More Old Soviet Posters October 3, 2011
Posted by irishelectionliterature in Communism.Tags: History
trackback
I’d previously posted a link to some wonderful Old Soviet Posters.
Here are some more Old Soviet Posters with some samples below.
The aim of the Soviets is to get rid of the bourgeois class, create a new society without any class division and private property and achieve total predominance of proletariat.
Young Communists, participate the seeding!
Don’t scold your children, buy them books instead.
Death to the Nazi invaders!
The world will belong to us!
Dreams of workers and peasants have come true.
We haven’t gone away, you know.
No Jewish caricatures from the *cough* “anti-cosmopolitan” campaign?
Or even the posters the Red Army put up in eastern Poland after they had divvied the country up with the Nazis?
Poles still have them.
Just to remind them what it was like when the two totalitarian monsters attempted to destroy them.
+1.
I find this Stalinist nostalgia quite disgusting.
Just a quick word. I’m pretty sure IELB isn’t a Stalinist, this stuff isn’t put up as a political statement. Moreover Mark P is correct, the materials date from 1917 onwards.
Actually, it’s a great pity that all of the posters don’t include their dates.
There is quite a sharp break in the aesthetics of Soviet state posters between the pre-Stalin and Stalin eras. At the link above, all of the artistically interesting ones, including quite famous images by Rodchenko and El Lissitzky, tend to come from the earlier period, during the flowering of the Soviet Avant Garde. Stalin, of course, did not approve of experimental visual art.
Stalin loved westerns. And that kinda says it all; the voizd in a stetson. Still the SU brought us nationalised property relations and proved that without workers democracy socialism will stagnate and die. A lesson for all democratic centralists surely, as Stalin and co were a product of this tactic.
What’s that wee fellah doing to that globe?
Love the WW2 poster especially, love this kind of stuff. Only thing preferrable is the hysteric indignation the USSR always brings out of infantile leftiest.
Ski-up
BBC 4 had a very interesting program on Russian painting.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2009/11_november/09/russia.shtml
One painting showed the dictator Stalin and the proverbial fields and factories of the “happy” workers and peasants. A careful look showed that the painter took risks. It showed the “black maria” which was used to take people away in the middle of the night to the Lukianka and hence to the gulag.
BBC 4 tends to repeat so watch out for it.
Oh it shops that the new Putin oriented stuff is also quite awful
On the broader issue, it’s a very mixed picture really. Firstly I think there’s often something of an elision of posters and fine art paint. While it’s absolutely true that the latter ossified across the life of the USSR with a concentration on socialist realism this was a process which started very early, for a number of reasons, and not all of them anywhere near attributable to ‘Stalinism’.
Firstly painting was seen as often bourgeois and individualist and not at the service of society [Lenin himself seems to have had a tilt towards classical forms rather than avant-garde ones], secondly the painters themselves tended to this view, like Rodchenko etc, and shifted towards designed materials, including posters – they themselves thought paint was played out, and that the future was in collage, photo experimentation and so on. And this wasn’t in the slightest bit restricted to the USSR but was an attitude prevalent amongst those in visual culture across Europe and even some of the US. This I think indirectly, or even paradoxically, fed into an attitude that fine art in its variants should be classically oriented whereas design could be much more forward looking.
So being a painter in 1921 was different to being a painter in 1918 and not necessarily an improvement. Rodchenko and El L themselves both worked with others producing avant garde design in print and exhibitions etc throughout the 1930s [and into the 40s and 50s in Rodchenko's case].
And while it’s also true that more representational posters became much more common particularly from the 30s onwards it’s not correct that experimentation in that form ended then, there were strongly avant garde formulations right the way through the succeeding years. But, part of the problem was that it was an avant garde rooted in the experimentation of the 1920s rather than what was taking place elsewhere.
For the everyday experience of Soviet workers then it’s probable that there was an odd mix of formalistic socialist realism in terms of banners, some posters, paintings and sculpture and then oddly experimental work in relation to designed packaging, some posters etc.
On the other hand, one need only look at the examples of posters and other designed materials in Poland, Czechoslovakia and even the DDR to see that there was extremely avant-garde work right through until the 1990s, easily as good as if not better than that seen in the West. So it’s hard to argue that ‘Stalinism’ is the only dynamic in play here.
Anyway if its painted or sculpted avant garde art one is looking for the major player through the 20th century from the 30s/40s onwards was the US [assisted by refugees from continental totalitarianism].
I’m not sure that I agree with all of that WbS.
You are of course right that there was a drive towards “useful” art, rather than painting for the sake of painting, inherent within Constructivism, but (a) Constructivism wasn’t the whole of the Russian avant garde and (b) there very much was a clamp down on the avant garde with the rise of Stalinism, both in painting and in other fields of art and design.
Rodchenko’s career as a photographer is a case in point. He was coming under criticism in official publications (firstly Soviet Photo), by late 1928. The New Left Front in Art journal, with which he was closely associated, was closed in 1929. Over the next four years there was a barrage of attacks on his “bourgeois formalism”, including a spectacularly philistine issue of Proletarskoe Photo which consisted of hostile reactions by workers and young communists to his work. His design department was shut down and he found himself scrabbling for work and adapting his work to the new climate simply to survive. And photography and photomontage were fields where the avant garde held out longer than in painting, where Stalin crushed them almost at a stroke.
