Socialist Realism's Legacy

By ROBERT HUGHES

As much as in the '30s and '40s, modernism is anathema

One wet Sunday in September 1974, a couple of dozen Soviet painters carried their canvases into a patch of wasteland in Cheremushki, an outlying district of Moscow, and began to set them up on makeshift stands. A small crowd of onlookers gathered, and so, to one side, did a platoon of KGB agents with bulldozers, dump trucks and water cannon. The secret policemen were disguised as civilians doing volunteer work on the abandoned site. As the spectators peered at the paintings and a few Western reporters clicked their cameras, the agents attacked, flinging the canvases into rubbish trucks. Then the bulldozers and water cannon moved in, grinding over fallen works and chasing the drenched artists from the site.

Within 40 minutes the battle was over. Eighteen paintings had been mutilated and burned; four painters were under arrest. The infectious spores of bourgeois formalism, carried by Jews and other rootless cosmopolitans, had been sanitized; the integrity of the official style of Socialist Realism stood vindicated.

Provincial by Western standards, the artists whose work was vandalized by the state at Cheremushki may not have been of high interest, outside the U.S.S.R., to a historian of style; it was as though the New York City police had been sent to crush one of the weekend art shows at Washington Square. Yet the meaning of the event lay not in the merits of this "dissident" art as art, but in its power to provoke repression simply by existing. Of all the major Occidental powers, only the U.S.S.R. treats art as though it were politically dangerous. By doing so, it ensures that art does matter politically. So a cycle of self-fulfilling repression continues.

In the West, artists succeed or fail in the marketplace. There is no official line on art, in any useful sense of the term. But in the U.S.S.R., art must toe the ideological line. If dissident --which generally means "modernist" --artists are not persecuted as systematically as dissident writers, and fewer of them actually end up laying rails in Siberia or being shot full of drugs in KGB madhouses, this merely reflects the fact that art is not as forceful a channel for maverick ideas as literature. Nevertheless, state approval governs every aspect of the production, exhibition, sale and discussion of painting and sculpture. The essence of totalitarianism is that there must be no gaps in the monolith, nowhere for culture to create its models of dissent.

This deep hostility to modernism, a permanent legacy of Stalin, seems especially ironic to Western eyes because it was in Russia, between 1910 and 1925, that one of the great experiments of modern art was carried out. The leaders of the avantgarde, among them Kasimir Malevich, Naum Gabo, Vladimir Tatlin, Alexander Rodchenko and El Lissitzky, wanted to serve the new power of the left by combining revolutionary art with revolutionary politics. Russian constructivism was, in fact, the only heroic modernist style that drew its strength from the revolutionary impetus. Yet its sin was in being abstract, and for that it was consigned to darkness by Stalin and his cultural apparatchiks after 1929.

According to the dogma of Socialist Realism, all art and literature must conform to the triple standard of partinost (party character), ideinost (socialist content) and narodnost (closeness to the people). For Stalin, this ideal was most faithfully reflected in the work of his favorite painter, Alexander Gerasimov, whose portraits of the dictator in various noble poses hung in museums, offices, factories and homes everywhere. At the same time, in the '30s and '40s, Stalin used every kind of coercion to apply the Socialist Realism doctrine, destroying the avant-garde and the contacts with Western artists that it needed. By 1953, when Stalin died, no Soviet artist could see, except in the most fragmentary way, any modernist art at all; the work of the constructivists, that heritage of Russian intellect and radical enthusiasm, was invisible.

"Socialist Realism is the only method of our art," wrote one of the surviving hacks in 1954. "Any other method is a concession to bourgeois ideology. In our country, where socialism has been victorious, where there has arisen a moral and political unity of the people unprecedented in the history of mankind, there is no special basis for different directions in art." Thus the lid clamped down, and it has remained down ever since, condensing the bland, dull, obsequious and piously idealistic nature of official "realism."

Today the most powerful state weapon against the dissident painter who cannot or will not join the Union of Soviet Artists--a closed Socialist Realist shop--is the law on tuneyadstvo (parasitism). An unemployed artist (and all nonunion members are, by definition, unemployed) can be punished with one to two years of prison. Apart from this, the "unofficial" artist must deal with a hundred resistances unknown to his Western counterpart.

Where can a sculptor find bronze, steel or plaster without union approval? How can a painter get access to studio space, even paints and canvas? How and where can the work be exhibited? How can anyone hear about it except by word of mouth, since all art writing in magazines like Iskusstvo (Art) or Sovietskaya Kultura is a direct emanation of union views, themselves determined by the Ministry of Culture?

Most unofficial Soviet art is earnestly provincial, dotted with quotations from Western modernist styles --abstract expressionism, Pop, minimalism--which cannot be assimilated properly because of the scarcity of information: one copy of a Western art magazine affects painters more, in this samizdat atmosphere, than do five museum shows in Manhattan. But the surprise is that such art exists at all. The dissident artist must expend so much energy on survival that he has less left for self-development. There is still no room for him in a society whose art has one purpose: to reinforce the narcissism of state power, under the guise of education. And the bitter moral dignity of his predicament cannot be much comfort.

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