Lyrical Socialist Realism

October ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 147 ◽  
pp. 56-77 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christina Kiaer
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Socialist Realism ◽  
Large Piece ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Critical Response ◽  
Geometric Patterns ◽  
Soviet Art ◽  
Socialist Realist ◽  
Cross Country ◽  
Revolutionary History

The thirty-three-year-old artist Aleksandr Deineka was given a large piece of wall space at the exhibition 15 Years of Artists of the RSFSR at the Russian Museum in Leningrad in 1932. At the center of the wall hung his most acclaimed painting, The Defense of Petrograd of 1928, a civil-war-themed canvas showing marching Bolshevik citizens, defending against the incursions of the White armies on their city, arrayed in flattened, geometric patterns across an undifferentiated white ground. The massive 15 Years exhibition attempted to sum up the achievements of Russian Soviet art since the revolution as well as point toward the future, and Deineka, in spite of his past association with “leftist” (read: avant-garde) artistic groups such as OST (the Society of Easel Painters) and October, was among those younger artists who were anointed by exhibition organizers as leading the way forward toward Socialist Realist art—a concept that was being formulated through both the planning of and critical response to this very display of so many divergent Soviet artists. Known for his magazine illustrations and posters, Deineka had also established himself at a young age as a major practitioner of monumental painting in a severe graphic style that addressed socialist themes, such as revolutionary history (e.g., Petrograd), and, as his other works displayed at the Leningrad exhibition demonstrate, proletarian sport (Women's Cross-Country Race and Skiers, both 1931) the ills of capitalism (Unemployed in Berlin, 1932), and the construction of the new Soviet everyday life (Who Will Beat Whom?, 1932).

Restating Classicist Monumentalism in Soviet Architecture, 1930s–early 1950s

2019 ◽  
pp. 64-88
Author(s):  
William C. Brumfield
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Socialist Realism ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Bolshevik Revolution ◽  
Stalin Era ◽  
Imperial Russia ◽  
Architectural Styles ◽  
The Soviet Union

This article examines the development of retrospective styles in Soviet architecture during the Stalin era, from the 1930s to the early 1950s. This highly visible manifestation of communist visual culture is usually interpreted as a reaction to the austere modernism of 1920s Soviet avant-garde architecture represented by the constructivist movement. The project locates the origins of Stalin-era proclamatory, retrospective style in prerevolutionary neoclassical revival architecture. Although functioning in a capitalist market, that neoclassical reaction was supported by prominent critics who were suspicious of Russia’s nascent bourgeoisie and felt that neoclassical or neo-Renaissance architecture could echo the glory of imperial Russia. These critics left Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution, but prominent architects of the neoclassicist revival remained in the Soviet Union. Together with the Academy of Architecture (founded 1933), these architects played a critical role in reviving classicist monumentalism—designated “socialist realism”—as the proclamatory style for the centralized, neoimperial statist system of the Stalin era. Despite different ideological contexts (prerevolutionary and Stalinist), retrospective styles were promulgated as models for significant architectural projects. The article concludes with comments on the post-Stalinist—and post-Soviet—alternation of modernist and retrospective architectural styles.

“Socialist Realist” Critiques of Neoliberal “Shock Therapy”

2019 ◽  
pp. 431-451
Author(s):  
April A. Eisman
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
East Germany ◽  
Shock Therapy ◽  
Socialist Realism ◽  
Neoliberal Capitalism ◽  
Works Of Art ◽  
German Art ◽  
Socialist Realist ◽  
East German ◽  
Insight Into

This article focuses on the East German artistic response to the 1973 putsch in Chile, an event now recognized as foundational in the development of neoliberalism. Outraged and saddened, artists in East Germany responded to the putsch with thousands of works of art. These works disrupt Western expectations for East German art, which was far more modern and complex than the term “socialist realism” might suggest. They also offer insight into the horrors of the putsch and remind us that there have been—and can once again be—alternatives to neoliberal capitalism. In addition to creating prints, paintings, and sculptures, East German artists organized solidarity events to raise money for Chile and spearheaded a book project with artists from sixteen communist and capitalist countries to document the event and losses suffered. This article ultimately shows that communist visual culture can serve as a model for art as an activist practice.

