Word: deineka
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...entire society." But, as the exhibition attests, artistic talent could occasionally shine through, transcending the intended ideology. Kazimir Malevich's 1928 Reapers, a bold, block-colored painting of three peasant women, is as stunning as the groundbreaking abstracts that made him famous in Czarist days. And Alexander Deineka's 1931 On the Balcony owes more to Bonnard or Matisse than to Stalin. But it is the affinity between Stalinist art and American commercial art that drives the show. Both evolved almost simultaneously on the strength of new media developments. Both aimed at mass appeal. And both presented an unattainably idyllic...
Socialist victory ends the class struggle and wipes out the old "capitalist" contradiction between beauty and truth. We in 1994 may get a hoot from Ekaterina Zernova's 1937 painting of collective farmers greeting a tank in a country lane with bouquets, or Aleksandr Deineka's solemn image of Lenin (who was childless) on a country spin in an open car with seven children, thus signifying his fatherhood of Russia. Why do we laugh? Because we do not grasp how, in the words of Towards a Theory of Art by an apparatchik named G. Nedoshivin, once "the basis in reality...
...scholarship a European audience feels entitled to. But it is the work that counts, and must be seen, in all its energy and episodic magnificence: a vast panorama, from the haunted fin-de-siècle symbolist canvases of Mikhail Vrubel to the last attempts, by painters like Alexander Deineka, to combine a social message with a post-cubist idiom before the freeze...
French impressionism. Yet, except for Lenin Prizewinner Aleksandr Deineka's husky peasant girls, which Estorick probably bought for diplomatic reasons, the show is not a dismal display of the Russian Tractor Style. Instead, the rest of the exhibition is heavy with still lifes and landscapes, competent, vaguely Western, strangely empty of invention. Perhaps half a dozen of the 82 artists are important...
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