"La Beaute Revolutionnaire"?
Realisme Socialiste and French Painting 1935-1954
SARAH WILSON
It is a remarkably French phenomenon that many of
the more public battles for Communist ascendancy
from 1935 to 1954 were waged in paint. After the pro-
gressive march of abstraction from Cezanne and the
Cubists through to the completely non-figurative
movements — Abstraction-Creation and Cercle et
Carre of the 1930s — a realist reaction was inevitable,
especially in the worsening political and economic
climate, with reports and pictures of atrocities coming
from Spain. The Forces Nouvelles group, active from
1935 to 1939, typify the new, neo-classical, subject-
orientated tendency, although the bestiality and vio-
lence in their Civil War canvases had surrealist affini-
ties.
The Surrealist movement itself was becoming pro-
gressively compromised: the call to political commit-
ment militated against their pre-occupation with
sexuality and the unconscious, and defections to the
Communist Party, notably those of Aragon in 1930
and Eluard in 1942, set the tone for the era. The late
1930s saw the rise and fall of the Front Populaire,
which united almost all the major French intellec-
tuals on the Left and the extreme Left — including the
Communist Party, which had previously been hostile
to the 'socialist bourgeoisie'. Elected to power in May
1936 — a euphoric moment — the Front Populaire
saw its adventurous plans for social reform increas-
ingly frustrated by a policy of non-intervention in
Spain, internal strikes, the devaluation of the franc
and the necessity for rearmament. April 1938 saw the
reinstatement of the centrist Daladier — and Europe
on the brink of the Second World War. Under the
government of the Front Populaire, the new depart-
ment of Sports et Loisirs had collaborated with the
Beaux Arts administration. The Maison de la Cul-
ture had become the meeting place for the Association
des Ecrivains et des Artistes Revolutionnaires .(.A-K
A.R.), and the Union des Peintres et Sculpteurs,
which published its own journal. Lecture pro-
grammes and guided tours of the museums were
organised in an effort to give art back to the people.
It was in this context that the "querelle de
realisme" assumed its fighting colours.
In 1935, Louis Aragon gave a course of lectures at
the Maison de la Culture, published under the title
Pour un Realisme Socialiste. Here he appropriated
Stalin's terms "socialist realism" and "engineers of
the soul", and gave an account of his conversion from
Surrealism to Communism, following a visit to Mos-
cow in 1930. In the U.S.S.R., complete state control
of the arts had been achieved in 1932, with Stalin's
creation of the Union of Soviet Writers and his
appointment of A. A. Zhdanov to police the restric-
T H E OXFORD ART JOURNAL — October 1980
tive programme of ideological orthodoxy formulated
at its first congress. Zhdanov's campaign became
really virulent in the summer of 1946, with his attacks
on Leningrad's literary periodicals, leading writers
and major theatres who produced 'improper' plays.
A mythic, heroic representation of class struggle be-
came the blueprint for 'realism'. Whole areas of ex-
perience, especially when potentially subversive —
for example, human sexuality — were strictly taboo.
Zhdanov's texts were to be published in transla-
tion from 1947 onwards, when socialist realism in
France was reaching its apogee espousing his prin-
ciples, and its advocates were becoming more and
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more dogmatic.
Following Aragon's autocritique of 1935, three de-
bates were held, and two published in 1936 as La
Querelle de Realisme. Artists as diverse as Gromaire,
Andre Lhote and Le Corbusier held the floor, with
Leger and Aragon as principal speakers. The defini-
tions of realisme which emerged were as individual as
each artist's personal style. Leger saw the origins of
nouveau realisme "dans la vie moderne meme", in the
influence of geometric, machine-produced products.
Le Corbusier stated: "Au sein de la production, l'art,
denomme abstrait, est concret. Le realisme est au-
dedans." Aragon, however, cried "Qui a peur du
realisme cinematographique?" He hoped that an era
of wars and revolution would find its reflection in
the developments of film and photography, referring
to Max Ernst, and the violent anti-fascist photo-
montages of John Heartfield, for whose exhibition at
the Maison de la Culture the previous year he had
written the text John Heartfield et la Beaute Revolution-
naire. In contrast to this committed art, Aragon vehe-
mently denounced the painters who were "noyes
dans la dilectation de la matiere, perdu jusqu'a
l'abstraction". However, at the Exposition Inter-
nationale of 1937 the huge murals for the Pavilion de
l'Air and the Pavilion des Chemins de Fer by
Delaunay, Leger and Herbin — dynamic, brilliantly
coloured abstractions — were far from the sort of art
Aragon had called for. (The younger assistants on
the commissions, Esteve, Manessier, Bissiere, were
to become the doyens of the abstract Ecole de Paris of
the 1940s.)
