Aleksandr Deineka (1899-1969) : an avant-garde for the proletariat
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[cat. 98]. (In the latter, there is an illustration that might as well have been an inverted cinemato- graphic version of Malevich’s Black Square , but is in fact a trivial scene of an audience sitting before a white screen in a dark cinema waiting for the elec- trician to restore electricity. 56 ) Electricity also finds its way into fragments of Deineka’s paintings. In Female Textile Workers
[cat. 125], a light bulb hangs over the figure on the far right. In a sketch of the left panel of a wall- painting Deineka was commissioned for the 1937 exhibition, electrical wiring dominates a picture of factory buildings, tractors and crowds dressed in red and white [fig. 24]. Using pale and somber colors in the second panel, Deineka portrayed the civil war, the impoverished soil of the kulaks
and an old plow hauled by a starving draft animal [fig. 25]. And it is clearly explicit in the colossal paint- ing that closes this exhibition, The Opening of the Kolkhoz Electric Station [cat. 244], completed in 1952.
However, Deineka’s oil paintings and posters from the late 1920s and 1930s explicitly reproduce electricity’s most dramatic eff ect: industrialization. Industrialization was more than just a guideline in Stalin’s policy; in addition to being linked with his nickname (“Stalin,” from “stal’,” meaning “steel” in Russian), industrialization was the
policy during his rule: the transfiguration of Stalin himself, as Klucis’s photomontage for the magazine Za proletarskoe iskusstvo [cat. 143, 144] suggests. This identifica- tion with industry was most visible in the imple- mentation of the Five-Year Plans and the erection of the most emblematic structure of his time: the Moscow Metro, a project in which Deineka took part. 57
Deineka’s work illustrates the various sides of industrialization: the exploitation of natural re- sources, industrial work and the mechanization of work in all its variants. In his paintings, he de- picts themes frequently linked to the Five-Year Plans; during the First Five-Year Plan (1928–32) he produced some of his better-known paintings and posters devoted to industrialization [cat. 115, 116, 125] and the collectivization and modernization of agriculture [cat. 168, 223]. Aviation was also a common theme in Deineka’s oeuvre. In the visual culture of the period, aviation— FIG. 22. Double-page spread in
URSS in Construction no. 9, September 1931 Fundación José María Castañé
FIG.23. Double-page spread in SSSR na stroike no. 7–8, 1934 Fundación José María Castañé [cat. 201] FIG.26. Krushchev with an airplane model in his study, ca. 1960. Fundación José María Castañé Fundación Juan March
the conquest of air and space—was closely linked to electrification and understood as a result of the conquest of earth and water and the spread of So- viet ideology. Aviation was, for many years, a recur- rent subject [fig. 26] in both Stalinist visual culture [cat. 210, 211] and Deineka’s body of work. The artist himself explained the impact aerial perspective and the experience of flying had on his output: I have traveled widely across Russia, Europe, Amer- ica, by boat and plane, and I have been enriched by the impressions of these trips. But the most vivid im- pression of all was flying over Kursk in 1920. I didn’t recognize the city from the air, so unexpected was the panorama of houses, streets and gardens unfold- ing below me. It was a new feeling, that of a man ris- ing in the air and seeing his hometown in an abso- lutely new light, but it would take me a long time to realize that all of this could be useful to my art. . . 58 He then continues: We have seen the far side of the moon for the first time. Our cosmonauts have feasted their eyes upon the Earth from the cosmos and found it to be beauti- ful. That which was a dream has become reality. The brilliant artist Leonardo da Vinci could only dream about flight, but we dream and fly. 59
airships [cat. 205]—are represented in his canvases [cat. 207, 208], posters and illustrations for books and magazines [cat. 96]. These topoi
are not an in- nocent “mimesis” of reality: obvious and illustrious forerunners are avant-garde artists Tatlin and Ma- levich. In addition to the plane crash in the last scene of Pobeda nad solntsem, the opera reveals an antecedent to the faint, light pathos of the new Stalinist world [fig. 27]: . . . it is precisely this “lightness” that characterizes the New World, and Malevich, whose postulate of ab- stract nature fits in a world that has freed itself from the principle of the force of gravity. 60