Painting was hit first by the official turn towards Socialist Realism, but architecture followed quickly, as did every other facet of art and design over a period. You can still find experimental elements from the 1920s in some much later work, particularly in “new” fields like cinema, photography, photo-montage etc, but these tend to have the character of old technical innovations put to new purposes rather than an ongoing avant garde impulse.
The problem is, from a non-Leninist viewpoint, that the rise of Stalinism wasn’t the first clampdown on art and that the drive towards ‘useful’ art was arguably as pernicious for experimentation as Stalinism was for those who had come to terms with the regime at the first step, though in truth neither Rodchenko nor El Lissistky suffered as some did in both categories I refer to.
And naturally Constructivism wasn’t the entirety of the avant garde, but it was perhaps the most celebrated and influential element of it both internationally and within the USSR.
Rodchenko for all the attacks on his work managed to remain well enough in with the regime to be still producing innovative work even during the 1930s, and wasn’t purged as other were.
But I think my point still stands that the avant-garde, or significant elements in it, who went over to the Communists, sowed the seeds of their own destruction by pursuing approaches rooted in the ‘useful’ rather than carving out a separate and distinct space for art independent of political activity – one could also add to that the ‘year zero’ mentality of the European avant-garde throughout this period from Cubism onwards and including Constructivism, Futurism, Dada and De Stijl which essentially argued that all other approachs to paint/sculpture were redundant, and that even paint itself was redundant, hence the tilt to photography.
I also think you’re underplaying both the enduring legacy of photography/photo-montage within the USSR even during the high Stalinist period and how important and central it was to the work of Rodchenko etc from the early 20s onwards. This was regarded as the future and other forms were seen as largely trivial. Of course, to those who stuck with experimental painting this must have been doubly frustrating, particularly when those like Rodchenko returned to painting on apersonal level in the 40s, because the very people who were well in with the regime and could have supported their position were the ones who eschewed it in the early to mid-20s.
I disagree that every facet of art and design was hit by Socialist Realism, and again, that’s simply not borne out in non-fine art areas where non-Socialist Realist approaches, albeit formalised and stuck in amber did survive.
I think that we are perhaps talking past each other to some extent here.
I did not at any point say that the Stalinist turn towards Socialist Realism was the only political interference in art, although it was certainly the most drastic and complete. What was important and new about socialist realism was not that it represented the first political interference in art, but that:
(a) it represented the destruction of the avant garde flowering which both preceded and particularly followed the revolution. Russia went from a world center of artistic innovation to a conservative backwater churning out monstrous kitsch in a remarkably short space of time.
(b) it was of a piece with other elements of Stalinist reaction, which involved reintroducing bans on homosexuality and abortion and generally undoing many of the social gains and experiments of the revolutionary wave.
(c) it was successful in imposing a monolithic orthodoxy in a way that none of the bickering avant garde factions had never been able to achieve, although some of them tried.
A Tsarist Academic sculptor losing his job and being unable to find a living is a human tragedy, but not something of great (or indeed any) artistic importance. Nobody would remember his work anyway. The destruction of Constructivism, Suprematism, the LEF, the Russian Formalists in literature and all of the countless small offshoots and avant garde circles and groups and journals and unions and the imposition of socialist realist kitsch as the only acceptable form of art was both a huge collection of personal tragedies and one of the main artistic disasters of the 20th century.
Some of the individual artists managed to adapt. Lissitzky, more successfully than most, as you note. Some did not, the poet Mayakovsky being perhaps the iconic example. Most kept their heads down and conformed, while a few managed to sneak out some interesting stuff around the fringes, particularly in less high profile design fields. But none of them produced anything of similar significance to their early work after the final victory of socialist realism in 1934.
And my point is that a revolution that was already sidelining artists both within the revolutionary fold and without by 1920 isn’t really in any position to complain when precisely the same dynamic is manifested albeit on a greater scale ten years later. Stalin et al merely codified a process that had been extant since the beginning of the revolution. Perhaps you aren’t that concerned about the individual Tsarist academic sculptor ignored or worse in 1918, and perhaps you’re a little more concerned about say, the dissident Menshevik sculptor sideline in 1919-20, and perhaps concerned quite a bit about the ultimately purged Bolshevik sculptor, but from a detached viewpoint it’s not the worth of their individual work that is important – it’s avant-garde quality – but their ability to carry it out free of intereference, or worse from the state. The instant the state interposed itself between artists and their work was the point at which the prospect of artists producing work of poor, middling or transcendent quality was gone because it would always be in relation to the state, and that some of it was, even in relation to the state, transcendent doesn’t negate that point, because if we look at these artists peers elsewhere in Europe [and at that time to a much lesser extent in the US] we see that they were able to produce similar work of similar quality – I mean constructivism wasn’t qualitatively better than Dada or any other avant garde form – and to continue doing it with little or no reference to the state.
By the way, this isn’t meant as a dig at you, and I strongly agree that post 1930 the situation worsened appallingly, it’s simply that I can’t see how the dynamic wasn’t intrinsic to this from the off.
