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

74

the actual works of the new art were less important 

than the relationships, relationships that did not sim-

ply summon a new art to life, but, and this was very 

important for him, that were generated by this new 

art: the language of friendship, intimacy, love.

Art understood as such requires not the critic 

as idler, but a participant, a member of a commu-

nity who demonstrates loyalty to his own group. In 

1937 Rodchenko wrote in his diary: “. . . something 

very warm must be done, human, for all humanity . . . 

Not to ridicule man, but to approach him intimately, 

closely, maternally tenderly . . . Motherhood. Spring. 

Love. Comrades. Children. Friends. Teacher. Dreams. 

Joy, etc.”

12

 This is a rather accurate description not 

only of the themes, but also of the aesthetics of so-

cialist realism—an aesthetics of the positive.

The Language of Loyalty

Art that bases its aesthetics on the construction of 

medially manifested social relations, and is rather 

indiff erent to the individual work, represents a social-

ist realism that is closer to the works of Joseph Ko-

suth than to realism. This is not easy to accept, since 

works of socialist realism usually appear very mate-

rial—pastose painting in a heavy frame, far removed 

from the laconic aesthetics of conceptualism. Many 

of the prominent figures of socialist realism—Sergei 

Gerasimov, Fedor Bogorodskii, Aleksandr Deineka, 

Iurii Pimenov, Il’ia Mashkov, Petr Konchalovskii—be-

gan their careers either in the circles of abstract art, 

or at least while the memory of VKhUTEMAS was still 

alive. Between the 1930s and 1950s the evolution 

from naturalism to abstraction that is often identified 

with the history of modernism is reversed in the work 

of these and other artists. Lines and planes become 

ever less expressive, colors less bright, the structure 

of the composition less obvious. Socialist realism—in 

general and in the work of individual artists—became 

a method that was increasingly vague and blurred, 

which could be understood as a unique form of laco-

nicism, but aimed primarily at the viewer.

If the modernism of capitalism formulated a spe-

cific language of criticism (minimizing, reduction-

ist), then the modernism of socialism—socialist real-

ism—pursued a consciously constructed alternative, 

formulating a language of positivity. While modern-

ism expresses distance and alienation exposing the 

method, this criticism of the medium is entirely ab-

sent in socialist realism, where a simplification of form 

is not permitted to any degree whatsoever. Socialist 

realism is recognized on the basis of this characteris-

tic, and it could be presumed that this was in fact its 

aesthetic program. The typical Soviet criticism of the 

form of a given work related not to a flawed style, but 

to the very presence of that style. Painting with the 

slightest intimation to the “cube, cone and pyramid” 

of Cézanne (whose legacy was decisive for Russian 

painting after 1910) was persecuted because young 

communists were forbidden to draw so “lifelessly.” 

The overemphasizing of method, the relishing of col-

or, the inflation of decorative quality and inordinate 

emphasis of any element whatsoever disqualified a 

work as inappropriate to socialist realism, the ideal 

work of which should, it seems, have no properties 

at all. This description applies to the aesthetics of a 

painting done from a photograph (as in Filonov’s Sta-

lin portrait, but also in the painting of the academic 

Isaak Brodskii, who was a great admirer of Filonov), 

but it also covers art that had appropriated the clas-

sics, a conglomerate of trivialized historical styles. 

The evolution from cubism and strict post-construc-

tivist style to realism with a nod toward the classics 

had been accomplished in the 1930s by Aleksandr 

Deineka in painting and Vera Mukhina in sculpture. 

The most widespread variation, however, was im-

pressionism—the final frontier before the painting of 

Cézanne with whom the emphasis on medium be-

gan—but only impressionism with consciously “pol-

luted” color and sluggish, non-expressive strokes. 