At this exhibition, the grim pavilions of Germany
and the Soviet Union stood facing each other — a
suggestive symbol of precarious international accord.
The Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, which was
signed in September 1939, shattered any hopes for
international peace, and resulted in the immediate
outlawing of the Parti Communiste Francais
(P.C.F.), following twenty years of legal existence.
61
After Hitler's invasion of Russia in 1941, however,
the P.C.F. had no further doubts about its allegiance
to the Resistance movement and gained immense
support as the parti des fusilles in Occupied France.
The Vichy government unhesitatingly delivered com-
munist hostages to the Germans whenever a selection
of prisoners had to be made (cf. Louis Aragon's Les
Martyrs de Chateaubriand, 1942). Thus, following the
Liberation, the Party was reinstated with great ac-
claim; between 1945 and 1947 it reached the height of
its political prestige, with ministers in the governmentstructeurs (1950) shown alongside a host of socialist
and an official membership in 1947 of one million.
This, however, was the year that it was forced out
of an administration increasingly dominated by the
Rassemblement du Peuple Francais, de Gaulle's
anti-Communist group. A radical socialist majority
promptly signed the Marshall Plan for United States
economic aid, followed two years later by the Atlan-
tic Pact, which made France dependent on the
United States for armaments — and left the P.C.F.
waging a guerre froide with its own countrymen, look-
back to the works celebrating les conges payes (paid
holidays) — a Front Populaire reform — and is essen-
tially a proletarianisation of the impressionist dejeuner
sur I 'herbe. David had had a huge bicentennial retro-
spective at the Musee de l'Orangerie in 1948, and
though there is no debt here on Leger's part, David,
along with Gericault, Delacroix, Courbet and
Daumier were paramount in the P.C.F. hierarchy
of revolutionary painters, who were looked to for for-
mal as well as historical inspiration. Leger's Les Con-
realist works at the exhibition De Marx a Staline in
1951, shows a group of workmen acrobatically poised
on a brightly coloured scaffolding, Beaubourg-avant-
la-lettre. Puffy clouds float behind in the blue; there is
no sign of toil, no sweat, no lutte ouvriere... Both Leger
and Picasso were renegades with regard to the Party's
aesthetic pronouncements.
To trace the evolution and final collapse of realisme
socialiste as such, the remainder of this article will

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focus on the changes in Aragon's position in the 1940s
ing increasingly to Stalinist Russia for impetus. The and early 1950s, specifically examining his relation-
Resistance was viewed nostalgically as an heroic ship with the painter Andre Fougeron — without
moment of political unity, when the Left was united, doubt the Party painter of the period. It is a useful but
all fighting pour la patrie. artificial structure within which to present the prob-
This was the new climate in which the notion of lem: for the host of second-rate fellow-travellers who
realisme socialiste gathered momentum. The melange alone can provide the context of the realisme socialiste
of Stalinism with a Front Populaire idealism and the debate, the reader is directed to the illustrations in
confusion surrounding the concepts of patrie and Arts de France for the period, particularly c. 1948-1954.
tradition — already present in the mid-1930s — con- Remember, too, that the guerrefroidesituation existed
tinued throughout the next decade, ambiguously in the streets of Paris: Communist painters and the
slanting Party rhetoric, including its aesthetic pro- new school of abstractionists would cross the road to
nouncements. avoid each other: "C'etait tres violent. Nous n'avons
The two most prestigious coups after the war in the pas evite des outrances...". (Boris Taslitzky, the 15th
field of painting, the recruitment of Picasso and of November 1979, in conversation with the author).
