Aleksandr Deineka (1899-1969) : an avant-garde for the proletariat
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The First Five-Year Plan Deineka’s tenure with OST came to an end along with NEP itself. The policies of NEP were phased out in 1928 by the new industrialization and planned econ- omy policies that would become known as the First Five-Year Plan (1928–32), and which spurred the on- set of the period of renewed class antagonism known as the Cultural Revolution. It was in this context that Deineka decided to leave OST and join the radical new association Oktiabr’ (October), which in many ways represented the last stand of the avant-garde, numbering Klucis, Lissitzky, Rodchenko, the Vesnin brothers, Aleksei Gan and Sergei Eisenstein among its members. It aimed to revive the “art into life” ideas of constructivism and productivism in diff erent form, calling for waging proletarian class war through the “spatial arts”: photography, graphics, monumental painting, industrial arts, cinema, architecture and design. Although Deineka had been experimenting with easel painting with great success, he would later state, “by nature I didn’t feel a kindred spirit with OST. I painted very few easel paintings—two pictures a year. As a matter of fact I was doing completely dif- ferent things so it was natural for me to want to leave OST . . . for October.” 6 As a member of October, then, over the next couple of years he concentrated on his work as a graphic artist for mass publication. His most innovative and widely visible work dur- ing the First Five-Year Plan was his successful entry into poster production. In the period from 1930 to 1933 Deineka published about fifteen posters, most of them deemed highly successful, on themes of socialist construction, physical culture and other Five-Year Plan propaganda topics. We Are Mecha- nizing the Donbass! of 1930 [cat. 159] captures the labor enthusiasm promoted by the rhetoric of the Plan in a visual language that—unusually among Deineka’s posters—closely approximates the con- structivist style of some of his October colleagues, in the way the figures of the miners are flattened and subsumed into the overall diagonal design. He was also heavily involved in the illustration of the short lived journal Daesh’! (pronounced “dayosh,” and meaning “Let’s Produce!,” published only for the year 1929), a “social-political and literary-artis- tic” journal whose production was dominated by October members [see cat. 117–124]. Daesh’ is well known to Western audiences of the avant-garde be- cause of the participation of Mayakovsky and Rod- chenko; Deineka’s many drawings of Soviet work- ers and industry were consistently juxtaposed with Rodchenko’s famous documentary photo essays on the same kinds of subjects, taken from unusual angles. Eventually, however, the journal began to insist on the superiority of the technologically- produced photograph over drawings, and Deineka stopped contributing. Similarly, when the October group finally, after many delays, held its first group exhibition in 1930, Deineka’s graphic works were exhibited only “on the order of discussion,” mean- ing that the organizers of the exhibition took their distance from them and presented them to view- ers as debatable—a clear sign of the continuation of the old disagreements between the avant-garde and the “picture” artists. Deineka’s hand-drawn figuration, however politically satirical and mass- Fundación Juan March distributed, did not meet the productivist stan- dards of the group. Given his treatment by October, Deineka chose to leave the group and in 1931 submitted an appli- cation to be admitted to the powerful new Russian Association of Proletarian Artists (Rossiiskaia assot- siatsiia proletarskikh khudozhnikov, RAPKh). This vi- tuperative and combative group assumed a leading position in Soviet artistic life at this moment by em- bodying most fully the Cultural Revolution’s rhetoric of class war. RAPKh artist and leader Lev Viazmenskii, for example, published an article in 1930 accusing the former OST artists of being anti-semitic, fascist and reactionary. 7 RAPKh divided all artists into three categories: fellow travelers; class enemies of the proletariat; and true proletarian artists. RAPKh im- mediately embraced Deineka, who was by now a well-known and highly regarded artist, for member- ship, but soon turned against him, accusing him of being apolitical and secretly reactionary, of “hiding his true political face behind the theme of sport.” 8
They even questioned the purity of his proletarian class origins—a common Soviet practice in general at this time, during which class enemies were con- stantly being rooted out of workplaces and organiza- tions. 9
