Confederation of Labor) of the miners of the regions Nord and Pas-de-Calais. The painter spent almost a year in the Calais region where he created paintings and drawings that were then presented at the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery under the title Le pays des mines. This cycle intended to represent the mining culture through portraits, genre scenes, landscapes, and a few still lifes. It included the work at the mine with all its drama, its stigmata, and its traditions. The choice of subject was important. The miner embodied the proletariat’s force and was a key figure of the communist iconography since the nineteenth century. In the 1940s and 1950s, he was one of the archetypes of the worker, patriot, and communist. French miners had won fame during the Second World War through acts of resistance to the German occupation forces and then after the war by strikes that were violently suppressed by the French state, in particular in 1947–1948. So, this was a highly political topic.
Auguste Lecoeur himself, as federal secretary of the Pas-de-Calais Communist Party, played an active role in the miners’ resistance during the war and, after the war, chaired the CGT of the mines in the region Nord-Pas-de-Calais. He was actually the initiator of the commission to Fougeron and of the large press campaign that accompanied the opening of the exhibition. His introduction to the exhibition catalog set the tone for the majority of the communist critiques of the show, which simply relayed Lecoeur’s dual amalgam between artist/activist and subject of the picture/cause to defend.61 In his words, pictures were understood as tools that lead viewers to adopt the miners’ point of view and therefore to support their struggle against the “Governmental boss.” He assessed pictures in terms of political effectiveness. The emotional shock derives from one’s knowledge of the subject matter.
In this light, the writer and journalist André Stil divided his review of the show into two equal parts: the first emphasized the importance of observation for Fougeron who does not remain isolated in his studio but instead grasps the reality on the ground; the second half of the text provides an account of French miners’ struggles since 1941. The author focused on the iconography and working method of the artist, thus leaving aside formal and stylistic issues.62
For some communist critics and painters, a painting had to feature a tractor in a landscape or a worker in a factory for it to be labeled as Socialist Realist.63 For others, the mere fact of representing a French landscape was seen as a patriotic gesture worthy of New Realism. But in both cases, the discourse external to the artwork was the element defining the artwork’s engagement—be it the title given or the commentary written by the artist or critics. As art historian Lucie Fougeron explained, communist art criticism sometimes went as far as to transmute the misery shown in some artworks into a triumph, as in Fougeron’s piece Le pensionné.64 The painting depicts an old and, according to Lecoeur, asthmatic man sitting on a chair and looking directly at the viewer. The horizontal format allows for a general view of a bare interior with a coil stove, and a chimney with pansies on it, as well as two portraits, one of the man’s son and the other of Maurice Thorez. About this theatrical staging of misery, Lecoeur wrote: “Fougeron powerfully reproduced this distress. We who know the subject, are deeply moved by this painting, we find it beautiful, beautifully true.”65
In Le Musée vivant, Madeleine Rousseau, on the other hand, accused Fougeron of confusing “realism” with “subject matter.” “For him,” she wrote, “a painting is realist when it illustrates a portrait or a battle. Does this narrow the conception of realism—valid over a hundred years ago—and still make any sense today? Only a handful of authentic painters can claim this, even among the communist ones.”66
Conclusion
Behind a unified theoretical façade, the PCF’s relationship to art and artists was fraught with ambiguity and contradiction. Deconstructing the coherence of the communist aesthetic line does not aim at denying its existence. The project of a communist aesthetic did exist. Elements for a definition of a (French) Socialist Realism or New Realism were given, but the terms employed were complicated and therefore could not lead to an unequivocal interpretation.
Pointing at the vagueness of the French Socialist Realist doctrine is not for us a goal in and of itself. It allows us to return to the doxa that asserts the existence of an art of the party and presents communist artists as devoid of any creative project, reducing them to mere “workers of painting,” who conformed to the expectations of the PCF.67 By not directly challenging the myth of a cogent Socialist Realism, we contend, scholars find themselves entrapped into a contradiction: while they assert that the role of the artist was to conform to the wishes of the party, they have to recognize that in practice the body of postwar communist art was not very coherent.68 We argue that contradictions did not just occur between theory and artistic practice, but rather were endogenous to the theoretical development itself. We believe that it is therefore essential to always keep in mind the realm of the unsaid that artists and art critics relied upon to create their works and write their texts.
1 Marc Lazar, “Le Réalisme socialiste aux couleurs de la France,” L’Histoire 43 (1982): 62.
2 This expression first appeared in 1932 in USSR in Pravda, the official Communist Party newspaper. It related to the official Soviet arts. Within the French Communist Party, some people such as the writer Louis Aragon tried to import these terms into France and applied them to French art in the 1930s, but they succeeded only after the war.