Leger, did little to help the cause. Picasso had joined
the P.C.F. immediately after the Salon de la Libera-
tion in 1944, but his uneasy relationship with Com-
munism certainly gave the Party no credit, and had Demobilised in 1940, Aragon spent the rest of the
a deleterious affect on his own work, as a brief mental war with Elsa Triolet among the literary circles in the
comparison between Guernica (1937) and the Massacre south of France, mainly in Nice. His immensely
en Core'e (1951) demonstrates. Stylised, rigid, in- nationalistic poetry, which had reverted to rhyme and
organic, the latter, in descent from Goya and Manet, traditional structures, circulated clandestinely dur-
presents a group of naked women, pregnant and ing the Occupation. But what of his concern for
weeping, with their children, facing a firing-squad of realisme socialiste?
inhuman-looking armoured warriors. Though far After the call for a realisme cinematographique in 1936,
from any realisme socialiste, it was interpreted as an it is fascinating to find Aragon prefacing at inordinate
oeuvre de commande at the time. The famous dove, length a collection of drawings published in 1942,
which Picasso designed for the World Peace Con- Matisse-en-France (sic). What are we to make of this?
ference of 1949, was perhaps the only happy moment First, nationalism at all costs, "au plus sombre de la
of his relationship with the Party. nuit", when covert resistance to the Occupant
Ferdnand Leger, who joined the P.C.F. on his created a movement intent on glorifying French
return from the United States in 1945, was another culture in its Frenchness to an extreme. The elision
prestigious asset. But again, as an internationally from romanesque art to Matisse's flat, brilliant, sym-
renowned artist of an older generation, he continued bolic colour and the play of arabesque, abutted in an
to work in his characteristic style, never broaching attack on the Renaissance and the 'decadence' of its
any realisme socialiste, although two important works three-dimensional space! Aragon's enemy becomes
must be cited within the context of this discussion. Michelangelo, the "dissector in secret". In compari-
Les Loisirs, Hommage a David (1948-1949) shows a son, Matisse's palette is "infiniment plus riche, im-
working-class family with bicycles posing after a periale", his "culture plus grande...". "II n'est pas
weekend spree in the countryside. In spirit it goes loin de dire, il dit meme, il m'a dit que l'art de la
62 THE OXFORD ART JOURNAL — October 1980
Renaissance, c'etait la decadence, une terrible deca-
dence."
It was in the same spirit — a nationalism looking
primarily from Matisse and Bonnard back to the
frescos of St. Savin and Tavant (the work of Henry
Focillon in the 1930s being crucial for the revaluation
of the French primitives) — that the Jeunes Peintres
de Tradition Francais held the first important exhibi-
tion of the Occupation in 1941. After this the galleries
gradually re-opened; but the n€w painting was an act
of resistance through the intensity of its colour and its appealed strongly to the war generation. On the arti-
presence alone — the subject matter remained that of
still-life, mother and child, etc..
Andre Fougeron, who was mobilised at the time,
could not participate in the 1941 exhibition. He came
from an anarcho-syndicalist background and Jiad
enthusiastically attended the A.E.A-R. meetings at
the Maison de la Culture in the late 1930s. In June
1936, as part of the group Les Indelicats, he had ex-
hibited a print from their album Elites — a scathing
du genie". No wonder, with such mauvaisefoi at this
level in the hierarchy, that the Communist Party was
beginning to lose its intellectual prestige. With the
defection of Aragon, Eluard and others from the Sur-
realist movement, Picasso's membership in 1944
and Leger's in 1945, it had once been the "parti de
1'intelligence francaise" (Roger Garaudy), but there
was now a serious threat from the non-Communist
Left. With their philosophy of free choice and political
engagement, Sartre and the Existentialist movement
stic front, there was also the young group Surrealistes
Revolutionnaires who had Trotskyite-anarchist tend-
dencies. They produced their manifesto, Rupture In-
augurate in defiance to Breton's Exposition Inter-
nationale du Surrealisme of 1937. As P.C.F. prestige
was eroded, the language of the Party grew more
outrageous. To call Sartre, Mauriac, Leon Blum
and Malraux "trifouilleurs de poubelles", in the
first editorial of La Nouvelle Critique for December

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attack on the Catholic right-wing bourgeoisie in 1948, was symptomatic of such a reaction. It was in
France. In December 1937 he had participated in the this climate that Aragon prefaced another collection
Art Cruel exhibition with such artists as Goerg, of drawings, Andre Fougeron's, at the latter's
Grosz, Gruber and Masson, where Picasso showed request.
