Aleksandr Deineka (1899-1969) : an avant-garde for the proletariat

Socialist Realism 

or the Collectivization 

of Modernism

Ekaterina Degot

Fundación Juan March

Fundación Juan March

70

PAGE 69.  Detail of CAT. 168

Aleksandra Ekster

Design for a Mechanical 

Engineering Pavilion, 1923

Private collection [cat. 32]

    

 

 

ithout

Malevich socialist realism is not possible,”

1

 asserted 

the employees of the Russian Museum in Leningrad 

when the threat of expulsion hung over Kazimir Ma-

levich’s paintings. This phrase is now perceived as 

rhetorical subterfuge, but the people who wrote it 

were not only sincere, they were absolutely correct: 

not only was socialist realism impossible, but it would 

not have existed without Malevich.

The simple, if not to say naive, understanding 

of society as split between communists and their 

victims as formulated during the Cold War both in-

side and outside the USSR obscures the numerous 

instances when a transition from the avant-garde to 

socialist realism occurred within the framework of 

the creativity of a single artist. The avant-garde past 

of famous socialist realists (Georgii Riazhskii, Evge-

nii Kibrik, Fedor Bogorodskii) remains unnoticed, as 

do the later figurative objects of the classics of the 

avant-garde: Stalin’s portrait in the work of Pavel Filo-

nov, the post-montage photographs of El Lissitzky 

and Aleksandr Rodchenko, and Malevich’s “realistic” 

portraits of the 1930s.

The aesthetic and institutional evolution of Soviet 

art from its Leninist period to the Stalinist period that 

began—approximately—with the “great rupture” of 

1929 still awaits in-depth investigation. The predomi-

nant version remains that of the violent conversion 

of artists toward figurative representation and the 

forced unification into a single Union of Soviet Art-

ists. This version absolutizes the diff erences between 

abstract and figurative art (transposing a Cold War 

antithesis to the Russian avant-garde, whose protag-

onists would never have thought in such terms) and 

idealizes the modern system of artistic institutions in 

which the artist ostensibly preserves complete criti-

cal freedom. In fact, in the USSR by the beginning 

of the 1930s, art—as well as the work of art and the

artist himself—had a completely diff erent status than 

in the classical modernist system. However, this sta-

tus is very familiar and comprehensible to anyone liv-

ing in today’s global world.

Art is the industrial production of images of 

dreams; the artist is a collectivized artist who under-

stands his activity not as individual self-expression, 

but as a service in a large corporate system; the net-

work of institutions is rooted not in the sale of a single 

work to an individual consumer, but in the mass dis-

tribution of visual images.

From Project to Projection

The years 1913–15 are generally considered to be 

the revolutionary epoch in the history of the Russian 

avant-garde, years that engendered a few innovative 

theoretical artistic programs, such as the abstraction 

of Wassily Kandinsky, the counter reliefs of Vladimir 

Tatlin, the suprematism of Malevich. In all of these 

cases, what was discussed were the 

projects

, that 

is, phenomena in which concept is no less important 

than implementation, and where implementation is 

never really finished, since the project automatically 

implies a potential for development.

However, this was only a prelude to another ar-

tistic revolution that has remained unnoticed to this 

day. In 1919, during the height of his white supre-

matist period, Malevich announced that he did not 

see the need to make paintings any more, and that 

he intended “only to preach.”

2

 Although, as we know, 

Malevich did paintings after this, however it is worth 

taking his pronouncement seriously: he really did not 

create works of art any more, having reoriented him-

self toward the “sermon,” in other words the theory.

Around 1919 the total disappearance of a market 

for material goods in Soviet Russia radically chal-

lenged the necessity of producing objects of art and 

identified the artistic gesture with media distribution 

of aesthetic ideas. It was precisely at this moment 

that Rodchenko announced that “it is not painting 

that is important, what is important is creativity . . . 

Neither canvases nor paint will be necessary, and fu-

ture creativity, perhaps with the aid of that same ra-

dium, via some sort of invisible pulverizers, will burn 

their creations directly into the walls, and these—

without paint, brushes, canvases—will burn with ex-

traordinary, still unknown colors.” 

