Word: stalins
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...Since 1989, cities from the Danube to the Urals have heard the liberating thud of bronze Lenins being pulled from their pedestals. But the biggest migration of images into oblivion began in 1956, three years after the Maximum Leader's death, when Nikita Khrushchev made a speech denouncing Joseph Stalin...
Throughout his rule, Stalin had sponsored a form of state art officially known as Socialist Realism. Geared to a naive, not to say brutish, mass public barely literate in artistic matters, Soviet Socialist Realism was the most coarsely idealistic kind of art ever foisted on a modern audience -- though Capitalist Realism, the never-never land of desire created by American advertising, runs it a close second...
...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...
...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...