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

X. Easel Painting is Inevitably a Museum Art Form

Easel painting and sculpture, whether its representation is naturalistic as in the 

work of Courbet and Repin, allegorical and symbolic as in Böcklin, Stück and Re-

rikh, or breaking with the objectivity of the concrete image and acquiring a non-

objective character as in the work of the majority of contemporary young Russian 

artists, are, all the same, museum arts, and the museum remains the formative 

influence (which dictates the form) and is the foundation for the creation’s mean-

ing and special purpose. Within the category of museum objects, I also include 

spatial painting and the counter relief, which have no vital or practical purpose. 

All contemporary art, created by the “left” wing, finds its only justification on mu-

seum walls, just as the entire revolutionary storm that it stirred up finds its final 

repose in the silence of the museum graveyard. 

Fundación Juan March

348

Museum staff  confront the enormous task of sorting this material, which was rev-

olutionary in its time, into historical order and burying it “beneath numbers” on 

the inventory lists of “artistic storehouses.” And for “art historians,” those indefati-

gable grave-diggers, there awaits the new chore of writing explanatory texts for 

these sepulchral crypts, so that future generations, if they don’t forget the way to 

them, will be able to correctly evaluate the past and not confuse the landmarks 

of the “historical perspective.” So, despite their futurism, the artists themselves 

are not forgetting to occupy their proper place in the cemeteries of passeism.

12

XI. The Demand Presented by Contemporary Reality 

Contemporary reality is making completely new demands on the artist. It does 

not want museum “pictures” and “sculptures” from him, but objects that are so-

cially justified in form and purpose. The museums are suff iciently full not to re-

quire stocking up with new variations on old themes. Life no longer justifies art 

objects that are self-suff icient in form and content. The new democratic art is 

social in essence, while individualist art is anarchic and finds its justification in 

isolated individuals or groups. If the teleological art of the past found its meaning 

in recognition by the individual, then the art of the future will find such meaning in 

recognition by society. In democratic art, all forms must be socially justified. So, 

looking at contemporary art from a sociological standpoint, we have come to the 

conclusion that easel painting as a museum art form is obsolete, socially as well 

as creatively. Both analyses have led to one and the same result. 

XII. The Rejection of Easel Painting and the Orientation towards Production

The funeral bell has tolled for easel painting and sculpture, and young artists 

themselves have helped to ring it.

All opponents of left art should take this actual situation into consideration, and 

be aware that leftist artists themselves abandoned painting, not because of any 

emerging reaction or return “to the past,” but because of the further evolution of 

creative orientations in the real world.

Here one should not forget the momentous meeting of the Institute of Artistic 

Culture (INKhUK) which took place on November 24, 1921, at which O. M. Brik de-

livered a speech concerning INKhUK’s transfer from the Commissariat of Enlight-

enment to the Supreme Council of the National Economy. Twenty-five masters of 

left art, having rejected easel painting as an aim in itself, and having adopted the 

productivist platform, recognized that this transfer was not only necessary but 

also inevitable. For the first time in the annals of artistic life, a painter consciously 

renounced the ground that had reared him, and having changed his orientation, 

turned out to be the most sensitive seismographer, registering the direction in 

which the future points.

But the death of painting, the death of easel painting as an art form, does not 

mean the death of art in general. Art continues to live, not as a specific form, but 

as a creative substance. Moreover, unusually wide vistas are now beginning to 

open up for the visual arts, at the very moment when its typical forms are being 

buried; we have witnessed the wake in the course of the preceding account. On 

the following pages, I invite the reader to attend the “christening” of art’s new 

form and new content. These new forms bear the name “production skills.”

In “production skills,” “the content” is the utility and expediency of the object, 

its tectonism, which conditions its form and construction, and justifies its social 

purpose and function.

1.  Al’tman (I have in mind his early works, because he subsequently abandoned figuration), Shevchenko, Grish-

chenko, N. Goncharova (in several works), Udal’tsova, M. Sokolov (1916).

2.  L. Popova (1914–16), Vesnin and Morgunov.

3.  Malevich, Rozanova and Lissitzky.

4.  Tatlin, Medunetskii, G. and V. Stenberg, Rodchenko, Stepanova, Lavinskii, L. Popova, Ioganson, M. Sokolov and 

others. 