3

 Numerous radio—

and now we would say tele—broadcasting projects 

have come to us from these years, the most famous 

of which was Tatlin’s Monument to the Third Inter-

national (1919–20). In her stage sets, Liubov Popova 

moved from appellation to abstraction (

The Magnifi-

cent Cuckold

, 1912) and then to images projected on 

the stage (in particular, photographs of Trotsky; 

Earth 

on End

, 1923). At that time Malevich was referring to 

his own activity as the projection of “images on the 

negative” (into the heads of his pupils).

4

The identification of art with the gesture of pro-

jection, physical or metaphysical, cannot be under-

stood outside of a connection with the key metaphor 

of the Russian avant-garde, which found its expres-

sion in the mystery play 

Victory over the Sun

 by Alek-

sei Kruchenykh and Kazimir Malevich (1913). If art 

defeats the sun, then it migrates into a diff erent zone 

(for Kruchenykh, a country), a zone of artificial light. 

In classical aesthetics, art is engendered by light 

(typical metaphors for art are shadow or reflection), 

but in the modernist aesthetic, art itself is artificial 

light. Before us is not a two-part classical model of 

“reality + art as its reflection,” but rather a three-part 

one that includes the origin of light (emancipation of 

art), a certain image that is permeated with this light, 

and the projection of this image on a plane, a screen, 

that is physical (as in the sceneographs of Popova), 

mental (as by Malevich) or social (as by artists of the 

constructivist circle). The original is inserted into re-

ality, being transformed at that moment into one or, 

more often, many projections or copies. This scheme 

diff ers from the early purely modernist project by the 

emergence of the visual image—although it has a 

completely diff erent status than in classical art.

In 1919 Rodchenko identifies creativity with the 

light of a candle, a lamp, an electric light bulb, and, in 

the future, radium, and asserts that “what remains is 

only the essence—to illuminate.” The question about 

what image is projected with this light does not even 

arise at all. The original, like a negative, is transparent, 

invisible: it is merely an idea, the minimal form (as in ab-

stract painting of light rays in the air that was planned 

Fundación Juan March

in those years by Rodchenko’s comrade-in-arms Ol’ga 

Rozanova). In 1927 Malevich, having turned to figura-

tive painting, asserts something that is already a bit 

diff erent: the depiction is like the button or socket in 

relation to the current.

5

 The only function accessible to 

the work of art is that of the manifestation of the sub-

stance of art—its inclusion or exclusion—via the use of 

a familiar code; images emerge finished, already exist-

ing in the consciousness of the artist, or in the history 

of his creativity. After 1920, the paintings of Malevich 

acquired the status of illustrations of his “prophesies” 

(theories), and as illustrations they are located outside 

the concepts of original and copy. Malevich replicated 

his 

Black Square

 several times, but for didactic not 

commercial goals. Malevich created a number of im-

pressionist works as visual examples, and only recently 

has it become known that they were made not at the 

start of the century, but after suprematism, at the end of 

the 1920s.

6

 Malevich took inspiration from motifs of his 

early paintings, and he would sometimes give the new 

works names such as 

Motif of 1909

. We are not talking 

about copies or forgeries, but about new projections 

of old originals, about inserting them into a new social 

context. So the approbation of any style becomes pos-

sible, including the realism of the nineteenth century. 

During those same years, Malevich wrote a note about 

X-rays which said that they provide “the possibility of 

penetrating inside an object, while not destroying its 

external shell.”

7

 Hence, the original through which the 

substance of art-light passes does not necessarily have 

to be transparent: if art is X-rays, then the work does not 

have to be pure and bare, like an abstract painting; it 

can represent a dense, massive (in terms of painting) 

“realistic” painting. This is precisely what Malevich’s 

paintings gradually become, as do the works of many 

other artists.

By “projection onto the negative” Malevich un-

derstood a certain speculative circulation of art. 

However, in the USSR since the beginning of the 

1920s a generation of artists had already been ma-

turing for whom projection meant circulation in the 

literal sense, mass distribution in social space. Such 

an understanding of projection was elaborated by 

the post-constructivist group of students in the High-

er Arts and Technical Studios (VKhUTEMAS) who 

called themselves “projectionists” (the theorist of 

this group, Kliment Red’ko, signified this technique 

of realization of artistic concepts by the word 

kino

 

in 1922–24).