Although French impressionism was judged harshly 

in Soviet criticism, in practice such pillars of off icial 

painting as Aleksandr Gerasimov, Vasilii Efanov, Boris 

Ioganson (not to mention the millions of less famous 

artists) painted precisely in this indeterminate man-

ner, and it was in just this direction that the academ-

ic, smooth manner of the nineteenth century, that is 

rare in Soviet art, was transformed. This “style with-

out style” turned out to be less vulnerable to criticism 

and, therefore, in the 1940s and 1950s acquired the 

status of being off icial art. Already during the late 

1920s Anatolii Lunacharskii praised new paintings of 

village life by Petr Konchalovskii (one of the pioneers 

of this manner) for the fact that it was immediately 

obvious that his peasants were neither rich nor poor, 

but middling.

The social meaning of this kind of painting rests 

in the implication of the laconic nature of the viewer 

who is deprived of the opportunity of assuming a crit-

ical attitude toward a given work. As Clement Green-

berg demonstrated in his classical works, modernism 

practices “self-criticism of art” in the forms of art, and 

therefore concretely emphasizes the foundations of 

such criticism, the criteria. It is precisely these crite-

ria—color, form, line—that modernist painting dem-

onstrates in more and more pure form, as though 

anticipating the work of the critic. However if these 

means are not identified explicitly—especially when 

this takes such a radical form as in socialist realism—

then the work is principally “nothing at all,” invulner-

able to criticism, there is nothing to be said about 

it. Whoever has tried to look attentively at a work of

Cover of

 Iskusstvo v massy

no. 2 (10), 1930

Archivo España-Rusia 

[cat. 146]

“I. V. Stalin and A. M. Gorky. 

September 25, 1932, on 

the 40th anniversary of 

A. M. Gorky’s literary and 

revolutionary activity.” 

Illustrated page in 

Stalin, 1939

Fundación José María 

Castañé [cat. 236]

Fundación Juan March

socialist realism is very familiar with the feeling of pro-

found frustration and temporary speechlessness.

The project of art as a means for paralyzing ex-

cessively individualistic action or judgment was 

well known in earlier Russian art too. Fedor Vasil’ev, 

a nineteenth-century Russian landscape artist from 

the Wanderer movement who died young, was ex-

traordinarily interested in theory. He dreamed of 

drawing a landscape that would stop a criminal who 

had decided to commit some evil deed. Malevich 

the suprematist aspired to paint in such a way that 

“words would freeze on the lips of the prophet.” So-

cialist realism aims to paralyze (not to mobilize and 

propagandize as is normally assumed) and, amount-

ing to the same thing, collectivize, and as such it ap-

pears as the precursor to contemporary international 

advertising whose goal is not to persuade us to buy, 

but to ward off  questions about quality and useful-

ness—to curtail critical judgment.

Perhaps this is the principal eff ect of mass dis-

tribution: it blurs, smoothes over any “self-criticism 

of the media” with its instantaneousness. Perhaps 

the notion of the critical potential of modernism as 

a whole is strongly exaggerated. Among the roots of 

modernism is the fanaticism of the artist, who con-

centrates on things he loves and is loyal to (about 

which he has no doubts). Perhaps the term most 

appropriate for defining the position of the artist 

between ecstatic apologia and criticism is “satire-

heroics,” which was made up by the projectionist 

Solomon Nikritin.

The attempt to avoid thematizing the media within 

a work of art could be connected with the fact that the 

work itself begins to be understood as a medium, as 

an integral image instantaneously fulfilling the task of 

“switching on/off ” a specific discourse. In the contem-

porary world this is primarily a characteristic of adver-

tising, which relates to modern art as its applied ver-

sion. “Poetry and art cease to be goals, they become 

means (of advertising) . . .” pronounced André Breton 

in 1919, and his words turned out to be prophetic. By 

the 1930s the critical model of thinking in international 

modernism had already been replaced by the sug-

gestive model. That which had been articulated with 

grandiose intellectual eff ort in classical modernism 

from Cézanne to Malevich—the teleological vector 

of art and its means—was mixed together again with 

no less eff ort in the attempts to deconstruct the dif-

ference in the art of the 1930s—be it socialist realism 

or French surrealism. Line, paint, plane—all emanci-

pated in abstract painting—turned out to be plunged 

into a new connectedness that was so grotesque that 

as “satire-heroics” it consumes itself.