The Dream and the Lie of Franco. Fougeron's own Allowing himself several digs at Breton's exhibi-
Spanish civil war canvases La Mori et la Faim and tion, and contemporary art in general ("Suicide
Espagne Martyre are outraged, brilliantly coloured epidemique, demission volontaire?"), Aragon cried:
tours-de-force — figurative, but symbolic rather than "II n'y a pas de movement dada en 1947... Mais
'realistic'. prenez garde: a chaque dessin se joue encore le destin
His decision to join the Communist Party at the de l'art figuratif... se joue encore le destin du
most dangerous moment, late 1939, was long deliber- monde "
ated. When demobilised it was inevitable that he Fougeron's work as a resistant had brought him
should become prominent in the Front National des initially to Aragon's notice, but these innocuous
Arts, and he was eager to put to use the lithographic sleeping peasants, cocks, the Picassoid Jeune Fille au
skills he had learnt from the painter Jacques Villon. Miroir, hardly merited such rhetoric. However, the
Thus Vaincre, an album of twelve lithographs by nine compliment was to be returned more than gener-
artists, came to be published clandestinely in June ously: the succes de scandale of the Salon d'Automne of
1944, the first work of a distinctively active resistance. 1948 was Fougeron's Parisiennes au Marche (Fig. 1).
The first lithograph, by Fougeron, shows an An aggressive poissonniere (apron fastened with a safety
aureoled, decapitated hero, holding his head in the pin), offers fish to a row of housewives in cheap print
manner of St. Denis, around whom are placed the dresses. The canvas is frankly, deliberately garish.
words: "Je vous salue ma France... sol seme de For the first time in Fougeron's work there is no res-
heros" — an extract from one of Aragon's most pect for the picture plane, which is creuse— hollowed
famous Resistance poems (unsigned, of course, at
the time). A pile of corpses lies at the hero's feet, a
compound of Golgotha imagery and Poussin's Mas-
sacre of the Innocents — a key painting for socialist
realist iconography, of which a striking detail was
used to advertise Arts de France throughout the decade.
Whether Aragon was aware of Fougeron's tribute
is a moot point. Certainly, between 1944-1947, when
the Party was at the height of its influence and most of
its aesthetic theory was propounded, it unfortunately
had no artists. Aragon, the porte-parole of the P.C.F.,
was still preoccupied with the "luxe, calme et
volupte" of Matisse. In 1946 one is astounded to find
him entitling the preface to another lavish edition of
reproductions 'Apologie du Luxe'!
Matisse paints lemons, pineapples, a Nu au Mag-
nolia, Jeune Femme a la Pelisse. Aragon's comment is Fig. 1. Andre Fougeron: 'Parisiennes au Marche', 1948,
ambiguous: "C'est la perpetuelle derniere cigarette 195 x 130 cm.. Collection of the artist, Paris.

T H E OXFORD ART JOURNAL — October 1980 63


Fig. 2. Andre Fougeron: 'Hommage a Andre Houiller', 1949, 250 x 375 cm.. Pushkin Museum, Moscow.
out into three dimensions — figuratively as well as
ideologically, it is a canvas about confrontation: the
woman in the spotted dress stares straight into the
spectator's eye... The debate — apart from the
question as to whether Fougeron (Prix National,
1946), had compromised his art — is literally about
the price of fish, and whether, for opinions varied,
these housewives are plump and reasonably content,
or "in the cruel light of 10 a.m.", they are women
"d'apres la trentaine" prematurely deprived of their
femininity, "mutilated" by their work, with "secret
ulcers" etc., etc.. (From an article by Georges
Mounin in Cahiers d'art, 1949, printed with a riposte
by Christian Zervos, 'Insignifiance de M. Fou-
geron...'). Essentially, however, the Parisiennes au
Marche consists of a still-life frieze offish, topped with
a series of portraits of models posed in the studio.
" L a Beaute Revolutionnaire" was succombing to
academic practice: in the world's eyes, an art de parti
had been born.
It was Fougeron's machine for the next Salon
d'Automne, L''Hommage a Andre Houiller (1949), which
to my mind is the most interesting temoignage produced
by a Communist painter (Fig. 2). The Hommage
a Houiller is complex, fascinating pictorially and
politically successful. In both its handling, and in the
psychological tension it creates, it bears comparison
with the work of Balthus in the 1940s. But while the
theme of the ouvrier mort generates its own emotional
nexus, it is the facts behind the canvas which make
it horrifically pertinent to the Communists' predi-
64
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cament. Houiller, a Resistance hero and militant
Communist, had been putting up posters at dawn
protesting against war, when he was shot in the back
and killed by a policeman who was himself 'moon-
lighting' preparing meat in a butcher's shop before
going on duty. That this murder could take place in
1949 is an index to the violence that Communist
activity could provoke; but worse, it happened that
these posters, A bas la guerre, had been designed by
Fougeron, who felt himself indirectly responsible
for the death. He describes in Arts de France
(no. 27-28, 1949), how, at the cemetery:
"J'etais dechire par la crainte de ne savoir m'y prendre
pour rendre a ce combattant l'hommage qu'il meritait.
