Aleksandr Deineka (1899-1969) : an avant-garde for the proletariat
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138 Aleksandr Deineka China on the Path to Liberation from Imperialism, 1930 Design for poster Watercolor, India ink and pen on paper 73 x 105.5 cm Kursk Deineka Picture Gallery Aleksandr Deineka Which is Bigger? Which is Better? 1930 Design for poster Tempera on paper 73.2 x 103.5 cm Kursk Deineka Picture Gallery Aleksandr Deineka Full Speed Ahead! 1930–31 Design for poster Gouache, lead white and India ink on paper Kursk Deineka Picture Gallery Fundación Juan March premises for the genesis of a series of paintings of an orderly, organized world in which each person, no matter how small or obscure, is perceived as an indispensable element of a finely tuned mechanism ( In the Mechanical Workshop, 1925, State Tretyakov Gallery) [cat. 111]. Deineka’s motives for joining the OST associa- tion in 1925 are understandable. According to his own account, he was “always drawn to large-scale canvases, in which human figures were bigger, more visible, grander.” 4 As a person and artist interested in the social function of the visual arts, in his own prac- tice he wanted to test and apply means and methods capable of adapting to modernity such an “archaic” attribute of the old world as easel painting was reck- oned to be. Furthermore, in Deineka’s view a painting was a kind of mouthpiece of the positive ideas that occupied an increasingly large place in his graphic work, although he was perfectly conscious that the degree and period of influence of drawings badly printed on magazine pages were entirely ephemeral. While most of the members of the association shared Deineka’s desire to find an artistic language capable of expressing contemporary themes pre- cisely and in appropriate imagery through modern expressive means, they essentially diff ered from him in the valuation and interpretation of the position from which this modernity should be approached. In particular, the majority of his colleagues did not share his enthusiastic conviction that the ideal or imaginary need not necessarily materialize in the ec- static vision of a city of the future (as did several of his colleagues in OST), but in the heavy and strained albeit outwardly calm work of “constructing new plants and factories.” Toward the end of the 1920s, reckoning that the creative work of his colleagues had become stuck in blatant “easelism” and that this did not conform to the “present situation,” Deineka broke with OST. He seemed to intuit a radical turn in the life of the country that would lead to fundamental changes and to the liquidation of large masses of people re- garded as “enemy classes.” As he had done at the decade’s onset, Deineka tried to position himself at the vanguard of the visual arts front. He thus be- came one of the organizers of the society Oktiabr’, which would proclaim roughly the same things that the “productionist” 5 opponents of all kinds of easel art had once proclaimed, and in opposition to which OST had been established. The association Oktiabr’ considered it its duty to support certain specifically can be gymnasts drilling next to a crucifix or skiers gliding past a church), this motif continued to appear in his work until the late 1920s, while in the following decade he opted to represent sporting activities and practitioners outside any context. The appearance of such motifs injects even greater dynamism into his pictures—and not only those where physical culture scenes are present. It is safe to say that sport motifs or, more accurately, the sporting spirit ultimately became the hallmark of Deineka’s creative work. As mentioned earlier, from the very start of his artistic trajectory Deineka displayed an inclination to capture movement and rhythm in its many states in his compositions, both in the ones dealing explicitly with these themes and in others. Yet in the mid-1920s movement and rhythm acquired a special “ideological” meaning that re- sponded not only to the development of the linear- plastic conception of the artist but also, to a degree, to the demands of the time, which became all the more rigid and less disposed toward compromise. The foundation of sport is its competitiveness, with the indispensable striving of participants in a compe- tition toward a final victory, their confidence in it and their right to it. Yet at the same time sport is a spec- tacle that should be perceived easily and in a low-key manner. The combination of easiness, power and a certain proletarian coarseness is reflected in the ap- pearance of the artist’s characters. Their motion and their gait acquire confidence and special resiliency— it is not for nothing that Deineka often spoke about “the springing gait” of his figures. In a sense, their forms became more important and monumental; the rhythm and composition acquired a special inviting dynamics, and these traits marked and continued to define the artist’s creative work. At the time of the Society of Easel Painters (OST) and the October Association (Oktiabr’), various art- ists, including Deineka, began to saturate their work with purely constructivist details—meticulous repre- sentations of platforms on various levels, lacework factory constructions and various kinds of lathes and mechanisms—in order to emphasize this rhythmic foundation. And yet the