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

362

Baumgarten, 

Arbeitswissenschaft und Psychotechnik in Russland [Industrial Science and Psychotechnology in 

Russia] [Munich and Berlin, 1924]: 45. Cited here in 

Meyerhold, ed. Tietze, as above, 214). “NOT was understood as 

a universal instrument for redesigning the backward country into a modern industrial state. NOT was supposed 

to be the basic method of a new culture.” (K. Hielscher, “Futurismus und Kulturmontage,” in 

Alternative 122/23 

[1978]: 230). This new social movement of a comprehensive culture of work “also views man as a machine and, in-

deed, as the best machine on earth.” (A. Gastev, 

Poeziia rabochego udara [Poetry of the Worker’s Blow] [Moscow, 

1964 & 1971], cited in K. Hielscher, as above, 231).

24  A. Gastev, “O tendentsiiakh proletarskoi kul’tury”[On the Tendencies in Proletarian Culture], cited in 

Proletarische 

Kulturrevoltuion in Sowjetrussland 1917–1921 [Proletarian Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia 1917–21], ed. R. Lo-

renz (Munich, 1969), 63.

25   K. Red’ko, diary entry from November 5, 1921, cited in. V. Kostin, 

K. Red’ko (Moscow, 1974), 65.

26   K. Red’ko, diary entry from October 14, 1921, cited in V. Kostin, as above, 64.

27   K. Red’ko, diary entry from November 9, 1920, unpublished manuscript from his estate.

28   K. Red’ko, diary entry from June 14, 1924, cited in V. Kostin, as above, 67.

29   See E. Butorina, A. Labas (Moscow, 1979), 8–9. Fedorov’s research was based on the work of the Vienna scientist 

W. Ostwald, some of which he translated into Russian. Ostwald developed a procedure by which the elements 

white, black and full color could be measured, and on this he based a theory of quantitative chromatics. His “Color 

Atlas” gave every color shading a number. A distinction was made between an analytical and a psychological 

color arrangement.

30   L. Zhadova, as above, p. 54.

31   Interview with Labas from October 20, 1975, conducted by A. Sidorov in Moscow.

32   G. Berkeley wrote about the complex of sensory impressions. Their “existence is that they are perceived” (“Esse 

is percipi”). Cited in M. Diersch, 

Empiriokritzismus und Impressionismus (Berlin [GDR], 1973), 25. According to 

Mach’s teaching, reality exists only in subjective experience. Objective reality is not open to detection. All objects 

exist only as impressions of colors, tones, prints, spaces, times, etc. Lenin, who in exile had recognized the influ-

ence of Mach and Avanarius on Bolshevik intellectuals such as Bogdanov, countered Mach’s supposed “idealism” 

with the “ABC of materialism” in his work “Materialism and Empiriocriticism” (1908).

33   V. Favorskii, cited in N. Rosanova, 

Favorskii (L., 1970), 54.

34   V. Favorskii, “Über die Komposition“ [About Composition], 

Iskusstvo 1–2 (1933): 3, cited in J. Martynenko, “’Raum-

Zeit‘ in der Malerei und in der Filmkunst“ [Space-Time in Painting and in Film Art], 

Kunst und Literatur 6 (Berlin, 

1969): 626.

35   Ibid.

36   See N. Tarabukin’s theoretical investigations of texture, color, material and dynamic design of painting at the 

INKhUK with which Red’ko, Shterenberg and others were probably also concerned. See N. Tarabukin, 

Opyt teorii 

zhivopisi [Experimental Theory of Painting] (Moscow, 1923); Ot mol’berta k mashine [From the Easel to the Ma-

chine] (Moscow: Izd.-vo Rabotnik Prosveshcheniia, 1923).

37   D. Shterenberg, “Die künstlerische Situation in Russland“ [The Artistic Situation in Russia], 

Das Kunstblatt (1922): 

492.

38   D. Shterenberg, “Brief aus Russland“ (Letter from Russia), 

Das Kunstblatt 4 (1923): 332.

OST Platform

OST Platform

1924

On the basis of the following program, the Society of Easel Painters aims to unite 

artists who are doing practical work in the field of the visual arts:

1.  

In the epoch of socialist construction the active forces of art must be partici-

pants in this construction; in addition, they must be one of the factors in the 

Cultural Revolution aff ecting the reconstruction and design of our new way 

of life and the creation of the new socialist culture.

2.  

