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

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March 5. The poet Anna Akhmatova dies in Lenin-

grad.

Andrei Tarkovsky concludes the film

Andrei Rublev

(aka

The Passion According to Andrei). After a first

failed screening, a cut version of the film was fi-

nally shown at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival.

1967

December 19. Deineka is awarded the Physical

Culture Activist Medal by the council of the “Spar-

tak” sports society for his “continuous propaganda

of physical culture and sports in art.”

The monograph

Deineka by Aradi Nora is published

in Budapest.

Elena Volkova-Deineka recalls: “My husband did

not always tell me what he was up to . . . that is

why I was not aware of how diff icult his relationship

with the Academy had become . . . In addition to

being upset over the Academy, there were signs

that he was terribly ill . . . He seemed to be losing

strength. Aleksandr Aleksandrovich continued to

work. He attended the Presidium meetings at the

Academy each week, traveled to the mosaic and

stained glass workshops in Leningrad, he lectured

at the Leningrad Academy of Arts, visited artists in

Riga, went to Czechoslovakia. But he worked less

and less on new works of art . . . He was obviously

deeply depressed . . . Sometimes he would say:

‘I have seen it all, I know what is going on around

me. I have had enough.’ And he tried to ‘drown’ his

emotions with his terrible medicine” (Elena Pavlova

Deineka in Problema sovetskogo iskusstva 1930–50

[Kursk, 1999], 129–30).

1

3

Fundación Juan March

1. Aleksandr Deineka

(right) with Maya

Plisetskaia, Nikolai

Cherkasov and Vladimir

Peskoven during the Lenin

Prize Award Ceremony,

Moscow, 1964

2. Aleksandr Deineka

next to one of his

sculptures, 1964

3. Aleksandr Deineka

in his off ice, 1956

4. Catalogue of the

Exhibition of Works by

Aleksandr Aleksandrovich

Deineka. People’s Artist,

Lenin Prize Winner and

Member of the Academy

of Fine Arts of the USSR,

Kursk Regional Art

Gallery, 1966; Museum

of Russian Art in Kiev,

1967; Art Museum of the

Latvian Soviet Socialist

Republic in Riga, 1967

5. Catalogue of the

exhibition

Aleksandr

Aleksandrovich Deineka.

People’s Artist, Member

of the Academy of Fine

Arts of the USSR, Lenin

Prize Winner, Academy

of Fine Arts of the USSR,

Moscow; Budapest;

Leningrad, 1969–70

6. Illustrated pages of

the magazine

Ogonek,

no. 3, 1969. Fundación

José María Castañé

7. Cover of the

magazine

Ogonek,

no. 39, September

1969. Fundación José

María Castañé

January 15. The artist David Burliuk dies in Long

Island, New York.

April 24. Vladimir Komarov becomes the first

cosmonaut to die during a spaceflight when the

Soyuz 1 spacecraft attempts to land.

The USSR celebrates the 50th anniversary of the

October Revolution.

September 1. Writer Il’ia Erenburg dies in Moscow.

1968

April 17. Deineka is commissioned by the USSR

Ministry of Culture to create a work for an exhibi-

tion commemorating the centenary of Lenin’s birth

in 1970.

May. Deineka faints and looses consciousness.

He is forced to stay in the hospital until July and,

according to Elena Volkova-Deineka, acquires the

reputation of being a “diff icult patient,” as he refus-

es to take his medication and requests incessantly

to be discharged, although he cannot even walk.

He does not acknowledge his illness or listen to the

doctors. “For three months he followed his ‘diet’

but then he soon deteriorated again. He would lie

in bed watching sports programs on television. His

eyes often filled with tears. He suff ered from his

helplessness” (Elena Pavlova Deineka in

Problema

sovetskogo iskusstva 1930

–

50 [Kursk, 1999], 133).

August 3. Deineka and Elena Volkova’s marriage is

registered.

Deineka works on a monumental panel entitled

All

Countries Come to Visit Us for a new addition be-

ing constructed at the Moscow airport.

March 27. The cosmonaut Iurii Gagarin dies during

a training flight.

August 20. Russian tanks put an end to the Prague

Spring.

1969

March 5. The USSR Ministry of Culture sends

Deineka on a ten day trip to Hungary, where a solo

exhibition of his work is on display in Budapest.

May 20. The artist T. T. Salakhov writes an article

in the newspaper

Sovetskaia kul’tura to celebrate

Deineka’s 70th birthday on May 21: “Deineka is

considered by many to be a master. I saw a repro-

duction of the

Defense of Petrograd in Renato

Guttuso’s studio. The Italian artist believes Deineka

is one of the finest artists in contemporary painting.”

