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Part I · Moving People
for orders from the Politburo,” as the painter Salvador Dalí, who had be- come pro-Franco, is said to have stated. 851 The communists, therefore, have the advantage of counting among their ranks or among their fellow travel- ers artists who were recognized before the war. Besides Picasso and Léger, one can mention at least the tapestry-maker Lurçat, Marcel Gromaire, and, at a stretch, Matisse—the greatness of whose disputable realism is not dis- cussed. Among the newcomers—alongside Fougeron—Boris Taslitzky (the creator of impressive drawings of Auschwitz) and Edouard Pignon respond to what the French party was expecting at the time. In 1952, Aragon travels to the USSR and returns with his “Reflections on Soviet Art,” which feature across some ten or more issues of Les Lettres françaises. He speaks primarily of what people already know about: writers such as Mayakovsky or the Pro- kofiev oratorio On Guard for Peace. He maintains that “there are sculptors in Moscow” but he focuses on the Spaniard Alberto, a refugee in Moscow since 1938, where he moved over to socialist realism painting (in fact, Alber- to does not return to sculpture until after 1956). At the end of a long piece that contains digression after digression and that, coming from the pen of a great writer, makes one sad to read, all that one learns is that he finds the “very beautiful Victory, by Topounidzé, which sits atop the new theater in the small town of Tchiatore in Georgia” more interesting than the “gentle- men in jackets” of Parisian statues, and that he is pleased with the trains and stations painted by a certain Gueorgui Nisski. In a line of argumentation of- ten taken from Soviet criticism, Aragon links great realists of the previous century (Briullov, Repin) to recent winners of the Stalin Prize, justifying the latter by the former. In doing so, as he knows he is going against the chro- nology of the history of art in this way by defending the art of another age, he finally invokes this curious get-out clause: “I try as much as I can to de- fend myself against fashions in art, as I know that all you have to do is wait for the fashion to change in order for what is beautiful—in the old eternal sense of the word—to change with it.” 852 It is sad to see Aragon give way to this kind of confusion. 851 André Breton, Œuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), vol. 3, 1066. 852 Only the first two of the eleven chapters of “Reflections on Soviet Art” are included in the selection in Ecrits sur l’art moderne. This quotation is taken from the last chapter, which appeared in Les Lettres françaises 408, 3 April 1952, 10. Breton responds immediately to this series of articles with two texts with explicit titles: “Why Hide Contemporary Russian Painting from Us?” And “Socialist Realism as a Means of Moral Extermination.” Besides the usual personal or ideological quarrels between them, Breton accuses Aragon of evading visual problems and, focusing on the photographs of Soviet paint- ings reproduced in Les Lettres françaises, he reveals the platitude and the con- ventional, forced nature of them. Aragon is too intelligent and too well-informed to imagine that what is at stake with this art is played out between surrealism and socialist realism. A much more important antagonism sets him against completely abstract art that was dominant everywhere, in France and the rest of the Western world. The Galerie Maeght brings out the great prewar abstracts again and the De- nise René Gallery effectively defends the geometric abstraction of Vasarely or Herbin—an old, abstract, communist painter who, in 1949, published a theo- retical book, L’art non-figuratif non-objectif (Nonrepresentational, nonobjec- tive art). At the same time, the critic Michel Ragon supports the informal art of Fautrier or the lyrical abstraction of Soulages. And without having seen all that much of it, we already know that abstract expressionism takes pride of place in the United States. Whether or not one approves of it, this conquering abstract art evokes scenes of another age, the patriotic scenes of Yuri Neprintsev which take us back to the era of Steinlen or Käthe Kollwitz. Therefore, Aragon aban- dons Soviet art somewhat in order to publish a book— L’Exemple de Courbet (1952) —and to look among the French for a realism that would be universal- ly popular. He finds it in Bernard Buffet, a very young painter whose manner- ism focusing on the sordid aspects of life (inspired by Francis Grüber) capti- vates all art lovers, both on the left and the right. This painter also allows him to celebrate a genre for which he would not be criticized, namely landscapes: “I consider, for my part, this landscape decadence to be the expression of the degradation of national spirit among the French lower middle class from which the majority of our painters originated. This is why, in 1953, I welcome as a symptom of renaissance in this area the exhibitions of Bernard Buffet.” 