Mass visual images of today’s international, suc-

cessfully collectivized, corporate world—photo-

graph, advertisement, cinema, video—are generally 

heirs of this aesthetic. Without Malevich there would 

be no contemporary art, but without him there would 

be no socialist realism either, and without the latter 

there would be no contemporary visual propagan-

da—commercial, ideological, or any other kind—

whose pragmatic goal gets lost in the labyrinth of the 

suggestive whole.

This article was originally published in English and German in a slightly dif-

ferent form in 

Dream Factory Communism: The Visual Culture of the Stalin 

Era, ed. Boris Groys and Max Hellein (Frankfurt: Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt; 

Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2003), 85–105. Reprinted by permission of the 

author and the publisher.

1.  Quote from Elena Basner, “Zhivopis’ Malevicha iz sobraniia Russkogo 

muzeia. Problemy tvorcheskoi evoliutsii,” in Elena Basner, 

Kazimir Male-

vich v Russkom muzeie (Saint Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2000), 15.

2. Varvara 

Stepanova, 

Chelovek ne mozhet zhit’ bez chuda: Pis’ma, poeti-

cheskie opyty, zapiski khudozhnitsy (Moscow: Sfera, 1994), 62.

3. Ibid., 

78.

4.  See Kazimir Malevich, 

Sobrannyie sochineniia v 5 tomakh, vol. 2 (Mos-

cow, 1998), 62.

5.  Vasilii Rakitin, “Kazimir Malevich: Pis’ma iz Zapada,” in 

Russkii avangard v 

krugu evropeiskoi kultury (Moscow: Radiks, 1994), 440.

6.  Charlotte Douglas was the first to propose redating later works by Malev-

ich. On this issue as a whole, see Basner 2000 (see note 1).

7.  Kazimir Malevich, “Mir kak bespredmetnost‘,” in Malevich 1998 (see note 

4), vol. 2, 38.

8.  Quote from Irina Lebedeva, “‘Projectionism’ and ‘Electroorganism’,” in 

Paul Wood, Vasilii Rakitin, Hubertus Gassner et al., 

The Great Utopia: The 

Russian and Soviet Avant-garde 1915–1932, exh. cat., Schirn Kunsthalle 

Frankfurt (Berne: Bentelli; Moscow: Galart, 1993), 188.

9.  Velimir Khlebnikov, “Radio,” in 

Collected Works of Velimir Khlebnikov, 

ed. Charlotte Douglas, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University 

Press, 1987), vol. 1, 392–6.

10.  That is, a new social life [Ed.]

11. Aleksandr 

Rodchenko, 

Opyty dlia budushchego: Dnevniki, statii, pis’ma, 

zapiski (Moscow: Grant, 1996), 160.

12. Ibid., 199.

Aleksandr Deineka

Conversation of the 

Collective Farm Brigade, 1934

State Russian Museum 

Saint Petersburg [cat. 223]

V. Ivanov

Slaves Straighten their 

Backs, 1939

Postcard, 14.4 x 10 cm

Iskusstvo, Moscow

Fundación José María Castañé

Fundación Juan March

Aleksandr Deineka: 

The Eternal Return 

of the Athletic Body

Boris Groys

Fundación Juan March

Fundación Juan March

78

he work of Aleksandr 

Deineka is a part of the 

figurative turn that is 

a distinguishing fea-

ture of European art 

in the late 1920s and 

early 1930s. After two 

decades of artistic 

experimentation that 

culminated in the intro-

duction of geometric 

abstraction through 

Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian, many European 

and Russian artists proclaimed a “return to order”—a 

revival of the figurative painterly tradition. The hu-

man body once again became central to art. While 

Deineka’s oeuvre celebrates the return of the body, 

his art—considered from an art historical perspec-

tive—also remains a singular phenomenon. This sin-

gularity has to do with Deineka’s specific conception 

of the human body. Unlike the French surrealists, he 

did not interpret the body as an object of desire; rath-

er, it is a desexualized, expressionless, one can even 

say abstract body. Moreover, it does not function as a 

bearer of social distinctions—analog to the German 

Neue Sachlichkeit—or as a symbol of neo-classicist 

nostalgia—as in the case of the Italian Novecento. In-

stead, Deineka was interested in the representation 

of the trained, “steeled” professional body of a mod-

ern athlete. Thus, he became one of the very few art-

ists of his time who turned sport into the main topic 

of his work and, in a certain sense, into a model for art 

in general. And yet this interest in the athletic body 

did not lead to a revival of the classicist ideal of the 

perfect human body, a trait of many artistic practices 

of his time, especially of art in Nazi Germany. 