You are also now collapsing all “interference with the artist” into one process, as if nothing is significant about the the type of interference, the reason for the interference, the scale of the interference or the result of the interference. Once “interference” has happened it seems to take on the form of of a kind of original sin.
The Russian Revolution right from the off involved interference in artistic matters, not all of it negative. The replacement of the stifling Tsarist academies with new schools of art and design was, for instance, something I have some considerable difficulty mourning as it immediately led to a great artistic flowering and gave enormous opportunities to the most talented and interesting artists and designers of the day, people who had been determinedly marginalised by the academies. Because of course, “interference with art” was the norm before the Russian Revolution too. And it is the norm in capitalist societies today, where the ability to make a living as an artist is directly dependent on the ability to find a willing patron, whether in the form of the state or the wealthy or institutions funded by the state or the wealthy.
In the early post-Revolution period, interference in art mostly took the relatively mild form of patronage for revolutionary minded artists of whatever school and a complete lack of state patronage for right wing artists. That’s not something I advocate or defend, but it was better than the situation it replaced. As the political situation grew tougher and more and more restrictions were placed on political freedoms this also had an effect in the world of art, again a negative development and one which was seized upon by various artistic factions as they bickered with each other. But it is only with the rise of Stalin, from 1924, that we start seeing a constant growth of massive and heavy handed interference, culminating in 1934 with the complete and enforced dominance of socialist realist kitsch.
This was a disaster not only in personal terms – as any marginalisation of an artist for political reasons will be – but a disaster in artistic terms as it crushed what was probably the richest and deepest set of avant garde movements in 1920s Europe. Don’t, by the way, think that I’m being flip when I referred to a Tsarist Academic sculptor. It really is a personal tragedy for someone in that position to suddenly find themselves with no hope of patronage, just as much as it is for an artist with something more interesting to say and it’s just as unfair. It just isn’t an artistic tragedy any more than a new rule from Dublin City Council banning the sale of little watercolour landscapes at Merrion Square would be.
The key political, as opposed to personal or even artistic, issue with enforced artistic conservatism under Stalin is that it was part of a counter revolution in every facet of Russian society, from art and design, to politics, to the family and even extending into science. It was not the culmination of a process begun earlier, but the root and branch destruction of that process in favour of a kitsch, crude, crass, repetition of the dross of Tsarism. There was no place for radical ideas of any kind under Stalinism, while radical ideas of every kind had flourished (and sometimes engaged in unseemly and unpleasant fratricidal conflict) in the period between the revolution and the strangling of the revolution by bureaucratisation.
The Soviet posters are not altogether different in style or content from Nazi posters of the same period. Take that as you will
The socialist realist ones certainly aren’t, though the more experimental ones clearly are, at least in style.
And on a similar line, it’s often forgotten that Italian Fascism also co-opted avant garde styles in its visual culture. Some posters of Mussolini are remarkably contemporary looking in terms of visual styling and typography.
Like this one here by Xanti Schawinsky.
http://www.prices4antiques.com/works-on-paper/posters/Poster-Political-Italian-Mussolini-Schawinsky-X-37-inch-B150117.htm
It’s rather the other way around. The Nazis and Socialist Realism shared a love of striking neo-classical tat. The third poster above, for instance, could rather easily be a Nazi poster with a quick change of flags. And of course, the endless pictures of healthy, strong, peasants muscularly chopping at wheat are often interchangeable.
However, posters like the image taken from El Lissitzky’s wordless children’s book or Rodchenko’s frankly terrifying advert for babies’ dummies (both included at IEL’s link above) are absolutely inconceivable as official publications in Nazi Germany. Or in the Soviet Union by the early 1930s..
The adoption of Italian Futurism by Mussolini is an interesting counter example to the Nazis, because that genuinely was an avant garde movement and would, had it been of German origin, certainly have ended up in the Nazis hostile displays of decadent art. Even still, mistaking an Italian Futurist image for a Russian Constructivist one would be difficult.
Fourth poster, not third poster.
I’m not as sure as you that it would have been difficult at all to mistake futurism and constructivism, not least because futurism was a significant influence on the latter and then ran parallel to it. Indeed just as constructivism bled into Dada and De Stijl so likewise did Futurism.
Whether one would have had such striking work illustrative work as Rodchenko did in the 1920s in the 1930s is almost beside the point. Rodchenko himself wandered off to pastures new towards the end of 20s. And it’s important to keep in mind that avant-garde or neo-classical all these are simply styles and that in each case they were used for avowedly political purposes and encouraged [to some extent at least] by the states themselves.
What is worth reflecting on is the plight of those artists who didn’t accept the primacy of the state in all these states, whether pre or post Stalinist or Fascist.
Yes, of course Italian Futurism was a big influence on later avant garde currents, but I’ve still yet to see a Futurist poster that could reasonably be mistaken for a Constructivist one.
I’m genuinely taken aback by your comments about “Rodchenko wandering off to pastures new” by the end of the 1920s. The point is that he had no choice. The artistic groups and movements he was central to were dissolved, his design institute shut down and the journals he might have hoped to work in were churning out attacks on both his ideas and him personally. He adapted to the new climate by trying to fit in and keep his nose clean, which meant moving away from anything which could be regarded as either “leftism in art” or “bourgeois formalism”.
