Word: stalins
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...truly astonishing thing was how quickly, after Khrushchev's speech, it all disappeared. The statues were unpedestaled; the thousands of pictures vanished into cellars; Stalin's auto-monument, his embalmed body, which lay in state beside Lenin's in the tomb under the Kremlin wall, was deaccessioned, hoicked out and cremated, and its ashes were scattered...
...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 and sculptures exhumed from various Russian museums. Appended to it is a group of works and installations by contemporary Russian artists -- Komar and Melamid, Ilya Kabakov and others -- that reflect on the Socialist Realist legacy with more irony...
...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 butchers of the Politburo frolicking with smiling children in Gorky Park is like hearing a particularly ghastly fairy tale told from the point of view of the ogre...
...matter for political purposes that the writer Maxim Gorky should be depicted taking lessons on the rifle range from Marshal Voroshilov, the commissar of war? It mattered because Gorky, though a literary favorite and a devoted friend of Lenin's, was opposed to shooting, and this bothered Stalin...
...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...