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Confrontations: Sessions in East European Art History

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Expanding Socialist Realism

By confrontations, on 28 August 2022

By Magdalena Moskalewicz

In this seminar with three invited guests: Juliette Millbach, Aliya de Tiesenhausen, and Kate Cowcher, we discussed the global implications of Soviet imperialism in the field of art, including Moscow-centered pedagogical models and iconography as well as the international circulation of Soviet-specific imagery across the Global South.

 Juliette Millbach presented on the career of the official soviet painter Arkady Plastov (1893-1972), whose works glorified the collectivization of the countryside embodying the authorized, party-line conception of Soviet rural life.

Aliya de Tiesenhausen problematized the Soviet-era depictions of Kazakhstan that contributed to the stereotype of Central Asia as a vast and mostly uninhabited land, with easily available natural resources (Kazakhstan was the 4th global producer of cotton). Interestingly, as de Tiesenhausen pointed out, while imperial powers typically shy away from openly representing their extraction of resources from their colonies, the Soviet Union’s activities in Central Asia were the subject of art—as in the case of the 1931 painting “Cotton Harvest” by the Tashkent-born and Kyiv-educated painter Alexander Volkov.


Alexander Volkov, Cotton Harvest (1931)

Kate Cowcher discussed the careers of Eshetu Tiruneh and Tadesse Mesfin, two Ethiopian artists who in the 1970s travelled to Moscow to receive Soviet-style art training as a part of a friendship agreement between the two countries. While the artists’ previous work engaged with the imagery of the 1973 famine, conveyed in a realistic and powerful way, the two painters now returned as masters of polished academic style. Cowcher argued compellingly that they became products of late Brezhnev-era art education that had little to do with their earlier revolutionary zeal.

Most fascinatingly, we learned that the legacy of the Soviet-style socialist realism in Ethiopia and Kazakhstan has had a lasting effect on both countries’ art scenes, as evidenced in their contemporary art—that either engages critically with Soviet histories and symbols (Kazakhstan) or continues the extremely detailed and polished painterly style (Ethiopia).

 

Polish Socialist Realism

By editorial, on 3 March 2020

 

Maja and Reuben Fowkes

A group seminar at Zachęta National Gallery of Art was an opportunity for presentations dealing with Polish art of the 1950s, generating intensive discussion of the local modalities of Socialist Realism and the career trajectories of individual artists.

Magdalena Moskalewicz addressed the historiography of Polish Socialist Realism through the story of painter Aleksander Kobzdej (1920-1972), a celebrated hero of Socialist Realist painting who transformed himself into a modernist abstract painter during the post-Stalinist Thaw. She drew attention to the ambivalence of the local scene towards an artist whose international visibility was based on his willingness to adapt to changing official tastes in art.


Agata Pietrasik’s discussion of Socialist Realism in Poland set out to challenge assumptions that the style was simply imposed from outside and above by an oppressive regime, complicating the picture by considering the agency of individual artists, as well as the relation of the doctrine to local art discourses and traditions. She also raised the issue of the longevity of paradigms as well as institutional structures established during the Stalinist period.

Magdalena Ziółkowska shared with the group her research into Andrzej Wróblewski’s visit to Yugoslavia in 1956, revealing the personal and intellectual as well as historical and political dimensions of his three-week stay in the company of art critic Barbara Majewska. Going beyond attempts to identify the stylistic influence on the artist of the journey – manifest in his subsequent use of colour, expressive forms and the appearance of themes that were absent in his earlier work – she placed their visit in the context of the rapidly evolving relationship between the cultural policies of Poland in the era of de-Stalinisation and the socialist modernism of third way Yugoslavia.

Cold Revolution

By editorial, on 3 March 2020

Tomasz Załuski

Joanna Kordjak, a curator working at Zachęta – National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, gave a talk about the project “Cold Revolution. East European Societies in the Face of Socialist Realism” she co-authors and co-organizes with Jérôme Bazin. It features a conference, which took place at the end of January, and an upcoming exhibition scheduled for October 2020. Its main purpose is to present the social transformations of the 1950s – such as industrialization, development of an industrial working class, urbanization and depeasantification, collectivization of agriculture, elimination of old elites, egalitarianism, social mobility and collective ownership of the means of production – through the perspective of a comparative, transnational, entangled history of architecture, visual arts and design in several East European countries: Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania.