 

The names of Shterenberg, Bruni, Bubnova, Babichev, M. Larionov, Ekster, Pal’mov, Karev, M. Sokolov, A. So-

fronova and others who do not fit into specific trends, should always be mentioned when we talk about the “left 

wing” of Russian art. 

 

All the aforementioned artists have gone through a series of phases, making it impossible for us to define their 

place precisely within the whole range of constantly changing groups. The work of contemporary painters (and 

not only painters) is characterized by the enormous amplitude of the oscillations in their creative pendulum. 

While the character of an artist in the past was usually revealed even in his early work and only became more 

defined in its features with time (this is true of all painters until the impressionists), contemporary artists astound 

us with the sharp fluctuations and leaps in their creative work. I cite Picasso as the most famous and characteristic 

example of this; he began with impressionism, moved through cubism and non-objectivity, and now works as a 

neo-classicist. 

5.  It is typical that just as we are abandoning these ideas, in the camp of the aesthetic art critics they are beginning 

to talk about objects as the substance of an art work, and the very term “object,” which is disappearing from our 

vocabulary, is now becoming established in their terminology. 

6.  I am calling abstract artists all those artists listed above, i.e. the cubists, suprematists, constructivists and others, 

for they have all abandoned the representation of objects. 

7.  I. Medunetskii and G. and V. Stenberg.

8.  A canvas by Malevich.

9. The 

exhibition 

5 x 5 = 25 (1921).

10.  See Malevich’s brochures, 

O novykh sistemakh v iskusstve [On New Systems in Art], Ot Sezanna do suprema-

tizma [From Cézanne to Suprematism] and others. [There is no published brochure with the latter title. Tarabukin 

seems to be referring to 

From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism of 1916—Trans.].

11.  I consider this canvas to be an easel painting and refuse to regard it as a “sample” for a decorative wall painting. 

12.  The collection of “leftist” painting in the Museums of Pictorial Culture in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. 

Originally published in Russian as Nikolai Tarabukin, 

Ot mol’berta k mashine (Moscow: Izd.-vo Rabotnik Prosveshche-

niia, 1923), ch. 1–12. For a German translation see 

Am Nullpunkt. Positionen der russischen Avantgard, ed. Boris Groys 

and Aage Hansen-Löve, eds.

 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005), 416–74.

The version here has been reproduced by permission, with minor changes, from “From the Easel to the Machine,” in 

Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology, ed. Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison, trans. Christina Lodder 

(London: Thames & Hudson; New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 135–42.

Fundación Juan March

Declaration: Comrades, 

Organizers of Life!

1923

D22

LEF

Today, the First of May, the workers of the world will demonstrate in their millions 

with song and festivity.

Five years of attainments, ever increasing.

Five years of slogans renewed and realized daily.

Five years of victory. 

And—

Five years of monotonous designs for celebrations. 

Five years of languishing art.

So-called Stage Managers!

How much longer will you and other rats continue to gnaw at this theatrical sham?

Organize according to real life!

Plan the victorious procession of the Revolution!

So-called Poets!

When will you throw away your sickly lyrics?

Will you ever understand that to sing praises of a tempest according to newspa-

per information is not to sing praises about a tempest?

Give us a new Marseillaise and let the Internationale thunder the march of the 

victorious Revolution!

So-called Artists!

Stop making patches of color on moth-eaten canvases.

Stop decorating the easy life of the bourgeoisie.

Exercise your artistic strength to engirdle cities until you are able to take part in 

the whole of global construction!

Give the world new colors and outlines!

We know that the “priests of art” have neither strength nor desire to meet these 

tasks: they keep to the aesthetic confines of their studios.

On this day of demonstration, the First of May, when proletarians are gathered on 

a united front, we summon you, organizers of the world:

Break down the barriers of “beauty for beauty’s sake”; break down the barriers of 

those nice little artistic schools!

Add your strength to the united energy of the collective!

We know that the aesthetics of the old artists, whom we have branded “right-

ists,” revive monasticism and await the holy spirit of inspiration, but they will not 

respond to our call.

We summon the “leftists” the revolutionary futurists, who have given the streets 

and squares their art; the productivists, who have squared accounts with inspira-

tion by relying on the inspiration of factory dynamos; the constructivists, who 

have substituted the processing of material for the mysticism of creation.

Leftists of the world!