Bearing in mind that only art of high quality can envisage such tasks, we con-

sider it essential, within the conditions of the contemporary development of 

art, to advocate the basic lines along which our work in the visual arts must 

advance. These lines are:

a)  The rejection of abstraction and peredvizhnichestvo

1

 in subject matter

b)  The rejection of sketchiness as a phenomenon of latent dilettantism

c)  

The rejection of pseudo Cézannism as a disintegrating force in the discipline 

of form, drawing, and color

d)  Revolutionary contemporaneity and clarity of subject matter

e)  Aspiration to absolute technical mastery in the field of thematic easel paint-

ing, drawing, and sculpture as the formal attainments of the last few years 

are developed further

f)   Aspiration to make the picture a finished article

g)   Orientation toward young artists

On the OST Platform

John Bowlt

The Society of Easel Painters (OST) arose as an untitled group just after the 

1st Discussional 

(see p. 354), in late 1924, and was established formally in 1925. Founding members included 

Iurii Annenkov, Aleksandr Deineka, Iurii Pimenov, David Shterenberg (chairman) and Pet’r 

Vil’iams, and its membership soon came to encompass many leading figures of young 

Soviet art. OST had four exhibitions from 1925 to 1928, all in Moscow (Deineka contributed 

only to the first two, leaving the society early in 1927) before it closed in 1931. Although OST 

supported easel painting as opposed to industrial design (one reason that Deineka left), it 

did not reject the achievements of the old avant-garde; Ivan Kliun, for instance, was invited 

to contribute to the first OST exhibition.

The text of this piece, “Platforma OSTa” (part of the society’s code), was formulated 

in 1929 but not published until 1933 in 

Sovetskoe iskusstvo za 15 let.

2

 It was based prob-

ably on Shterenberg’s lecture at the Communist Academy in Moscow in May 1928, entitled 

“Teoreticheskaia platforma i khudozhestvennaia praktika OSTa” [The Theoretical Platform 

and Artistic Practice of OST]. OST contributed a great deal to the renewal of easel activity 

and achieved very interesting results, particularly in the initial work of Pimenov, Aleksandr 

Tyshler and Vil’iams. In some cases, as in Pimenov’s war pictures, the influence of German 

expressionists such as Otto Dix and George Grosz was especially noticeable, although this 

angular, skeletal quality was also eff ective in the young Soviet artists’ depictions of industri-

al and mechanical scenes. OST members displayed a technical competence and an intel-

lectual energy lacking in the “sketchy’’ studies of Four Arts or the academic work of AKhRR. 

— JB

1   A derogatory reference to the art of the Peredvizhniki (Wanderers). The word might be translated as “hack real-

ism.” For details on the Wanderers see the Introduction in John E. Bowlt, ed. and trans., 

Russian Art of the Avant-

Garde: Theory and Criticism 1902–1934, rev. and enlarged ed. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988).

2  

Sovetskoe iskusstvo za 15 let, ed. Ivan Matsa. (Moscow-Leningrad, 1933), 575.

Introduction originally published in German as “Die ‚Gesellschaft der Staff eleimaler’ (OST) und die ‚Kunstlerbrigade’ 

(IZOBRIGADA) 1925–1932,“ in 

Zwischen Revolutionskunst und Sozialistischen Realismus: Dokumente und Kommen-

tare. Kunstdebatten in der Sowjetunion von 1917 bis 1934, ed. Hubertus Gassner and Eckhardt Gillen (Cologne: Du-

Mont, 1979), pp. 324–33.

The version of the introduction here has been translated from the German original by Andrew Davison.

Platform originally formulated in Russian as “Platforma OSTa” (1924) and subsequently published in 

Sovetskoe iskusst-

vo za 15 let, ed. Ivan Matsa. (Moscow-Leningrad, 1933), 575. For a German translation see Zwischen Revolutionskunst 

und Sozialistischen Realismus: Dokumente und Kommentare (see above), pp. 342, 343.

The version here has been reproduced by permission, with minor changes, from “OST [Society of Easel Artists] Plat-

form,” in 

Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism 1902–1934, ed. and trans. John E. Bowlt, rev. and 

enlarged ed. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988), 280–81. 

Fundación Juan March

Again about the Easel, the 

Painting, the Chair and VKhUTEMAS

1925

D31

E. Beskin 

(In the form of a discussion)

In our arguments about fine art, easel painting and VKhUTEMAS, extensive con-

fusion has created the unstable interpretation of the formula “art is production,” 

“art as production.” Furthermore, this has led to disagreement even between like-

minded persons. It is necessary to come to an agreement here and bring about 

clarity, in order to oppose as a united front those phenomena of artistic life which 

we identify as reactionary and which in essence truly are reactionary. 