continued with his own work, and on April 23, 1932, a decree issued by the Central Committee of the Party disbanded all literary and artistic groups, including RAPKh, precisely in order to put a stop to the destruc- tive and disruptive infighting. It instituted centralized professional unions, and Deineka soon joined the Moscow Division of the Union of Soviet Artists (Mos- kovskii Oblastnoi Soiuz Sovetskikh khudozhnikov, MOSSKh). This famous decree was one of the mea- sures that signaled a shift in policy away from class war and Cultural Revolution as the First Five-Year Plan came to a close. “Life has become better, comrades, life has become more joyous – Stalin, 1935” The 1934 Party Congress was called the Congress of Victors, in celebration of the victory of socialism in the USSR through the successful industrializa- tion drive accomplished under the First Five-Year Plan. A year later, at the first congress of Stakhano- vites—workers who exceeded production targets, on the model of the miner Aleksei Stakhanov—Sta- lin famously declared “Life has become better, comrades, life has become more joyous” (Z hit’ stalo luchshe, tovarishchi, zhit’ stalo veselee ), claiming that the worst travails of industrialization and collectivization were over, and Soviet citizens could now enjoy the fruits of their labor through consumption and cultured leisure. Proletarianiza- tion and class antagonism were out; promoting “culturedness” ( kul’turnost’ ) among workers and the new Soviet elites was in. It was also this short period of the mid-1930s of relative calm, between the Cultural Revolution and the Great Terror that would follow, that saw the institution of socialist realism in 1934 as the art that would best express Soviet reality “in its revolutionary development”— meaning as it would become with the full advent of socialism. This period in many ways saw the peak of Deineka’s status as a Soviet artist; although many successes would follow in his long career, they would always be interrupted and marred by the denunciations, demotions, and snubs orches- trated by the Soviet art bureaucracy. But at this time he was on the ascendant as one of the art- ists pointing the way toward what socialist realism FIG. 2. Aleksandr Deineka Mother, 1932 Oil on canvas, 121 x 160.5 cm State Tretyakov Gallery Moscow might look like, whose images brimmed with the socialist confidence and pride that the country aimed to project. In 1933, the huge exhibition 15 Years of Artists of the RSFSR in Moscow, which was meant as both a summation and a decisive argument about the cor- rect path forward for Soviet art, included a number of paintings by Deineka, both from his OST period and more recent works. Critics agreed with the curatorial framing of the exhibition, which clearly presented his work as one possible model for the future in opposi- tion to the “dead end” of the avant-garde. 10 As one critic put it, “Deineka is above all an intelligent artist, with a great future.” 11 This critical confidence in his future as a painter stemmed not only from his great OST canvases of the later 1920s, but also from the new, so-called “lyrical” painting style that he had be- gun to develop in a few canvases in 1931–32, along- side his poster work. Critics praised these paintings of young people in highly physical situations, usually of sport or play, as “joyful” ( radostnyi ) depictions of the “new person” or the “new woman” ( novyi che- lovek, novaia zhenshchina ) 12
imagery of “cheerful” young people enjoying them- selves that was meant to replace the stern workers of the First Five-Year Plan. Deineka did not paint a lyrical picture like the Ball Game
of 1932 [cat. 194] on a direct commission for an exhibition, a propaganda poster, a journal illustra- tion, or on the basis of a paid komandirovka to a spe- cific Soviet site. Rather, he seemed to sense, or even engineer, the changing ideal of the new Soviet per- son with his less overtly ideological subject matter and more painterly handling of sensuously charged bodies. Yet he was not operating like an artist in the West, inventing alone in his studio and hoping for a buyer. He was under contract with the organization Vsekokhudozhnik, the central state commissioning agency, which entered into contracts with artists stipulating that a certain number of works be pro- duced within a certain period of time in return for a monthly stipend (a system called kontraktatsiia )— Fundación Juan March 62 eff ectively supporting artists in good standing to produce independent works that would eventually be purchased by museums or distributed to the huge network of Soviet institutions. But even with the freedom to work without di- rect commissions, what, we might ask, prompted Deineka to alter his pictorial form toward the paint- erly conjuring of sensuous bodies like those in the
