Dream Factory Communism: The Visual Culture of the Stalin Period

Rating:
Summary: Soviet art, more the Brothers than Karl
Review: Boris Groys, one of the editors of this comprehensive survey of Soviet art sets the scene in his essay Utopian Mass Culture by writing 'The most intriguing aspect of Socialist Realism is precisely that no one liked it when it was being produced. This art satisfied no existing tastes, fulfilled no existing social demands. It was produced in the relatively firm conviction that people would come to like it when they became better people, less decadent and less corrupted by bourgeois values than they were at present'. Well, as we all know now, such fanciful notions eventually ended up in the wheelie bin of history

The book examines the presentation of the visual arts in the Soviet Union in ten essays but the writing is very academic, not helped I thought, because the English text has been translated from German. These essays (and artists biographies, chronology and bibliography) form the bulk of the book rather than color reproductions that I would have expected, there are only eighty-four of these in the main display section. The poster section though does have a wonderful showing of thirty-eight examples, fortunately not dominated by Lissitsky or Rodchenko, they only get one each.

Boris Groys is right to say that no one really liked this art, the paintings seem uniformly dull and uninspiring and I suppose this was only to be expected when the output of art was almost exclusively controlled by the Union of Soviet Artists. They decided who was in favor or out and I expect they would have been shocked to see the ironic visual language used in the paintings of Komar and Melamid, the leaders of the Sots Art movement in the sixties and seventies.

This will probably be the standard reference book explaining Soviet art, despite the small number of works shown (and why no index?) and is completely different to a similar book on communist creativity, 'Chinese Propaganda Posters' (ISBN 3822826197) by Michael Wolf. A huge coffee-table book of three hundred colorful posters portraying the bright future for the folks in Mao's China.