Many assume that the productivist understanding of art implies to sit down at 

once and “learn how to make chairs.”

This is an obvious mistake. 

The productivist understanding of art is in essence a Marxist, dialectical-materi-

alist and objective understanding of it. It is in contrast to the religious, aesthetic, 

subjective-idealist reception of art. 

For us there is no psycho-physical parallel, no interaction between the soul and 

the body, there are only various degrees and forms of organization of unified 

matter, beginning with so-called inorganic nature and finishing with the entirely 

diff icult phenomena of human society, the entire sum of contemporary human 

culture. Hence, as one of the disciplines of our consciousness, art is a manifesta-

tion (a quite complicated manifestation) of highly organized matter in one of the 

forms of human production, of human mastery, called art.

This is the productivist understanding of art. 

Not the metaphysics of otherworldly “beauty in itself,” not the romanticism of “the 

godly word” and “aroused souls,” not the abstract creation of an idea, but the or-

ganized mastery of the production of things. Therefore, each work of art is always 

and invariably a thing (and not a “spiritual phenomenon”), a product determined 

by the entire sum of biological and social factors influencing the artist. 

We get to know the ideology, the idea of art only through production, only through 

the fabricated thing, by working through a material. “But questions of form,” said 

N. Bukharin in one of his speeches, “are they not the sphere of ideology?” Correct. 

Beyond forms in art, beyond the artistic thing, there is also no ideology.  

Yet are those “productivists” correct, who under such a notion of the thing sug-

gest an exclusively industrial foundation and say that the artist should immedi-

ately drop everything and “learn how to make chairs”? 

In the concrete conditions of the present, this means to repudiate art. However, 

the question should not be posed this way. 

It is impossible to close your eyes tight and persuade yourself that easel painting 

has vanished.

After all, it exists . . .

It is possible to live with illusions and to decide that the easel painting department 

of VKhUTEMAS generally no longer exists—“the patient, ill according to the laws 

of medicine, died”—and that the woodworking department should operate only 

on laboratory experiments on the chair. 

Yet, allow me, the painting department lives—it is impossible to bury it alive. 

That’s my first point. Secondly, concerning the woodworking [department]: if it is 

to be occupied only with the repair of furniture and the hackneyed construction 

of chairs, then why should it be in VKhUTEMAS? In order to shut down the paint-

ing department? See for yourself, this doesn’t help the matter—they will move the 

easels somewhere else. And chairs will not become better for this. 

There is another path; it leads instead to utilitarian, technical art, the coming of 

which is inevitable due to a number of objective reasons. It is impossible to give 

birth to this mechanically, but to help it be born and to have an impact on the 

process of birth is possible. For this, it is necessary to bring the artist-painter, the 

easel painter, closer to the woodworker of VKhUTEMAS, as well as the reverse. For 

the easel painter this will be simply advantageous, since in good time it will lead

him from the bounds of the diminished market of easel painting and will pro-

vide an appropriate outlet for artistic energy. For the production departments 

of VKhUTEMAS this would be the start of a utilitarian art and a divergence from 

stark industrialism. For VKhUTEMAS as a whole it would mean the realization of an 

artistic-production complex in which the so-called “pure” departments, the easel 

painting ones, grow into productive ones and establish what comrade Arvatov 

quite correctly defines in issue 32 of 

Zhizn’ iskusstva [Life of Art] as “the invention 

of industrial things, the norms of everyday life, agit-forms, the design of tem-

porary campaigns and festivals, posters, advertising, illustration, various cultural 

activities, models, plans, projects of blueprints, etc.” 

Yet the maximalist path is the path of ecstasy, and not the concrete, real, living 

dialectic. It is necessary to take the existing culture of art and rationally to exert 

influence, to direct, and to remake it. The deceased should be buried (there are 

such phenomena that have already died, but to the present have not been bur-

ied), the necessary should be retained, the unnecessary should be eliminated . . . 

. . . Does not that inventory of productions of utilitarian art, which I cited above, 

demand exactly such a remade easel painting (the design of campaigns, posters, 

advertising, illustrations, etc.)? At least for the present. Later, this will be dictated 

by the new everyday life, the new consciousness, and the new technology, which, 

of course, will depart from the intimate easel work, from the chamber easel “pic-

ture.”