8

 What was discussed was the insertion 

of certain models into everyday life, on the basis of 

which the masses were supposed to organize their 

lives. The work of the artist was considered not to be 

these models themselves, but rather primarily the 

method of projection.

This definition of one’s art as a method, rather 

than as a collection or specific visual forms, literally 

coincides with the self-definition of socialist real-

ism, whose theoreticians were always announcing 

that this was a method and not a style. In the 1930s, 

participants of the projectionists group—Kliment 

Red’ko, Solomon Nikritin, Sergei Luchishkin, Alek-

sandr Tyshler—became active (although criticized) 

adapters of socialist realism. Although socialist re-

alism is usually perceived as a doctrine rigidly de-

manding a specific style from the artist, the external 

appearance of a work is secondary in relation to the 

work’s function—instantaneous mass dissemina-

tion. The technology of this dissemination was even 

defined by the avant-garde: in 1921 Velimir Khleb-

nikov foresaw letters and images “on dark canvases 

of enormous books, larger than buildings, that had 

sprouted up on village squares, slowly turning their 

pages,” transmitted from the main “Radio Tower” via 

“light blows.”

9

 Khlebnikov’s utopia rather precisely 

describes contemporary electronic advertising bill-

boards; but it was precisely this role that was per-

formed in the USSR by posters and paintings. One 

of the most important genres in the USSR, which 

was also pursued by the masters of the avant-garde 

(for example, Malevich’s pupil Nikolai Suetin) was 

the panorama and diorama. Today we would refer 

to them as multi-media installations utilizing light ef-

fects and images projected onto a concave surface. 

However, this system, which combined a discursive, 

ideological foundation with visual material, also drew 

in easel painting—namely as reproduction.

From the very beginning, Soviet art was formed 

as the art of mass distribution, indiff erent to the origi-

nal. Included in its system were the poster, design 

books, cinematography, photography. But easel 

painting was also integrated here—in the form of 

mass reproductions in postcards, magazines, text-

books. Precisely the reproduction, and not the origi-

nal, is the classic work of socialist realism: stories 

about polar explorers (or milkmaids) asking the artist 

to give them a painting of their labor clearly attest to 

how the manual production of a canvas was viewed 

only as the preparation for reproduction. Publishing 

houses and magazines constituted the Soviet artistic 

system, just as galleries did in the Western system. 

A painting was exhibited in a museum as an original 

in the sense that was imparted to this word back in 

the eighteenth century: as a model for copying, by 

machine or by hand. The Academy of the Arts of the 

USSR was reconstituted in 1947 as an institute for 

creating such normative models. The state bought 

paintings for museums with precisely the same in-

tentions as when selecting negatives from photog-

raphers working in the news agencies—in order to 

preserve the possibility of subsequent reproduction. 

A portion of the negatives, like a portion of the paint-

ings, remained with the authors themselves in a kind 

of “creative kitchen,” and the state was not very inter-

ested in them at all (even if this was abstract painting 

or other experiments): this planted the seeds for the 

subsequent formation of unoff icial art.

The bizarre mimicry of painting and photogra-

phy, of original and copy, in this artistic system was 

captured in an anonymous magazine picture of the 

Stalinist period. A young soldier is finishing a paint-

ing that the reader of the magazine should recog-

nize: this is the textbook Russian landscape of the 

nineteenth century, Aleksei Savrasov’s 

The Rooks 

Have Landed

. The involuntary comical nature of this 

scene rests in the fact that the soldier has apparently 

executed the landscape from his imagination. The 

original from which he is copying is not to be seen, 

yet common sense suggests that the soldier’s origi-

nal is not the painting in the State Tretyakov Gallery, 

but a reproduction thereof. This is the ideal work of 

art as conceptualized by Soviet aesthetics. The hand 

of the artist moves by a force that projects a finished 

image into his consciousness in such a way that any 

memory of the fact of copying is suppressed—it is 

as though he is painting over the reproduction with 

his own brush. In the actual photograph the fact of 

projection is erased by coarse retouching. From the 

painting a photo-reproduction has been made, from 

which the soldier has copied the painting. His paint-

ing was then in turn photographed along with its 

author, and then this photograph was retouched in 

such a way that it became almost a painting itself, and 

then it was reproduced again, this time on the page 

of a magazine, and subsequently, this photograph

Kazimir Malevich

Suprematist Composition, 1915

Fondation Beyeler 

Riehen, Basel [cat. 6]

Mikhail Razulevich

Ten Years without Lenin, 1933

Photomontage, 22.9 x 49.7 cm

Collection Merrill C. Berman

Fundación Juan March

72

in turn could be hung on the wall in some soldiers’ 

club, like a painting. This infinite chain equates the 

painting copied from a photograph with a photo-

graph of a painting—and these were indeed the two 

most widespread genres in Soviet art.