specific image of an ultra- rhythmic and regulated space, dedicated to labor, sport and the collective celebrations of the Soviet people, only surfaced in Deineka’s oeuvre ( Demon- stration, 1928, State Tretyakov Gallery). The artist used all these motifs and even images tied to the heavy trials of the Civil War ( Defense of Petrograd, 1928, Central Museum of Armed Forces) [cat. 131] as proletarian phenomena in the field of the visual arts. Any manifestation of Stankovism, or easel painting, fell under suspicion of being individualistic, while on the contrary, any reference to a general commission from a “collective of consumers,” who allegedly were sharply in need of “industrial art,” was welcome. It is no accident that architects and applied artists made up the majority of the group Oktiabr’. At that time, Deineka was busy working in the field of graphic arts—producing posters in which he demonstrated his ideological loyalty to authority and sharpened his compositional skills—while continuing to collaborate with journals and periodicals, for which he produced illustrations that went on developing the earlier themes of labor and sport, though at the turn of the decade these subjects at times found a new special realization. A number of “dark” drawings executed with fine white lines on a dark background come to mind, in which a series of original “negatives” of his characteristic motifs and models spring up. The dark background serves to “bring to light” some of these aspects about which, it appears, the artist was not fully aware. The theme of labor, for instance, found its expression not in the image of “scientifically orga- nized” and entirely regulated production, but in the form of workers in the dark repairing an electrical net- work and literally extracting light from the darkness, as if accomplishing some sort of “miracle” ( Night Re- pair of the Tram Network , 1929, State Tretyakov Gal- lery). The theme of sport and movement is expressed in swift and transparent white contours on a black ground ( At the Races, 1930). The coarse sensuality of Deineka’s early studies of female models is trans- formed into the beckoning and unattainable sexual- ity of
The Acrobats (1930, State Tretyakov Gallery). Though Deineka only produced a small number of these “negative” drawings, he used this same meth- od in the design of his illustrations for the children’s book
Kuter’ma ( Zimniaia skazka ) [Commotion (A Win- ter Tale)] [cat. 97]
by Nikolai Aseev (incidentally, like Deineka, a native of Kursk province). Deineka applied himself to the design of chil- dren’s books and magazines—a new activity for him—in the late 1920s. He appears to have enjoyed working in this field, in which he displayed consider- able ingenuity and inventiveness while using the de- vices and resources with which he was already famil- iar. Overall, these books and magazines are bright, striking, edifying and didactic. Yet Deineka’s design for the children’s book Kuter’ma was rather diff erent. The artist’s critics have unanimously commented on Fundación Juan March 140 its severe black and white design, which could have been appropriate in view of the “productionist” con- tent of this winter’s tale. It tells the story of how the lights went out in a town on a freezing cold winter, and how life came to a standstill until skillful electri- cians arrived at the scene and repaired the power supply system. Yet in illustrating Aseev’s little book, Deineka for some strange reason did not emphasize its didactic and edifying content, as was habitual in him. And the stories of the bubbling life in the city once the lights returned, with the Pioneers marching anew and Deineka’s trademark skiers racing across the snow, are also interpreted as a sort of addendum to something more important. This “something more important” is materialized in a single illustration— A Girl at the Window (1930)— an episode which, incidentally, does not form part of Aseev’s original text. Present in this drawing is one of Deineka’s recurrent themes, that of oppositions: dark/warm, far away/near, black/white. In keeping with his highly personal style, the artist uses black and white shading to create a sensation of volume and even of temperature, of warmth or cold. How- ever, in contrast to his former work, here, for the first time, he depicts a new heroine who is neither one of his habitual models, nor a woman liberated from “domestic slavery,” nor a female worker pushing a heavy cart. She is not a NEP storekeeper from his ear- ly magazine illustrations, nor an oppressed and in- timidated peasant woman from that same time, nor a sportswoman, nor an adolescent Pioneer, but simply a girl who is endowed with the same nimble and ath- letic carriage of Deineka’s traditional characters, not- withstanding her short stature. As was his custom, the artist portrayed her with her back turned toward the viewer, submerging her—and this is something new in an artist passionate about action—in a state of contemplation on the cold but also extraordinarily at- tractive and melancholy spectacle unfolding before her through a “constructivist” window. It is possible to see this way only in childhood. The artist, who for the first time understood and experienced this mira- cle thanks to his heroine—who appeared out of the blue in the little book Kuter’ma
