MOSCOW, Russia–Two exhibitions have opened in Moscow to mark the 50th anniversary of the death of the father of nations: “Stalin: Man and Symbol” in the Central State Museum of Contemporary History of Russia (the former Museum of the Revolution) and “1953: Between Past and Future” in the Federal Archive’s exhibition hall.
MOSCOW, Russia–Two exhibitions have opened in Moscow to mark the 50th anniversary of the death of the father of nations: “Stalin: Man and Symbol” in the Central State Museum of Contemporary History of Russia (the former Museum of the Revolution) and “1953: Between Past and Future” in the Federal Archive’s exhibition hall. Neither is particularly artistic. But painted portraits of Stalin by such greats of socialist realism as Efanov and Shurpin gel effortlessly with the long documents, photographs, and gifts given to Stalin. Josef Vissarionovich is everywhere: from sumptuous canvases of the calm generalissimo to scenes from one of the countless Party conferences where the great leader welcomes delegates with a kind smile. Forget the black-and-white photographs with that familiar, stern face.
Stalin’s image is firmly tied to Soviet portrait art from the 1930s to the 1950s, which did much to consolidate that image in the mind’s eye. Portraits of the leader were the most encouraged genre of socialist realism. Judge for yourself: Among the newly created Stalin Prizes awarded in 1921, four fine art prizes were awarded for representations of the head of state. In 1947 (there is no count during World War II), “Stalinist” works were awarded with six prizes. In 1949, they were given 13. Thousands of portraits of Stalin have survived to the present day, while no more than three dozen remain of the other tyrant of the 20th century, Adolf Hitler. That isn’t just because portraits of the Fuehrer were destroyed by the victorious Allies as well as by “enlightened” Germans after the defeat of Nazi Germany. Rather, Hitler–an unsuccessful artist who failed the entrance exams to the Viennese Academy of Arts–believed that he had impeccable taste and was extremely particular about his portrait. He personally chose which portraits would be publicly displayed and ensured that only the best recent portrait was shown at the large annual exhibition of German art in Munich (the Fuehrer, it seems, struggled for quality).
Stalin, for his part, was not capricious. A religious seminary is not the same as an art academy and, according to his daughter, Svetlana Allilueva, the walls of Stalin’s bedroom were decorated with cheap reproductions of the Wanderers–a 19th-century Russian art movement meant to bring art to the people–cut from the magazine Ogonok. The magazine’s style, with its out-of-focus reproductions and pitilessly bright, implausible colors, is the style of socialist realism. A style lacking a style.
It is widely accepted that all socialist realist art–including the multitude of Stalin portraits–is of very poor quality; that official Soviet artists were raised on the Wanderers, with their precise depiction of manners and calculated placement of marionette-personalities; that only a narrow beam of impressionist light occasionally penetrated the darkness of this dead czardom of classicism. But this aficionado’s diatribe is nothing but rhetoric. Searching for the Stalinist roots of social realism is senseless because social realism had no style per se. In truth, the creation of a style was not important for an art that wasn’t intended for art critics or museum walls, but for the pages of Ogonok.
State-sponsored artists in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s produced works for mass reproduction in magazines, newspapers, postcards, and cheap calendars. Sometimes they were destined for the easels of a brigade of nameless copy artists and eventually ended up in the foyers of movie theaters and palaces of culture in Soviet villages. It is not a coincidence that an album of Stalin posters was published to mark the end of the “Stalin and the Peoples of the Soviet Union” exhibition at the Tretyakov gallery in 1939. Pages from the album were meant to be displayed in workers’ clubs, in factories, and on collective farms. Paintings from a museum and their reproductions were fully interchangeable, at least for the purposes of propaganda.
Here the word “propaganda” is the most important. Socialist realist portraits were slogans, simply created according to the precepts of an unnecessary traditionalism. How much individual style could there be in a slogan? Ideological canons were important, not self-expression.
It is understandable where all those portraits of Stalin come from. The nation(s) knew their beloved leader, locked away behind the Kremlin walls, mostly through paintings. There were so many of them that each family could afford its own Stalin and, of course, the family didn’t worry about stylistic finesse.
Stalinist socialist realist paintings can, in some ways, be considered an innovative artistic project–even more innovative, perhaps, than those underground artists who began, in the 1980s, to depict Stalin with classical statues or alongside Marilyn Monroe. Innovative in the sense that it was the creation of a utopian art utterly deprived of an individuality and a unique style so valued by traditional art. What kind of a message can Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin have? There the message belongs in its entirety to the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Communist Party and not to the artist, Gerasimov.
Pop artists like Andy Warhol tried to create a similar form of “art without an artist.” Supermarket advertisements or the pages from comics were exactly reproduced 1:1 on canvas and then reprinted in countless copies. Moreover, Warhol was not afraid of the word “propaganda,” meaning the propaganda of the American way of life.
Today, socialist realism is again re-entering intellectual fashion, comparable only to its success during the early 1990s. For example, a huge exhibition of socialist realist art will open in Frankfurt, Germany, this fall, curated by Boris Groys, a Russian emigre and now among the most influential theoreticians of contemporary art in the West. The exhibition on socialist realism’s avant-garde is ahead of its time. And, perhaps, not only the paintings of the 1930s will become fashionable, but Josef Vissarionovich himself. And the contemporary artists of all countries will be able to say with pride: “Stalin is with us!”
This article originally appeared in the Russian Ezhenedelny Zhurnal. The English translation by Kevin J. Krogmann was posted on the TOL Wire on 6 March.