Socialist Realist Art: Towards New Approaches to Interpretation
Keywords:
Soviet art, socialist realist painting, Soviet culture, visual culture, studies of Soviet visual cultureAbstract
The study was carried out within the framework of project No. 25-28-00351 “Representation of everyday life in Soviet visual culture of the 1950s–1970s”, funded by the Russian Science Foundation.
The article considers the issue of possible strategies for interpreting Soviet realistic art. Socialist realist painting is a difficult object to study, since most influential modern approaches to its understanding are oriented towards the criteria set by the development of 20th-century Western art. An analysis of the key approaches to the interpretation of Soviet art allows us to identify a range of dominant trends, which, with all their inherent differences, are united by their orientation towards the aesthetic criteria of the artistic avant-garde. From this point of view, socialist realism is an anomalous phenomenon in the history of 20th-century art and can only be considered as an untenable artistic project. The article proposes to approach the study of socialist realism from the perspective of a “social” or “anthropological” framework and to look at Soviet fine art as a reflection of specific socio-cultural practices. The implementation of such an approach will allow us to pose new research questions, in particular, to draw attention to the relationship between the transformation of the figurative system of Soviet painting and the multidirectional processes that took place in Soviet society. The solution to the problem formulated in this way will require a study of various empirical material, that is, a study of the totality of images and texts generated by Soviet culture. Such an extension of the study framework allows us to claim that the subject of the study is not art as an autonomous sphere, but visual culture as a whole.
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