Socialist Realism and Socialist Realist Romanticism

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 259-277
Author(s):  
Irina Zavedeeva ◽  
Albina Ozieva ◽  
Jeremy Howard
Keyword(s):  
Socialist Realism ◽  
Socialist Realist

scholarly journals Introduction to Hélio Oiticica's “The Senses Pointing Toward a New Transformation” (1969)

ARTMargins ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-128
Author(s):  
Jo Melvin ◽  
Luke Skrebowski
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Behavioral Patterns ◽  
Art Making ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
British Art ◽  
Art Magazine ◽  
The Senses

Hélio Oiticica's “The Senses Pointing Towards a New Transformation” was written between June 18 and June 25, 1969, in London and submitted to the British art magazine Studio International, but never appeared in print. The essay negotiates art after objecthood and contextualises Oiticica's project to effect a definitive radicalization of anti-art, one that the artist held to be necessary in light of the impasse reached by the longstanding conflict between formalist art and its various neo-avant-garde negations (both within the Brazilian and the international neo-avant-gardes). For Oiticica, after both Neoconcretism and Minimalism, it was now the process of art making itself that had to be rethought. Oiticica did so by developing what he called “crebehavior,” a practice that revealed the routinized character of everyday life and proposed an immanent transformation of the same via a change in everyday behavioral patterns. Such a transformation opened up the possibility of bringing about “creleisure,” a condition that Oiticica understood to involve both the realization and the dissolution of art.

Icarian Games: Iosif Chaikov and the Jewish Legacy

Experiment ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 166-193
Author(s):  
John E. Bowlt
Keyword(s):  
Central Theme ◽  
International Training ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Socialist Realist

Abstract The focus of this article is on the early, experimental sculpture of Iosif Chaikov, known for his Socialist Realist statues rather than for his avant-garde involvement. Chaikov’s Jewish lineage, his collaboration with the Kultur-Lige, his international training, and his cultivation of flight as a central theme are examined in an attempt to restore a more synthetic and comparative station to his oeuvre as a Soviet artist. Copious reference is made to his industrial or “Constructivist” themes of the 1920s and 1930s.

scholarly journals B.S. Johnson’s Liberatic Cityscape in Albert Angelo

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 99-110
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Biela
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Visual Sensitivity ◽  
Material Object ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Crucial Aspect ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Way

For Bryan Stanley Johnson, a British post-war avant-garde author, space was a crucial aspect of a literary work. Inspired by architects and film makers, he was convinced that “form follows function” (“Introduction” to Aren’t You Rather Young to Be Writing Your Memoirs) and exercised the book as a material object, thus anticipating liberature – a literary genre defined in 1999 by Zenon Fajfer and Katarzyna Bazarnik, which encompasses works whose authors purposefully fuse the content with the form. The goal of this paper is to analyse the cityscape theme in Johnson’s second novel, Albert Angelo (1964), in which London is presented as space that accompanies the character in his everyday life and becomes a witness of the formation of his identity. The protagonist is an architect by profession, so special attention is paid to his visual sensitivity and the way the cityscape is reflected in his memories. Furthermore, Johnson’s formal exploitation of the book as an object and its correspondence to the content is analysed with reference to the metaphor of “[t]he book as an architectural structure” discussed by Bazarnik in Liberature. A Book-bound Genre.

scholarly journals Intimité de Jean-Victor Pellerin, ou à la recherche du « théâtre du silence »

2017 ◽  
pp. 114-122
Author(s):  
Tomasz Kaczmarek
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Main Element ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Inner Life ◽  
Sexual Motives ◽  
Avant Garde

Jean-Victor Pellerin was a representative author of the „school of silence” or, as some called it, „art of unexpressed”, in which emotions are implied in gestures, fragments of speach, and silence. In his first drama Intimacy (1922) the French playwrighter presents a bourgeois marriage living a monotonous life. The characters discuss trivial things of everyday life, they talk to each other, but there is no communication between them, because each of them is closed in their own world. Nobody is listening one another and words are spoken only in order to fill their existential emptiness. The writer is focused on the dialogue between the characters in the context of what they hide and what they do not want to tell themselves. People who appear to them are not flesh and blood human beings but they are the reflection of their own disturbed personality only. In this manner the writer focuses on the inner life of his solitary, their nostalgia for youth or even their hidden sexual motives. This is why the silence grows into the main element of the drama. Intimacy is one of the finest examples of „intimist aesthectic” developed by the avant-garde theater creator Gaston Baty who rejected the predominance of the word for discovering the mysterious world of the spiritual man.

