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

Aleksandr Deineka: 

A One-Man Biography

of Soviet Art

Christina Kiaer

Fundación Juan March

Fundación Juan March

58

Khrushchev’s Thaw as the USSR negotiated the Cold 

War; and, finally, the position of artists during the era 

of “stagnation” under Brezhnev in the 1960s. 

Deineka vocally embraced the socialist idea from 

the first moment of revolution, and never looked 

back. He literally turned eighteen in 1917, becoming 

an adult with the Revolution; younger by five to ten 

years than most of the main avant-gardists, he had 

no artistic career outside of Soviet structures. His 

work evolved within these structures, which would 

eventually, by the early 1930s, develop into a totally 

new system for producing modern art without the art 

market. This system and the art form that it gener-

ated, socialist realism, have always been understood 

as coercive and repressive, the convenient opposite 

of the freedom of art in the west. Seen in its most pos-

itive light, however, the Soviet system was the most 

advanced in the world: it provided state support for 

artists, delivering them from the vagaries of the mar-

ket, and created a vast infrastructure of paid artistic 

research travel, commissions, exhibitions and mass 

distribution that was meant to make art an egalitar-

ian, collective and participatory experience for pro-

ducers and consumers alike. Although Deineka was 

unusually successful, his career is still representative 

of both the productive aspects of this innovative sys-

tem and its stultifying and recklessly cruel eff ects. 

Deineka can be fit into art historical categories—

his work has been seen in relation to the fresco paint-

ing of the Italian primitives, Russian icons, German 

expressionism, and so on—but to focus too much 

on the nature of his artistic mastery and influences 

would be to miss the point that his work is shaped 

through and through by the “social command” and 

the individual Soviet commissions that were its basis. 

Neither a dissident nor an ideological dupe, Deineka 

produced an earnest and brilliant body of work that 

off ers, for better or worse, a biography of the USSR 

in pictures. This essay will trace the contours of that 

biography, concentrating on the 1920s and 1930s 

and the passage from avant-garde to socialist real-

ism, which is the main focus of the works assembled 

in this exhibition.

Revolution and Civil War

The October Revolution of 1917 jump-started Deine-

ka’s career. In the beginning of 1917 he was just an-

other young student at the School of Fine Arts in 

Kharkhiv, a Ukrainian city near his Russian home town 

of Kursk, where his teachers were traditional artists 

trained at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts in Saint 

Petersburg. His own practice was largely realist, with 

post-impressionistic touches in his landscapes. By 

1918, back in Kursk, he was already overseeing the 

fine arts section of the local department of educa-

tion, and was sent on trips to Moscow by the new 

Soviet authorities to learn advanced techniques 

for creating street decorations for the celebrations 

of the first anniversary of the Revolution. He would 

later write about his gleeful discovery of the avant-

garde on those trips, and claim that on his return to 

his provincial hometown, he was “stuff ing the purest 

cubism into the potholes of Kursk.”

2

 In 1919, he was 

mobilized into the Red Army where he coordinated 

agitation and propaganda, including the direction 

of  the Kursk section of one of the classic projects 

of early Soviet avant-garde art: the famous “ROSTA 

windows,” stenciled Civil War propaganda posters 

produced by the Russian Telegraph Agency (ROSTA) 

that were displayed in the windows of telegraph of-

fices and other sites; Vladimir Mayakovsky himself 

made posters for the Moscow ROSTA, and some of 

 

 

 

      

    hen  we  in  the 

West think of Soviet art, we mostly think of the spec-

tacular pictorial achievement and rousing political 

commitment of the modernist avant-garde of the 

early years of the Revolution. We are by now deeply 

familiar with figures such as the futurist poet Vladi-

mir Mayakovsky, the abstract suprematist painter 

Kazimir Malevich, and constructivists of various 

stripes such as Liubov Popova, El Lissitzky, Vladimir 

Tatlin, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova and 

Gustavs Klucis. Yet the avant-garde forms only part 

of the story of revolutionary Russian art and it ends 

by the 1930s—with Mayakovsky’s 1930 suicide; with 

the deaths of Malevich in 1935, Popova already in 

1924, and Lissitzky in 1941; and the marginalization of 

Tatlin, Rodchenko and Stepanova by the mid-1930s. 