We know few of your names, or the names of your schools, but this we do know—

wherever revolution is beginning, there you are advancing.

We summon you to establish a single front of leftist art—the “Red Art Interna-

tional.”

Comrades!

Split leftist art from rightist everywhere!

With leftist art prepare the European Revolution; in the USSR strengthen it. 

Keep in contact with your staff  in Moscow (Journal 

Lef, 8 Nikitskii Boulevard, 

Moscow).

Not by accident did we choose the First of May as the day of our call.

Only in conjunction with the Workers’ Revolution can we see the dawn of future 

art.

We, who have worked for five years in a land of revolution, know: 

That only October has given us new, tremendous ideas that demand new artistic 

organization.

That the October Revolution, which liberated art from bourgeois enslavement, 

has given real freedom to art. 

Down with the boundaries of countries and of studios! 

Down with the monks of rightist art!

Long live the single front of the leftists!

Long live the art of the Proletarian Revolution!

The journal of the Left Front of the Arts, 

Lef, existed from 1923 until 1925 and then resumed 

as 

Novyi lef in 1927 and continued as such until the end of 1928. Among the founders of the 

Left Front of the Arts (LEF) were Boris Arvatov, Osip Brik, Nikolai Chuzhak, Boris Kushner, 

Vladimir Mayakovsky and Sergei Tret’iakov. Its editorial off ice was in Moscow. In 1929 the 

group changed its name to Revolutionary Front (of the Arts) (REF). In 1930 the group disin-

tegrated with Mayakovsky’s entry into the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP; 

see p. 387) and with the general change in the political and cultural atmosphere. LEF was 

especially active during its early years and had aff iliates throughout the country, including 

Southern Left Front of the Arts (Iugolef) in the Ukraine. As a revolutionary platform, LEF was 

particularly close to the constructivists and formalists; 

Novyi lef devoted much space to as-

pects of photography and cinematography, Aleksandr Rodchenko playing a leading part.

1

 

The text of this piece, “Tovarishchi, formovshchiki zhizni!,” appeared in 

Lef in Russian, 

German and English. This was the fourth declaration by LEF, the first three appearing in the 

first number of the journal: “Za chto boretsia 

Lef?” [What Is Lef Fighting for?,” pp. 1–7], “V 

kogo vgryzaetsia 

Lef?” [“What Is Lef Getting Its Teeth into?,” pp. 8–9] and “Kogo predoste-

regaet 

Lef?” [“Whom Is Lef Warning?,” pp. 10–11].

2

 However, they were concerned chiefly 

with literature and with history and had only limited relevance to the visual arts. This decla-

ration sets forth the utilitarian, organizational conception of art that 

Lef/Novyi lef attempt-

ed to support throughout its short but influential life. 

— JB

1.  For comments and translations see 

Form (Cambridge, Eng., 1969), no. 10, 27–36, and Screen (London, 1971–72), 

vol. 12, no. 4, 25–100.

2.  The first and fourth declarations are reprinted in 

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

1933), 291–95, and all of them are translated into French in 

Manifestes futuristes russes, transl. León Robel (Paris: 

Editeurs Français Réunis, 1972), 61–78. 

Originally published in Russian, German and English as “Tovarishchi, formovshchiki zhizni!” 

Lef  2 (April-May 1923): 

3–8. This text is based on the English version (pp. 7–8). It is reprinted in 

Sovetskoe iskusstvo za 15 let, ed. Ivan Matsa 

(Moscow-Leningrad, 1933), 291–95. For a French translation see 

Manifestes futuristes russes, transl. León Robel (Paris: 

Editeurs Français Réunis, 1972), 61–78.

The version here has been reproduced by permission, with minor changes, from “Declaration: Comrades, Organiz-

ers of Life!,” 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), 199–202. 

Fundación Juan March

350

Revolutionary and Socialist Art

1923

D23

Lev Trotsky

There is no doubt that, in the future—and the farther we go, the more true it will 

be—such monumental tasks as the planning of city gardens, of model houses, 

of railroads and of ports, will interest vitally not only engineering arch itects, par-

ticipators in competitions, but the large popular masses as well. The impercep-

tible, ant-like piling up of quarters and streets, brick by brick, from generation to 

generation, will give way to titanic constructions of city-villages, with map and 

compass in hand. Around this compass will be formed true peoples’ parties, the 

parties of the future for special technology and construction, which will agitate 

pas sionately, hold meetings and vote. In this struggle, architec ture will again be 

filled with the spirit of mass feelings and moods, only on a much higher plane, 

and mankind will educate itself plastically, it will become accustomed to look at 

the world as submissive clay for sculpting the most perfect forms of life. The wall 

between art and industry will come down. The great style of the future will be for-

mative, not ornamental. Here the futurists are right. But it would be wrong to look 

at this as a liquidating of art, as a voluntary giving way to technique. 

