The historical significance of the ARMU during the NEP and Ukrainization

The article examines the circumstances of the founding of the Association of Revolutionary Art of Ukraine (ARMU), its program principles and significance in the history of Ukrainian art in the second half of the 1920s — early 1930s. The cultural and political reasons and consequences of the introduction of the NEP, Ukrainization, collectivization and reform of art education in the Ukrainian SSR, as well as the changes that took place after the transfer of power in the USSR from V. Lenin to J. Stalin were analyzed. It was found that the ARMU was founded against the background of intensifying competition between left and right wings of art, as well as the emergence of branches of the Russian associations AHRR (Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia) and LEF (Left Front of Art) in the Ukrainian SSR. It is shown how the connection of the ARMU with the Kyiv Art Institute (KKhI), its rector, teachers and students influenced the formation of a broad program of this association, which proclaimed the equality of all types of fine arts and design. It is analyzed how the resolutions of the Communist Party and the peculiarities of cultural policy in the field of fine arts in the Ukrainian SSR during the time of O. Shumsky and M. Skrypnyk influenced the activities of art associations and the ARMU in particular. The statements of the ideologists of the ARMU I. Vrona and V. Sedlyar about the realism and activity of the Russian association of the AKhRR in the Ukrainian SSR are analyzed. The consequences of the collapse of the NEP and Ukrainization, with the fight against formalism on the fate of the ARMU and its members were revealed.

Ukrainian Art of the Totalitarianism Epoch: the Case of the “Zhovten” Association

The present article focuses on the transformation of style and sense of Ukrainian art in the 1930s, in the context of the “Zhovten” Association designers’ creativity. Ideological pressure became determinant in the work of Ukrainian artists. Period of repressions led to decay of art in general, and dramatic reduction in style directions. Industrialization in the USSR, carried out in the 1930s, and measures to accelerate the development of industry were the main themes imposed on artists. Ideologically biased theoretical foundations of the new artistic style typical for the 1930s were clearly manifested in the declaration of the “Zhovten” Association. The ranks of this association, founded in 1930, included some former members of the Association of Revolutionary Art of Ukraine and the Association of Contemporary Artists of Ukraine. The theory spelled out in the declaration of unification was significantly ahead of its practical implementation, the artists themselves gradually switched to new forms and content in their works, without breaking ties with the national and European school. The “Zhovten” Association became a true litmus test of those phenomena that dominated in the art of the Stalin era. At the same time, it crossed out all the achievements of the associations-predecessors, creating a version of the all-Union ideologically engaged associations in Ukraine. A sharp change took place in the artistic environment when the question of form ceased to be a vital topic. The attention was focused on the content of artworks. The ostentatious elated mood of works of art hid the realities of the time like a screen. It camouflaged serious constraint in artistic statements, offering the only “correct” chartered way forward that made it impossible for any artist to make their own graphic statements. A tangible ideological pressure prompted the artists to abandon their creative originality, and strive for maximum realism. They added cliché images to their works: portraits of ideologists, workers, flags, Soviet symbols, and the like. At the same time, the authors lost their creative identities, and their artworks were deprived of any artistic value.

Wagnerian Contexts and Wagner’s Codes of T.S. Eliot’s Poetry, 1910-20s

The paper deals with the analysis of reception and poetic transformation of aesthetic concepts and music ideas of Richard Wagner (1813–1883) in the works by T. S. Eliot (1888–1965). The research material includes the poems of the 1910-20s (“Opera”, “Paysage Triste”, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, The Waste Land) as well the essay “Dante” and lectures “The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry”, “The Music of Poetry”. The research is aimed to solve the problem of genesis of Eliot's Wagnerianism and identify the Wagnerian codes for his poetic texts. Following the representatives of literary Wagnerianism Eliot assimilated the ideas of revolutionary art, anti-bourgeois pathos, ideas of synthesis of arts, indivisibility of poetry and music, mythopoesis, etc. The poetry of the 1910–20s reflected Eliot’s interest in a wide cultural context (Wagnerianism and “Wagnerovschina”), Neo-Mythologism, etc. The poetry of this period is characterized by representation of Wagnerian “situations” and plots (the Grail plot), themes, composition strategies (system of leitmotifs, multi-layered text, etc.), music techniques (atonality, “endless melody”, suggestiveness, etc.), the direct quotations from Wagner’s works, etc. The author of the paper suggests that The Waste Land was created as a Gesamtkunstwerk, a complex multi-level poetic intermedial structure incorporating the elements of different arts (music, painting, scenography, dance, etc.).