Klucis is the most tragic of this group, murdered at 

the hands of the secret police in 1938 during Stalin’s 

Great Terror. 

Aleksandr Deineka began his career in the heroic 

revolutionary era of the avant-garde, but in contrast 

to these better-known figures, he survived the 1930s 

and stayed more or less successful within the Soviet 

art system all the way until his death in 1969. He is 

not as well known in the West as these avant-gardists 

because as a figurative artist his work was not to the 

taste of the modernist curators and scholars who first 

began the work of retrieving the lost Soviet avant-

garde in the 1960s. More saliently, by the 1930s he 

embodied one model of socialist realism—always 

regarded in the West as kitsch—and he was an off i-

cially sanctioned artist within the Stalinist system, a 

status that made him and all such artists distasteful 

to many Westerners in the era of the Cold War. Yet he 

has always had fans, because his work is simply so 

striking—in 1934, Henri Matisse himself called Deine-

ka “the most talented” and “the most advanced” of 

all the young Soviet artists.

1

 Now that contempo-

rary art has fully challenged modernist orthodoxies, 

embracing diff erent models of figuration, and now 

that revisionist cultural histories of Soviet Russia are 

challenging the totalitarian model in which socialist 

realism must always be seen as repressive, coercive 

and fake, the moment has arrived for us to really see 

Deineka. 

He is worth looking at not only for his vibrant, 

hard-edged images of modern life under socialism, 

but also for the way his career in and of itself tells the 

dramatic story of the sweep of Soviet art from start to 

(almost) finish, from the Revolution to the Brezhnev 

era. His particular story is intertwined with all the key, 

thorny moments of Soviet art and history: the early 

avant-garde of the Civil War years; the proliferation 

of traditional and avant-garde art groups during the 

New Economic Policy; the fierce infighting among 

artists during the First Five-Year Plan; the advent of 

socialist realism in the 1930s; the ruthless realign-

ment of the art world during Stalin’s Great Terror; the 

further shifts caused by the demands of the Second 

World War; the oppressive years of High Stalinism at 

the end of Stalin’s rule; the swings in art policy during 

PAGE 57. Detail of CAT. 1

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the poster designs that Deineka made in Kursk were 

illustrations of Mayakovsky poems. In 1920, at the 

ripe old age of twenty-one, Deineka was appointed 

head of the workers and peasants theater division 

and director of the regional division of the Kursk IZO 

(Regional Department of Fine Arts), where he over-

saw agitational projects such as the decoration of 

agit-trains and the design of revolutionary festivals. 

While it might seem surprising that a young and in-

experienced artist would be given such positions of 

responsibility, Deineka was by all reports a brash and 

confident young man, and further, this situation was 

not unusual within the early Soviet government dur-

ing the confusion of the Civil War—enthusiastic and 

ambitious supporters of the new regime were given 

such appointments when older, established artists 

refused them. In Moscow, for example, Rodchenko 

was appointed director of the Museum Bureau and 

Purchasing Fund in 1920 at the age of twenty-eight, 

with responsibility for reorganizing art schools and 

museums and purchasing new art for museums 

around the country.

What did it look like when Deineka, in all his of-

ficial capacities, was “stuff ing the purest cubism into 

the potholes of Kursk?” How did he unite cubist pic-

torial concerns with his very real, specific and local 

propaganda tasks? His 1919 image 

Battle against Dis-

ruption

 [cat. 39] shows him placing a perfectly realis-

tic train locomotive (carefully labeled no. 36, no less) 

into an unreadable landscape of seemingly receding 

tracks, whirling spirals and red diagonals forming a 

triangle against a blank white ground. These curved 

and linear shapes might not represent the very pur-

est cubism, but they call to mind the forms that ap-

peared in cubist-influenced avant-garde paintings at 

this time, such as Rodchenko’s 

Construction

 of 1919 

[cat. 26]—but unlike Rodchenko’s insistence on such 

painterly forms as themselves now the proper sub-

ject matter of art, Deineka uses them to evoke the 

chaos that resulted from the disruption of the cen-

tralized train system caused by the Civil War. In the 

background the phrase “battle against disruption” 

