“Both the Soviet and Nazi regimes were dedicated to breaking with the past and so could be expected to embrace the avant-garde in art” Why did this not happen and what were the consequences?
In answering this question we must look at the several differing socio-cultural reasons for this retrograde attitude to the arts unique to both the USSR and the Third Reich but also there are also linked systemic and ideological reasons that help explain it.
At first both states seem diametrically opposed and different yet both states were totalitarian, highly ideologically driven, led by mediocre, violent, delusion demagogues. Yet their ideologies were vastly dissimilar, and the goals and aims of the states were as different as the two societies in those states were. In analysing the content and cultural basis of the art of the USSR and the Third Reich the political context must remain in the foreground, particularly given the overt political nature of both regimes.
Art in Tsarist Russia in the nineteenth century underwent radical change as it began to move away from the conventions held influenced by the art of the icon and that of European High art imported by the French and European inclined aristocracy
1. The primary institution through which these styles were promulgated in Russia was the Imperial Academy created by Peter the Great
2.
The nascent nationalism of the Russians and their Slavic providence began to influence the visual arts and the peasant and the rural soul of Russia became themes and subjects of Artists, like the Wanderers. They rejected the proscribed tests at the Imperial Academy of Arts and opted to “depict the lives of ordinary Russians, especially the oppressed”
3 in contrast to the culturally rigid tastes of the academy.
This trend continued and in 20th Century Tsarist Russia
4, and it carried through into the USSR (in the early 20s) where the Arts were free initially to be creative and embrace and be the Avant Garde. This was the result of the revolutionary tide against authority and the release from the Orthodox (both religious and cultural) influence and that of the Imperial Academy of Arts. The old dependence on bourgeois patrons vanished, creating new dynamics regarding the commissioning of art with the Bolshevik state emerging as a principal patron. Various artistic movements of great influence developing in this time such as Constructivism and Suprematism.
These movements in some ways symbolise the promise of freedom the revolution seemed to bring. Suprematism was based around the purity of geometric shapes, a dramatic step away from the figurative art that dominated Russia. It can be seen as a reflection of the intellectual idealism of the revolution. Constructivism was an artistic effort to connect art with the people, rather than representing the reality of the proletarian masses, emphasising practicality and physicality, representing the new role of proletariat as the dominant class.
Lenin himself spoke in a 1920 against radical experimentation and called for the continuation of the trends of conventional bourgeois art
5. We can see some of the roots of the later Socialist Realism in the conventional attitudes to art brought from the collectivist attitude of the Bolsheviks and even in the more progressive movements like the Proletkult the disdain of the individualism of the avant-garde so vital to it.
Culturally the Russian peasant had long-standing notions of the immorality of surplus wealth, of the religious value in being poor
6. Being part of the 'mir' village collective system also imbued a collectivist sense of ownership in the majority of the Russian people. This attitude created further hostility to the individualism of avant garde art than would otherwise have been. So when the revolution came it was the old intelligentsia and aristocracy were firmly established at the bottom of the social hierarchy.
The initial outpouring of creativity gradually succumbed to state control and ideology with the rise of the Stalinism before being officially ended with the introduction of the Socialist Realism style in 1934, effectively proscribing any art deemed unsuitable. The various hostilities to the modernist tendency in Russian art came to be formalised in the state favoured doctrine of Socialist Realism. A conventional style recalling the Wanderers, emphasising the not only the glorious triumphs of Soviet civilization but it's intended destination
7; works had to be realist and represent the ideal Soviet socialist society. For those artists that dared go against the will of the state and the doctrine of Socialist Realism the punishments could be extremely harsh, ranging from employment issues
8, difficulty in practising the arts
9, to being sent to a Siberian Gulag.
Art in the Soviet Union under Socialist Realism then was narrowly constrained in the doctrinal confines determined by the state. The fervour that accompanied the creativity of the revolutionary period transmuted in public acquiescence and conventional state approved expression. Yet this public face contrasted with the non-conformist art that Soviet citizens produced for their own private desires. This art was not displayed in galleries, exhibitions, the art magazines or other public media in the USSR, and as such remained strictly private
10. Some of this art became available in the west and in this obtuse way the 'unofficial' art was freely available, albeit not in the country it was made.