June 4. Deineka’s health deteriorates drastically. He

is not able to attend the opening of his solo exhibi-

tion at the Academy of Fine Arts in Moscow, held

on June 5, in which 250 works are displayed. The

show later travels to Leningrad.

June 10. Deineka is awarded the honorary title

Hero of Socialist Labor and receives the Order

of Lenin and the Hammer and Sickle gold medal.

Elena Volkova-Deineka recalls that she received a

call from the Department of Culture of the Central

Committee, apologizing that “technical problems”

prevented them from awarding the title sooner,

when Deineka would have been well enough to

appreciate it. “I ran to the hospital . . . he was very

ill and although he recognized me, when I con-

gratulated him on the honor, he looked at me with

confusion in his eyes, and so I believe he never

understood he had been awarded the title.”

June 12. Aleksandr Deineka dies in the early

morning.

June 16. Deineka is interred at Novodevichii

cemetery in Moscow.

June 17. The article “Pokhorony A. A. Deineki” (A. A.

Deineka’s Funeral) published in Sovetskaia kul’tura

recounts the following: “On June 16, Moscow said

its final farewell to Aleksandr Aleksandrovich

Deineka, Hero of Socialist Labor, People’s Artist

of the USSR, recipient of the Order of Lenin. His

friends, pupils, admirers of his great talent, gath-

ered at the USSR Academy of Arts where he was

lying in state. His finest works are on display at the

Academy as part of an exhibition that opened re-

cently to celebrate his 70th birthday. The exhibition

has turned into a commemorative event.”

November 3. The State Art Gallery in Kursk is

named after Deineka.

1976

A commemorative plaque is placed outside Deine-

ka’s former studio, located on 25/9 Gorky (present

day Tverskaia) Street.

1989

May 22. A monument by sculptor A. I. Ruskavish-

nikov and architect I. N. Voskresenskii is erected at

Deineka’s grave as a memorial to the artist.

Fundación Juan March

Aleksandr Deineka:

The Mimesis of

a Utopia (1913–53)

Manuel Fontán del Junco

Fundación Juan March

In it is no

lacrimae rerum.

No art. Only the gift

To see things as they are,

Halved by a darkness

From which they cannot shift.

Derek Walcott,

A Map of Europe

Aleksandr Deineka

(1899–1969) turned

eighteen when the

Bolshevik revolution

rose to power in

Russia after the de-

position in 1917 of

Tsar Nicholas II. A

contemporary of

Lenin and Stalin,

Deineka died at the

age of seventy in Moscow, in 1969, at the height

of the Khrushchev era and while he was still the

distinguished president of the Fine Arts Academy

of Moscow. Deineka thus embodied the true

homo

sovieticus

, an artist from a generation instructed

almost completely by and for Soviet power, whose

life and work were determined by the political re-

gime that overthrew the Tsar.

Deineka between Two Tsars

As if the history of the Russian revolution had re-

peated and mockingly projected itself onto the

history of art, the historical appraisal of Deineka’s

work and what is referred to as “socialist realism”

has been the object of a kind of posthumous re-

venge from a diff erent “tsar”: Clement Greenberg,

regarded as the “art tsar” of Western art criticism

during most of Deineka’s career.

Deineka, who was forty at the time, had recent-

ly completed the

komandirovka

for the frescoes for

the Soviet pavilion at the 1937

“Arts et techniques

dans la vie moderne”

International Exhibition in

Paris [fig. 29, p. 45] when Clement Greenberg’s

well-known essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” was

published in the

Partisan Review.

This influential

article was a radical and energetic vindication of

the concept of avant-garde and the formal analy-

sis of the work of art, a view that exerted—and

continues to exert—influence on our understand-

ing of modern art. Greenberg famously outlined

the diff erences between avant-garde and kitsch,

which ultimately applied to high and low culture

or art and popular culture. The main diff erence, he

claimed, between avant-garde and kitsch lay in the

fact that:

If the avant-garde imitates the processes of art, kitsch

. . . imitates its eff ects. The neatness of this antithesis

is more than contrived; it corresponds to and defines

the tremendous interval that separates from each

other two such simultaneous cultural phenomena . . .

The disparity between avant-garde and kitsch

has become a generalized notion linked to the

discrepancy between abstract art and realism, by

which the subject matter of realist art is reality it-

self (whatever this may mean) and therefore im-

plies a straightforward and immediate experience

of the work, while abstraction focuses on art and is

thus experimental and diff icult to grasp.