Corporation USSR

By the end of the 1920s the USSR had developed a 

system that defined artists in a mass—rather than 

singular—system, as employees of a medial state 

apparatus to be sent out to the plants and factories. 

Such was the status of artists of the Left Front of the 

Arts (LEF) group, but the first to achieve this status 

was the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia 

(AKhRR). Immediately after the revolution this was a 

modest commercial enterprise founded by a group 

of young realist painters. In 1922, after their associa-

tion suff ered a financial crisis, they off ered their ser-

vices to the Central Committee of the Russian Com-

munist Party. They were told to go to the working 

masses, but at first misunderstood the request, and 

arranged an exhibition and sale of drawings made in 

factories (which was, of course, unsuccessful). After 

this experience the group’s leader, Evgenii Katsman, 

changed course toward exhibitions of reproductions. 

Although members of AKhRR also managed to sell 

their works to representatives of power (for example, 

Kliment Voroshilov) personally, their main activity 

consisted of thematic exhibitions where they would 

display paintings along with documents (for the first 

time at the 

Lenin’s Corner

 exhibition in 1923) and in 

active publishing work (AKhRR published postcards 

in print runs of millions). AKhRR recognized that the 

role of the artist understood as a journalistic role, as 

an ideological designer, required above all corpo-

rative solidarity and loyalty. Unknown in the artistic 

world of classical modernism (in its idealized form), 

these qualities are, however, very well known today 

in our world of contemporary mass visual forms—ad-

vertising, design and television—that actively and 

even aggressively merge with gallery art. Admittedly, 

though, in the USSR artists had no choice but to pur-

sue the production of mass visual forms.

On April 23, 1932, the All-Union Communist Party 

(Bolsheviks)—as the Party was renamed in 1925—

published a resolution “On the Reconstruction of Lit-

erary and Artistic Organizations” (see D53), which is 

considered to mark the beginning of the Stalinist pe-

riod of Soviet art. Liberal Russian art historians usu-

ally interpret this as the victory of the proletarian line 

over the intelligentsia, as a repression against artistic 

groups in Moscow and Leningrad that had preserved 

the pre-revolutionary traditions. However, the resolu-

tion itself actually calls for the dissolution of purely 

proletarian, class-oriented organizations (such as the 

Russian Association of Proletarian Writers, RAPP) and 

the unification of artists and writers who “support the 

platform of Soviet power.” There is much evidence 

that the resolution was widely accepted with enthusi-

asm and a sense of liberation, because the artists felt 

that the larger umbrella of the Union of Artists would 

off er greater opportunities. Structurally, the Union of 

Artists united the various tendencies to which every 

artist had belonged until then.

Gustavs Klucis

We Will Transform the 

Five-Year Plan into a Four-Year 

Plan, 1930

Collection Merrill C. Berman

[cat. 142]

Embroidered copy of 

the portrait of Stalin by 

Gerasimov, 1948

Fabric, 81.5 x 71.3 cm

Fundación José María 

Castañé

Scarf printed with a portrait 

of Stalin, 1937

Silk, 68.5 x 56.5 cm

Fundación José María 

Castañé

Fundación Juan March

Artistic groupings, uniting artists who would orga-

nize joint exhibitions, defined the Soviet scene during 

the 1920s. Some of them attempted to continue the 

pre-revolutionary practice aimed at the private mar-

ket, and to sell paintings from exhibitions (Jack of Dia-

monds resurrected its pre-revolutionary commercial 

enterprise under the name of Moscow Painters from 

1924 to 1926), while others attempted to operate as 

publishers. In 1921 a group of religious symbolists cre-

ated the Makovets association around a private jour-

nal, and cooperated with the philosopher Pavel Floren-

skii. However, by the middle of the 1920s it had already 

become clear that the private market was not taking 

shape. The groups existed partially on the means of 

the participants, to a larger degree on state subsidies 

and the private or semi-government patronage of 

those in power. Four Arts (1925–32), where artists and 

architects of the neo-classical line had found refuge 

(Vladimir Favorskii, Vera Mukhina, Aleksei Shchusev), 

managed to gain the support of Anatolii Lunacharskii. 