853 But problems were to arise in another established genre. In March 1953, as a 853 Louis Aragon, Ecrits sur l’art moderne (Paris: Flammarion, 1981), 103. 408 409 2. The Moscow Underground Art Scene… Part I · Moving People posthumous tribute to Stalin, he commissions Picasso to draw a portrait of the great man and publishes it on the front page of Les Lettres françaises. Un- fortunately, the work did not appeal to the communist audience whose tastes are very academic. It must be said that Picasso was not terribly inspired, but one finds it surprising today that this portrait caused such an outcry. Dis- owned by the secretariat of the French Communist Party, Aragon apologiz- es: “My whole life I have been used to looking at pictures by Picasso, for exam- ple, with Picasso’s works in mind; I lost sight of the reader who would look at it without thinking about the brush strokes and the technique. That was my mistake.” 854 The orthodox figures at La Nouvelle critique are happy, but the old surrealist opponents can only mock. Breton writes: “Everyone knows that Picasso’s works, from their beginnings to today, are the unrestrained negation of so-called “socialist realism.” The scandal of the “portrait” has no other interest than that of making it blatantly clear to all eyes the incompatibility of art with the orders of the police squad that claims to govern it. 855 Nineteen fifty-three is a particularly tense period of the Cold War. A cir- cular from John Foster Dulles forbids works of a “communist” nature in American cultural centers abroad, and all civil servants have to swear loy- al allegiance to the US government. Convicted of espionage for the Soviet Union, the Rosenbergs are executed. Neither the death of Stalin nor the ar- mistice in Korea bring about the slightest détente. This year, Aragon himself reports on the Salon d’automne in Paris. He enthusiastically calls to mind es- tablished treasures such as Picasso, Marquet, Valtat, and Kisling, and of the more recent artists, Taslitzky, Georges Rohner, Bernard Lorjou, and many others, the majority of whom are unknown to us today. The surprise comes from a long section attacking Civilisation atlantique, a large painting (4 x 6 m) by André Fougeron, to make it clear to him “that he is wrong. That he has left the path of realism. That this is not the way that the ideas we have in com- mon can and should be expressed.” 856 The painting is certainly representa- 854 Ibid., 113. 855 Breton, Œuvres complètes, vol. 3, 1097. 856 Aragon, Ecrits sur l’art moderne, 133. tional, but it juxtaposes—without respecting the perspective and the scale of things—an electric chair, an SS soldier getting out of an American car, fac- tories, coffins, miserable children, a Black and Algerian population enslaved, etc.; all edifying scenes of an unambiguous militancy. It is no great master- piece, but—along with my British colleague Sarah Wilson—I do see in this crude portrayal a process that is ten or more years ahead of narrative represen- tation (Erro, Télémaque, Rancillac, Arroyo, Peter Saul, etc.). This time, the critic who had amazed us with La Peinture au défi (1930) loses his perspicac- ity and only sees in it “the most academic elements of Mexican painting, the old processes of juxtaposing the surreal in paintings and photomontages.” 857 This is a threefold criticism: of Mexican muralism that actually appears to have been Fougeron’s inspiration for his spatial composition; of the strange combinations of surrealism (Magritte’s cloudy musical instruments, Dalí’s gi- raffes on fire, etc.); and of the constructivism of Rodchenko or Heartfield re- jected by socialist realism. In the course of the next few years, Aragon—who is well aware that he is speaking on behalf of the French communist intellectuals—continues to propose Courbet as a model painter and Victor Hugo as a model writer: “The fight for Victor Hugo is a part of the fight for realism, and the fight for real- ism is a part of the fight for true democracy and peace.” 858 His unconditional admiration remains with Picasso and Matisse. Furthermore, we notice that he no longer systematically attaches the adjective socialist to the word realism and that he makes extensive use of the word national. Pierre Daix, who was editor-in-chief of Les Lettres françaises (1947–72) and was to leave the Com- munist Party in 1974, gives his account: With the war over, Aragon returns to socialist realism when the apolitical, abstract, rhetorical art of a new generation eludes him and when social- ist realism is no longer simply justification for itself. This is why he sinks deeper into his almost unconditional apology until 1954, perhaps even 1955. The first reproduction of an abstract painting in Les Lettres français- es dates from that year. 859 857 Ibid., 134. 858 Louis Aragon, Journal d’une poésie nationale (Lyon: Henneuse, 1954), 161. 859 Pierre Daix, Aragon, une vie à changer (Paris: Le Seuil, 1975), 357. 