Socialist Realism: The Style of Soviet Art

Vera Mukhina "Worker and Kolkhoz Woman", 1937

I am interested in looking at the origins of American art and tracing the varieties of realism and its critical reception through the 20th Century.  In previous posts I looked at three dominant art movements in the United States during the 1930s:  Regionalism, Social Realism and Abstract Expressionism.   In this post, I wanted to briefly explore the government approved style of art in the Soviet Union that existed alongside these three art movements in America.

From the early 1930s-1950s, Socialist Realism was the form of art that flourished under the approval of the Soviet Government. It was a state sponsored artform in which the art was used as a tool to educate the people about the benefits of Communism. Socialist Realism took as its themes the worker, the government bureaucrat or the military man, commemorating each as a hero. A specific genre of celebrating the cult of personality of Stalin was particularly favored.

Coinciding with the rule of Stalin, Socialist Realism was fashioned to be a deliberate turning away from the excesses of Modern art.  Interestingly, during the Russian Revolution of 1917 some party officials saw the then new Modern art as sympathetic to their goals.  The Bolshevik and the Constructivist artists were together breaking with the old bourgeois culture. By 1918, the old style academies were shut down by the new government's educational and cultural minister.  However, after a debate during the 1920s among the party officials about the purpose of art, it was decided that the complexities of modernism were to be replaced with a simpler, more proletariat-friendly art.  This ended the period of post-revolution art (also called Heroic art) and ushered in the new Soviet art, Socialist Realism

For its clear and easily understood manner, a representational style was favored. In painting, realism was narrowly proscribed to be the sympathetic depiction of the daily reality of the worker and anything that showed the unpleasantness of Communism was to be avoided. Often landscape paintings depicted abundant fields or industrial subjects that showed the efficiency of the Soviet economy.  In sculpture, Socialist Realism looked back to the severe style of Republican Rome and depicted young and strong figures fresh from work, tools held high above their heads.  

The forms of Socialist Realism were inorganic, rigid and inflexible. As a style, what it lacked in human warmth, it more than made up for in powerful presentation, especially the public sculpture. As with all totalitarian art, one could tell that people were to be sacrificed on the altar of government plans.

Realism as an art movement has always had socialist leanings.  From its inception in mid-nineteenth century France, there was a tendency of realist artists (such as Courbet and Millet) to avoid subjects that appealed to the ease and comfort of an aristocratic culture.  Foregoing depictions of sitters in well-appointed apartments, the Realists artist showed people at work. Often the artists celebrated a return to nature and deliberately choose subjects that showed evidence of a dignified albeit hard life born out through manual labor.

An interesting and beautifully illustrated book published in 1998 called Socialist Realist Painting shows Socialist Realism in its full and proper context.  The author Matthew Brown traces the origins of Socialist Realism prior to the Russian Revolution and well beyond the death of Stalin when Modern art was allowed into the nation. Mr. Brown does a wonderful task in revealing the paintings that were produced that didn’t fit into the approved style.  Many of them are great works filled with empathy and humanity that somehow survived destruction by government censors.
  
One of the strawman arguments that  Modern art and Post Modern art aficionados have put forth is that figurative work (especially that inspired by Classicism) is fascist.  It seems to me just as people may go about doing many things (such as joining any political party and choosing to do good or bad), that figurative art may do many different things.  It may commemorate great military battles,  depict important religious events, celebrate the human in action or capture the fey expression of  a society debutante.  What was interesting to me as each art movement vied for cultural dominance in the United States was that the artist was always free to do and depict what he desired.  This was true then as it is  now.  Sadly, it wasn't the case for the artist in the Soviet Union.