Take the penknife as an example. The combination of art and technique can pro-

ceed along two fundamental lines; either art embellishes the knife and pictures an 

elephant, a prize beauty or the Eiff el Tower on its handle; or art helps technique to 

find an “ideal” form for the knife, that is, such a form which will correspond most 

adequately to the mate rial of a knife and its purpose. To think that this task can 

be solved by purely technical means is incorrect, because pur pose and material 

allow for an innumerable number of variations. To make an “ideal” knife, one must 

have, besides the knowledge of the properties of the material and the methods 

of its use, both imagination and taste. In accord with the entire tendency of in-

dustrial culture, we think that the artistic imagination in creating material objects 

will be directed toward working out the ideal form of a thing, as a thing, and not 

toward the embellishment of the thing as an aesthetic premium to itself. If this is 

true for penknives, it will be truer still for wearing apparel, furniture, theaters and 

cities. This does not mean the doing away with “machine-made” art, not even in 

the most distant future. But it seems that the direct cooperation between art and 

all branches of tech nique will become of paramount importance.

Does this mean that industry will absorb art, or that art will lift industry up to itself 

on Olympus? This question can be answered either way, depending on whether 

the problem is approached from the side of industry, or from the side of art. But 

in the object attained, there is no diff erence between either answer. Both answers 

signify a gigantic expansion of the scope and artistic quality of industry, and we 

understand here, under industry, the entire field without excepting the industrial 

activity of man; mechanical and electrified agriculture will also become part of 

industry.

The wall will fall not only between art and industry, but simultaneously between 

art and nature also. This is not meant in the sense of Jean Jacques Rousseau, that 

art will come nearer to a state of nature, but that nature will become more “arti-

ficial.” The present distribution of mountains and rivers, of fields, of meadows, of 

steppes, of forests and of seashores, cannot be considered final. Man has already 

made changes in the map of nature that are not few or insignif icant. But they are 

mere pupils’ practice in comparison with what is coming. Faith merely promises 

to move mountains; but technology, which takes nothing “on faith,” is actually 

able to cut down mountains and move them. Up to now this was done for indus-

trial purposes (mines) or for railways (tunnels); in the future this will be done on an 

immeasurably larger scale, according to a general industrial and artistic plan. Man 

will occupy himself with re-registering mountains and rivers, and will earnestly and 

repeatedly make improve ments in nature. In the end, he will have rebuilt the Earth,

if not in his own image, at least according to his own taste. We have not the slight-

est fear that this taste will be bad.

. . .

Mankind will come out of the period of civil wars much poorer from terrific de-

structions, even without the earthquakes of the kind that occurred in Japan. The 

eff ort to conquer poverty, hunger, want in all its forms, that is, to conquer nature, 

will be the dominant tendency for decades to come. The passion for mechanical 

improvements, as in America, wiIl accompany the first stage of every new social-

ist society. The passive enjoyment of nature will disappear from art. Technique 

will become a more powerful inspiration for artistic work, and later on the contra-

diction itself between technique and nature will be solved in a higher synthesis. 

The personal dreams of a few enthusiasts today for making life more dramatic 

and for educating man himself rhythmically, find a proper and real place in this 

outlook. Having rationalized his economic system, that is, having saturated it with 

consciousness and planfulness, man will not leave a trace of the present stagnant 

and worm-eaten domestic life. The care for food and education, which lies like a 

millstone on the present-day family, will be removed, and will become the subject 

of social initiative and of an endless collective creativeness. Woman will at last 

free herself from her semi-servile condition. Side by side with technique, edu-

cation, in the broad sense of the psycho-physical molding of new generations, 

will take its place as the crown of social thinking. Powerful “parties” will from 

themselves around pedagogical systems. Experiments in social education and 

an emulation of diff erent methods will take place to a degree which has not been 

dreamed of before. Communist life will not be formed blindly, like coral islands, 

but will be built consciously, will be tested by thought, will be directed and cor-

rected. Life will cease to be elemental, and for this reason stagnant. Man, who 

will learn how to move rivers and moun tains, how to build peoples’ palaces on 

the peaks of Mont Blanc and at the bottom of the Atlantic, will not only be able 

to add to his own life richness, brilliancy and intensity, but also a dynamic quality 

of the highest degree. The shell of life will hardly have time to form before it will 

burst open again under the pressure of new technical and cultural inventions and 

achievements. Life in the future will not be monotonous.