Malevich also refers to this subject in his writ- ings, as witnessed by the last phrase in the follow- ing quotation, which belongs to “On the Museum”: Flying’s magical appeal not only characterized the basic idea of suprematism concerning the “neutral- ization of the force of gravity,” but also aff ected, on a broader scale, the liberating gesture of the era, the desire to escape three-dimensionality, an earthly prison, and contemplate a new global world from a bird-eye’s view. In this sense, flying was at that time just as innovative as cinema . . . since both enabled, or even forced, an entirely new dynamization of percep- tive perspective. “Do we need Rubens or the Cheops Pyramid? Is a depraved Venus necessary to the pilot in the heights of our new comprehension?” 61
The Pathos of an Era That said, the balance between formal qualities (that is, “realist”) and “content” (that is, “socialist”) can re- veal diff erences between Deineka’s oeuvre and that of Isaak Brodskii or Aleksandr Gerasimov, for example,
1937, 1937 Oil on canvas, 70 x 220 cm Perm State Museum FIG. 25. Aleksandr Deineka 1917, 1937 Oil on canvas, 71 x 222.5 cm Perm State Museum FIG. 27. Illustrated page in the book
Rabochaia Krestianskaia Krasnaia Armiia [Workers and Peasants Red Army], 1934 Fundación José María Castañé [cat. 215] Fundación Juan March 44 It was a collective pathos that was new and newly built, enhanced by urban planning, the bustle of work and production [cat. 175]. This sentiment was further underlined by re- current imperatives, exclamation marks and nu- merous terms belonging to socialism’s semantic field that made their way into book and magazine titles or posters dominating the streetscape: The
Reconstruction of Architecture, The Construction of Moscow, Build the Partnership of Craftsmen, We are Mechanizing the Donbass! , We Must Become Experts , The Metro is Here! ,
phrases that were in- dicative of a happy collective consciousness work- ing in unison towards a prosperous future. Within this collective consciousness was an en- thusiastic eagerness intrinsically linked to produc- tivity: poetry appeared beside the grueling job of mining [cat. 159, 160] while the Stakhanovites were seen marching cheerfully in 1937 [fig. 29]. Through this type of imagery the prototypical “landscapes” and “scenes” of socialist realism were rendered vis- ible [fig. 30]. 65 What was conveyed was a fraternal feeling, a sense of joyful camaraderie that tran- scended all borders and races [fig. 31]. A springlike pathos, a celebration of May Day [cat. 161], a spirit of which the citizens of the Soviet Union felt part and one to which Deineka contributed through his art. As he observed: Life is especially good in the spring, especially du- ring May Day—the world workers’ holiday . . . On Red to mention two well-known representatives of social- ist realism.
Deineka mastered a wide range of themes and genres, and did not merely reproduce the proto- typical iconography of socialist realism’s “aesthetic arsenal.” 62 His art possesses an ambivalent quality: Deineka worked simultaneously on political posters and canvases and combined oil painting with the realist equivalent to Tarabukin’s “Machine Art” (the wall painting), 63 as appreciated in his large-scale fres- coes, mosaic panels and murals commissioned by the Soviet regime. Overall, he was a gifted painter and an excep- tional draftsman, and all these qualities combined made him stand out among his fellow painters. One could argue Deineka was the only painter who truly practiced “socialist realism”—and at the same time partook in the unique, genuine pathos of socialist realism and Stalinism—whereas other artists prac- ticed a motionless form of “realistic socialism.” 64 Deineka’s body of work, for example, includes very few representations and portraits of the iconic figures of socialist realism (Marx, Lenin, Stalin or his entourage of Soviet leaders). Whether dead or alive, Lenin was, of course, at the core of Soviet life and its collective imaginary. Not even Stalin dared to question Lenin’s status as the indisputable lead- er, and instead he chose to represent himself as a sort of duplicate, a new edition of the dead leader. (For a brief period, his body rested beside Lenin’s and his name was inscribed on the mausoleum beneath Lenin’s name.) Lenin was the exception in
Lenin on a Walk with Children, 1938 Oil on canvas, 136 x 190 cm Museum of Armed Forces, Moscow
Deineka’s oeuvre, the only political figure he ever represented. In a radiant scene dating from 1938, Lenin is portrayed in an automobile surrounded by children—the future, the potential citizens of uto- pia—as they leave a dark, cloudy past behind and move towards a brighter future, like the weather conditions represented in the image [fig. 28]. But if Deineka’s oeuvre is considered “social- ist realism” it is not only because of the motifs of his work, but because he actively took part in the unique pathos
of Stalin’s Russia and conveyed it in his work. During the 1920s and 1930s, the USSR seemed to experience a period of optimistic, cheerful romanticism. For example, when con- fronted with discouraging news—such as the sad unemployed women depicted in a painting from 1932 [cat. 182]—the blame was placed on foreign actors (the title of this work was Bezrabotnye v Berline