Encounter Three: Art and the Socialist State

2019 ◽  
pp. 55-68
Author(s):  
Jan Bryant
Keyword(s):  
Free Market ◽  
Socialist Realism ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Socialist State ◽  
Political Views ◽  
Free Market Capitalism ◽  
Market Capitalism

This chapter traces the tactics used by the art Slovenian collective, Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK), specifically the art section, Irwin and the music group, Laibach, to criticise the socialist state of Yugoslavia. The chapter offers a brief overview of the political climate at the time leading up to and during the Yugoslavian wars (1980s and ‘90s). Closely analysed is NSK’s use of ambiguity and parody to hold a mirror up to authoritarianism and Irwin’s appropriation of early Russian avant-garde motifs to criticise socialist-realism and the State’s ‘misuse’ of art. As protection against retaliation by the state, NSK never prescribed their intentions, so audiences and viewers needed to bring their own context and perspective to events. Once Slovenia left the Yugoslavian Federation to enter into free-market capitalism, NSKs tactics seemed far less potent, flowing neatly into a 1980s western art context (a moment in history) that embraced ambivalence and indeterminacy. As an approach that hides a work’s political intent, allowing its viewers to have their own political views affirmed, it is argued that such a tactic fails to shake the political aesthetic. [181]

Soviet Film

2019 ◽  
pp. 63-74
Author(s):  
Lisa Nanney
Keyword(s):  
Political Action ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
Short Film ◽  
Independent Film ◽  
Hollywood Film ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Critical Response ◽  
Film Treatment ◽  
Film Productions ◽  
The Masses

Dos Passos’s adaptation of cinematic methods to literary style beginning in the mid-1920s emerged further in his work after he visited Russia in 1928. Tepid public and critical response to New Playwrights dramas motivated Dos Passos to explore how the revolutionary state-supported Russian theater and film productions had engaged the masses, united them politically, and produced groundbreaking artists. In dramatist Meyerhold’s avant-garde theater, Constructivist industrial sets and “biomechanical” acting techniques created successful dramas about and for workers. Dos Passos observed that cinematic innovations emerged from the Soviet-controlled studios despite the state’s use of film as its primary tool of mass ideological education. Though Lenin, then Stalin increasingly controlled film productions and artists, Soviet filmmakers nonetheless evolved theories of montage that became foundational in filmmaking and informed Dos Passos’s modernist novels and his 1936 independent film treatment “Dreamfactory,” with its meta-filmic exposé of the Hollywood film industry. In particular, these works registered the formal and conceptual innovations of two directors: Eisenstein, whose films combined fiction and history to effect political action through art; and Vertov, whose films acknowledged the artist’s vision as controlling the camera “eye” and who embedded in one short film an auto-critique of movie-making.

Russian Modernism (1890–1934)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Douglas Clayton
Keyword(s):  
Socialist Realism ◽  
Russian Revolution ◽  
Commedia Dell'arte ◽  
Machine Age ◽  
Fyodor Dostoevsky ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Face ◽  
Russian Modernism ◽  
Lev Tolstoy ◽  
Important Shift

Russian modernism arose as a rejection of positivism and the realism of the major nineteenth-century Russian novelists such as Lev Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Ivan Turgenev. In its first phase it was marked by a rekindled interest in poetry, mysticism, and symbolism. There was also a tendency to seek a fusion of different forms of artistic expression: poetry, music, painting, and theatre. Playwrights reflected the move away from naturalism towards the theatricality of commedia dell’arte and metadrama (the play within the play). In prose there emerged a new decorative style and new themes such as sexuality. The Russian Revolution of 1917 signalled an important shift towards the avant-garde. Poets adopted radical new poetic forms, glorified the new machine age or hearkened back to the pre-historical roots myth, and experimented with invented, abstract language. Prose writers shifted towards a stark new factual style that incorporated documents and slogans. Their themes were the revolutionary changes in Russia and their own inadequacy in the face of the new Soviet man. The avant-garde received its death-blow with the promulgation of Socialist Realism as the mandatory style for all publishing authors at the All-Union Writers’ Conference in 1934.

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