Word: realisms
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...young man Stalin had been snubbed by the Russian intellectual elite. His revenge was to grind their faces in the ice of miracle, mystery and authority, to make culture into a form of ventriloquism from on high. Socialist Realism was a religious art celebrating the transcendent power of communist ideology, the impending heaven of world socialism and the godlike benignity of its father, Lenin's successor, Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, the man of steel. And like the traditional icons of Christ and the saints it replaced, the stuff was omnipresent. No square or schoolroom in Russia lacked its image of Stalin...
Thus by one of those ironies in which totalitarian culture abounds, Socialist Realism was censored out of view just as its sponsor had once buried Modernism -- the art of the earlier Russian Constructivists. There must now be millions of Russians who have never seen one of these once mandatory icons of the dreaded father. The stuff was never popular in America either. Hence the interest of the current show at the Institute for Contemporary Art in the P.S. 1 Museum in New York City. Titled "Stalin's Choice: Soviet Socialist Realism, 1932-1956," it consists of around 100 paintings...
With the help of the Russian Ministry of Culture, curators Joseph Bakshtein, Kathrin Becker, Zdenka Gabalova and Alanna Heiss have done a remarkable job on a very tight budget. A sampling of Socialist Realism was included in a broader Russian exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1977, but otherwise nothing like this show has been seen in America before. The very notion of an American museum asking for Stalinist paintings seems so weird that any interest in them is bound to seem morbid. To look at, say, Vasili Svarog's ebullient 1939 painting of Stalin and the jolly...
...minor figures including Saddam Hussein -- has meant more to more people in the past 60 years than all the sanctified Modernist styles, from Fauvism to Pop, rolled together. Like Modernism's, its roots lay in the 19th century. If Modernism grew from Manet, Monet and Cezanne, Socialist Realism emerged from their conservative opposition -- the academic and narrative work that was the institutional art of Europe a century ago. In Russia the hugely popular landscapes and genre scenes of the Peredvizhniki, or Wanderers, led by Ilya Repin (1844-1930), were promoted as a mirror of the Russian soul by the most...
What strikes a modern non-Russian viewer most is Socialist Realism's unabashed fantasy. Realism in Stalinist terms did not mean painting things as they were or even as they might be: the inevitability of Socialist progress erased that conditional "might," along with the gap between present and future. That which will be already is, under the world-sustaining gaze of Comrade Stalin. Ideology ascribed to Stalin the actual role of God, the creation of reality itself...