[The Unemployed in Berlin]). Fundación Juan March FIG. 29. Aleksandr Deineka
Stakhanovites, 1937 Oil on canvas, 126 x 200 cm Perm State Art Gallery
Double-page spreads in L’URSS en construction no. 1, January 1937 Collection MJM, Madrid [cat. 231] FIG. 30. Double-page spreads in
URSS en construction no. 8, August 1936 Collection MJM, Madrid [cat. 179] and URSS en construcción no. 5–6, 1938 Collection MJM, Madrid [cat. 235] Fundación Juan March
46 Square, we heard the powerful rumble of defense te- chnology. We saw the measured tread of our soldiers. Sportsmen passed by with light steps. The merry hubbub of the Pioneers rang above the square. We saw an endless stream of people, walking by the Mau- soleum in which lies the great Lenin . . . For us artists, the May holiday is doubly excellent . . . The profound humanity of the everlasting ideas of Lenin, his con- cern about monumental propaganda imparts to art a special democratic nature, it is realized in the gran- deur of images, comprehensible to ordinary people far beyond the limits of the Soviet Union. Paintings, frescoes, the adornment of the cities and everyday life—all should be pierced through with a profound national spirit and with beauty. 66 A spirit of sentimental lyricism imbued every- thing. In 1934, an excessive number of floral mo- tifs appeared on the front cover of SSSR na stroike [cat. 214], while the inside pages featured a chil- dren’s off ering at a floral eff igy of Stalin [fig. 32]. It was a spirit of bucolic lyricism, as appreciated in the issue devoted to Gorky Park which included an embarrassing inscription by George Bernard Shaw. 67
ing in a paradise and, more importantly, a paradise eff ectively safeguarded [fig. 33] from its enemies. “The Reality of Our Program is Real People, It’s You and Me” In this proletarian chanson de geste , revolutionary work ethic became attached to productivist and bio- logical utopias, something of a Soviet take on Tay- lorism, Fordism and Eugenics that was evidenced in the ideas put forward by Aleksei Gastev [fig. 34] and the Central Institute of Labor, Aaron Zal’kind’s Psy-
chology of the Communist of the Future , Aleksandr Bogdanov’s optimistic theories about vitality, and Valerian Murav’ev’s pamphlets on the use of time as a means of organizing labor. 68 The regime’s obses- sion with progress, comparative figures and visual graphics—as appreciated, for example, in a unique edition in Spanish of Moscow Has a Plan by M. Il’in [cat. 174] with a front cover designed by Mauricio Amster—went hand in hand with their centralized and demiurgic conception of political power. And while such high ideas were instrumental, in the end work methods and manpower are inseparably linked. In the following text, Deineka expressed a sentiment that characterized his entire body of work, a motto that may well be applied to Stalinist iconography: “At one time I was carried away by the lacework of facto- ry constructions, but they are only the background. I always portrayed man in close-up . . .”
69 In spite of the mammoth size of the factories and their beastly machinery—as seen in the aeri- al photograph of the Magnitogorsk complex [fig. 35] which was compared to the Ford River Rouge plant
70 —manpower and the physical eff ort of hu- man beings continued to be the center of atten- tion: Like Razulevich’s photomontage [cat. 170] or Klucis’s poster of Stalin marking the pace of work- ers and the militia [fig. 36], the leader’s statement that “the reality of our program is real people, it’s you and me” defined the era. An era epitomized by the slogan “Nothing is impossible for a Bolshevik” [cat. 216]. The emphatic words printed in Nikolai Sidel’nikov’s photo collage [cat. 190]—“time, en- ergy, will,” all Soviet, it is understood—could over- come anything. The sun’s death left a void in which time ceased to exist allowing the Bolsheviks to not only shorten distance 71 but destroy it, and lead the way towards “the world behind the looking glass (‘all the tops facing downwards as if in a mirror’) where time either stops or goes randomly ‘against the clock’.” 72 In this mindset, the Five-Year Plan could be achieved in four, as Vasilii El’kin’s poster suggests [cat. 178]. Fredric Jameson has pointed out that the pro- cessual logic of the Soviet system must be under- stood within this context. The subject matter of sport [cat. 192, 193] and fit, athletic bodies [cat. 195]—recurrent in Deineka’s work—also responds to this concept, as observed by Boris Groys. 73 The
productivity of the body was directly conveyed by Deineka in works like Shockworker, Be a Physi- cal Culturist! [cat. 113] and Collective Farmer, Be a Physical Culturist! [cat. 191], both from 1930, or the outstanding Work, Build and Don’t Whine! from 1933 [cat. 197], in which he articulated the produc- tive, military and patriotic qualities of sport, under- stood as a matter of state, with striking and opti- mistic detail.