The Art of Liberation

This article describes an under-reported success of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. Through a creative team led by the party’s Minister of Culture Emory Douglas, who was also the Black Panther (BP) newspaper’s designer and main illustrator, the Panthers visualized compelling alternatives to post–Civil Rights Black assimilation in the United States. Douglas and the other artists filled the paper’s pages every week with drawings, cartoons, and posters that empowered people who were historically relegated to subservient representations in mainstream media. Douglas’s larger posters were wheat-pasted on walls in Black communities, creating advertising for psychological liberation as the struggles for complete liberation continued on several fronts. Through textual and visual analysis of BP newspapers from 1968, clear visual strategy and intentions are deconstructed in a way that illuminates the party’s more visible words and public actions and explains why their “revolutionary art” resonates into the twenty-first century.

The Battleship Potemkin

The Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Potёmkin) is Sergei Eisenstein’s second feature film. Produced in 1925 and premiered in January 1926, the film was a watershed moment in the history of Russian and Soviet cinema. In addition, in its home context, Potemkin has asserted that experimental montage is the dominant mode of cinematic storytelling in the Soviet 1920s. Likewise, Potemkin asserted, more vociferously than any other early Soviet film, a specific type of relationship between film/art and state ideology. In the international arena, the worldwide success of the film put the Russian and Soviet cinema on a map for the first time. The triumph of Potemkin announced the advent of the short-lived golden age of early Soviet filmmaking style, hallmarked by the aesthetics of short cuts and fast editing that aimed to challenge the viewers’ perception of the world and posit a revolutionary message. Thematically, the film is set around a historical event, the mutiny on the Imperial Navy armored cruiser Prince Potemkin of Tauris, which took place in June 1905. The events are dramaturgically organized in five parts, emulating, as Eisenstein later recalled, the structure of a classical tragedy (see Eisenstein 2010, cited under Typage Acting). These parts were titled as follows: “Men and Maggots” (Liudi i chervi); “Drama on the Quarter-Deck” (Drama na Tendre); “Appeal from the Dead” (Mertvyi vzyvaet); “Odessa Steps” (Odesskaia lestnitsa); and “Meeting the Squadron” (Vstrecha s eskadroi). Each of the parts is endowed with dramatic function and facilitates a transition to a different mood. The events in Part 1 gradually build narrative tension toward a culmination point in Part 2, and, similarly, the events in Part 3 set the scene for the culmination in Part 4, with Part 5 functioning as an epilogue. A believer in traditional aesthetics and concepts such as organicist whole or golden ratio, Eisenstein argued that dramaturgy of the moving image, facilitated through conflicting montage sequences, can deliver the task of revolutionary art, bringing the viewer into a desired psycho-emotional state that would make one susceptible to the right ideological messages. For all these reasons, the apprehension of Potemkin requires the researcher to acknowledge a number of aspects of the film. Given that Potemkin is a historical film par excellence, the relationship between the fictional narrative, historical period under consideration, and historical time of the making of the film ought to be given due attention. In addition, the production history of Potemkin also matters, as it tells much about the position of the film in the nascent Soviet cinematic “dispositive.” Last, but certainly not least, Potemkin is an artistic tour de force that deploys complex cinematic devices, the understanding of which will be a demanding task as well.

The Syrian Post-Revolutionary Art: The Lingua Franca of the EU

The Syrian political crisis that swept through the country caused a fierce, exhausting, destructive war and forced hundreds of thousands of Syrians to leave their homes in search of a safe life, though full of deprivation. Many of them have settled in the EU. According to psychologists, the level of stress that a person experiences during the process of adaptation to a new environment and integration into a new society is enormous and equal to 8 (on a scale from 1 to 10), which certainly affects many aspects of life, including the artistic potential. The aim of this study is to analyze the art of the Syrian descendants which is currently becoming a new way of communication and helps to discuss problems in those fields where the artistic expression is more effective than the verbal means of communication.