It is possible, of course, to smash the painting on the chair, but it is naive to think 

that this will forever destroy all “pictures” and, in exchange for them an artistic 

chair will be created to the glory of utilitarian art. It is necessary 1) for the sum of 

objective conditions to go from the “picture” to the “chair,” 2) for the artist’s con-

sciousness to be educated in the direction of a productive understanding of art 

and, finally, 3) for instruction in technical know-how in schools to be oriented to-

wards the utilitarian remaking of easel painting (and not the aff irmation of it) and 

towards the use of artistic creativity in building the utilitarian object. The elimina-

tion of easel painting is a process. It is necessary to master this process, and not 

to shut oneself off  from it. Then we will more easily and more painlessly arrive at 

the goal—a utilitarian art. 

In connection with the reform of VKhUTEMAS, it is impossible to be limited to 

a few production departments and to ignore painting. This is a manifest error. 

It is necessary to bring together there the woodworkers with the artists. In the 

process of their convergence, we will obtain an artist-woodworker, an artist-

inventor, an artist-builder. This is the single path for the organic reconstruction of 

VKhUTEMAS. 

Originally published in Russian as E. Beskin, “Eshche o mol’berte, kartinke, stule i VKhUTEMASe,”  

Zhizn’ iskusstva 36 

(September 8, 1925): 4–5. For a German translation see 

Zwischen Revolutionskunst und Sozialistischen Realismus: 

Dokumente und Kommentare. Kunstdebatten in der Sowjetunion von 1917 bis 1934, ed. Hubertus Gassner and Eck-

hardt Gillen (Cologne: DuMont, 1979), 151–54.

The version here has been translated from the Russian original by Erika Wolf.

Fundación Juan March

364

Reaction in Painting

1925

D32

Boris Arvatov 

. . . Exactly this inventiveness may serve as a peculiar proof of the reverse, that 

nothing remains for easel painting, other than to last out a little longer (as long as 

the market will allow) and to leave the stage forever. 

The participants of OST are young artists, recently graduating from VKhUTEMAS 

and passing through the fire and storm of revolutionary artistic searches, but falling 

back to easel forms. As a result of such a retreat, their easel painting refutes itself. 

The overwhelming majority of pictures show the complete inability of the authors 

to make an easel painting composition; nearly everything is done in the manner

of posters, advertisements or signboards—I will name: Barsch’s 

Motion Study 

[Khronometrazh], Vil’iams’s 

Portrait of Meierkhol’d, Vialov’s Automobile Race, 

Deineka’s 

In the Mine [V Shtreke], all the works of Dobrokovskii and Kudriashev, 

Pimenov’s 

Skiers, and many others. These pictures should be hung on the streets, 

in the vestibules of sports clubs, professional clubs and so forth. While the poster 

once learned from painting, now painting attempts to save itself by copying the 

poster. Yet in this it stops being painting. The utilitarian demands of our epoch 

provide the possibility to develop only utilitarian forms. Not for nothing are the 

themes of OST entirely productional: 

Motion Study, Poster, Motorcycle Race, Ra-

dio and again Radio, Circus, Before the Descent into the Mine, In the Mine, draw-

ings from the magazine 

At the Factory Workbench, Factory Drawings and Plac-

ards, Construction of Straight and Curvilinear Movement, The Factory, etc., etc.

The hopelessness of the attempts of easel painting to make its way along the 

path of independent development is especially evident in OST. Even grasping 

what they are fighting for—for the machine, for the poster—the easel artists suff er 

defeat. Only in one respect are their performances extremely dangerous: they 

create an illusion of the triumph of at one time overthrown art forms. It is neces-

sary to fight mercilessly against this. Using the respite to catch their breath, the 

enemy will climb onto the pedestal. It is necessary to cast him off . It is necessary 

to ring the tocsin, to raise the alarm and to mobilize the actual revolutionaries of 

art. Artistic reaction attempts to raise its head too freely and unceremoniously. 

Originally published in Russian as Boris Arvatov, “Reaktsiia v zhivopisi,” 

Sovetskoe iskusstvo 4–5 (July-August 1925): 

70–74. For a German translation see 

Zwischen Revolutionskunst und Sozialistischen Realismus: Dokumente und Kom-

mentare. Kunstdebatten in der Sowjetunion von 1917 bis 1934, ed. Hubertus Gassner and Eckhardt Gillen (Cologne: 

DuMont, 1979), 345–46.

