Word: lenines
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Okrent adroitly retells the famous story of young Nelson Rockefeller's run-in with Diego Rivera, the Mexican artist whose mural for the lobby of the RCA Building--a dreadful kitsch effulgence, by the way--was demolished on Nelson's orders after Rivera slipped in a portrait of Lenin. Okrent is also supremely funny on the subject of S.L. (Roxy) Rothafel, creator of superabundant picture palaces along Broadway, those Moorish-boorish Odeons, who was the man chosen to guide development of Radio City Music Hall. Once he was in the job, fate teamed Roxy with Deskey--Donald Deskey, the great...
...force of the Bolshevik Revolution. But by the late 1920s, the Left Front movement, which included filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, had turned to a more accessible and representational art. Before long, Gustav Klutsis and Alexander Gerasimov had perfected the stiffly staged portraits - as reverential as old Russian icons - that mythologized Lenin and glorified Stalin. The familiar Gerasimov portrait of Stalin, looking kindly as a schoolmaster with outstretched hand and twinkle in his eye, found its way into millions of Soviet homes. Thus was mass art invented with a simple switch of artistic purpose: the artist was no longer meant to create...
...between the 1960s and the 1980s. Big names like Jirí Kolár and Poland's Magdalena Abakanowicz are here, but the most riveting displays are by lesser-known artists. Especially imposing is Gebauer's Correct Side of the Slaughter-House, a Grim Reaper-like figure that mimics Lenin's official portraits. Gebauer, now 62, says he enjoys the freedoms of the post-communist Czech Republic, but notes that artistic recognition remains hard to come by. "Things are essentially the same," he says, "except I don't have to worry about who is eavesdropping on my conversations...
...years later, Sitte denounced this style and swore allegiance to the party line. He enjoyed a successful career as East Germany's top artist and president of the Artists' Federation of the G.D.R. (He also worked with the Stasi secret police to denounce colleagues.) His 1969 painting of Lenin, Hommage à Lenin, reflects the shift: it is a bombastic explosion of color, celebrating Lenin at a time when the Soviet Union was despised by the people of Eastern Europe. By the 1980s, the end of the regime was nearing. Cornelia Schleime, a former singer in a Dresden punk band...
...just on remote islands in the White Sea or the permafrost of the Far North. There were camps in the center of Moscow, too. In the early 1950s, for example, some 12,000 men and women - a mix of political prisoners and criminals - worked in Stroilag in the Lenin Hills, a beauty spot overlooking the capital, building parts of Moscow State University and other academic institutions. Elsewhere in the city, prisoners built ports, airfields, homes and even dachas in the élite villages of Barvikha and Zhukovka, now the preserve of Russia's new rich. Alexander Solzhenitsyn served part...