The general pathos of the Stalin era can be summa- rized (as Boris Groys and Christina Kiaer have done, among many others), in a phrase coined by Stalin in 1935: “Life has become better, comrades, life has become more joyous.” This remark applies to the dif- ferent aspects of the Soviet life that socialist realism tried to represent in its “revolutionarily transforma- tion” and also mirrors the festive atmosphere of the time. Deineka was part of and contributed to this cel- ebratory spirit, present in some of his better-known compositions. However, this general feeling, this atmosphere can only be understood as the almost psychotropic eff ect of a kind of ideological hard drug: the belief that they were already living in the future: the fu- ture they had dreamed of, their goal [see fig. 3], a future they already lived in because their “dreams had come true” [fig. 37]. This sentiment runs through the entire rep- ertoire of choreographed motifs which, due to
URSS en construction no. 3, March 1934 Collection MJM, Madrid [cat. 72]
Double-page spreads in L’URSS en construction no. 1, January 1937 Collection MJM, Madrid [cat. 231] Fundación Juan March
restrictions of space, was examined in this essay through the structural metaphor of light and its artificial transformation. This repertoire signals to what extent socialist realism was a vehicle for the transmission of Soviet ideology in everyday life [cat. 35]. As Ekaterina Degot suggests, socialist realism followed the inexorable demands of an ar- tistic economy targeted at consumers of ideology rather than market consumers. 74 From the Kremlin star [cat. 75], the buildings [cat. 158], the auto- mobiles’ brake lights [cat. 77], the New Year tree lights [cat. 76], or an image of one of the Seven Sisters on the back of a pack of cigarettes [cat. 71]; from work to death, as well as children’s play [cat. 156], a “varied uniformity” seems to coherently run through everyday life: Stalinist culture could well be defined in theatrical and cinematographic (as well as museistic 75 ) terms. In short, it was rendered through representation. Soviet life was, to a certain degree, “per- formed,” not only in a literary sense as entertain- ment for the masses—like the marching soldiers who spell out the leader’s name (Kirov) with their colored uniforms [fig. 38]—but as a genuine, social choreography in which each person occupied his designated place within a larger machinery. The eff igy of its motor and main actor, Stalin, can be interpreted—as in this photomontage—as a meta- phor for this social structure [fig. 39].
The images of socialist realism share a cinemato- graphic quality that brings to mind a sequence of film frames. Nonetheless, together they do not make up a realist or neo-realist film depicting real life but a film narrating the rehearsal of a dreamlike reality Soviet life tried to fulfill for years: it was a dress rehearsal for utopia.
76 In the tradition of the literaturnost’ typical of Russian-Soviet culture, this was a subtitled rehears- al: the revolutionary mottos and phraseology were present almost everywhere—on billboards, posters and flags [cat. 46], some of which were flooded with written information (see, for example, cat. 141). Socialist realism was a long performance of the life that followed the victory over the sun,
a mi- mesis of the real
dress rehearsal for utopia: it was not an imitation of the world, but a mimesis of the world that should be. The former would have re- sulted in “realist socialism” or rather “dirty realism” (as has been proved) given the fact that the con- trast between depictions of reality and reality itself was unquestionable. The idyllic images of agricul- tural collectivization and modernization contradict real facts of famine and poverty, political purges and mass deportation, the assassination of kulaks and forced labor. No. Socialist realism had to “represent life in its
revolutionary transformation .” 77 It was not simply a matter of “performing” the life that was being Download 4.48 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
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