(

bor’ba s razrukhoi

) is hand lettered and non-linear, 

like the texts that appeared in many avant-garde 

works of this time, such as El Lisstizky’s famous Civil 

War propaganda poster 

Beat the Whites with the 

Red Wedge

, 1919–20 [cat. 14]. But messy lettering or 

no, the phrase is readable, and in combination with 

the picture of the locomotive, we immediately un-

derstand the purpose of the image: to remind us to 

support the Bolshevik campaign to keep the trains 

running on time.

Just as the Soviet train system was fully central-

ized and all trains famously ran on Moscow time, so 

the center of the new art lay in Moscow, and an am-

bitious—and by now unusually experienced—young 

artist like Deineka needed to get himself there. In 

early 1921, toward the very end of the Civil War, he 

received permission from the Kursk authorities to 

be relieved of his Red Army duties and to relocate 

to the capital to enroll in the new state school of art 

and industrial design, the Higher Arts and Technical 

Studios (Vysshie khudozhestvenno-tekhnicheskie 

masterskie, VKhUTEMAS). At the very center of in-

novative art pedagogy in Soviet Russia, its painting 

faculty boasted teachers from the avant-garde such 

as Rodchenko, Popova and Aleksandr Vesnin.

Deineka opted to enroll in the graphics faculty be-

cause of his commitment to making art that could be 

mass distributed, such as posters and illustrations, 

and during his years at VKhUTEMAS he developed 

the foundations for his terse, stylized form of figura-

tion. The “cubist” squiggles and unidentifiable lines 

that we saw in 

Battle against Disruption

 drop out, but 

the cubist destruction of traditional pictorial space 

would define his work for many years to come in the 

form of blank white grounds, geometrically-blocked 

and often diagonal compositions, or figures that are 

stacked on top of each other rather than fitted into 

three-dimensional boxes of space. These kinds of 

compositional forms would lead later, in the 1930s, 

to accusations against him of “formalism” and “sche-

matism”—but that gets us ahead of our story. 

The New Economic Policy

In 1921, in an attempt to save the economy from total 

collapse after the upheavals of world war, revolution 

and civil war, the Soviet government instituted a se-

ries of economic measures known as the New Eco-

nomic Policy (NEP). These measures partially legal-

ized private manufacture and trade, eff ectively rein-

stating a limited model of capitalism after the radical 

communist economic measures of the Civil War years 

known as War Communism. A semblance of the prer-

evolutionary art market returned with the new patron 

class of rich “Nepmen”—the speculators, merchants 

and middlemen who could suddenly operate legal-

ly—who wanted attractive paintings, sculptures and 

other objects of display, in direct contrast to the vari-

ous forms of art supported by the Bolshevik govern-

ment, from constructivism to propaganda posters 

to figurative easel paintings of workers and red army 

soldiers. VKhUTEMAS, as the hotbed of the new revo-

lutionary art, was a kind of bulwark against the return 

of philistinism (

meshchanstvo

) in art during NEP. 

Mayakovsky was a patron, and Vladimir Lenin and his 

wife, Nadezhda Krupskaia, paid a visit to the students 

there on February 25, 1921. VKhUTEMAS students at 

that time had an acute sense of themselves as the 

generation that would produce an entirely new kind 

of socialist art. 

Deineka fit right into this mindset, with his already 

extensive experiences of revolutionary art adminis-

tration as well as art production in Kursk, and his self-

assured personality. Repeatedly described as 

svetlyi

, 

meaning light or blond; 

bodryi

, meaning cheerful, 

or hale and hearty; and 

zhizneradostnyi

, meaning 

literally “happy with life,” he was well known as an 

accomplished boxer in the VKhUTEMAS gym, one of 

the centers of school life. A photograph of him from 

the early 1920s, dressed in a tank top and gym shorts 

[fig. 1], conveys his identification with the “new So-

viet person,” trim and fit from participation in whole-

some sports as well as labor—the antithesis of the 

Nepman and his female counterpart the Nepmanka, 

who were usually depicted in Soviet visual culture, 

along with priests, rich peasants, and any bourgeois, 

as corpulent and debauched. While studying at 

VKhUTEMAS, Deineka was in fact learning to become 

one of the prime architects of precisely this graphic 

visual language of class diff erence that would define 

much of Soviet art.  