Aragon se penchant vers moi me dit doucement: 'Tu sais
maintenant ce que tu dois faire pour la prochaine Salon
d'Automne...'."
Fougeron then describes how the picture was painted:
it was the largest format he could get into his studio
(4.10 x 2.55 metres), and took nearly a year to com-
plete. After being exhibited at the Salon d'Automne,
it was offered to Stalin for his seventieth birthday by a
subscription of the Federation de Paris du P.C.F..
The three figures holding hands on the left are
dressed in colours that together represent the French
flag; again a symbolic assertion that the P.C.F. fights
for the patrie and the peuple against the dirigeants, who,
according to the poster, are preparing the destruction
of France via the alliance with Germany, war against
T H E OXFORD ART JOURNAL — October 1980
Russia, and atomic annihilation. The concern with
expression, physiognomy, the arousal of hate and
vengeance, is positively Poussinesque, and is corro-
borated by the emphasis on construction, propor-
tion, the golden section and the ceremonial linking of
hands. All conspires to a single purpose:

"Montrer l'indignation populaire! Montrer qu'on ne peut

plus toucher impunement aux Communistes! Montrer le
sens de leur devouement au cause sacre de la patrie...
Montrer tout, oui, absolument tout: le peuple, les femmes,
les families, la tristesse devant le crime impuni, mais aussi
les raisons de nos certitudes. Cela depasserait mes moyens?
Peut-etre...."
On the occasion of his next major exhibition, Poussin
was again invoked in an article by Jean Marcenac:
'Fougeron, L'Arcadie et la beaute moderne', {Les
Lettres Frangaises, 1951).
The Pays des Mines were commissioned after the
Salon d'Automne by the Federation Regionale des

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Mineurs du Nord et du Pas de Calais. Auguste
Lecoeur, their president, had prefaced a small edi-
tion of poems with the same title by Aragon in 1949,
demanding: "Les mineurs attendent maintenant
TAragon' de la peinture." Fougeron rose to the
challenge: forty paintings, drawings and studies
were completed in 1950. The fact that they were
exhibited, in 1951, in one of the smartest galleries in
Paris, Bernheim Jeune, where Fougeron already had
a contract, was of major importance: 50,000 people
passed in front of Terres Cruelles, Defense Nationale, Fig. 3. Andre Fougeron: 'Defense Nationale', 1950, 325 x
Lesjuges, in Paris alone, before the exhibition went on 225 cm.. Museum of Fine Arts, Bucharest.
tour to St. Denis, Lens, Douai, Marseilles, St.
Etienne, and Ales; and, of course, it was massively with Les Juges, Le Pensionne (Fig. 5), a retired miner
reviewed. hunched in his chair, presents the other aspect of
Documentary or propaganda? In the first edition of socialist realism. While the party rhetoric was geared
the Pays des Mines to be printed in book form, Andre towards the imminence of revolution and its inevi-
Stil provided some statistics: 2,500,000 miners went table success, the justification of the revolutionary
on strike in 1947, the year of grave economic crisis, position depended on the misery and suppression of
and there was an eight-week strike in October 1948, the working classes — hence the dialectic of triompha-
by which time, apparently, their purchasing power lisme/miserabilisme, which was never resolved. While
had halved in spite of a doubling of production. The Defense Nationale, with its cowering policemen, is
government, under the slogan "charbon a bas prix", patently triomphaliste, and vengeance is to the fore in
refused to acknowledge that 343 people were killed Hommage a Houiller and Les Juges, the Pensionne pre-
(one per day), and 240,415 injured (700 per day) in sents a spectacle of passive and despondent suffering.
