Includes some material translated from the Italian. Catalog of an exhibition held at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, Oct. 11, 2011-Jan. 8, 2012. Includes bibliographical references.
Contents:
Foreword / Matthew Bown, Zelfira Tregulova, Evgenia Petrova -- 1920-28 -- 1928-36 -- 1936-41 -- 1941-45 -- 1945-54 -- 1954-64 -- 1964-70 -- Realism victorious / John E. Bowlt -- The labour of joy : Soviet culture and the production of exultant masses / Eugeny Dohrenko -- Stepping on the throat of one's own song? / Faina Balakhovskaya, Zelfira Tregulova -- Many realisms, a single hero - the proletarian / Nicoletta Misler -- Religious sources in the art of Socialist Realism / Evgenia Petrova -- Combatant art - the discovery of reality / Vladimir Lenyashin -- Realisms in Soviet architecture from the 1930s to the 1950s / Alessandro De Magistris -- Fairy-tales of the proletariat, or, is Socialist Realism Kitsch? / Christina Kiaer -- A Soviet flower of evil : representation of everyday life in the Socialist Realist art / Svetlana Boym -- Walking and looking in the Socialist Realist world / Gian Piero Piretto -- Lacrimae rerum : Geli Korzhev's series Scorched by the Fires of War / Matthew Bown -- Curating the incurable : one curator's experience with Soviet art / Ekaterina Degot -- Echoes of Socialist Realism in post-Soviet art / Aleksandr Evangeli -- Red is beautiful! / Vitaly Komar -- The gravitational field - a satellite leaving orbit / Mark Gisbourne -- French Socialist Realism 1945-70 / Sarah Wilson -- Interview with Geli Korzhev / Zoya Katashinskaya -- Realism unbound : the effects of international encounters on Soviet art practice and discourse in the Khrushchev thaw / Susan E. Reid -- Chronology 1917-70.
Summary:
"Socialist Realism was and remains an exceptional phenomenon in twentieth century art. It bore the challenge of promoting realist figuration on a scale without parallel in the rest of the world, employing the talents of thousands of artists over decades and spreading over an immense and varied empire. By glorifying the social role of art, affirming the primary value of content as opposed to form and restoring the central role of traditional practices, socialist Realism was the declared opponent of the modern movement, and in fact represented the only completely alternative artistic system. Socialist Realism. Soviet painting 1920-1970 is the most exhaustive exhibition on Soviet realist painting ever shown outside Russia and follows the movement's development over fifty years through a selection of works from the country's leading museums. Created by the great Russian artists (Deineka, Malevic, Adlivankin, Laktionov, Plastov, Brodskij, Korzhev) the works present a multiplicity of questions, themes and formal approaches to art spanning from the last phases of the civil war to the beginnings of the Brezhnev era, stopping at the early 1970s when trends in official Soviet art took on varied and inconsistent directions such that the cultural supremacy of the socialist-realist current faded definitively. A non monolithic view emerges, in which the movement does not originate exclusively as the product of totalitarian control and political pressures but as an evolving organism that reflected internal issues and echoed the great historic events of the twentieth century."--Publisher's website.
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