Soviet Art (1917-1991)

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, more commonly known as the USSR or the Soviet Union, was the successor of the Russian Empire, and the precursor to the Russian Federation. The Soviet Union was officially founded in 1922, after a 5 year civil war (the Bolshevik revolution) against the Russian empire. This blog will be focused on artwork created during the Soviet era, including art created during or just before the civil war, and until the union's eventual collapse in 1991.

Revolutions often come with a drastic shift in culture, which also brings with it an equal shift in the production, purpose, and place of art within society. Revolutions are a great opportunity for previously unpopular artforms to rise in popularity, and for the artform that was popular pre-revolution to fall out of style. The dominating style prior to the Bolshevik Revolution was Russian avant-garde, which is an umbrella term that covers several styles, including one I have covered in a previous blog (Suprematism, which is the style that the “Black Square” artwork is labeled under). Avant-garde and its subsidiary styles began falling out of popularity in favor of Socialist Realism following the revolution. Avant-Garde was officially supplanted by Socialist Realism in 1932-1934(I got conflicting numbers), via a declaration from the state. Socialist realism was defined as “socialist in content and realist in form” by Stalin. This largely meant that the content had to depict life in the Soviet Union, and it had to do so in a positive manner. The “life in the Soviet Union” part was pretty flexible, and as long as it depicted the Soviet Union positively, most art was allowed. Another thing is that it meant that the art could not contain super abstract ideas. This just about entirely killed the idea of avant-garde, since it is an inherently abstract style. Socialist Realism was the primary art style until Stalin's death in 1953, which acted as almost a wake-up call for Soviet society. It sparked massive changes not only in art but also in the policies passed within the Soviet Union. With his death, there was no longer as much of an iron grip ensuring that all the art produced was in the Socialist Realism style, and henceforth the dominant style became Soviet Nonconformist art. As a collectivist state, having nonconformism be the dominant art style is kind of oxymoronic, and is credited as the “beginning of the end” of the Soviet Union by art historian Joseph Backstein.

My first piece of art is “The Glass”(1912) by Mikhail Larionov. Mikhail Larionov received his education at the Moscow School of Painting. Fun fact, he was born the same year as Pablo Picasso, and was suspended from the school for his views on art not once, not twice, but three separate times. The piece was created several years before the Bolshevik Revolution, so it shows the state of art before the Soviet Union came to be. This piece of art falls under the category of Russian avant-garde. It specifically is “Rayonism”, which was based on how rays of light interact with other objects, hence the name. Rayonism as a style was formed when several Russian artists left a prestigious art group which, to them, relied too much on French art styles. Mikhail Larionov was one of the founding members of that art group, and the creator of Rayonism as well as his lifelong partner Natalia Goncharova. I think that “The glass” is a very pleasing piece of art. I think that the idea behind the style is very interesting; blending science and art, and I think the way Mikhail Larionov used color in it works well. Beige is very easy on the eyes, and the teal is quite pretty.

My second piece of art was also created by Mikhail Larionov, this time in 1913, a year after “The Glass”. This piece is called “Red Rayonism”, and is also in the rayonism style, like the previous piece. As it is in the same style, I do not have much to say in that regard. I can however say that it is much less pleasing on the eyes. This one features exclusively warm colors, such as burgundy, red, orange, and yellow. The way they are combined as well as the empty space within it makes it feel like someone took “The Glass” and turned the warmth and saturation values up to 100. I think the low file resolution also contributes to this issue. With “The Glass”, the file resolution is high enough that you can actually see the texture of the canvas. On “Red rayonism” the resolution is low enough that it just looks like bloody shards of glass to me, which is ironic given that the other piece has glass in the name but not this one. It reminds me of the needle pit in the second Saw movie, although that was much more green-yellow because of the intense color grading that they put over the trap scenes in those movies.

My third piece is a sculpture created by Yevgeny Vuchetich. Fun fact, Yevgeny Vuchetich sculpted one of the largest sculptures in the world (at the time), and the statue and his face itself was printed on Russian currency for some time. The sculpture is supposedly called “Soldier-Liberator”, but depending on the source, that is an entirely different statue. Maybe it is just a popular statue name. The statue sits on top of the Soviet War Memorial in Treptower Park, in Berlin, Germany (on the east side). The sculpture was finished in 1949, and there was an entire competition to decide what the statue should look like. Yevgeny Vuchetich was the winner. I think it stretches the idea of “realism” a little bit. It features a Soviet soldier standing on top of a broken swastika, holding an absurdly thick sword in one hand and a German child in the other. That is quite fantastical. Swords were in fact used by the soviets during World War 2, but only by cavalry units, and the swords they used were not that bulky. I can see how it counts as realism however, because it is real people and not just abstract shapes and colors. Additionally, carrying a sword that looks like the Dragonslayer from the Berserk manga does look much more heroic than carrying a shashka.

My fourth piece is a little silly. It was originally graffitied onto a part of the Berlin Wall in 1990 by Dmitri Vrubel, although the image included in this blog is from a Soviet nonconformist art exhibit, hosted in 2010. It is titled “My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love”. It features Leonid Brezhnev and Eric Honecker (the leaders of the Soviet Union and East Germany respectively) smooching voluptuously. I was surprised to learn during my research of this piece that the painting was not entirely made up, those two individuals did in fact kiss (accidentally) and it was caught on camera. The painting is a recreation of the event. I struggled a lot to find information on this piece, I began thinking that perhaps I could not find the artist because they were afraid of what the government would do to them if they were publicly associated with the painting, and that it lacked a title for the same reason. As it turns out, I was just unlucky and the first 3-4 websites that I found with that image (I had to use a reverse image search to find them) just used it as a gag image and did not credit an artist or a title. In the day and age of the internet, not crediting who you got something funny from is more common than ever. Memes will be the death of crediting the original creator.

Sources

https://www.britannica.com/art/Socialist-Realism

https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/2408

https://youtu.be/iHgIVxedEEE?feature=shared

http://thisistomorrow.info/articles/glasnost-soviet-non-conformist-art-from-the-80s

https://medium.com/@thespyring/hell-is-a-bureaucracy-reports-from-the-front-lines-of-new-brunswick-canada-df11322b9233

https://medium.com/@thespyring/hell-is-a-bureaucracy-reports-from-the-front-lines-of-new-brunswick-canada-df11322b923

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_art

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_realism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_avant-garde

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Union

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_nonconformist_art