It wasn’t the case that the avant gardists lost interest in experimentation, it was simply that experimental art was forcibly replaced with Socialist Realism, first in oil painting, then in architecture, and then in every other field. I also don’t accept that all of these things are somehow interchangeable as mere “styles”.
As for art which does not accept the primacy of the state or the particular state form of the time, a certain L. Trotsky had some pretty vigorous views on the subject: “The domain of art is not one in which the party is called upon to command”, which is something I’d have no problem agreeing with.
Sorry, that was a miswrite, I meant El Lissitzky in the ref to Rodchenko above – who went on to considerable success in exhibition design. But, even taking Rodchenko’s example, he remained in good enough books with the regime to be able to continue working and producing his own art right through to his death in the 1950s.
I certainly didn’t argue that the avant garde lost interest in experimentation, indeed I’m unsure as to where you got that impression. But I would argue that the avant-garde, or rather those elements who went over to the revolution by their allegiance to socially useful art undercut rationales for their own experimentation once the state had altered its views on the utility of their particular approach.
Of course they’re styles. Everything was once avant-garde, even classicism, and in both fine art and design we see a continual churn and rechurn of older ideas reworked and occasionally new ones introduced. That doesn’t make neo-classicism at the level of the state in the USSR, or fascist regimes, any less absurd, but neo-classicism is merely an extension of previous waves of neo-classicism which various societies including our own have passed through and no doubt will again. There’s an argument that what we saw in the USSR and the fascist states was particularly noxious because of its gigantism… but then again, we live in an age where the scale of building construction dwarfs all that went before.
Anyhow, the problem is that for many artists from 1917 onwards their art was in conflict with the state, and even for those who were nominally, or actually, within the fold, such as Bogdanov and the Prolekult movement, they were ultimately, and fairly quickly, regarded as hostile to the Revolution and there was direct interference in their affairs from 1920 onwards. Narkompros was fine in relation to those artists who supported the revolution, whatever their approaches, at least initially, but gave no support at all to those who were critical or hostile.
I certainly didn’t argue that the avant garde lost interest in experimentation, indeed I’m unsure as to where you got that impression
I got that impression, perhaps wrongly, from your description of Rodchenko’s evolution. Wandering off to pastures new implies a voluntary choice, when in fact his move away from experimentation, as with the rest of the avant garde, was an enforced one.
On your wider points in this comment, I disagree fairly strongly with your views on “style” and on “useful” art. You seem to me to be assuming some unchanging spirit of art which merely expresses itself in different ways in different times, sometimes original, sometimes recycling styles from the past and neither inherently preferable to anything else. Personally I’m of the view that a movement like neoclassicism is at best pointless, trivial and dull and at worst outright reactionary, but this is the kind of issue we are unlikely to solve through an exchange of blog comments!
I think also that you misunderstand the movement of the avant garde towards “useful” forms of creativity. The point was not to put their ideas at the service of an undifferentiated state but at the service of a social revolution. It is hardly surprising that the Stalinist counter-revolution preferred trivial and conservative art to revolutionary ideas. Nor is it something that undermines the views of the revolutionary artists. It’s much more damaging for the legacy of the Constructivists to be collected by the wealthy today than it was for them to be despised by the Stalinists.
The problem with that analysis is that it elides avant garde with revolutionary and also ignores the strong anti avant garde inclinations of many within Bolshevism, including Lenin who was deeply sceptical if not indeed hostile, in relation to visual and other culture.
You see the blossoming of visual art as being a product of the revolution but that’s an overstatement. Russia already had a strong avant garde well before the Revolution dating from the latter part of the 19th century. The Revolution encouraged this where its proponents worked with tge Revolution, and ignored or worse where they didn’t, but long before 1924 had begun to circumscribe it.
And my point in all of this is that given the historical record the concept of anent garde as progressive per se is shown as demonstrably false by tge Italian experience (or more obviously the historyof fine art in particular in the US) and the idea that Stalinism accounts for the sclerotic containment of the avant garde where all was sweetness and light before 1930 or 1924, and it’s notable how both those dates are used, is ahistorical. Already by the mid 20s experimentation elsewhere was moving on and the tropes that powered experimentation in the USSr were being superseded as they were elsewhere and this returns me to my initial point. The 1910s and early 1920s were littered with people arguing it was the death of paint and that photography and photo montage would take over amongst them El Lissitzky whose own PRoUNS shifted decisively away from paint to architecture and designed media.
You’re right, this isn’t the place to exercise our differing views on the relative merits of avant garde or other approaches or tge meanings or otherwise of visual culture in all it’s forms (though worth reflecting on the point that classical styles themselves were meant to embody a range of meanings originally including concepts of the mathematical, tge rational, democracy – albeit in a truncated form so to simply say they or their successors are ‘conservative’ doesnt do them complete justice and to some degree ignores the clear influence from art deco as well) but I am trying to addresss this using the terms you utilised from the off.
No one is disputing Stalinism made things much worse but I think to many dispassionate observers things weren’t that great to begin with during the revolutionary period and the idea that artistic expression under Tsarism was say in the post 1905 period vastly worse again highly contestable.