Even before leaving the school, he published his 

satiric drawings nationally for the first time in the jour-

nal 

Bezbozhnik u stanka 

in 1923, and would continue 

as a prolific journal illustrator into the 1930s. Journals 

like 

Bezbozhnik u stanka

 used crude and virulent an-

ti-religious satire in an attempt to convert workers—

who were often recent transplants from the more 

religious countryside—into socially conscious athe-

ists. Religion was associated with benighted peasant 

ways or, conversely, with bogus bourgeois propriety, 

and women were targeted as particularly backward 

and unwilling to give up their traditional faith. One of 

FIG. 1. Deineka in the 

early 1920s

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Deineka’s illustrations from 1925 shows two women 

side by side with the coy title “Picture Puzzle” and the 

caption, “Which one is an atheist?” [cat. 80]. Is it the 

trim, strong young woman worker on the right, iden-

tifiable by her simple clothing and red worker’s ker-

chief, striding confidently toward us with a factory in 

the background? Or is it the blowsy woman waddling 

toward us on the left, her fashionable dress clinging 

to her large, floppy breasts and soft belly, and framed 

by a room with a lampshade and curtains, the con-

temporary semaphores of a bourgeois interior?

This drawing demonstrates the extraordinary 

economy of means that would make Deineka such 

a popular illustrator. The worker’s skirt, for example, 

is simply an unmodulated black shape, recogniz-

able through a minimum of curving outlines. The 

extensive areas of white form both negative spaces 

(what we as viewers must supply as “background”) 

and positive ones (such as the collar and belt of the 

bourgeois woman’s dress). Spatial relations are sug-

gested, rather than spelled out, through the simple 

positioning of the feet, or through a montage-like 

technique familiar from the photomontages of Rod-

chenko, such as the little square of fussy tiles that 

floats under the pointy shoes of the Nepmanka. 

Two elongated, openly suprematist or constructiv-

ist black and red quadrilaterals separate the two 

pictures. Deineka’s mix of avant-garde techniques 

with a total commitment to readable, didactic figu-

ration demonstrates that early Soviet art was more 

fluid and varied in its allegiances than suggested 

by the combative rhetoric of the avant-garde itself, 

which insisted, especially in the pages of the journal 

Lef

, on the gulf between the traditional hand-drawn 

“picture,” which would be inadequate for represent-

ing the new socialist life, and the abstract, industrial 

and technical objects produced by constructivism.

3

 

Although in the West our understanding of early So-

viet art is dominated by the avant-garde, it actually 

formed only one modest, if vocal wing of the Soviet 

art world. Most artists, including young art students, 

rejected what they saw as the extremism of the 

Lef

 

artists in favor of figurative art of various degrees of 

modernism and realism. 

Deineka’s graphic work for journals such as 

Bezh-

bozhnik u stanka

 was not only formally innovative, 

but also represented a new model of artistic work 

that would eventually, by the 1930s, become stan-

dard practice in the Soviet art world: he was routinely 

sent to industrial sites on assignment in order to 

produce drawings of workers. In 1925, for example, 

he went on assignment to the Donbass to study the 

work and lives of miners, and also to the Trekhgornia 

(Triple Peaks) textile factory in Moscow to observe 

the lives of the predominantly female workers there 

in the workshops and dormitories for a special issue 

on “women and religion.” Such assignments were 

known as 

komandirovki

, from the verb 

komandiro-

vat’

, meaning to dispatch or send on a mission. Of 

course investigative journalists and documentary 

photographers had always been sent on assign-

ments by the press, but these Soviet 

komandirovki

 

represent a new and fundamental aspect of Soviet 

art: the conviction, especially in the face of NEP com-

promises, that the purpose of art was to document 

and express socialist labor and construction—and 

not just for artists producing illustrations for mass 

journals but for easel painters as well. 