This comprehensive project is to cover a wide range of thematic issues: complex chronologies of Socialist Realism, its pre- and post-histories, changing geographies of cultural exchanges during the 1950s (not only ones within the Socialist Bloc, or between the countries of the Bloc and Western Europe, but also between Eastern Europe and extra-European countries), visual celebration of labour and workers, proletarisation of art and design, development of cultural infrastructure and movement of workers as art creators, the heterogeneity of socialist societies – social structure of the peasantry and the working class, internal divisions within both groups and their mutual relations and, last but not least, the question of gender roles and national minorities. The conference and the exhibition clearly aim at making another step in the ongoing process of shifting the historiography of Socialist Realism from the paradigm of political history and questions of aesthetics to a complex interpretative framework of socialist modernizations – and it seems they stand a good chance of succeeding.

Socialist Art

By confrontations, on 5 November 2019

After Pavlina’s fruitful introduction to the various Confrontations exhibitions throughout the socialist period in Czechoslovakia and beyond, we continued the morning session with a lecture on socialist art by Tomáš Pospiszyl, Czech critic, curator and art historian. In 2018 JRP Editions published Pospiszyl’s monograph An Associative Art History: Comparative Studies of Neo-Avant-Gardes in a Bipolar World which aimed to locate East European postwar art in global history. Speaking at his home institution – Pospiszyl is a lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague – he gave a most amiable overview of the tasks for the study of East European art during the socialist era.

The presentation started on a positive note: East European art history has enjoyed much success during the last 15 years, nearly every important artist has had a catalogue published (in English) about his/her oeuvre, private and public collections have shown great interest in this field. However, at times this has come with a cost of assimilating western concepts to East European art. By emphasising neo-avant-garde tendencies or the semi-official artistic culture of the so-called grey zone, art historians have left behind blind spots in recent art histories, especially in terms of the most common official visual culture of the socialist era. In other words, we don’t know much about socialist art.

In order to encourage his colleagues to pick up the topic, Pospiszyl proposed dozens of ‘tasks’ (e.g researching the creation of socialist reality by socialist artists, analysing institutional conditions, looking into the relationship between high and low/mass culture under socialism) and urged fellow researchers to share the knowledge. I presume that the majority of the audience welcomed Pospiszyl’s urge to study the official art of the socialist era, but it seems to me that most of the listeners were reluctant to agree with the strictly socio-economically defined concept of socialist art. As always, it’s recommended not to go from one extreme to another.

(Gregor Taul)

Interrupted Song

By confrontations, on 5 November 2019

What does Czechoslovak Socialist Realism look like? Alexandra Kusá, director of the Slovak National Gallery in Bratislava and curator of the 2012 exhibition “Interrupted Song: The Art of Socialist Realism 1948-1956” showed us a number of atypical examples, both in content and form. We saw a Stalin at a museum, looking at a baroque painting; another one listening to a classical music concert; a double portrait of two men swimming together in a visibly homoerotic embrace. Other pieces, though typical in their topics characteristic for Socialist Realism — they were painting and sculptures depicting scenes of factory work or crop gathering — used surprising visual language, either indebted to the great masters like Giotto and Piero della Francesca, or even clearly referencing “debased” modern art styles, such as cubism!

The challenge posed by the Czechoslovak Socialist Realism, however, is grounded not only in iconography or stylistic considerations. Just like with the more general history of art from the communist period, there is a degree of difficulty with discussing what was actually Czecho-Slovak about this art.

Even though Czechoslovakia was a single country for almost five postwar decades, with a single state Artists Union serving all practitioners in the federation, the scenes in Prague and Bratislava remained largely separate. And especially after the split of 1993, there seems to be general pressure to consider the cultural history of Czechia and Slovakia independently from each other. Kusá admitted to us that this issue, and related tensions, stalled her work on the project for an extended period of time. Finally, she decided to deal with this issue in a conceptual manner: In a book Perusena Pesen: Vytvarne Umenie w Casoch Stalinskej Kulturnej Praxe that she published in 2019, she included examples of artworks from the Czech part of the federation among those made by Slovak artists, but had all those objects captioned in the Czech, rather than Slovak, language. “There were fights with the copy editor, but I won!” she told our group.