[...] More Old Soviet Posters (cedarlounge.wordpress.com) [...]
It’s interesting how those that describe themselves as ‘Red’ try to fool people by suggesting Stalin was a monster and Lenin and Trotsky were the good guys. Bolshevikism was Machiavellian and life under collectivisation was a misery.
There was widespread famine.Millions died. There was uprisings as the Reds had grain stores full of confiscated foodstuff, but under armed guard.
Well some don’t. Some argue that Stalin was entirely wronged by Trotsky, and was indeed the true inheritor of the Bolshevik mantle.
I’m agnostic in such matters, although I find Trotsky a fascinating individual. But it does pay to get these things right from the off if you’re trying to shape a critique of Trotskyism.
You are so wrong Owen.
Have you not seen the happy rubicund peasants in the posters
Independent peasants were seen as enemies. They were far from happy.
How can you defend Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin as they saw independent peasants as the enemies of the workers in their factories working for the State.They had them work on collective wars.
Should have said collective farms
I was being facetious I can assure you.
Any state that murders millions and millions of its people in order to make them ‘happy’ is an abomination.
Apologists for Bolshevism occupy the same moral space as Holocaust deniers.
I am genuinely touched at the meeting of hearts and minds between Owen and Tumbles. Let’s hope that this romance blossoms and that one day, they’ll have little clown children.
I already have children. They stopped listening to fairy tales about magical lands ruled over by kind princes with bald heads and beards when they were 6
No doubt there’s only room for a Gaelic land ruled over by Grizzly and Garfunkle in your children’s hopes and dreams.
Owen will be devastated by the news. It’s not often that a neo-fascist stumbles upon somebody so close to his own way of thinking on a left wing website. Although I get the distinct impression that even Owen might find your company a little tedious if he was given the opportunity to enjoy it for too long.
This guy tumbles is nearly as boring as the guy that writes the GAA column in An Poblacht.
Maybe Paidí O’Shea will start shouting for the Shinners if FF continue to implode? Might liven up the sports commentary in An Phoblacht.
You always have to laugh at folks who think Fascism and Stalinism were the same thing in different languages.
‘But they KILLED loads of people and built horrible big statues!’ they will wail.
Well yeah, but so did Hulagu Khan. It’s a depressing fact of human history that a propensity for violence doesn’t actually tell you an awful lot about a given society.
you should try reading his book – apparently the Reds ran the IRA until Gerry Adams showed up, Cuchulain-like, slayed them all and made the IRA Gaelicly-Gael and free once again.
@WBS You say
…this isn’t the place to exercise our differing views on the relative merits of avant garde or other approaches or tge meanings or otherwise of visual culture in all it’s forms …
Actually, CLR is as good a place as any. Why would art (especially in the USSR) fall outside the remit of a quality lefty blog?
That’s very nice of you and you’re right, no reason it can’t be addressed here, I guess Inmeant in the context of the above debate there’s so many issues were already trying to engage with that another one is perhaps one too many.
Yes, it’s very difficult to keep a discussion focused when it involves quite so many different but relevant points. Particularly in a comments section which as a format has plenty of advantages but doesn’t really do sprawling argument very well. Without wanting to repeat myself, or drag you into repeating yourself, there were two peripheral points in your last post I wanted to address though:
Firstly, I do think that there is a link, and a strong link at that, between artistic avant gardes and radical politics. Not necessarily radical politics of the left, but radical politics of different varieties. It goes with the iconoclastic territory.
In terms of visual art, at least the visual art of the first half of the 20th Century, avant garde movements and artists were not universally of the radical left but they did tend very strongly in that direction. There were notable exceptions, including many of the Italian Futurists and, of course, the British Vorticist Wyndham Lewis, but these were very unusual amongst avant garde movements of the period. Constructivism and the Proletkult were particularly explicit in their left wing politics, but while other movements tended to be less loud about it the Suprematists, Surrealists etc were very clearly of the left. For every Wyndham Lewis there were, at least in political terms, half a dozen Picassos. The dominance of the left is less clear in some other fields of artistic expression. There were notably more right wing modernist writers than painters, for instance.
At the same time, an affinity for radical left politics amongst avant garde artists didn’t necessarily imply an appreciation of (what was then seen as) “difficult” art by all radical leftists. The Stalinists, for example, found no shortage of enthusiastically philistine young communists to denounce the lack of proletarian authenticity of formal experimentation.
Secondly, I don’t think that it’s correct to view the move by the Russian avant garde towards new forms of art and design as something to be juxtaposed against some supposed superceding of their formal experiments in painting elsewhere in the world. The Suprematists, after all, had arrived at Black Square by 1915 and White on White by 1918. There really isn’t very much further to go in terms of formal experiment with painting on flat sheets of canvass after that (which is not of course, quite the same as agreeing with many of the Russian avant garde that “painting is dead”).
Instead, I think that the move into other forms of expression, architecture, design, cinema, photography, photomontage were a logical continuation of their earlier work and ideas and arguably their most important and interesting work.