Indeed, the reintroduction of the classicist ideal 

of the human body was eff ectuated by sport earlier 

and to a much greater extent than by art. In fact, this 

revival of the classical humanist ideal by means of 

sport coincided with the abandonment of this para-

digm in art at the beginning of the twentieth century. 

Modern sport became the renaissance of the mass-

es. The Olympic Games took over the position that 

was earlier occupied by French salon painting. It was 

an attempt to realize the classical ideal of humanity 

on a mass scale at a moment in which the cultural 

elite rejected this model. Today, it is not art but sport 

that links our culture to its ancient roots. This con-

nection was ingeniously thematized by Leni Riefen-

stahl in her film 

Olympia

, in the first sequences of 

which the ancient Greek sculptures morph into the 

bodies of the modern athletes. Sport marked the 

rebirth not only of the classical body but also of the 

classical virtues—a healthy mind in a healthy body, 

the harmonious development of the human person-

ality, balance between the physical and the spiritual, 

dedication to one’s goal, fairness in competition. At 

the same time, modern artistic sensibility tended and 

still tends to reject the classicist ideals of a beautiful 

body and a heroic pose as kitsch. That is why off icial 

Soviet art that appeared to stay in this classicist tradi-

tion and glorified mass sport enthusiasm is as a rule 

also regarded to be intimidating and crass. Deineka 

was one of the most successful, prominent and cel-

ebrated off icial Soviet artists during Stalin’s rule. 

However, an attentive spectator cannot overlook 

the singularity of Deineka’s art—in fact, it does not 

fit into the neo-classicist, neo-traditional paradigm 

of its time. Deineka’s treatment of the athletic body 

is diff erent from the way in which it was interpreted 

and depicted by, say, Leni Riefenstahl or Arno Breker. 

This divergence is mainly dictated by the specific-

ity of the Soviet ideology and by the tradition of the 

Russian avant-garde that was continued by Deineka, 

even if in modified form. 

This diff erence can be described in the follow-

ing way: Deineka did not interpret the athletic body 

as a kind of aristocratic, socially and culturally privi-

leged body. The already mentioned sequences from 

Riefenstahl’s 

Olympia

 celebrate the origin of the ath-

letic body in the ancient Greek tradition. The mod-

ern athlete symbolizes here the transhistorical, im-

mortal, eternal validity of the ancient Greek-Roman 

humanist ideal. And the body of the modern athlete 

is interpreted as the re-incarnation of this ideal. The 

national-socialist ideology looked for the origin, con-

tinuity, heredity and transhistorical racial, genetic 

substance of historically changing forms of civiliza-

tion. On the contrary, the Soviet ideology believed in 

radical historical breaks, new beginnings and tech-

nological revolutions. It thought in terms of classes 

that emerge and disappear historically according 

to the “development of productive forces”—and not 

in terms of races that remain self-identical through 

technological, social and political transformations.

The athletic body represented by Deineka is 

clearly not an aristocratic body but a proletarian one. 

In a very obvious way, it has its origin not in the high 

culture of the pre-industrial Greek and Roman era 

but in the quasi-symbiotic relationship between hu-

man body and machine that is characteristic of the 

industrial age. Deineka’s athletic bodies are idealized 

and, so to say, formalized bodies. Looking at them 

the spectator cannot imagine them becoming ill or 

infirm, transforming themselves into the vehicles 

of obscure desires, decaying, dying. Rather, these 

formalized athletic bodies serve as allegories of cor-

poreal immortality; not the aristocratic immortality 

of discipline and tradition but the technicized im-

mortality of machinery—a machine that can be dis-

carded but cannot die. Deineka understands sport 

as mimesis of industrial work and the athletic body 

as mimesis of a machine. At the end of this mimetic 

process the human body itself becomes a machine. 