The version here has been translated from the Russian original by Erika Wolf.

AKhRR at the Factory

1925

D33

Boris Arvatov 

Recently a remarkable brochure was published, the author of which is one of the 

founders of AKhRR, the artist Katsman. The brochure tells how the AKhRRovtsy 

[members of AKhRR] decided for the first time “to enter the thick of life” and be-

come “participants of revolutionary construction.”

1

 What did they do to achieve 

this? “We,” states Katsman, “went to the factory with painter’s cases and pencils,” 

word-for-word, like the Barbizon artists settled in the forests of Fontainebleau with 

easels, like Levitan went to the Volga, like the Dutch spending days and nights in 

peasant taverns—they went to this unknown lair, called a factory, with what? “. . . 

with painter’s cases and pencils,” with the antediluvian implements of easel aes-

thetics, in the white gloves of bourgeois art, in order to contemplate the genuine 

“proletarian” and to sketch him; literally some salon ladies from the artistic da-

chas, recording profiles of the landscape in their albums.

Listen further to Katsman: “In the tearoom near the factory we had lunch merrily 

and noisily. We ate with cabbies, workers, and village muzhiks [peasant men] . . .

 2

 

‘To hell with the abstractionists,’ we said, ‘look at these splendid faces, backs of 

heads, short sheepskin coats, look at how they sit, chat, eat, all of this is pic-

turesque and splendid.” The words of the AKhRRovtsy cited here appear to be 

copied to the letter from thousands of similar expressions of gourmand delight, 

embraced by bourgeois aesthetes from the Renaissance to the modernists at the 

sight of the exotic for them (only, it seems, for them and not for the objects of 

delight), pictures, that is “of the simple people.” 

What kind of inveterate bourgeois aesthetes and refined intelligentsia they must 

be, how far apart they must stand socially and practically from the workers, in 

order to perceive from a “painterly” position the backs of their heads, even their 

food . . . Furthermore, at the sight of a short sheepskin coat, instead of thinking 

about eff icient clothing for proletarians, the enraptured admirers took it as a class 

marker of the workers (the worker is dirty, ragged, often sullen—oh, how all of this 

is “picturesque and splendid!”), and that is why it at once was made into a pearl 

of creation

I continue the excerpt: “They led us into the foundry, which I personally (i.e., the 

“proletarian” artist Katsman. B. A.) had never seen before. We passed through 

several rooms (!), where a group of worker-metalsmiths were doing something 

(!!). All in semi-darkness, dark colors (bluntly speaking, damn nothing was vis-

ible. B. A.). The faces business-like and masculine (who are these AKhRRovtsy, if 

something special like “masculine” faces amaze and delight them? B. A.). Finally, 

we arrive in the foundry. Wonderfully beautiful. An enormous building. Above, a 

wagon moves. Below, in the middle, from a tap pours blinding yellow-red cast 

iron. As water pours . . . I painted portraits of the foundry master and the chairman 

of the communist cell.” Unfortunately, Katsman does not tell what distinguishes 

the portraits of the master and the representative from the millions of portraits 

of other people in the sense of “proletarian quality” . . . Indeed, is this not pas-

sive contemplation, admiration, an approach from without? . . . But we, sinners, 

thought that it would be better without semi-darkness, that the absence of elec-

tricity is technological backwardness . . . 

. . . It is disgusting, when such vulgarity is presented as revolutionary art, when 

obviously bourgeois concoctions and obviously bourgeois relations to produc-

tion are imposed upon the working class. 

If you like the factory, the machine, production in general . . . for the practical con-

nection of a person with the proletariat a single conclusion is in order: build such 

factories and machines, build together with the producers the objects of factory 

production, but do not sketch them . . . 

1.  E. A. Katsman, 

Kak sozdalsia AKhRR [How AKhRR was Created] (Moscow, 1925).

2.  Suspension points in the original [Trans.]. 

Originally published in Russian as Boris Arvatov, “AKhRR na zavode,” 

Zhizn’ iskusstva 30 (July 28, 1925): 5. For a German 

translation see 

Zwischen Revolutionskunst und Sozialistischen Realismus: Dokumente und Kommentare. Kunstde-

batten in der Sowjetunion von 1917 bis 1934, ed. Hubertus Gassner and Eckhardt Gillen (Cologne: DuMont, 1979), 

416–18.

The version here has been translated from the Russian original by Erika Wolf.

Fundación Juan March