But the problem remains that even if one aligns avant-garde with leftist – something you admit isn’t the totality, the reality is that those of a leftist persuasion were of a broad spectrum. You’d probably not if you were using contemporary definitions of leftism that you use in other contexts consider many of those supposedly ‘left’ artists to be left at all. The Bauhaus was stacked full of people who were rhetorically left wing but in truth were functionally social democratic and became more evidently so as the 20s went on. And how this moves us past the further reality that the revolution coopted these artists, left wing or not, when it saw them as useful and discarded them – even at the earliest time – when it didn’t.
Secondly, if what you’re saying now re Suprematism was your belief earlier there’s an obvious contradiction with your complaints over Rodchenko’s treatment later as regards painting. If experimentation was dead in paint in 1919 then what matter if the state dictated that he do hack works after 1934? Arguably he’d be better off going into photomontage or whatever… but of course paint was no more dead in 1919 than it was in 2010 because Malevich had painted White on White. From Rothko to Gerhard Richter that lie has been neatly skewered.
As it happens though I agree that at the time the move towards architecture, design, cinema… etc was indeed the most important and interesting work of many of those working then and it was for subsequent generations to take up paint in an innovative fashion. But that surely is what I’ve been arguing from the off, that most of these artists went with a will towards precisely those newer forms and were able, for the most part to incorporate them even into Stalinist precepts, even as painting in the USSR and sculpture ossified.
By the way, I believe in no such thing as the ‘spirit of art’, quite the contrary, I think visual culture is the product, or expression, of a confluence of various and sometimes contradictory dynamics, economic, social, political and cultural amongst them, acting on both an individual, collective and societal level.
I’m a bit baffled by this response, WbS, because you seem determined to argue against views I’ve not only put forward but have explicitly opposed.
I don’t think that “painting was dead”. I do think that there was nobody pushing formal experimentation in painting on canvas further than Suprematists and Constructivists in the period immediate afterwards, and indeed that in terms of formal experimentation alone it is very difficult to go much further than they were doing at quite an early stage. They were pushing up against limits of the form, which is not the same as saying that nothing of interest can be done within the form.
Their move into other forms of expression did in part flow from that, but I do not in any way agree with your apparent assumption that their (general but by no means universal) move towards other media represented an end to their formal experimentation or a break with it. In fact I think it was a logical continuation of their experimental attitude, as well as their radical politics. The Stalinists didn’t just force an end to what remained of their interest in experimental painting, they forced an end to their meaningful experimentation in architecture, photography, cinema, clothes design, and for that matter poetry, literary criticism etc. It wasn’t simply that abstract painting was replaced by kitsch figurative pictures of happy muscular peasants, it was that near-abstract experimentation in photography was crushed, that constructivist architecture was replaced with Stalinist wedding cake, that Mayakovsky was replaced with heroic stanzas about the harvest, etc.
As I’ve already said, in some of the newer arts some of their experimental techniques survived in limited form (it is for instance nearly impossible to create even “straightforward”, simple, figurative, photomontages without at least incorporating some of Rodchenkos techniques) but the experimental drive was thoroughly, ruthlessly crushed. The art and design institutes were closed or purged, the journals and magazines entirely reoriented, the artists subjected to torrents of official abuse.
It is not enough to talk about “the state” using these artists when they were useful and then discarding them. That’s too simple and indeed directly misleading. It misses the crucial ruptures in the role and designs of the state and the sweeping changes in state policy of which state policy towards art was a relatively small component. These artists and their experimentation and their revolutionary fervour both in art and in politics were in favour while the state was revolutionary, and they were obliterated with the Stalinist counter revolution. Of course, the Stalinists had no use for revolutionary art any more than they had a use for a revolutionary foreign policy or a revolutionary social policy at home. This was a period of reaction: Back to conservatism in the family, in reproductive rights, in terms of sexuality, in every facet of state policy. And unsurprisingly what the Stalinists wanted were massive but trivial allegorical works of figurative art, looming idiot pastiches of the architecture of the old order etc.
On the other issue you raise, I think it’s rather unfair to read later social democratic destinations into the earlier radical views of the German avant-garde. However, leaving that aside, I didn’t suggest that every avant garde artist of advanced leftist views (which is to say a large swathe of them) were of precisely the political views of a Lenin or a Trotsky, nor do I think it’s particularly relevant either way. As I’ve already said, I agree with Trotsky’s vigorously expressed point of view that it is not the role of the party to dictate a “line” to artists.
Actually, ignore the first sentence above, both because it’s missing a crucial “not” and because it’s too confrontational. The problem is less that you are arguing against points I’m not putting forward and more that there’s a degree of talking past each other going on in both directions.
Also, while I’m retracting things, I somehow got Lissitzky’s About Two Squares mixed up with Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge in one of the first comments in this exchange.
I don’t think that “painting was dead”. I do think that there was nobody pushing formal experimentation in painting on canvas further than Suprematists and Constructivists in the period immediate afterwards, and indeed that in terms of formal experimentation alone it is very difficult to go much further than they were doing at quite an early stage. They were pushing up against limits of the form, which is not the same as saying that nothing of interest can be done within the form.