410 411 2. The Moscow Underground Art Scene… Part I · Moving People In fact, despite the process of de-Stalinization begun by Nikita Khrush- chev in 1956 (which does not stop the brutal crushing of the Hungarian uprising in the same year), socialist realism stands firm in Europe—and in France in particular—no doubt because one must not lose sight of the reader, as put by Aragon who, in 1957, runs headlines in Les Lettres françaises such as “Socialist Realism Not Dead” (on the recent Soviet novel) and, shortly af- terward, “New Ideas in Soviet Art?” In the latter article, we read this mawk- ish comment: Even in the paintings that are the product of an illustrative profession more closely linked to this genre of realism to which it would be improper to continue to limit socialist realism, in painting, one cannot fail to notice the modification of the themes: infinitely less bombastic, often descriptive of the intimacy of the Soviet people. This is therefore an acknowledgement that the former Soviet art was “il- lustrative,” “bombastic”: all these Lenins and Stalins in favorable situations, these sturdy kolkhozniks, these brave soldiers, these dynamic building sites, these merry sportsmen and sportswomen. . . . Let us note here, as an aside, that socialist realist art is in fact close to what Nazi or fascist art was, as Igor Golomstok has shown in his book Totalitarian Art (1990), however, it must not be forgotten that at the same time, official French or American art also shows an abundance of robust farmers, brave soldiers, etc. The change ob- served by Aragon concerns a change in Soviet society, of which he gives this ingenuous example: “Today the climate is such that, on Nikolski Boulevard for example, I have seen couples kissing in public, in a manner that is entirely natural and that is by no means shocking to us, but that would have been un- thinkable not so long ago.” 860 In other words, the socialist realism of today is no longer what it once was—an idea that Aragon was to return to frequently. In 1959, in a speech to the Communist Youth of France, he states: Socialist realism, to call it by its name, is not a concept of art that is set in stone once and for all, that can be learned, that responds to formulae. So- 860 Aragon, Ecrits sur l’art moderne, 181. cialist realism, as I understand it, is not necessarily what people here call by that name, nor what every Soviet writer calls by this name. . . . For my part, I have an open, nondogmatic concept of socialist realism, one that al- lows the artist claiming to be enriched by it to enrich his art, not in an ex- clusive field, but wherever he finds his inspiration, subject to the critical eye of his concepts. 861 While the Soviets made socialist realism a fixed doctrine with well-de- fined sources and practices, the socialist artist is invited here to freely bor- row from the works of others to achieve his ends without betraying his con- victions. Aragon adds that “socialist realism developed in the USSR under conditions very different to those that applied in France. . . . Hence the dif- ferences between socialist realism in the USSR and socialist realism in France, and it would be absurd to deny them. They even explain the possible contradictions.” 862 This is the view of other communist theorists, of the Mex- ican Siqueiros who made the mistake of exposing it frankly to Moscow—but let us not get ahead of ourselves—and, a little later, of the Belgian painter Roger Somville. When he addresses a Soviet audience (in a speech delivered in Moscow on 28 April 1959), Aragon is more moderate in the terms he uses, warning only that “it is hardly sufficient to proclaim socialist realism as the art of the present and of the future; one must also know how to prohibit any old merchandise being given this label.” 863 This is really signaling that he is distancing himself from Zhdanovism. Realist art, like abstract art or surrealist art, can also be a refuge, a conve- nient pretext for hard-working artisans and for dabblers, as it has to constant- ly feed itself and break new ground if it does not want to keep turning out its formulas, and, according to Roger Somville (the only true European heir of Mexican muralism—see, in particular, the Hankar Metro Station in Brus- sels) maintain “the desire to establish a new public art linked to the living and constant realities of the class struggle.” 864 The beginning of the 1960s was not 861 Louis Aragon, J’abats mon jeu (Paris: Les Editeurs français réunis, 1959), 137 and 140. 862 Ibid., 166. The italics are those of Aragon. 863 Ibid., 269. 864 Roger Somville, Hop là! Les pompiers les revoilà (Brussels: Editions du Cercle d’éducation populaire, 1975), 17. 