And modern sport functions as a public celebration 

of this “becoming-machine” of the human body. 

Now this mechanization was an explicit goal of the 

Russian avant-garde—especially in its constructiv-

ist version, as exemplified by the work of Aleksandr 

Rodchenko. Thus, one can say that Deineka’s art is 

a continuation and radicalization of the avant-garde 

project and not its rejection, as was the case with 

Nazi art. Here it is important to understand that the 

mechanization of the human body was not the result 

of an “anti-humanist” attitude on the part of the avant-

garde, as it was often described by the avant-garde’s 

critics. Rather, it was an answer to the mortality of 

the human body under the conditions of the radically 

modern, e.g. radically materialistic, worldview that 

rejected any escape from corporeal finitude into the 

imaginary kingdom of immateriality, spirituality and 

transcendence. The dream of corporeal immortal-

ity here substituted the traditional concept of spiri-

tual immortality. To become immortal the “natural” 

human body had to become artificial, machine-like. 

Deineka’s athletic bodies are placed on the surface 

of his paintings and frescoes in a way not unlike the 

geometric forms on the surface of Malevich’s paint-

ings. These bodies seem to be half-artificial, steeled 

by industrial work and sport, and thus embody the 

promise of eternal life. Immortality is understood 

here not as the extension of an individual life-span 

but as the exchangeability of individual bodies owing 

Fundación Juan March

to the lack of “inner life” that would make them “per-

sonal,” irreplaceable and, by the same token, mortal. 

A good literary analogy to this post-constructivist at-

titude toward the human body can be found in Ernst 

Jünger’s seminal book from 1932, 

The Worker: Domi-

nation and Form

.

1

Ernst Jünger’s treatise has generally been treated 

by critics as a political text, a project aiming to con-

tribute to the creation of a new type of totalitarian 

state based on the principles of modern technology 

and organization. But it seems to me that the main 

strategy of the text is dictated, rather, by Jünger’s in-

terest in immortality, that is, in the potential of a single 

individual human being to transcend his own death 

after the death of the “old God” announced by Ni-

etzsche. This strategy becomes particularly evident 

when we consider Jünger’s reference to the trope 

of technology in the course of his polemic against 

“unique” personal experience. According to Jünger, 

the notion of “personal experience” serves as the ba-

sis not only for the kind of bourgeois individualism 

which would confer “natural” human rights on each 

man, but also for the entire ideological trajectory of 

liberal democracy which reigned in the nineteenth 

century. Jünger engages the trope of technology es-

sentially as evidence that the bourgeois, liberal no-

tion of unique individual experience was rendered ir-

relevant in the twentieth century, as our social world 

require the individual to submit to any state, nation, 

race or class. Neither does he proclaim the values of 

any particular collective to be more important than 

those of the individual. Instead Jünger strives to dem-

onstrate that, since individual, particular experience 

can no longer be accessed in the world of modern 

technology, the individual as such no longer exists. 

In the technological era the subject has become the 

bearer of experiences which are impersonal, non-

individual, serial and standardized; and his existence 

has also become impersonal, serial and replicable. 

Thus, Jünger states that in modernity the general 

public prefers serial items over and against unique 

objects. The typical automobile consumer, for ex-

ample, opts for standard-issue, serially reproduced 

cars with reputable brand names; he has little in-

terest in possessing a one-of-a-kind model which 

is designed for him alone.

2

 The modern individual 

appreciates only that which has been standardized 

and serialized. Such reproducible objects can always 

be substituted; in this sense they are charged with 

a certain indestructibility, a certain immortality. If a 

person wrecks a Mercedes he or she can always pur-

chase another copy of the same model. Jünger aims 

to prove that we have similar preferences in the field 

of personal experience, such that we tend to privi-

lege the standard and the serial. The best-received 

films are those that are formulaic, those which lend