My response to that was due to your writing the following ‘Secondly, I don’t think that it’s correct to view the move by the Russian avant garde towards new forms of art and design as something to be juxtaposed against some supposed superceding of their formal experiments in painting elsewhere in the world. The Suprematists, after all, had arrived at Black Square by 1915 and White on White by 1918. There really isn’t very much further to go in terms of formal experiment with painting on flat sheets of canvass after that (which is not of course, quite the same as agreeing with many of the Russian avant garde that “painting is dead”).’
I’m not sure how I’m meant to interpret that other than you suggesting that painting was dead, other than formal exercises, otherwise why raise it? And the history of painting subsequently, as I noted, is littered with counter examples of how there has been no end of innovation and experiment with painting on flat sheets of canvass, from Rothko onwards.
And of those examples one – and if we are to use your logic, the one that is most important as an example of pushing up against the limits of the form – predates the Revolution. I’m an huge admirer of Malevich and Black Saquare in particular, but I think it’s a stretch to argue that that work marked an end point in formal experimentation [and even less so for Supermatism or Constructivism as a whole - not least because all of them continued after those individual pieces to provide innovative work]. Futurism in its generality would have a strong case that in the period before the war it was at least as innovative. Synthetic cubism which began before Suprematism and ended after it likewise. Dada wasn’t just an influence on constructivism but ran parallel to it, De Stijl likewise – and van Doesburg’s work strikes me as arguably equally as innovative as Malevich.
Their move into other forms of expression did in part flow from that, but I do not in any way agree with your apparent assumption that their (general but by no means universal) move towards other media represented an end to their formal experimentation or a break with it. In fact I think it was a logical continuation of their experimental attitude, as well as their radical politics. The Stalinists didn’t just force an end to what remained of their interest in experimental painting, they forced an end to their meaningful experimentation in architecture, photography, cinema, clothes design, and for that matter poetry, literary criticism etc. It wasn’t simply that abstract painting was replaced by kitsch figurative pictures of happy muscular peasants, it was that near-abstract experimentation in photography was crushed, that constructivist architecture was replaced with Stalinist wedding cake, that Mayakovsky was replaced with heroic stanzas about the harvest, etc.
…your apparent assumption that their (general but by no means universal) move towards other media represented an end to their formal experimentation or a break with it.
From what you write above I’m not sure you’re fully appreciating the points I’ve been making so far. The point above in bold is precisely what I’ve been saying from my first comment on this thread, that they – a significant tranche of the avant-garde, explicitly through an ideology positioned part in politics and in part in art/design theory, as represented by manifestos such as PROUNS and its like, turned their back on fine art paint and instead applied their radicalism to … well… all the subjects you reference above…architecture, photography, print, etc… and I was arguing that when Stalinism moved to its high period that this earlier shift left fine art paint in particular but not alone, as perhaps the most prominent form of artistic expression, conceptually undefended as an aspect of the avant garde. And when the constraints that artists already operated in from the beginning of the Revolution became more pronounced in the run up to the Stalinist period that PROUNS-like ideology was a part, not the only one, but not unimportant either, of the weakening of the position of the arts.
Any of us can readily see what the critiques would be, that painting other than in the service of the Revolution was bourgeois, individualistic, ignoring the needs of the revolution and the people, difficult to understand, etc etc. I’ve argued above that the avant-garde made a fundamental but understandable error in identifying their interests as being coterminous with a revolutionary elite that had very mixed views on experimentation in visual, and all, culture.
So, as far as I can tell, we don’t disagree that in visual culture there was a shift in the nature of the experimentation from paint/sculpture to other areas. Where we diverge is that I believe that in the latter areas the approaches based on such experimentation survived through Stalinism, not in great shape, but certainly not quashed entirely. I can show you posters from the 50s/60s and right into the 1990s which are clearly constructivist in approach. I can show you badges, designed objects, domestic products and architecture that is likewise. Or look at the magazine USSR in Construction which was published right up to 1941 and was explicitly a vehicle for Rodchenko, El Lissitzky et al to continue their investigations into photomontage etc.
As I’ve already said, in some of the newer arts some of their experimental techniques survived in limited form (it is for instance nearly impossible to create even “straightforward”, simple, figurative, photomontages without at least incorporating some of Rodchenkos techniques) but the experimental drive was thoroughly, ruthlessly crushed. The art and design institutes were closed or purged, the journals and magazines entirely reoriented, the artists subjected to torrents of official abuse.
It is not enough to talk about “the state” using these artists when they were useful and then discarding them. That’s too simple and indeed directly misleading. It misses the crucial ruptures in the role and designs of the state and the sweeping changes in state policy of which state policy towards art was a relatively small component. These artists and their experimentation and their revolutionary fervour both in art and in politics were in favour while the state was revolutionary, and they were obliterated with the Stalinist counter revolution. Of course, the Stalinists had no use for revolutionary art any more than they had a use for a revolutionary foreign policy or a revolutionary social policy at home. This was a period of reaction: Back to conservatism in the family, in reproductive rights, in terms of sexuality, in every facet of state policy. And unsurprisingly what the Stalinists wanted were massive but trivial allegorical works of figurative art, looming idiot pastiches of the architecture of the old order etc.