(Magdalena Moskalewicz)

Socialist Realism Beyond Humour

By confrontations, on 5 November 2019

During our trip to Prague and Bratislava we were confronted with different approaches to the artistic production of socialist realism. During our first session in Prague, Tomáš Pospiszyl presented us the theoretical premises of his new research project dedicated to the official art of the socialist era. The art historian emphasised that it is important to step outside art history’s comfort zone of modernism and neo-avantgarde in order to turn to practices that are aesthetically more challenging. The study of conditions of production of officially sanctioned art can also change our understanding of the practices that were contesting it.

The theoretical framework presented by Pospiszyl created a stimulating discussion and made us eager to confront the socialist realist art works in question. How bad could they be? At that stage, armed with arguments we were prepared to confront smiling faces of multiple Lenins and Stalins. However, the display at the National Gallery in Prague left us empty-handed as it turned out socialist realist art was removed from a small room dedicated to it in a previous version of the display. We were told that the arrangement was rather stereotypical in depicting socialist realism as failed, political kitsch.

In Bratislava, we saw a different approach to socialist realism. During her presentation, the director of the Slovak National Gallery, Alexandra Kusá presented to us her exhibition and book titled “Prerušená pieseň” (“Interrupted Song”) dedicated to the official art of the period between 1945 and 1956. The curator’s approach was distanced from any moral and aesthetic judgement on art of that time. However, as we soon discovered by breaking into collective laughter when confronted with some examples of badly executed socialist realist painting, it is hard to look at socialist realism from today’s perspective without any sense of humour. Yet, reaching beyond the comic effects of some art works, Kusá’s talk discussed conditions of art making under Stalinism, exposing motivations and social factors at work. The comprehensive catalogue constitutes a rich resource of images and documents relating to the period. It will be really interesting to see how this research will be articulated in the new display of the Gallery’s permanent collection.

(Agata Pietrasik)

No SR in the MSU

By confrontations, on 29 April 2019

In light of our discussions, it was extremely instructive to have a tour of the incomparable MSU collection from curator and co-author of the display Tihomir Milovac. He shared his methodology of developing a ‘collection in motion,’ and the intricacies of approaches to abstraction in the oeuvre of EXAT51 artists and the Gorgona group.


He also sympathetically fielded critical observations on particular curatorial / institutional decisions about how to represent the art of socialist times, such as why there is no Socialist Realism on display. The diplomatic response was that the museum takes 1950 as a cut-off point and that the Gallery of Contemporary Art was founded and began collecting only in 1954, so had no interest in acquiring works in this style.
Curator Jasna Jakšić offered further illumination of the research possibilities of the collection and was of invaluable assistance in organising our time in the museum. Direct encounters with the artworks and their museological presentation created a rigorous setting for discussions and it was refreshing – and paradigm-expanding – to follow an alternative route around the collection that gravitated towards those art historical episodes that preceded and followed the heights of new art practice in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
(MRF)

Metelkova Group Seminar

By confrontations, on 29 April 2019

After the insightful introduction to Slovenian art through the Modern galerija’s collection and a visit to the neighbouring International Centre of Graphic Art, which through its long-running biennial conveyed the intricacies of exhibition diplomacy in non-aligned Yugoslavia, the group headed to the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova (MSUM). The Confrontations seminars continued in a comparative spirit by examining the specificities of Croatian and Slovenian views of Yugoslav art history, as well as expanding the discussion further. Constanze Fritzsch spoke about Socialist Realism: A sublation of art into life as an abstract painter like Hermann Glöckner would have understood it?, complicating the established narratives of the distinctions between socialist realism and abstract art. Daniel Véri spoke about Conflicting Narratives: The Memory of the Holocaust in 1960s Hungarian Art, distinguishing between the restrictive format of official monumental commemorations and the more testing approaches to Holocaust memory in the work of experimental artists.

(MRF)