—depicted her again the following year, 1931, in an easel painting which nonetheless used the same black and white tones (State Tretyakov Gallery, 1931). Two years later, he repeated this motif in a painted version to which he added restrained color (State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg). Already before this Deineka had repeat- ed those motifs which had been successful. Here, Aleksandr Deineka Skating, 1927–28 Drawing for the magazine Prozhektor, no. 23 (117), 1927 Page 25 India ink and lead white on paper, 47 x 40.2 cm State Tretyakov Gallery Moscow Aleksandr Deineka Skiers, 1927 Drawing for the magazine U stanka, no. 2, 1928 Pages 12–13 Watercolor and India ink on paper, 34.1 x 52.8 cm State Tretyakov Gallery Moscow
Fundación Juan March however, true to his principle of representing mo- tion, he compelled his immobile heroine to “move” in the biological sense, i.e., to grow up in the real time in which the artist himself was living. Indeed, in the variant from 1931, the girl appears to have grown: she is roughly a year older than the one who appears in Kuter’ma ; and in the 1933 painting she is even more “grown up.” One could say that this little heroine “ex- isted” and developed as a temporal sketch alongside the artist who created her and turned her into his al- ter ego. This happened at a time when Deineka tem- porarily set aside those ideological themes, subjects and images which he had earlier pursued with such enthusiasm in his illustrations and paintings. Not that he renounced them entirely, but during this stage they coexisted in his oeuvre with works of an alto- gether diff erent nature. In particular, in 1930 Deineka created a series of works on a theme that had appealed to him for some time: the contemplation of something unusually striking and, hence, amazing. However, he no lon- ger shows the scene that captivates his characters, portrayed, as always, with their back to the viewer. It is also significant that the brightest moments of Deineka’s graphic work, hereto associated to his use of black and white—now and then illuminated with one or several colors, as was the case in the pre- ceding decade—from that moment on were linked with large watercolor drawings complemented with touches of tempera or gouache. As if the artist had understood just then that, in order to save face and avoid any manifestation of insincerity and falsity, the time had come to move away from constructiv- ism and the neatness of black and white. He thus switched to the less defined world of colors, shades and halftones, which helped him to reproduce the world in all its beauty like some veritable wonder. At the same time, the purely graphic means which helped him not only to transmit his impressions of this beautiful world but also to show the logic of its structures, and consequently the rationality and jus- tification of its existence, continued to form part of his arsenal. Entirely atypical for a representative of off icial Soviet art, he found beauty not only in the image of a peaceful Soviet sky or in the tranquil and confident Soviet people, but also in that which he saw during his trips to various hostile capitalist countries. Large sheets with wonderfully composed, beautifully drawn and colored Italian and French views by right belong to the best of Deineka’s creations. This seemingly beautiful and rational world sud- denly collapsed with the onset of the Second World War. Many have noted that in this tragic time, the virtu- oso draftsman seems to have lost the skill to wield the graphic resources so familiar to him. He produced an enormous amount of work, but he did so with short, heavy strokes that transmitted his shock at what he saw. In the 1920s he frequently depicted his figures raised from the ground, situated on some sort of plat- form. In the 1930s, they either hovered in the air in the cabins of aeronautic machines or stood firmly on the ground. During the war, the figures—whether people or military technology—in many Deineka drawings lay on the ground or crawl along it. It is as if the very strokes of his pencil cling with their entire strength and cannot tear themselves away from this bitter and terrible yet much loved earth. Toward the end of the war, Deineka’s innate positive mood and faith in ratio- nality and justice were gradually restored. In 1945, his dark watercolors of a demolished Berlin appear to be a righteous condemnation on the evil which had un- leashed the world catastrophe. In the post-war series Wartime Moscow (1946–47) the severe spirit of those terrible times and the premonition of the approach- ing victory are present, at times springing up in ev- eryday details. In 1947 he traveled to Vienna as part of a Soviet delegation. In the series of drawings and wa- tercolors dedicated to this city a striking image of the world comes into existence, a world which, in spite of the recent catastrophe and its perceptible traces, all the same continues to be attractive, secure and even exudes a spirit of mercy, of quiet joy. 1. Aleksandr Deineka, Iz moei rabochei praktiki (From My Working Practice) (Moscow: USSR Academy of Arts, 1961), 7. 2. Cited in Galina L. Demosfenova, Zhurnal’naia grafika Deineki. 1920-nach- alo 1930-kh gg (Deineka’s Magazine Graphics in the 1920s and Early 1930s) (Moscow: Sovetskii khuodozhnik, 1979], xxl. 3. Aleksandr Deineka 1961 (see note 1 above), 11. 4. Ibid., 8.
