Post Camp
When you
hear the term "Socialist Realism," you probably see in your mind's eye a large,
detailed canvas: A sweating laborer, goggles pushed back on his forehead,
stands by his red tractor and shakes hands with Stalin, in a white uniform, who
smirks under his mustache. Behind them is a chorus line of muscular women in
babushkas; behind them, in turn, a rising sun. Or something like that. Nine
years after the collapse of the Soviet empire, the genre is now referred to
primarily in vodka ads, as stock imagery of a comfortably camp sort. It is a
grotesque relic of a defused threat, and we can feel good knowing that we have
triumphed over its implications.
So what could be the
purpose of this massive book? You pick it up expecting counterpropaganda run
rampant. But this is no mere coffee table decoration--although it weighs at
least 5 pounds and contains 530 reproductions, it is text-laden far beyond the
norm. The next thing that makes an impression on leafing through it is the
unfamiliarity of the images. Tractors and babushkas and Stalin are accounted
for, but very few of the many pictures fit the conventional mold. The paintings
chosen as illustrations tend to be darker, less academic, more complicated. The
tone is very different from, for example, that of the show of Socialist Realist
paintings I saw a few years ago at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels,
which approached the subject in the usual pop-camp way--nearly every picture
looked like a parody, and any of them could have been hung very nicely next to
Andy Warhol's Mao . But the paintings in Matthew Cullerne Bown's book,
grave and dignified and often eager to claim descent from the likes of
Rembrandt, would be affronted by the pairing.
As I continued second-guessing my way through my initial
encounter with the book, my next thought was that it must surely represent a
perverse but fascinating phenomenon: a defense of Socialist Realism from the
position of aesthetic conservatism. After all, there exists a tendency these
days that is eager to reclaim the likes of Norman Rockwell while consigning to
his former cell Clement Greenberg and his exemplars. Since a loss of faith in
the Modernist canon often seems to be paired with a disillusionment with
communist teleology, wouldn't championing the essential conservatism of all
those Zhdanovists make a dandy short circuit? Indeed, the Western artist who
most consistently comes to mind when you look at the pictures in Bown's book is
Andrew Wyeth. But there are also a considerable number of works illustrated
that do not fit the bill, that refer neither to old masters nor to magazine
illustration. Again I was guilty of trying to boil Bown's argument down to a
formula.
His argument is not a
simplistic one; in fact it is an argument against simplification. Bown proposes
that we in the West have ignored, if not actually betrayed, the great body of
painting made in this century in the former Soviet republics. We have chosen to
represent Socialist Realism in terms of its most moronic and craven examples,
and we have instead upheld the banner of the "left" artists, the Futurists and
Constructivists, who were marginal at best in their time and place.
He does not dismiss the latter, recognizing the originality
and strength of Kazimir Malevich, Aleksandr Rodchenko, El Lisitski, and their
colleagues, but he wants us to pay attention to those other artists, many more
in number, who do not fall seamlessly into the Modernist continuum but who
often had to pay as harsh a price for their independence as their better-known
avant-garde counterparts. For nonspecialist readers, the book is a journey into
the unknown.
Bown, described in press
materials as an independent scholar, has absorbed a vast history largely
unreported outside the Soviet republics. It is seldom easy going. Acronyms
bristle on the page as he records internecine warfare in various Soviet
artists' leagues. The reader's mind throbs as he dissects minute shifts in
official thinking and individual temper, and conducts tours of the diverse art
scenes in far-flung provincial cities. But there is always a point. It is
fascinating, for example, to note the many swings of the official pendulum
between the two cardinal sins of "naturalism" (meaning grim subject matter) and
"formalism" (denoting any sort of aesthetic deviation). At various times in
various cities, war or peace ruled as themes, women were seen as strong or as
fragile, colors were to be bright or dun. Small revolutions took place when,
say, failure was accepted as a subject or national costume permitted. There was
no single Zhdanovist tank that rumbled down the street but a plethora of
day-to-day changes, both in official policy and in artists' decisions.
For that matter, Socialist Realism was no monolithic
invention of the Soviet state. As Bown takes pains to point out, it descended
largely intact from the artistic currents of the 19 th century and
had its roots both in classic Western art and in much older local traditions,
including the work of such Russian masters as the 15 th century monk
Andrei Rublev. And Bown has unearthed a tremendous number of strong paintings,
largely from private collections, that defy all our notions of what Soviet art
looked like, even at the height of Stalinism. Who would have expected that in
1934, Petr V. Vilyams could have been making such a rarefied, Vuillard-like
canvas as Nana , with its profusion of sensuous patterns and textures, a
painting that just reeks of sex? Or that in 1932 Georgi I. Rublev, behind the
unpromising subject of A Factory Party Meeting , could have been up to
something that looks simultaneously back to rural primitivism and forward to
Larry Rivers? You get the sense, continually, of various fallen reins picked
up, of artists in remote mining towns discovering Courbet, or Whistler, or
Léger, or reinventing Impressionism or Expressionism as if they had never heard
of those schools--as indeed they might not have.
If there is a single
throbbing star in this show it is Aleksandr A. Deineka, whose extraordinary
work really does not look like anyone else's. Building New Factories
(1926) and Female Textile Workers (1927) and The Defence of
Petrograd (1927) take the conventional subjects their titles indicate and
make them new, setting human figures--which are somehow at once photographic
and icon-based--in fields of geometric patterns that are nevertheless
recognizable as industrial landscapes. Deineka, whose career endured into the
1950s despite intermittent castigation for "aestheticism," represents a missing
link, connecting Socialist Realism with the collages of the Constructivists and
them with the icons of Rublev. He may be the major revelation here, but his
neglect in the West is just one indication of the giant iceberg of unknown art
whose existence below the surface Bown spotlights, explains, and places in
context.