412 413 2. The Moscow Underground Art Scene… Part I · Moving People to placate the protests of the Breton surrealists against everything that comes even remotely close to communism, Neruda or, indeed, Sartre, whereas in the communist regimes themselves, socialist realism endures more or less well— from the triptych Zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung (1961) by Werner Tübke to the generally disappointing exhibitions of official art at the Moscow Manège into the 1980s. The story is a different one on the other side of the Atlantic, in Latin America, but we will see that it was not unfamiliar with the French explora- tions of the time. The major issue is the large island of Cuba, culturally and linguistically linked to the whole of Latin America and yet close to the shores of the United States. Although independent in principle, after the war Cuba is controlled politically and economically by the United States. Since the 1920s and 1930s, the communist or the communizing influence has won over several Latin American countries. The influence of the Peruvian theorist José Carlos Maríategui has been considerable and has endured despite his premature death in 1930. A great number of intellectuals join the Commu- nist Party or become fellow travelers along this path: writers such as the Chil- ean Pablo Neruda or the Brazilian Oswald de Andrade, painters such as the Ar- gentinian Antonio Berni or the Ecuadorean Guayasamin, and the majority of Mexican artists, with the Mexican revolutionary government openly displaying its sympathies with the Bolshevik revolution from the outset. Aside from Mex- ico, therefore, Cuba is the country with the greatest number of key intellectu- als whose political preoccupations are manifest, from Nicolas Guillén to José Lezama Lima, from Alejo Carpentier to Juan Marinello; its best artists have sojourned in Paris and are perfectly in line with the most advanced aesthetics: Eduardo Abela, who is also a popular caricaturist, Marcelo Pogolotti and Car- los Enriquez who denounce the United States’s exploitation of the island since the 1930s, and Wifredo Lam, whose left-wing views are known. As before the war, the information (or propaganda) reaching the Americas from the USSR passes by Paris when it is not obtained directly from Moscow. This explains one of the differences between the Cuban communists themselves, and in particu- lar between two former members of the Revista de avance (1927–30) who were very influential after the war, namely Alejo Carpentier (1904–1980), who spent a long time living in Paris, and Juan Marinello (1898–1979), who spent less time in Paris and preferred to look to Moscow. Giving an account of a stay in the Soviet Union in 1950, Marinello insists that he admired everything there, from the incomparable museums to the libraries which are an impulse in the service and celebrating the triumph of the people’s culture; from the rooms of the Kremlin to the tractor factory; from the Moscow under- ground, a wonder of art, to the kolkhozes of Georgia, a wonder of justice; from the stones of Stalingrad, symbols of a past defeat, to the Red Square, triumph of tomorrow. 865 Without disdaining the factories and the agriculture, Carpentier feels more qualified to speak about concerts and exhibitions. The indigenist Latin Amer- ican figures and socialist realism inspire him less than the contemporary art he sees in Parisian galleries. Throughout his regular articles one often comes across the celebrities of the moment, such as Matisse, Picasso, Léger, and Braque, but also Kandinsky, Mondrian, Kupka, or Pevsner, and faced with these radical ab- stract painters, he calls to mind in 1952 that “as always where art is concerned, everything depends on the quality of the result. A good abstract painting will always be better than a badly painted native American woman.” Again he is to admit that it is not easy to judge because “one person in a hundred is aware of the distance separating the creation of a Vasarely from the work of any old tech- nician who thinks he is a painter.” 866 For his part, and without ever attacking Aragon and socialist realism, he continues to prefer Arp or Miró to Bernard Buffet. In 1958, Carpentier becomes filled with enthusiasm for the minimalist painting of the Polish unists (Strzeminski, Stażewski) exhibited by the Denise René Gallery. However, in the same year, Marinello delivers a completely con- trary speech in a small book he is to publish in Argentina, Conversations avec nos peintres abstraits. In it, he condemns not only abstraction, but also cubism and surrealism, as “a persistent aberration” and concludes with the words: “The illegitimacy of the abstractionist theory—which is born, according to its prin- cipal theoretician, from a reactionary position—leads to a decisive negation of the social meaning of art.” 867 865 Juan Marinello, Commentarios al arte (Havana: Editorial Letras cubanas, 1983), 302. 866 Alejo Carpentier, Artes visuales III (Havana: Editorial Letras cubanas, 1993), 41 and 134. 867 Marinello, Comentarios al arte, 63 and 82. The theoretician in question is Kandinsky. 