Socialist Realist Painting

After the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, the new government took control of Russian art, nationalizing art collections and laying down the principles that were to govern the creation of new art. Soviet Realism was the result. This book traces the style from its artistic and intellectual origins in 19th-century Russia to its decline at the end of the Soviet period. 184 color and 346 b&w illustrations.

Paintings from Russia, the Ukraine, Belorussia, Uzbekistan, Kirgizia, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Moldova selected in the USSR by Matthew Cullerne Bown for an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 12/1 - 15/3 1992.

Socialist Realism appeared in order to proceed towards what was then conceived as a bright new future - the Communist paradise on earth.

Drawing from Life explores revolutionary drawing and sketching in the early People’s Republic of China (1949–1965) in order to discover how artists created a national form of socialist realism. Tracing the development of seminal works by the major painters Xu Beihong, Wang Shikuo, Li Keran, Li Xiongcai, Dong Xiwen, and Fu Baoshi, author Christine I. Ho reconstructs how artists grappled with the representational politics of a nascent socialist art. The divergent approaches, styles, and genres presented in this study reveal an art world that is both heterogeneous and cosmopolitan. Through a history of artistic practices in pursuit of Maoist cultural ambitions—to forge new registers of experience, new structures of feeling, and new aesthetic communities—this original book argues that socialist Chinese art presents a critical, alternative vision for global modernism.

"Dislodging the avant-garde from its central position in the narrative of Soviet art, Collective Body presents painter Aleksandr Deineka's haptic and corporeal version of Socialist Realist figuration not as the enemy of revolutionary art, but as an alternate experimental aesthetic that, at its best, activates and organizes affective forces for collective ends. Tracing Deineka's path from his avant-garde origins as the inventor of the proletarian body in illustrations for mass magazines after the Revolution through his success as a state-sponsored painter of monumental, lyrical canvases during the Great Terror and beyond, Collective Body demonstrates that Socialist Realism is best understood not as a totalitarian style, but rather as a fiercely collective art system that organized art outside the market and formed part of the legacy of the revolutionary modernisms of the 1920s. Collective Body accounts for the way the art of the October Revolution continues to capture viewers' imaginations through the sheer intensity of its evocation of the elation of collectivity, making viewers not only comprehend but also truly feel socialism, and retaining the potential to inform our own art-into-life experiments within contemporary political art. Deineka figures in this study not as a singular master, in the spirit of a traditional monograph, but as a limited case of the system he inhabited and helped to create"--

"[This book] has been organized to provide a unique opportunity to challenge current artistic paradigms by displaying the diversity, creativity and technical brilliance that is incorporated in both Socialist Realist and nonconformist art. The exhibition presents examples of the two internally competing views of contemporary life in the Soviet Union, providing a cross section of the art of the period as a mirror of a society that was largely isolated from most Americans at the time."--From introduction.

The development of Soviet realist painting over fifty years through a selection of works from Russia's leading museums. Socialist Realism was and remains an exceptional phenomenon in twentieth century art. It bore the challenge of promoting realist figuration on a scale without parallel in the rest of the world, employing the talents of thousands of artists over decades and spreading over an immense and varied empire. By glorifying the social role of art, affirming the primary value of content as opposed to form and restoring the central role of traditional practices, socialist Realism was the declared opponent of the modern movement, and in fact represented the only completely alternative artistic system. Created by the great Russian artists (Deineka, Malevic, Adlivankin, Laktionov, Plastov, Brodskij, Korzhev) the works present a multiplicity of questions, themes and formal approaches to art spanning from the last phases of the civil war to the beginnings of the Brezhnev era, stopping at the early 1970s when trends in official Soviet art took on varied and inconsistent directions such that the cultural supremacy of the socialist-realist current faded definitively. A non-monolithic view emerges, in which the movement does not originate exclusively as the product of totalitarian control and political pressures but as an evolving organism that reflected internal issues and echoed the great historic events of the twentieth century.

Argues that Socialist Realist paintings, typically seen by western art historians as examples of retrograde art and by scholars of Soviet history simply as propaganda, were a part of an extensive program of skillful artistic practice coupled with masterful propaganda.