Applied to the Russian art scene of the first

three decades of the 1900s, this rigid framework

has spread various misnomers, and so the Russian

avant-garde has been deemed worthy of such a

title, whereas the entire socialist realism painting

is viewed as an academic form of kitsch at the ser-

vice of political propaganda.

The sharp contrast

between both styles—resembling to some extent a

“cold war” waged between communists and their

scapegoat—was validated by the Soviet regime’s

deeply flawed moral standards, as they annihilat-

ed—quite literally in the unfortunate cases of some

individuals—the utopian ideas of the avant-garde

in favor of a specifically socialist form of realism

that would more eff ectively take their totalitarian

message to the masses.

The Formalist Unconscious:

Formal and Political Analysis

Such formalism is inherent to the West’s percep-

tion of art and has led to a correlation between

abstract art movements and canonical art history.

In turn, realism and its variants have been reduced

to a network of secondary roads that are every so

often rediscovered on account of art’s various “re-

turns to order” or “returns to reality.”

Two further aspects may have contributed to

this lack of knowledge and concern regarding so-

cialist realism: firstly, an eff ect of formalist analy-

sis; and secondly, a shortcoming relating to the

hermeneutics of socialist realism’s underlying ide-

ology: dialectic materialism or, more specifically,

Marxism.

The first aspect presents a twofold misconcep-

tion in the appreciation of the situation at hand: it

must be borne in mind that to historicize and re-

flect on events we must approach and, at the same

time, distance ourselves from the object; proxim-

ity encourages analysis while distance allows for

the comparison and identification of diff erences.

Hence, observing a work requires a forward and

backward movement, forcing the viewer to adopt

two viewpoints. In the case of art history and its

related theory, it is as if the observer had two dif-

ferent pairs of glasses (one to treat myopia and a

second one for hyperopia) and always put on the

wrong pair to make up for his shortsightedness,

and vice versa.

As a result of this misconception, a formalist

framework has been applied to political matters and

a political approach to formal issues. And if there

is a paradigmatic example of a formalist viewpoint

wrongly applied to a context in which artistic and

political circumstances are inseparable, it is that of

the Russian avant-garde; and vice versa: if there is

a paradigmatic example of a political approach to

inseparable political and artistic circumstances it is,

without a doubt, socialist realism. Indeed, many anal-

yses of the Russian avant-garde and socialist realism

tend to focus on the formal (and politically positive)

aspects of the avant-garde whereas realism is de-

scribed in political (and pictorially negative) terms.

As a result, the avant-garde is succinctly glorified as

an innovative and daring utopian experiment of great

formal value; socialist realism, on the other hand, is

chastised and perceived as traditionalist and reac-

tionary “bad painting,” devoid of artistic value and at

the service of political propaganda. In the absence of

a political approach to avant-garde art and a formal

analysis of socialist realism, the avant-garde move-

ment continues to be seen as embodying the naive,

spotless, positive qualities of a utopian future while

socialist realism carries the guilty and negative bur-

den of a cruel past.

This widespread understanding of Greenberg’s

influential essay, with its clean binary divide between

PAGE 31. Detail of CAT. 169

Fundación Juan March

political structure of the Soviet state—tends to be

examined as an ethical

epos

or as the product of

an ideology particularly gifted at galvanizing the

masses into action, which is only partly true. Marx-

ism is essentially and unequivocally a philosophy

as well as an artistic praxis. Marx’s well-known

eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach—“the philosophers

have hitherto only interpreted the world in various

ways; the point is to change it”—is not as much a

philosophical axiom as it is an invitation to radical

revolutionary action from historical consciousness,

a point of departure embedded in the Hegelian dia-

lectic according to which all forms of conscious-

ness and reality are fundamentally historical, that

is, artificial and therefore transformable.

In short, the dominions of the compelling tsar

of formalism, the study of socialist realism in exclu-

sively political terms and that of the avant-garde

in formalist terms, and the lack of attention paid

to the aesthetic quality of Marxism

has resulted

in the rigid framework on which the relationship

between socialist realism and the avant-garde is

based: The Russian avant-garde, with its astound-

ing utopian potential, represented one of the most

radical formal experiments in history, yet it was

liquidated by a form of derivative art subject to a

totalitarian ideology that had begun to show its

darkest side by the 1930s.

Russian Avant-Garde

and Socialist Realism

Aleksandr Deineka clearly exemplifies why the above-

mentioned paradigmatic binary divide is inaccurate.