More than that. Man at last will begin to harmonize himself in earnest. He will make 

it his business to achieve beauty by giving the movement of his own limbs the ut-

most precision, purposefulness and economy in his work, his walk and his play. 

He will try to master first the semi-conscious and then the subconscious process-

es in his own organism, such as breathing, the circulation of the blood, digestion, 

reprod uction, and, within necessary limits, he will try to subordinate them to the 

control of reason and will. Even purely physiological life will become subject to col-

lective experiments. The human species, the coagulated homo sapiens, will once

more enter into a state of radical transformation, and, in his own hands, will be-

come an object of the most complicated methods of artificial selection and psy-

cho-physical training. 

. . .

Man will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the 

heights of consciousness, to make them transparent, to extend the wires of his 

will into hidden recesses, and thereby to raise himself to a new plane, to create a 

higher social biological type, or, if you please, a superman. 

It is diff icult to predict the extent of self-government which the man of the future 

may reach or the heights to which he may carry his technique. Social construction 

and psycho-physical self-education will become two aspects of one and the same 

process. All the arts—literature, drama, painting, music and architecture—will 

lend this process a beautiful form. More correctly, the shell in which the cul tural 

construction and self-education of communist man will be enclosed, will develop 

all the vital elements of con temporary art to the highest point. Man will become

im measurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body will become more harmo-

nized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will 

become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of 

an Aristotle, a Goethe or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.

Lev Davidovich Bronshtein (1879–1940), who later took the name Trotsky, was born the son 

of an illiterate Jewish farmer in Ianovka, Ukraine, on October 26, 1879. Trotsky had origi-

nally wanted to become a writer—his first publications were works of literary criticism—but 

instead he became a professional revolutionary. He came into contact with revolutionary 

circles in his late school years. Around the turn of the century he became a Marxist and thus 

a criminal. By 1905 he was chairman of the Petersburg Soviet and in October 1917 he led the 

armed uprising in Petrograd. Trotsky continued to publish on art and literature throughout 

his life, even after he was appointed People’s Commissar for Foreign Aff airs and, in March 

1918, Commander in Chief of the Red Army.

This essay was probably written in the summer of 1922 or 1923, i.e. after he had brought 

the civil war to a victorious end and shortly after the introduction of the New Economic 

Policy, which he rejected. It was first published in Pravda in 1923 and later included in a col-

lection of Trotsky’s essays on literary criticism and cultural theory, which was published un-

der the title 

Literatura i revoliutsiia  [Literature and Revolution] in Moscow in 1923, though it 

received little attention at the time.

Having been gradually deprived of power, isolated, ostracized and ultimately expelled 

from the Soviet Union in 1929, Trotsky spent the rest of his life as a writer in exile; initially in 

Turkey, then in France, Norway and finally Mexico, where he was attacked by one of Stalin’s 

agents on August 20, 1940. He died the following day.

— MH

Fundación Juan March

Originally published in Russian as Lev Trotsky, “Iskusstvo revoliutsii i socialisticheskoe iskusstvo” in 

Literatura i revo-

liutsiia (Moscow: Gozisdat, 1923), 169–90. For a German translation see Die Neue Menschheit. Biopolitische Utopien 

in Russland zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Boris Groys and Michael Hagemeister (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 

2005), 415–21.

The version here has been reproduced by permission, with minor changes, from “Revolutionary and Socialist Art,” in 

Literature and Revolution, trans. Rose Strunsky (1925; London: RedWords, 1991), 277–84.

The biographical note has been translated by Jonathan Blower from 

Die Neue Menschheit. Biopolitische Utopien in 

Russland zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Boris Groys and Michael Hagemeister (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 

2005), 415.