414 415 2. The Moscow Underground Art Scene… Part I · Moving People The seizure of power in Cuba by the supporters of Fidel Castro is a major event that completely changes people’s consciences in Latin America, but it does not change the differing views of Carpentier and Marinello, who con- tinue to rule over art criticism in their country. This is due to the fact that the Cuban revolutionaries did not impose an artistic norm. As long as the artist does not express any views against the revolution and communist ideas, he is free to adopt an aesthetic to his own taste—but is in trouble if any dissident expressions are revealed. In 1967, the regime is still liberal enough for Cuba to invite young painters to the Salon de mai (Arroyo, Erro, Monory, Rancillac, etc.), as well as surrealists and writers who may be anticommunist (Michel Leiris, Maurice Nadeau). This liberalism deludes people less and less as the regime begins to toughen up and turn toward dictatorship with the help of the Soviet Union. But in 1970, Marinello still judges art according to Lenin’s view, “truth and example.” 868 In 1980, a Cuban critic celebrates the fact that “in Cuba, committed art has not been the special privilege of the epic paint- ers.” In it, one sees “the most delicate lyrics, the explorers of the depths of the subconscious, the painters of landscapes and flowers, and also the coldest and most convulsively subjective abstracts.” 869 In other words, everything is pos- sible if one does not criticize the regime; the landscapes and the flowers are as neutral as abstract art and question nothing. Across the Latin American world, the Russian presence in Cuba is regard- ed in varying lights; the most favorable sometimes think that there was little point in getting rid of the Americans only to have the Russians in their place. In Peru in 1970, the Hora Zero group exclaims in its review: “We share com- pletely the postulates of Marxist-Leninism and we applaud the Cuban revo- lution.” But there are already doubts about this revolution, and the Peruvian José B. Adolph replies that he wants “neither the Ivory Tower nor the Lenin Tower.” At the time, many intellectuals share this view. In Mexico, history takes a different course as the Mexican revolution brings to power a regime advocating a type of socialism in affinity with the Russian revolution, but that is not prepared to adopt its practices. Its independence be- comes apparent when Trotsky, who was sent into exile by Stalin, is welcomed in 1937 and put up by Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. This is where Breton comes 868 Ibid., 231. 869 Gerardo Mosquera, Exploraciones en la plastica cubana (Havana: Editorial Letras cubanas, 1983), 456. to meet him in 1938, and where they together write the manifesto “For Inde- pendent Revolutionary Art.” But the following year, Rivera—who had never stopped attacking Stalinism—has a falling out with Trotsky. His muralist col- league Siqueiros, who is devoted to Stalin, attempts to assassinate Trotsky in 1940. He is arrested, but with the help of Neruda he escapes to Chile. He re- turns to Mexico in 1944 after having visited several countries in South Ameri- ca and Cuba. He publishes Ours Is the Only Way (1945), in which he celebrates Rivera, who inspired the muralist movement, and José Clemente Orozco, the “first anti-fascist artist of Mexico and perhaps even the continent” 870 —but Orozco is fiercely independent and does not allow himself to be won over by the Communist Party. In 1947, Siqueiros is more severe toward his colleagues and accuses Orozco of “political confusionism (nihilist liberalism)” and Rive- ra of “stagnation in terms of technique and materials.” 871 Moreover, he loathes the painter Rufino Tamayo and the writer Luís Cardoza y Aragón, close to Pa- risian surrealism. Indeed, the position of Siqueiros is clearly Stalinist, but he is a great inventive painter and he is not prepared to sacrifice himself to socialist realism according to Moscow. On the contrary, he denounces “the persistence, the stagnation of the theories, of the material techniques and the styles” and concludes peremptorily that “it is inevitable that an archaic technique can only produce archaic shapes and emotions.” 872 The man who, since the 1930s, has re- formed the traditional perspective to adapt it to mural art, the man who is a supporter of new techniques (projectors, aerographs, airbrushing) and new ma- terials (pyroxylin, sculpto-painting), believes it to be an integral kind of art as, in his words, “the separation of sculpture, painting, stained glass windows, etc., from architecture was a natural consequence of the individualist concepts.” 873 This revolutionary conception of art implicitly rejects all the academicism be- ing practiced at the time in Soviet art. He also explicitly rejects the “one-eyed” art coming from Paris, that is to say, surrealism, abstract art and all new trends in the Parisian scene of which the champions are Cardoza y Aragón, the paint- ers Tamayo and Carlos Mérida, and the poets of the review Contemporaneos, 874 with whom the diatribes were to be never-ending. 870 David A. Siqueiros, L’art et la révolution (Paris: Editions sociales, 1973), 72. 871 Ibid., 19. 872 Ibid., 20 and 111. 873 Ibid., 115. 874 Palabras de Siqueiros (Mexico: Fonds de Cultura economica, 1996), 293. |