Although fewer experts now support this premise,

curators and critics continue to foster and spread

such ideas, shaping the perception of the general

public. With the publication of works by some Rus-

sian theorists and essayists such as Boris Groys (with

his groundbreaking essay, “

The Total Art of Stalinism:

Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship and Beyond

)

and Ekaterina Degot

in the 1980s, as well as certain

exhibitions and research conducted by European

scholars such as John Bowlt, Matthew Cullerne Bown

and Christina Kiaer,

it has been established that

while opposing

tout court

the avant-garde to social-

ist realism remains a comforting assumption, it is

in fact false. Thus, an in-depth analysis is needed, a

reading in line with the historical circumstances of

the time and the rationale behind cultural events.

Simply contrasting the avant-garde to socialist

realism does not truthfully reflect what occurred.

Firstly, the political activism of several artists of the

Russian avant-garde surpassed, in many cases, the

Bolsheviks’ commitment to the cause.

Not only

do the avant-garde’s statements, manifestos and

belligerent group proclamations—of which a broad

selection is featured in the documentary section

of the present catalogue

—attest to their political

commitment, but so do the works they produced,

in which a “double obedience” can be perceived:

Vladimir Tatlin authored counter reliefs [cat. 7] and

also the Monument to the Third International [cat.

8];

16

Gustavs Klucis, the revolutionary graphic art-

ist of the 1920s and 1930s [cat. 60], who designed

the templates for revolutionary propaganda [cat.

12], also created the stylized “red man” dating from

1918 [cat. 11]; in a similar vein, his wife Valentina Ku-

lagina designed abstract architectural structures

in 1923 [cat. 13] as well as propaganda posters in

1930 [cat. 127].

We must also refer to Kazimir Malevich’s seem-

ingly striking return to figuration [cat. 22], from his

suprematism [cat. 20] of the 1920s to the detailed

figures completed around 1930 [fig. 1], and to Alek-

sandr Rodchenko’s shift from pure constructivism

[cat. 26] to the photomontages narrating the histo-

ry of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union [cat.

47–52], not to mention his collaboration with

Lef

[cat. 27–29]. There are a number of illustrative ex-

amples, including Rodchenko, Stepanova and Lis-

sitzky’s frequent contributions to the journal

SSSR

na stroike,

Natan Al’tman’s practice of suprematist-

revolutionary techniques which he combined with

figurative portraits of Lenin (compare cat. 23 to

cat. 24), El Lissitzky’s

Proun

and his use of supre-

matist elements in his celebrated poster of the Civil

War [cat. 15, 14], Liubov Popova’s painting of an

abstract architectural structure from 1916 [cat. 9]

followed by

Hail the Dictatorship of the Proletariat!

from 1921 [cat. 10], or Aleksandra Ekster’s design

of a pavilion for the 1st All-Union Agricultural and

avant-garde and kitsch, has defined an era, and

while the author’s claim has been nuanced by art

historians and critics alike, curatorial practices and

the public’s perception of art prove diff erently.

That Greenberg’s influence is especially felt in the

latter two examples is understandable: exhibitions

and audiences expose more clearly that the intrica-

cies of the Western gaze—the gaze of the spectator

and curator of the West—is rooted, though uncon-

sciously, in formalism. Because the Western gaze

encounters art in the formal context of either the

art market or the museum, it has become structur-

ally and unconsciously formalist and is therefore

unable to apprehend the rationale behind a style of

art that was not produced for either the art market

or the museum (the formalist gaze is constructed

at and by the museum and the market)

. Socialist

realism, on the contrary, was not meant to be dis-

played in a museum but was produced to form part

of real life.

This is the crux of the matter: the avant-garde

also

aimed to form part of real life and to trans-

form the art and the world left by its predecessors.

These extra-artistic claims made outside the mu-

seum bring the avant-garde closer to socialist real-

ism and the third factor of this narrative: ideology

or, more specifically, political praxis.

Dialectic Materialism as Artistic Praxis

The second aspect of this certain lack of knowl-

edge regarding the relation between the avant-

garde and socialist realism (i.e. art and political

power) derives from a reductive interpretation in-

fluenced by the absence of a very specific histori-

cal experience. Marxist dialectic materialism has,

to some degree, been “underinterpreted,” as has

its eff ectiveness and long-lasting cultural influence

in Russia, which spanned over nearly 70 years.

In eff ect, dialectic materialism—the ideology

that inspired the Bolshevik revolution and the entire

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