Ball Game ? One obvious answer is that this was the moment when the concept of socialist realism was being formulated, as critics increasingly criticized any kind of “formalism” and the realist AKhRR artists dominated the painting section of the new Artists’ Union. In the usual top down understanding of the totalitarian model, we could assume that Deineka was coerced, either directly or indirectly, to modify his “severe graphic style”—or as Matthew Cullerne Bown put it, that he had “bent suff iciently in the pre- vailing wind.” 13 Given Deineka’s strong position as a widely employed and exhibited artist in the early 1930s, however, there is no evidence that he felt externally compelled to change his style. It is more likely that he understood, correctly, that the new system of socialist realism would promote not only more realist form, but also oil painting itself as the most valued medium, and that he therefore needed to retreat from his earlier statement that he did not feel a “kindred spirit” with easel painting. 14 He chose to experiment with it to find diff erent ways to pursue his long-standing interest in representing the new Soviet person, whose very body expressed his or her socialist being. There is also a straightforward biographical ex- planation for the fascinated, close-up intimacy with the women’s bodies in the Ball Game : the model for the nude women in this painting, as well as for those in his paintings Mother
(1932) [fig. 2] and Bathing
Girls (1933), was the sixteen-year old champion long distance swimmer Liusia Vtorova, whom he met at the Dinamo sports complex in Moscow in 1932 and purportedly fell in love with [fig. 3–5]. 15 Painting the broad-backed, muscular body of a specific, desired person rather than the anonymous workers or ath- letes of most of his previous works led him to tightly frame and crop the body in a dark, intimate space, as if leaning close to touch it, and even to replicate the body three times, in three positions, as if trying to grasp it. The stilled, dreamlike state of these bod- ies suggests erotic reverie more than sport, in spite of the painting’s title. Yet if we can identify a priva- tized intimacy in lyrical pictures like this, Deineka did not necessarily see them as separate from his other ways of working. This is evidenced by the fact that he also used Liusia’s image in two highly
Liudmilla (Liusia) Vtorova, 1930s. Courtesy of Evgeniia Vtorova
Fundación Juan March his diff erent painting and graphic styles to achieve this kind of adequacy. Like many of his graphics and graphic-inspired paintings, it shows a frieze of work- er figures in an overtly political situation, occupying a flattened and highly short-hand pictorial space; yet more like his lyrical paintings, it brings us in close to the figures and places them into a jewel-colored setting in relaxed, almost dreamy interactive poses, evoking the beauty and “cheerfulness” of the better life to come under socialism. Structurally, Deineka did not choose the subject matter freely, but responded to a specific commission for four mural designs on the subject of “The Revolution in the Village”—a con- straint that here was a productive one, resulting in a taut, inventive composition. The argument for the “worse” side of this social- ist realist painting usually trumps all, however: what makes this a picture of “reality in its revolutionary development” rather than actual Soviet reality is the fundamental untruthfulness of its representation of harmony and plenty on the collective farm. As is now well known, the Soviet collectivization of agriculture was brutal and ineff ective, resulting in peasant pro- test and large-scale famine. The picture raises the primary ethical problem for us as viewers of social- ist realism: do we follow the totalitarian model and reject it because it unavoidably forms part of a po- litical system that wreaked unspeakable havoc on its own population in the name of socialism? Or do we accept it as an earnest pictorial fantasy of what collective political conversation might look like in the bright future, worked out within a complex set of artistic constraints that make for a compelling work of art? Unlike totalitarianism, this second model has the advantage of granting Deineka agency as an art- ist who actively produced socialist realist imagery. As an urban artist based in Moscow, Deineka would not have known of the worst abuses of collectivization, because they were not reported, and when he was sent to a collective farm on a komandirovka as part of the commission, it was to one of the better “model” farms. But even when faced with evidence of the worst abuses of the regime, many Soviet citizens in the 1930s believed the rhetoric that class enemies had sabotaged sincere government eff orts, that sac- rifice was necessary to achieve socialism, and that no matter what, life in the USSR was still better than the poverty and oppression endured by most people under capitalism. Someone like Deineka, whose en- tire adult artistic output had been shaped by Soviet socialism, would not hesitate to take on the subject matter assigned to him under the socialist realist sys- tem, whether or not he had any personal doubts. Nei- ther a dupe nor a ruthless opportunist, he was finding a way to work successfully in his given circumstanc- es and to pursue his chosen imagery, or fantasy, of the new Soviet person. One of the most significant signs of Deineka’s favor within the Soviet art system at this time was the decision to send him on the mother of all kom- andirovka s: all the way to the United States, as of- ficial representative of the exhibition The Art of So- viet Russia that would open in December 1934 at the Pennsylvania Museum of Art in Philadelphia. This was an extraordinary privilege at a time when travel to the West had largely