No Potemkin Village in Malaga- Socialist Realism at the Russian Museum
After securing an offshoot of the Pompidou Centre to grace the City’s redeveloped port-side promenade, the authorities in Malaga have gone to form an alliance with the Hermitage in St Petersburg, and jointly create El Museo Ruso (Russian Museum) in the vast and splendid building that was once the tobacco factory. Does Malaga intend to become the synecdoche of the world’s leading galleries?
The Russian Museum is very spacious – eerily so, because its relative novelty and location away from the centre means that the number of visitors is not routinely proportionate to its size. (The large café had no other customers when we visited.)
The idea is that the Museum mainly houses temporary exhibitions (meaning a year’s residence put together from the Hermitage’s huge collection).
The main show for the year ending 31 January 2019 is, or was, devoted to the art of Socialist Realism.
To many people (me included before this visit) “Socialist Realism” conjures those vivid, expressionist, posters, in which chisel-jawed men and women brandish hammers and sickles, or other implements, including those of war. There is something faintly in common with the more muscular inter war British posters advertising the glories of cycling or hill walking. But the Soviet posters have greater experimental technique. For which we must be grateful, as this Exhibition shows experimental technique of the expressionist kind was generally crushed.
It is an exhibition that sets the hairs standing on end – as one gradually realises the growing chasm between “reality“ in art (the Socialism Realism bit) and reality in Soviet life.. Only in the desperate years of WW2 did the two sometimes coincide.
Socialist Realism had its roots in hagiography – the celebration of the Revolution’s leaders, and the worship shown to its consolidators and to the regime’s eventual dictator, Stalin.
There are interesting large canvasses- Lenin in London, at a congress of turn of the 20thcentury revolutionaries and reformers; Stalin meeting Mao. There are creepy ones- Stalin with one of his generals, dominating a Moscow skyline.
With the Stalin portraits one sees the manufactured, quasi-religious fervour coming in. Stalin as a Zeus figure, in his Moscow Olympus, attended by his current (and lesser) God of War. Elsewhere: Stalin as the adorable friend of peasants and workers of all ethnicities. Stalin always with the enigmatic Big Brother smile (Orwell has contaminated his image beyond restoration).
Maxim Gorky proclaimed that the Soviet writer or artist should be an “engineer of souls”. Here we get to the heart of the project (which it pretty much was). The task of writers and artists was to show “Soviet reality” – not as it was in the present, being nasty, brutish and short in many places and at many times- but as would and should be, under the Party’s guidance. Thus portraits of the “present” are subtlety, and not so subtlety, transformed into portraits of life just round the Communist corner.
Here we go, with peasants, workers, soldiers, and intellectuals of the appropriate sort.
Especially ironic are the paintings extolling the collectivisation of Soviet farming (expropriating the small peasant farmers, or Kulaks), which in historical truth was a catastrophe, fatal to millions. In the Exhibition the paintings are of happy and determined Village Committees of peasants dedicated to the task.
Not quite all. Some artists (doubtless a literally vanishingly small number) managed to smuggle some satire through (the proof being the survival of their work). Such as this, in which a loud-mouthed Party activist (doubtless from the elitist metropolis) hectors the sullen farmers.
Soviet painting on industrial themes is more interesting. You get the propaganda: sentimental and noble titans of labour, and the grateful-to-the-party-and-its great leader stuff. But there’s also a genuine artistic response to the extraordinary industrialisation of the Soviet Union – a neo-Vorticist or Futurist style delighting in the messy energy and detail of huge industrial processes.
Another theme of the Exhibition is Soviet sport: the celebration of strong and healthy Soviet athletes (or just strong and healthy Soviet citizens). This was part of the “Tomorrow, nearly Today” package, and something into which the Soviet Union poured immense resources.
There was an offshoot cult of the Soviet body beautiful. I wonder, as with Medieval and Renaissance paintings on certain classical stories, there was an excuse to dwell upon the body as erotic..
For me, the most interesting part of the Exhibition were the sections devoted to WW2 Soviet art. Artists were presented with an urgent choice: propaganda against the “Fascists”, the “real” realism of war, or something in between.
There’s a shocking image of a German pilot, shot down and falling to earth away from his smoking plane. Is he alive and closing his eyes to the rusty iron which will instantly shatter him? Or is he already dead? He hurtles out of the canvas towards to the viewer.
There’s a patriotic panorama of Soviet soldiers and sailors overwhelming fearful and dying Germans at Sevastopol. It is cruder than most such panoramas, but has many cousins in many lands.
But there are moving paintings of the chaos and determination at the epic siege of Leningrad (now again St Petersburg), which the artist lived through.
And there’s a painting that resonated in a peculiar way with me. It is of the head of a motorised military column driving through a recent battlescape. Unusually for a Soviet painting, the viewpoint is just behind the front seat of a jeep, with the anonymous driver and officer sitting there, following a truck as both drive past shattered military ordnance.
This is a paradigmatic image of all Allied soldiery in the last phases of WW2- whether Soviet, US, British or French. Motoring on towards VE Day. My father and grandfather were in such jeeps.
Jan 2019
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