3 This “New Realism” has to be distinguished from the Nouveau Réalisme founded by the critic Pierre Restany in 1960.
4 The analysis of the Soviet system has long been dominated by this trend, freely inspired by the work of Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarism (New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1951). Schematically, its proponents postulated the existence of a monolithic political system, of an all-powerful state controlling an indoctrinated society, deprived of its rights and dominated by terror. They focused on political history, in which the state was merged with the party. This history thus became one of the political leaders, mainly of the omnipotent and omniscient chief. When access to sources was a major problem, the authors sought to identify a system as a whole. The limit of this work lies in particular in the fact that they considered a project whose realization would be perfectly planned and thus tend to ignore tensions and conflicts within society.
5 This opinion is relayed in particular by Jeanine Verdès-Leroux, Au service du parti. Le Parti communiste, les intellectuels et la culture, 1944–1956 (Paris: Fayard-Minuit, 1983); Dominique Berthet, Le PCF, la culture et l’art (Paris: La Table ronde, 1990).
6 Ibid., 308; Verdès-Leroux, Au service du parti, 35–36.
7 Sarah Wilson, “Art and the Politics of the Left in France, c. 1935–1955,” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Courtauld Institute of Art, 1992).
8 Laurence Bertrand Dorléac, Après la guerre (Paris: Gallimard, 2010).
9 Verdès-Leroux, Au service du parti; Sylvie Peignon, “Le Réalisme socialiste en France, 1945–1953: sa peinture,” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, 1986).
10 Peignon, “Le Réalisme socialiste en France.”
11 Berthet, Le PCF, la culture et l’art, 315.
12 Peignon, “Le Réalisme socialiste en France,” 125, 141–142; Lucie Fougeron, “Un exemple de mise en images: le ‘réalisme socialiste’ dans les arts plastiques en France (1947–1954),” Sociétés et représentations 15 (2003): 201, 204.
13 Despite the insistence on the ephemeral nature of the Socialist Realism theory in the French literary field, attempts are still shy when it comes to visual arts matters.
14 For precise chronologies, see Peignon, “Le Réalisme socialiste en France” and Wilson, “Art and the Politics of the Left in France.”
15 See Serge Fauchereau, introduction to La querelle du réalisme (Paris: Éditions du Cercle d’art, 1987).
16 Roger Garaudy, Les intellectuels et la Renaissance française (Paris: Éditions du parti communiste français, 1945), 2–11.
17 Bertrand Dorléac, Après la guerre, 129.
18 Laurent Casanova, Le Communisme, la pensée et l’art: discours au XIe congrès du PCF (Paris: Éditions du Parti communiste français, 1947).
19 In May, in the foreword of a drawings book of André Fougeron, see Wilson, “Art and the Politics of the Left in France,” 292.
20 Louis Aragon, “Toutes les couleurs de l’automne,” Les Lettres françaises (November 12, 1953).
21 Berthet, Le PCF, la culture et l’art, 223–243.
22 On Louis Aragon’s views see in particular: Emmanuelle Cordenod-Roiron, “Aragon derrière l’emblème politique: où en est-on?” Itinéraires 4 (2011). Accessed March 27, 2016 doi:10.4000/itineraires.1380.
23 See Wilson, “Art and the Politics of the Left in France,” 366–370.
24 Madeleine Rousseau was accepted to write a thesis on the painter and republican activist writer Philippe Auguste Jeanron (1809–1877) at the École du Louvre under the direction of Louis Hautecœur. Two articles by Danielle Maurice establish the state of the research on the figure of Madeleine Rousseau and the review Le Musée vivant: Danielle Maurice, “Le Musée vivant et le centenaire de l’abolition de l’ esclavage: pour une reconnaissance des cultures africaines,” Conserveries mémorielles 3 (2007). Accessed March 27, 2016 http://cm.revues.org/127; Danielle Maurice, “L’art et l’éducation populaire: Madeleine Rousseau, une figure singulière des années 1940–1960,” Histoire de l’art 63 (October 2008): 111–121.