ceased for Soviet citizens. As his letters and written accounts from the trip show, Deineka arrived in the United States confident that he was there to represent a vital new form of socialist art and culture, and to judge American art and culture by its standards—no matter that he spoke no English and had never traveled abroad before. Five of his paintings were in the Art of Soviet Russia exhibition, including his other three Narkomzem mural designs and his spectacular canvas The Goalkeeper of 1934 [cat. 199], in which a soccer goalie seen from behind hurtles horizontally across the elongated picture sur- face, suspended in mid-air. American audiences and critics were enthusiastic about his paintings, some comparing him to the American artist Thomas Hart Benton, and he held three small, well-reviewed solo shows of his works on paper while in the States. 16
aspects of American technological modernity: not only the skyscrapers of New York and Philadelphia, but also the well kept roads and abundant automo- biles [see cat. 220–221]. Yet in spite of his enthusiasm for American technology, architecture and art, and the warm receptions he experienced in almost three months spent in Philadelphia, New York, Washington and Baltimore from December 1934 to March 1935 [fig. 6], he longed to return home, and still came away with a sense of the superiority of the USSR and its art. In a 1935 speech at a MOSSKh debate, he praised the art of “our new country, our new people,” which he contrasted positively to art in the West (his trip to the States was followed by shorter stays in Paris and Rome). “I told people that our artists travel around the country, they fly, they paint aviation themes . . . FIG. 6. Photograph of Deineka taken at a photo studio in New York, 1935, with a dedication to his mother and sister: “Hello Marfa Nikitichna and An’ka from your prodigal son and brother. AD!” public commissioned works from this time that more closely resemble his usual laconic, graphic style: for the central figure in his 1933 poster known as the Fizkul’turnitsa (Female physical culturist) [cat. 197] with the off icial title Work, Build and Don’t Whine! , and for the young women on the right of his 1934 oil sketch for one of four murals for the National Com- missariat of Agriculture (Narkomzem), on the theme of the Conversation of the Collective Farm Brigade [cat. 223]. The beloved, athletic body of Liusia Vtoro- va stretched across the diff erent genres of his work, as did his idealism about or even obsession with the new Soviet person—the leitmotif that explains his rel- atively seamless transition into becoming one model of a socialist realist artist. The
Collective Farm Brigade mural sketch is a work of socialist realism proper, for better or for worse. He painted it in 1934, when socialist realism was adopted as the off icial style of Soviet art. No one was certain what this style would actually look like, and it would be debated constantly in the meetings of MOSSKh over the next few years, but it was clear that it would mean some kind of substantial, resolved model of realist painting that would be adequate to the achievements of socialism. To argue the “better” side of this socialist realist work, we can see Deineka successfully struggling here formally to synthesize Fundación Juan March 64 this was simply astonishing to them, because not a single artist outside of our borders addresses these questions. They just keep on painting still lifes and portraits of bourgeois ladies. In this sense we are pio- neers and in this sense people will learn from us.” 17 Deineka’s greatest triumph of this period was his solo exhibition in Moscow at the end of 1935, en- compassing 119 of his works. He chose to exhibit only newer works, including many of his paintings based on subjects from his trip abroad, and major paintings based on his komandirovka to collec- tive farms in the Donbass region in the summer of 1935, such as his great Collective Farm Woman on a Bicycle [cat. 225]. Characteristically innovative in composition, with the woman in her day-glo red dress pasted against a flat, bright green landscape, it also off ered an idealistic, if not directly untruth- ful vision of life on the collective farm: few farms actually owned the kind of combine harvester vis- ible in the distance, and the bicycle was a scarce and highly desired consumer item in the strapped Soviet 1930s, distributed as a prized reward to only the most over-achieving workers and collec- tive farmers. A number of critics cautioned that some of the works in Deineka’s show, like this one, were overly “schematic”—a code word for “formal- ist”—but mostly they praised his inventiveness and originality. Over twenty-five notices and reviews of the show appeared in the newspapers, and it was hailed as one of the most important art events of the season. The exhibition moved on to Leningrad in early 1936, and it seemed that Deineka was on top of the Soviet art world—his life, for one, had in fact become better and more joyous with the advent of the established Soviet art system.
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