Soviet art
Under Stalin, Socialist Realism became the only permitted style. After his death a crack opened up, and alongside official art an unofficial art emerged in studios, flats and on empty fields.
In 1934 Socialist Realism was established as the official method for all art in the Soviet Union. Art was to be realist in form and socialist in content, and to show reality “in its revolutionary development”: happy workers, rich harvests and leaders such as Lenin and Stalin. Vera Mukhina’s sculpture Worker and Kolkhoz Woman of 1937 became a symbol of the state.
Artists who did not conform could lose their commissions, their studios and sometimes their lives during the Terror of the 1930s. During the Second World War art was mobilised for defence, with posters, the war pictures of Alexander Deineka and Arkady Plastov, and thousands of portraits of heroes.
After Stalin’s death in 1953 came a period of thaw. The “Severe Style” depicted workers and everyday life more honestly, and an unofficial art emerged in Moscow and Leningrad. Ilya Kabakov, Erik Bulatov, and Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid played with the images and language of propaganda in conceptual art and Sots Art. Only with Gorbachev’s perestroika after 1985 could they exhibit openly.