In the revolutionary years of the USSR and those immediately following, a mass artistic organisation, the Proletkult (proletarskaya kultura – proletarian culture), arose in 1917, in the very last period of the Provisional Government. It incorporated the different pre-revolutionary organisations
11 into one dedicated artistic wing of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat
12. This organisation was dedicated to creating and reflecting the new 'proletarian culture'
13.
Though nominal independent, such a position created hitherto unforeseen issues in the relationship of art and the state. Ideologically Proletkult was for collectivist and proletarian forms of expression as befitted such an organisation. The mass membership of Proletkult and its vanguardist stance on working class culture shows the progressive and avant garde at work in Soviet Russia, and contrasts completely with the elite bourgeois ethos of the Tsarist period.
Art in Nazi Germany was set upon a different path than the USSR. Culturally Germany was a world away from Orthodox Russia. Religious heterogeneity meant that there was no overarching theological framework like the Orthodox Church to formalise religious iconography. The earlier development of Capitalism contrasted with Russia’s tardy entrance into the world economy, and meant there was a longer tradition of bourgeois patronage.
Yet Germany too experienced a period of creativity following the collapse of it’s own Empire which paralleled that of Revolutionary Russia. It was in the years of the Weimar Republic the arts embraced the avant-garde. Famous movements like Bauhaus emerged
14, symbolising the permissiveness of the Weimar years. Even before this groups, such as ‘Die Brücke’ and ‘Der Blaue Reiter’ had been founding influences of Expressionism.
The rise of the Nazis spelled the end of this freedom in the arts for they saw Bolshevik and Jewish influence and subversion in modernist art
15. Although apparently embracing the modern the Nazi's held a highly racist world-view, with themselves at the top, towering over the inferior untermenschen, such as Jews, Blacks and Slavs; any prominent Jews in the arts, sciences etc were severely discriminated against. This discrimination provided a scape goat for the ills of German society and enabled the Nazis to distract the majority of society from their totalitarian dictatorship.
Soon after gaining power Bauhaus was closed by order of Göring as a “bastion of subversives
16”. In contrast to the experimentalism of modern art and design typified by the Bauhaus, the Nazis encouraged realist depictions of the Aryan race in line with their political ideology emphasising the vigour, martial prowess, and the rural idyll of the Fatherland
17. This attitude is evident even in ‘Mein Kampf’, where to Hitler, modern art is “the product of diseased minds, themselves the product of a degenerate race
18”.
The doctrine became known as Heroic Realism, the name has strong echoes of Socialist Realism and was indeed comparable in limiting art to a physical manifestation of government ideology whether Nazi or Soviet. A defining feature of Nazi art was its pre-occupation with the Aryan form, art full of strong muscular men, and curvaceous blond maidens.
This Heroic Realism naturally precluded any art that did not adhere to their strict definitions, and artists deemed unsuitable, including communists, socialists and Jews as well as those whose work did not conform to their ideals, were often simply arrested, others fired from their academic positions
19. This was similar to events in the Soviet Union with the Gulags replaced with Concentration Camps.
More than simply arrest or impoverish disagreeable artists the Third Reich created a exhibition of ‘degenerate art’ intended to discredit and besmirch Modern Art. The exhibition included the works of more than 100 ‘degenerate’ artists and toured several German cities starting in Munich on July 19, 1937.
The Degenerate Art exhibition contrasted greatly with the ‘Great German Art Exhibition’ also opening in Munich that same July. The art for the exhibition was confiscated from the various museums and galleries of the Third Reich under order of Hitler and Göebbels
20. The pieces were arranged in a haphazard fashion and adorned with negative and undermining comments
21. More than two million visited the exhibition
22, significantly more than visited the exhibition of Germanic art, indicating a level of popularity with the German public the Nazis would be loath to admit. Against the backdrop of the removal of artists not agreeable to the Nazis, the exhibitions actually removed the art itself, not just physically but in the context of public display. Both the art and artists who made it, were removed from the ‘volksgemeinschaft
23’ the Nazis tried to create. This public shaming was another tool the Nazi's used against their cultural opponents.