In spite of his graphic emphasis, Deineka had 

studied painting at Kharkiv and VKhUTEMAS, and in 

1925 he became a founding member of the Society 

of Easel Painters (Obshchestvo stankovistov, known 

as OST). Composed of a disparate group of mostly 

younger artists who had been heavily influenced by 

the avant-garde, its goal was to unite experimental, 

modernist painting techniques of various stripes 

with socialist subject matter and social purpose. The 

group’s name deliberately invoked easel painting 

in order to reclaim it both from the constructivists, 

who had dismissed it as bourgeois and outmoded 

no matter how socialist the subject matter, and from 

the dominant Association of Artists of Revolutionary 

Russia (Assotsiatsiia khudozhnikov revoliutsionnoi 

Rossii, AKhRR) group which insisted that revolution-

ary subject matter had to be painted in a traditional 

realist style, preferably that of nineteenth-century 

Russian realists like Il’ia Repin, in order to respect the 

dignity of proletarian viewers. As an ambitious art-

ist, Deineka wanted to make his mark in painting—a 

medium that received more critical attention than 

graphics, then as now—and the formally open-end-

ed but politically committed platform of OST was 

ideally suited to his purposes. In the first OST exhi-

bition in 1925, he exhibited his large canvas 

Before 

the Descent into the Mine

 [cat. 115] which was a 

literal, point by point transposition of a drawing he 

had made of miners preparing to start their shift for 

the cover of the third issue of the journal 

U stanka

 in 

1924. Transposed from the small, newsprint graphic 

format to the much larger size and glossy surface of 

an oil painting, the rhythmic composition of the pairs 

of miners, the sparely-delineated, almost silhouetted 

bodies, the near monochrome colors and the blank 

white and beige grounds take on a decidedly radical, 

modernist look, evoking the paintings of the Neue

 

Sachlichkeit

 

in Germany. Critics responded positive-

ly to the “severe graphic quality” of this painting, see-

ing in it a “monumental” style well suited to depicting 

the grandeur of labor.

4

  

Deineka would go on to produce only three more 

major paintings as a member of OST, between 1926 

and 1928, but all of them became instant classics of 

Soviet art: 

Building New Factories

 of 1926 [cat. 116], 

Female Textile Workers

 of 1927 [cat. 125] and the Civil 

War themed 

Defense of Petrograd

 of 1928 [cat. 131], 

commissioned for the 10th Anniversary Exhibition of 

the Red Army. They all share the graphic quality of 

his earliest OST painting, as well as origins in journal 

drawings, but they demonstrate his increased atten-

tion to the specificity of the medium of painting. In 

Building New Factories

, one of the women is pushing 

an industrial trolley, just like the women workers in a 

textile factory in his 1926 illustration for 

Bezbozhnik u 

stanka

, “A Riddle for an Old Man” [cat. 85]. At the bot-

tom right of this image a tiny, caricatured old priest 

peers into this picture of strong, purposefully work-

ing women, saying, “So many womenfolk, and not 

one of them is praying. What is this place I’ve come 

to?” Another drawing from the same journal later 

in 1926 gives an even more detailed account of the 

textile factory floor and its machinery, showing the 

women working barefoot in the heat and humidity.

5

 

Yet in the painting, placed onto the blank ground and 

montaged factory elements, the two female figures 

have taken on a muscular, Michelangelo-like painter-

ly heft, at once lyrical and massive, with the flowing 

dress and laughing rosy-cheeked face of the woman 

in white, combined with the bare feet and the unex-

pectedly bright blue sky, suggesting a kind of indus-

trial pastoral. The subject of the painting is now the 

charged mutual gaze between the two monumental 

women, one facing out, one facing in, one light, one 

dark. Much more than in 

Before the Descent into the 

Mine

 of the previous year, the shift from propaganda 

drawing to stand-alone easel painting ups the am-

bition of the image: the question here is no longer 

“What does the factory floor look like?” or “What do 

atheist workers look like?” but “What will the joy of 

collective laboring bodies look like under socialism?”