This group held evening gatherings in private homes 

with music and literary readings, and subsequently 

the form of a musical salon was transferred directly to 

exhibitions. Artists of the avant-garde who assumed 

that the individual viewer, the picture and the market 

had been destroyed along with the bourgeois class, 

saw themselves either as a scholarly collective (Malev-

ich and Mikhail Matiushin headed such collectives at 

the Leningrad Institute of Artistic Culture or INKhUK; 

Filonov led the group Masters of Analytical Art); or a 

party whose mouthpiece was the press, not the ex-

hibition (the group associated with the journal 

Lef

, 

1923–25, and 

Novyi lef

, 1927–28). The declarations 

of these organizations, despite their very diverse di-

rections, draw one and the same picture: a demand 

for civic, “family” solidarity, a recognition of the need 

for a common line in each exhibition, where separate 

works were merely links in a common chain. In June 

1930 the Federation of Associations of Soviet Artists 

(FOSKh) was created, with David Shterenberg—chair-

man of the art section of the People’s Commissariat 

of Enlightenment (Narkompros)—as its president. 

FOSKh advocated the insertion of art into industry, a 

movement of art to the masses and a brigade method 

of creativity. It was precisely these slogans that were 

later realized in the Union of Artists.

The will coming “from below” for a unification of 

the various groupings was connected with the desire 

to eliminate a system of preferences in the distribu-

tion of state purchases and orders. After 1932, this 

system actually was, if not eliminated, then at least 

substantially corrected. In the Union of Artists, be-

cause of the way it was structured, not a single artist 

remained without government support. To lesser or 

greater degrees, everyone received orders (paid for 

in advance and not always actually fulfilled by the art-

ist). An artist’s status in this system was defined not 

by the sale of his works, nor by their quality as estab-

lished by the critics, but exclusively by his belong-

ing to this society, this corporation, one that rather 

quickly applied strict rules for both membership ap-

plications and resignations. If one was not a mem-

ber of the Union of Artists, it was necessary to find 

alternative sources of income (for example, semi-

legal teaching) and to renounce public exhibitions. 

Off icial power in the USSR, contrary to widespread 

opinion, never repressed the production of art in pri-

vate studios, but it controlled its distribution through 

exhibitions and reproductions. The equating of art 

with art that could be shared by the masses led to a 

division between those artists allowed access to the 

channels of distribution, and those denied access to 

ented toward the international market (Naum Gabo, 

Wassily Kandinsky, Marc Chagall, Aleksandra Ekster) 

had abandoned the country rather quickly, and that 

option remained open throughout the 1920s. Those 

who remained shared the notion of Soviet art and the 

idea that the principles of its organization should be 

diff erent than those of bourgeois art. Rodchenko for-

mulated it this way (in Paris in 1925): “. . . we need to 

stay together and build new relationships between 

workers of artistic labor. We will not succeed in orga-

nizing a new everyday life

10

 if our relationships resem-

ble those of the bohemians of the West. This is the 

crux of the matter. The first thing is our everyday life. 

The second is to pick ourselves up and stay firmly to-

gether and believe in one another.”

11

 For Rodchenko,

them (like Malevich, Matiushin, Filonov in the later 

years) and who had a more reflective attitude toward 

this system. It was this situation that brought forth 

the unoff icial art of the 1960s, the status of which 

resembled that of experimental science—not being 

put into production.

In order to understand the specifics of Soviet art 

as a type of collectivized art that is structurally simi-

lar to the specifics of the USSR itself, it is necessary 

to recognize that artists of the Stalin period (but not 

those of the 1960s and 1970s) were in the country 

voluntarily. Those who had been categorically op-

posed to Bolshevik politics (such as the majority of 

artists of the old tsarist court circles, including Il’ia 

Repin), as well as those who had earlier been ori-

Gustavs Klucis

Untitled, 1933

Poster. Lithography

137.2 x 99 cm

Collection Merrill C. Berman 

Fundación Juan March