We can see that the Nazis and Soviets embrace of realism in art, overlaid with their ideological beliefs held complex roots. In the USSR the revolution created an outburst of artistic creativity, at the crest of the world's avant garde. This wave was smashed on the rocks of Stalinist control and domination of society. The individualism and freedom in the arts prevalent in the revolutionary years was fundamentally compatible with this desire to control. The Socialist Realist doctrine enshrined a rigid monotonous art style devoid of the new intellectual ideas, only displaying not representing new buildings, new machinery etc. The relentless modernisation of industry under Stalin was accompanied by retrograde moves in the Arts.
In Nazi Germany the racist fascist ideology of the Nazis was doomed to clash with modernity in art, representing freedom and intellectualism rather than the wholesome 'Blut und Boden
24', rural Aryan life and Germanic military might the National Socialists demanded of their art. Cultural policy was a way for the Nazis to legitimise their ideology just as much as the employment figures or tank production.
It was the individualism and freedom of avant garde art that prompted the USSR and the Third Reich to oppose and persecute modern art, by repressing art and creating state sanctioned forms tied to ideological purity.
Bibliography
Golomshtok, Igor and Glezer, Alexander
Unofficial Art from the Soviet Union
Publisher Martin Secker and Warburg Limited 1977
ISBN 0-394-41664-9
Mally, Lynn.
Culture of the Future: The Proletkult Movement in Revolutionary Russia. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1990 1990.
http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft6m3nb4b2/
Berger, John
Art and Revolution Ernst Neizvestny and the Role of the artist in the USSR
Publisher Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969
Hosking, Geoffrey
Russia and the Russians, From Earliest times to 2001
Publisher Penguin Books, 2002
Figes, Orlando
Natasha's Dance A cultural history of Russia
Publisher Penguin Books, 2002
ISBN 0-713-99517-3
Hinz, Berthold
Art in the Third Reich
Publisher Basil Blackwell Publisher, 1980
ISBN 0-631-12501-9
Adam, Peter
The Art of the Third Reich
Publisher Thames and Hudson, 1992
Petropoulos, Jonathan.
Art as politics in the Third Reich
Publisher Chapel Hill, N.C. ; London : University of North Carolina Press, c1996.
ISBN 080782240X
Grunberger, Richard
A Social History of the Third Reich
Publisher Phoenix Books, 2005
c 1971
0-75381-938-4
1Orlando Figes – Natasha's Dance pg 24
2John Berger – Art and Revolution pg 22
3Geoffrey Hosking – Russia and the Russians pg 348
4John Berger – Art and Revolution pg 27
5http://marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/oct/08.htm
6Orlando Figes – Natasha's Dance pg 437
7Orlando Figes – Natasha's Dance pg 474
8Orlando Figes – Natasha's Dance pg 480
9John Berger – Art and Revolution pg 64
10Igor Golomshtok and Alexander Gleazer - Unofficial Art from the Soviet Union pg VIII
11Lynn Mally - Culture of the Future The Proletkult Movement in Revolutionary Russia pg 26
12 Lynn Mally - Culture of the Future The Proletkult Movement in Revolutionary Russia pg xviii
13Lynn Mally - Culture of the Future The Proletkult Movement in Revolutionary Russia pg 26/78
14Richard Grunberger – A Social History of the Third Reich pg 530
15Richard Grunberger – A Social History of the Third Reich pg 531
16Jonathan Petropoulos – Art as Politics in the Third Reich pg 20
17Berthold Hinz – Art in the Third Reich pg 17
18 Peter Adam – The Art of the Third Reich pg 10
19 Berthold Hinz – Art in the Third Reich pg 30
20 Peter Adam – The Art of the Third Reich pg 121
21 Berthold Hinz – Art in the Third Reich pg 40
22 Peter Adam – The Art of the Third Reich pg 124/125
23 National Community
24 Blood and Soil