5. “Productionism,” which conceived itself as a species of collective artis- tic labor whose leading theoretician was Boris Arvatov, was the precur- sor of Soviet constructivism [Ed.]. Fundación Juan March 142 78. Aleksandr Deineka Cover for U stanka [At the Factory Workbench], no. 2, 1924 Magazine. Lithography 20.2 x 27.7 cm MKRKP (b), Moscow Collection Merrill C. Berman 79. Aleksandr Deineka Bezbozhnik u stanka [Atheist at the Factory Workbench], no. 7, 1925 Pages 10–11. Magazine Lithography, 35.5 x 53.3 cm MKRKP (b), Moscow Text: The parson of our parish 1. He smirks with the kulak: the fee is not shared 2. Scare tactics are used on the poor 3. A baby arrives, a calf departs 4. The couple wed, a cow dies 5. Such is the priest, but not the people 1 Collection Merrill C. Berman 81. Aleksandr Deineka Illustration for the story by N. Dorofeev “The History of a Homeless Child” Bezbozhnik u stanka [Atheist at the Factory Workbench], 1924, no. 10 Page 4 of the back cover Magazine. Lithography, 33.1 x 25.4 cm MKRKP (b), Moscow Text at top: On Red Square Text at bottom: Be prepared, always prepared! Collection Merrill C. Berman 80. Aleksandr Deineka Bezbozhnik u stanka [Atheist at the Factory Workbench], no. 8, 1925 Magazine. Lithography 35.5 x 25.4 cm MKRKP (b), Moscow Text: Picture Puzzle / Which one is an atheist? Collection Merrill C. Berman Fundación Juan March Fundación Juan March 144 Fundación Juan March 82. Aleksandr Deineka Illustration for N. Dorofeev’s story “Pelageia Prokhorovka,” Bezbozhnik u stanka [Atheist at the Factory Workbench], no. 11, 1925 Pages 12–13. Magazine Lithography, 35.5 x 53.3 cm MKRKP (b), Moscow Text bottom left: A slave to God Bottom right: A candidate admitted to the [Communist] Party Collection Merrill C. Berman
Illustration for Bezbozhnik u stanka [Atheist at the Factory Workbench] no. 28, 1925. Magazine Lithography, 35.5 x 53.3 cm MKRKP (b), Moscow Text: The power of the Soviets under the leadership of the working class Top: Lenin. We are building socialism under the leadership of the proletariat in union with the poor and the average. Industrialization, cooperation. Lowering of prices! A regime of economics! Power to the Soviets The Red Army! To battle against bureaucracy, the kulak, the priest! Collection Merrill C. Berman 84. Aleksandr Deineka Rokfeller. Risunok dlia zhurnala “Bezbozhnik u stanka” [Rockefeller. Drawing for Atheist at the Factory Workbench], 1926 India ink on paper , 32.6 x 38.7 cm State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow Inv. ArjGr-90 Fundación Juan March
146 Fundación Juan March 85. Aleksandr Deineka Illustration for Bezbozhnik u stanka [Atheist at the Factory Workbench] no. 2, 1926, pages 12–13. Magazine Lithography, 35.5 x 53.3 cm MKRKP (b), Moscow Text at top: A riddle for an old man Text at bottom: So many womenfolk and not one of them is praying. What is this place I’ve come to? Collection Merrill C. Berman 86. Aleksandr Deineka Illustration for Bezbozhnik u stanka [Atheist at the Factory Workbench] no. 6, 1926, pages 12–13. Magazine Lithography, 35.5 x 53.3 cm MKRKP (b), Moscow Text at top: For faith in the Tsar and the fatherland At bottom: At the White Army Headquarters: Repent, vile creature, as the justice of Heaven is drawing near! Shoot this Bolshevik! Collection Merrill C. Berman
Illustration for Bezbozhnik u stanka [Atheist at the Factory Workbench] no. 2, 1927, page 21. Magazine Lithography, 35.5 x 25.4 cm MKRKP (b), Moscow Text: Everyone for himself, but God for all Collection Merrill C. Berman Download 4.48 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
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