25 Madeleine Rousseau, “Quelques réflexions recueillies parmi nos adhérents,” Le Musée vivant (January 1948): 5.
26 See Wilson, “Art and the Politics of the Left in France,” and Peignon, “Le Réalisme socialiste en France.”
27 Laurent Casanova, “Salut à Picasso! La classe ouvrière et les artistes,” La nouvelle critique (Summer 1950): 25–29.
28 The most important exhibitions organized by the PCF were the exhibition in honor of the 50th anniversary of Maurice Thorez (Mairie d’Ivry-sur-Seine, 1950), De Marx à Stalin (From Marx to Stalin; Maison des métallurgistes, Paris, 1953) and solo exhibitions by André Fougeron Le Pays des mines (The Mining Country; Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris, 1951), Algérie 1952 (Algeria 1952; Galerie André Weil, Paris), by Boris Taslitzky, and Mireille Miailhe. But the communists’ artists also participated in exhibitions whose themes were close to the interests of the party, especially Art et Résistance (Art and Resistance; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1946), the Salon devoted to Les peintres témoins de leur temps (Painters Witnesses of their Time; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1951 and 1953) and exhibitions on peace (in 1948 at the World Congress of Intellectuals in Warsaw and in 1950 in Lyon). Finally, they were also involved in main events of the French artistic life as the famous Salon d’Automne, Salon des Indépendants or Salon de Mai. See Peignon, “Le Réalisme socialiste en France,” 90–99.
29 See articles of 1951 quoted in Peignon,“Le Réalisme socialiste en France,” 93–95.
30 Karl Marx, “Einführung in die Kritik der politischen Ökonomie” (1857), in Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (Berlin: F. Duncker, 1859); translated in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Sur la littérature et l’art, textes choisis précédés d’une introduction de Maurice Thorez et d’une étude de Jean Fréville (Paris: Éditions Sociales, 1954), 183; Karl Marx, Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (Hambourg: Verlag von Otto Meissner, 1867); translated in Marx and Engels, Sur la littérature et l’art, textes choisis, 174.
31 Karl Marx quoted in Henri Lefebvre, “Introduction à l’esthétique,” Arts de France 21–22 (1948): 55.
32 Lefebvre, “Introduction à l’esthétique,” 19–20, 21–22, 23–24, 25–26.
33 Fougeron, “Un exemple de mise en images,” 196; Verdès-Leroux, Au service du parti.
34 Vladimir Ilich Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Sur la littérature et l’art, textes choisis, traduits et présentés par Jean Fréville (Paris: Éditions Sociales internationales, 1937); Vladimir Ilich Lenin and Joseph Stalin, Les grands textes du marxisme sur la littérature et l’art, textes choisis, traduits et présentés par Jean Fréville (Paris: Éditions Sociales internationales, 1937); Georgij Valentinovich Plekhanov, L’art et la vie sociale, précédé de deux études de Jean Fréville (Paris: Éditions Sociales internationales, 1950, 1953); Andrej Zhdanov, Sur la littérature, la philosophie et la musique (Paris: La nouvelle critique, 1950).
35 See Cécile Pichon-Bonin, Peinture et politique en URSS, L’itinéraire des membres de la Société des artistes de chevalet (OST), 1917–1941 (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2013); on the RDA, please refer to the writings of Jérôme Bazin, Réalisme et égalité : une histoire sociale des arts en République démocratique allemande, 1949–1990 (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2015).
36 See Régine Robin, Le réalisme socialiste, une esthétique impossible (Paris: Payot, 1986), 69; and Pichon-Bonin, Peinture et politique en URSS, 278.
37 Marc Lazar, “Les ‘Batailles du livre’ du parti communiste français (1950–1952),” Vingtième siècle. Revue d’histoire 10 (April–June 1986): 47–48.
38 Philippe Olivera, “Aragon, ‘réaliste socialiste.’ Les usages d’une étiquette littéraire des années Trente aux années Soixante,” Sociétés et représentations 15 (2003): 229–246.
39 See in particular Laurence Bertrand Dorléac, “Moi, André Fougeron, peintre communiste,” L’Histoire 151 (January 1992): 65; Carole Robert, “Les échanges artistiques entre la France et l’URSS entre 1945 et 1985,” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Université Paris I Sorbonne, 2000).
40 See Bertrand Dorléac, Après la guerre; J. P. Chimot, “Avatars de la théorie de l’art dans Arts de France (1945–1949),” in Art et idéologies, l’art en Occident 1945–1949 (Saint-Étienne: Université de Saint-Étienne, 1978), 145–158.
41 See D. Milhau, “Présupposés théoriques et contradictions du nouveau réalisme socialiste en France au lendemain de la seconde guerre mondiale,” in ibid., 115–128.
42 Realism was an artistic movement that began in France after the 1848 Revolution. Realists proposed to depict real and typical contemporary people and situations, while not avoiding unpleasant aspects of life. In Russia, the Wanderers of Itinerants Association promoted those principles by the 1870s.
43 In this context, see Michel Aucouturier, “Les problèmes théoriques de la critique littéraire marxiste en Russie,” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Université Paris IV Sorbonne, n.d.).