But the state/Revolution did use them when they were expedient and did discard them when they weren’t. And the proof of this is the control group of those artists who were ignored or sidelined by the Revolution/State from 1917 onwards. Their autonomy wasn’t upheld or supported. The State became the arbiter, as I’ve noted before. Once that happened, it really didn’t matter much about the ruptures in the state, or state policy, because the state itself had already determined the parameters of what was allowed or not allowed. It doesn’t matter in the slightest if it had spent the next sixty years supporting experimentation that was focused on reifying the state, or suppressing experimentation entirely.
You appear so focused on Stalinism being somehow some sort of unique evil in the course of the history of the Revolution that you seem unwilling to appreciate that for chunks of the avant-garde the Revolution itself from the earliest stage was problematic, and the record is clear that members of that avant-garde who were initially supportive of the revolution, were leaving from a year or two after the Revolution once the nature of the revolution became clear {Kandinsky who came back because of the Revolution was in large part due to criticism, by 1921 away to Weimar Germany]. This long predates Stalinism in either its high period – say 34 – 55 or the softer period from say 24 onwards.
Moreover there are few who would so conveniently label the revolution in the terms you do where there’s a rupture between a pure ‘revolutionary’ revolution and a fallen Stalinist ‘conservatism’. There’s a fair bit to admire in the initial approach of the Revolution to a variety of issues, but measures to strengthen families were introduced from 1922 onwards in the face homeless and orphaned children, etc, etc. The trend across the 20s was already, and well before Stalinism, one of a return to more traditional approaches [one could add, and this isn't meant as an apologia for Stalin, that external issues played their part throughout, from the disruption of the Civil War through to that of WWII]. And although in the 60s much of the worst of the legislation was amended or ameliorated, though not the prohibition on homosexual acts [and there are mixed views on whether the advent of the revolution was all that great for homosexual rights with some indications that there was an attitude that this was best dealt with as a medical or psychological issue which is arguably a disimprovement on the status quo ante from 1905 onwards], I’m guessing you’re not arguing that that loosening of the constraints in the late 60s represented the end of Stalinism.
Re the ‘looming idiot pastiches’… I’ve already noted that Stalinist neo-classicism was heavily influenced by Art Deco, and I think that the forms owe something to the monumentalism of the 1920s and 30s in popular culture – ironically or otherwise – from Metropolis onwards, which itself was strongly inflected by Art Deco [as well naturally owing even more to the tendency of states to celebrate themselves in stone]. There’s another point entirely which is one which centers on the meanings implicit in these works, and yes, there was the trivial etc, but a counter argument could be put forward that this was the first society in human history to celebrate the worker, the peasant. So while the forms were often banal and in no way ignoring the monstrous aspects of the regime the meanings are quite intriguing.
On the other issue you raise, I think it’s rather unfair to read later social democratic destinations into the earlier radical views of the German avant-garde. However, leaving that aside, I didn’t suggest that every avant garde artist of advanced leftist views (which is to say a large swathe of them) were of precisely the political views of a Lenin or a Trotsky, nor do I think it’s particularly relevant either way. As I’ve already said, I agree with Trotsky’s vigorously expressed point of view that it is not the role of the party to dictate a “line” to artists.
I don’t think it’s unfair, it’s not meant unfairly, it’s simply an observation. These were people caught up in processes, not events set in stone, and nor were they that much later. The Bauhaus wasn’t as radical as Bolshevism – even if El Lissitzky etc visited and interacted there, and Gropius [and perhaps as important the influence of the New Objectivity] were essentially undergoing the same shift from fine art paint and sculpture to addressing a mechanised industrial society where mass produced and designed goods took precedence albeit with a different ideological flavor. The same is true of the other movements during the period from Futurism through DaDa to De Stijl.
But the party from 1917 was dictating the line. And one L. Trotsky [presumably unrelated to the L. Trotsky you quote above] was central to the pushing back of ProleKult etc. It’s the old saw, ‘outside the party there is nothing’. So perhaps Trotsky was talking in the abstract but when faced with a concrete situation he was as willing as any of us to compromise with others.
And that was entirely relevant to the lives and careers of artist. Moreover, you appear to believe that there was no avant-garde before the Revolution, and I think your comment about a Tsarist academically trained artist is very telling. Many of the avant-garde had been through the academies. To counterpose the latter as simple engines of reaction or to suggest that the divergence was between them and an avant-garde which only found its expression during the revolution is to something of a disservice to the actual history. The avant-garde was well embedded in Russian visual culture well before the Revolution.
Overall I can’t help but think your political standpoint is slightly distorting your analysis here. You seem to make more out of the avant-garde during the 1917 − 1924 period than the historical record suggests, and you seem to do that by diminishing what came before 1917 and came after 1924 while underplaying problematic aspects of the history between those two dates. On a political level I can understand that, as one art critic wrote the thing about the avant-garde during that period is that its the only time that there was any significant visual cultural achievement during the Soviet period, but it wasn’t an achievement that sprung fully formed into being in 1917 supported by the Revolution alone and it wasn’t one whose influence faded entirely in 1924, or 1934 or even later. Nor was it one which was unequalled elsewhere in Europe during the same period, but was instead a localised manifestation of a broader cultural dynamic that had international and national expression.