Monthly Archives: August 2019
Socialist realism
Social realism as a way of perceiving reality and work in an embellished form appeared in the USSR in the 1930s and was intended to replace the “bourgeois” art, which then included everything that does not glorify the “man of action”. Being ridiculed by Mikhail Bulgakov in “the Master and Margarita”, this approach prescribed the artist to treat his art “on workdays”: how many benefits he received, so much text must pass. Just as in the Union of writers (fictional Bulgakov Massolit), “if a ticket for a week, then the writer must pass a story, for two weeks – a story, and only for three weeks in the “Swallow’s nest” in the Crimea – and the whole novel can be”. Continue reading
Graphics by Alexander Deineka of the 1920s and 40s
Alexander Deineka entered the history of Russian art primarily as the author of mosaic panels and large thematic paintings, as an enthusiastic fan of all equipment, terrestrial and celestial, as well as as an admirer and connoisseur of various types of physical education and sports. Deynek put his outstanding artistic gift and remarkable energy at the service of the victorious Communist ideology, which he sincerely believed to be the only correct one. Continue reading
Avant-garde and social realism
Avant-gardism, developed in literature by Vladimir Mayakovsky and Velimir Khlebnikov, has also spread powerfully in Russian painting since the 1910s. As early as the 1910s, Kazimir Malevich (who created the style of Suprematism), Vasily Kandinsky, and Vladimir Tatlin were interested in avant-gardism in Russia. The Russian avant-garde flourished in 1914-1922. What was the avant-garde? Combining abstractionism, constructivism, cubism, Suprematism, and other postmodern movements in painting, he rejected realism, while maintaining an emphasis on the form of objects as such. Thus, Malevich’s Suprematism appeared in the 1910s as a style of writing in the form of combinations of multi-colored planes and simple geometric outlines. Continue reading
