Russia Reconsidered

The systematic destruction of Stalin's "cult of personality" by Russia's new masters (see FOREIGN NEWS) is beginning to shake Soviet painters as well as the commissars. Instead of the models of heroic realism, which Russian painters have been forced for decades to turn out with machinelike standardization, Soviet painters have started shyly showing each other paintings they have kept carefully hidden away. Reported one recent visitor to Moscow: "Remarkably like Cezanne."

The first signs of a thaw in Russia's artistic climate even brought one timid debut out into the open. An unpublicized show by younger artists in a small Moscow gallery included canvases copying the strong, clear colors of Matisse and even imitations of Braque's cubist period. Clear inspiration for the new art effort was an exhibition--one of the most exciting seen in Moscow in decades--of French painting up to 1917, the year before the Soviets confiscated major private collections. Art students queued for hours in the subfreezing weather before Moscow's Pushkin Museum, came away from the show buzzing with excitement.

By last week the new party line had at least partial approval from the greatest Soviet realist of them all, Stalin's favorite portrait painter and president of the Soviet Academy of Art, Alexander M. Gerasimov, 74, whose heroic, mural-sized painting of Stalin and Marshal Voroshilov on the Kremlin ramparts recently disappeared from the Tretyakov State Art Museum. In a signed three-column article in Sovyetskaya Kultura, Gerasimov publicly confessed some errors of the bad old days: "The cult of the individual has done considerable harm . . . Recollecting certain of my works of the past years I must admit that even in them has been reflected the negative influence." Calling for "a fire of color, powerful, elevated color chords," Gerasimov admitted that "the heritage of impressionism can be used for service to socialist realism." Comradely discipline and social consciousness still rate high. But, said he: "In the inner world of the individual we are far behind the old masters . . . One must not artificially force a theme on artists alien to their line of creation."

In opening the door a crack to modern art (at least up to 1917) and admitting that "both still lifes and landscapes have every right to develop in Soviet art," Gerasimov also left the door ajar for himself. Privately Gerasimov has been turning out a crop of voluptuous nudes with no social import whatsoever.

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