44 Pichon-Bonin, Peinture et politique en URSS, 78–79, 127–128.
45 Jean Pérus, “La critique et la création,” La nouvelle critique 22 (January 1951): 61.
46 See for example Émile Bottigelli, “À propos de l’esthétique de Lukac,” La nouvelle critique 3 (February 1949): 51–58; see also Louis Aragon, “Réalisme socialiste et réalisme français,” La nouvelle critique 6 (May 1949): 27–39; reprinted from Louis Aragon, Réalisme socialiste et réalisme français, 1937.
47 See Pichon-Bonin, Peinture et politique en URSS.
48 Jean Dewasne, “Pour et contre. Où se trouve l’art marxiste? Opinions de Fougeron, Jean Dewasne, Madeleine Rousseau et d’un surréaliste révolutionnaire,” Arts. Beaux-Arts. Littérature. Spectacles (March 12, 1948): 5.
49 Jean Dewasne, “Traité d’une peinture plane” (1949) reprinted from Traité de la peinture plane et autres écrits (Paris: Minerve, 2007), 55.
50 Patrice Deparpe, ed., Jean Dewasne (Paris: Somogy, 2014). Published in conjunction with the traveling exhibition of the same name.
51 In 1937 Léo Lagrange (Undersecretary of State for the Organization of Sport and Recreation under the Popular Front) put Madeleine Rousseau in contact with Paul Rivet, George-Henri Rivière, and Jacques Soustelle then occupied with the moving of the Musée de l’homme that was scheduled for opening in 1938. That same year, Paul Rivet founded Le Musée vivant, the review of L’Association Populaire des Amis des Musées (APAM) of which Madeleine Rousseau was appointed editor.
52 Madeleine Rousseau played an important role promoting Hartung. She signed the text of his first personal exhibition at the Parisian gallery Lydia Conti in 1947 and collaborated with Alain Resnais in the creation of the short-length film Visite à Hans Hartung (1947). On those aspects see in particular Annie Claustres, Hans Hartung: les aléas d’une réception (Dijon: les presses du réel, 2005); Marianne Le Galliard, “Alain Resnais: initiation à l’art abstrait (1946–1948),” Attractions. Carnet de recherche visuel (http://attractions.hypotheses.org/55).
53 See Madeleine Rousseau, “Vie et œuvre,” in Hans Hartung, ed. Madeleine Rousseau, James Johnson Sweeney, and Ottomar Domnick (Stuttgart: Domnick-Verlag, 1950), 38–39.
54 Madeleine Rousseau, “Rencontre de l’Europe avec l’Afrique,” Le Musée vivant 36–37 (1948): 40.
55 Aimé Césaire, Le discours sur le colonialisme (Paris: Réclame, 1950); Cheikh Anta Diop, Nations nègres et culture (Paris: Éditions africaines, 1954); on Césaire, see also Aimé Césaire, Poésie, théâtre, essais et discours (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2014).
56 André Fougeron, Jean Milhau, and Boris Taslitzky, “Révolution et contre-révolution en esthétique,” La nouvelle critique 10 (November 1949): 91.
57 Boris Taslitzky, “La peinture et le lyrisme de notre temps,” La nouvelle critique 16 (May 1950): 105.
58 Pérus, “La critique et la création,” 60.
59 Maurice Thorez, Rapport au XIIème Congrès du Parti, 2–6 avril 1950 (Paris: Éditions du PCF, 1950), 55.
60 André Stil, “‘Avance Fougeron!’ Vers le réalisme socialiste,” La nouvelle critique (1952): 31–53; reprinted from: André Stil, “La peinture en mouvement,” La nouvelle critique 22 (January 1951).
61 Auguste Lecoeur, “Introduction,” in André Fougeron: Le pays des mines (Lens: Fédération régionales de mineurs du Nord et du Pas-de-Calais, 1951), 5–7. See also Jean Fréville, “Peintre de la classe ouvrière,” La nouvelle critique (June 1951). The exhibition was extensively discussed in the January 1951 issue of Arts de France.
62 Stil, “‘Avance Fougeron!’”
63 Boris Taslitzky, “L’art et les traditions nationales,” La nouvelle critique 32 (January 1952): 70–71.
64 We refer in particular to the foreword of the catalog written by Lecoeur, “Introduction,” 7–8. See also Fougeron, “Un exemple de mise en images,” 204.
65 Lecoeur, “Introduction,” 7.
66 Madeleine Rousseau, “La querelle de l’art présent,” Le Musée vivant 36–37 (November 1948): 94.
67 Berthet, Le PCF, la culture et l’art, 311.
68 Peignon, “Le Réalisme socialiste en France,” 146.