mining accidents in 1948. The Minister of the Interior It is significant that the only pictures in his room
sent the C.R.S. riot police, with dogs and tear gas to are the framed photographs of Stalin and Maurice
quell the miners, and spoke of the "etendue des terri- Thorez on the mantlepiece, and that Fougeron went
toires occupes". Three miners were killed and hun- out of his way to choose the 'right' (i.e. particularly
dreds injured in confrontation with the police. Defense tasteless) pink wallpaper — for not only did the work-
Nationale (Fig. 3), attemps a synopsis of the situation ing classes have no means to buy socialist paintings,
— the tricolour on the right, by the women and child- they had no wish to see themselves represented in a
ren, as in Delacroix's Barricade, indicates which side is miserable state; nor did they consider the visual arts
fighting for liberty. as an educational priority or a form of leisure
Lesjuges (Fig. 4), uses the confrontational structure activity. The P.C.F. was admirable in its attempts to
of Parisiennes au Marche to present, not, as in Tas- interest workers in the arts, bussing them to the Salon
litzky's Les Dele'gue's, a front of solidarity, but an ugly d'Automne and so forth, but as far as selling pictures
and accusatory view of accident and disease: blue was concerned, it was forced to create its own mar-
scars, silicosis, collapsed vertebrae, amputation — ket, commissioning works from Party funds for its
and the orphan in the foreground. In comparison own exhibitions. There is no room to go into finan-

T H E OXFORD ART JOURNAL — October 1980 65

Fig. 4. Andre Fougeron: 'Lesjuges', 1950, 195 x 130cm..
Collection of the artist, Paris.
cial details here — suffice it to say that apart from
Houiller, now in the Pushkin Museum, Moscow, and
the Pensionne and Defense Nationale in Bucharest, the
remaining canvases are all still with Andre Fougeron.
The Party created no mural or poster art of any sig-
nificance. The fact that socialist realist painting was
in oils and limited in general to the dimensions of the
easel went hand-in-hand with the reversion to three-
dimensional, quasi-photographic subject painting.
The Salon d'Automne of 1951 was the most scan-
dalous yet, though this time not thanks to Fougeron.
On the 6th of November, at the hour when the
presidential visit was expected, the government sent
in the police to take down seven canvases passed by
the jury: Jean Milhau's Maurice Thorez va bien —
showing Thorez on the front page of copies of
I'Humanite, the vendor surrounded by children and
flowers, Marie-Anne Lansiaux's Le Defile du premier
Mai, equally saccharine; a Manifestation by one Ber-
berian; Bauquier's Les Dockers, assembled in front of a
barrier proclaiming "Pas un bateau pour Indo-
chine"; Taslitzsky's Riposte, Port de Bouc, (1949) —
the C.R.S. riot police and their dogs attacking
dockers who refuse to export material bound for the
Indochinese war: Singer's Le 10 fevrier a Nice, when
the population threw a launching ramp for a V2
rocket into the sea; and Julian Sorel's portrait of
Henri Martin in a prisoner's uniform — Henri Mar-
tin whose protest against the war in Indochina led to
his imprisonment at Melun. (Sartre himself led the
campaign for his liberation, which at the time effected
an important rapprochement between himself and the
Communist Party.)
The protests by Matisse, Picasso, Goerg, Les Lettres quotations from the director of the Galerie Tretiakoff
Francoises, Arts, Le Parisien Libere'and I'Humanite', led to (the Russian equivalent of the Jeu de Paume), made
the reinstallation of all except the Bauquier and the in 1949:
Singer on the 10th — but three works were taken^
down the same afternoon, leaving only Thorez and Le
Premier Mai on display. Aragon immediately pub-
lished an illustrated pamphlet, L'Art et le Sentiment
National, in whose name die government claimed to
have acted: "Le sentiment national de qui?" He re-
66
Fig. 5. Andre Fougeron: 'Le Pensionne', 1950, 250
190 cm.. Museum of Fine Arts, Bucharest.
marks that not only I'Humanite, and Liberation, but
Franc-Tireur, Le Populaire and Temoignage Chretien un-
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animously denounced the Indochinese war, "la sale
guerre", for which Martin had been pilloried. The
"sentiment national" is shocked, he says, by the
sight of police brutality when ex-Resistance heroes
protested at the homage to Petain in Notre Dame,
the rearmament of Germany, the French army under
the command of "un Pentagone transatlantique",
the general economic depression.... What is remark-
able is how the decrochage — obviously an attack on
artistic freedom of expression — becomes a vitally
symbolic political issue, the Salon d'Automne a focus
for the discussion of politics — as were in their day
the canvases of the painters Aragon cites: Gericault,
Daumier and Courbet.
Aragon, however, eschews qualitative comparison
between the latter and these works of 1951. The
Zhdanovist theories of socialist realism put about in
translation from 1947 onwards were bearing sorry
fruit... 1952 brought its counter-protests: Edouard
Pignon painted his second Ouvrier Mort — the first
had been in 1936 — to show via the theme of a min-
ing disaster that one could dramatise a scene "sans
tomber dans la banalite et l'ecoeurment". He
remarks in his autobiography on the "espece d'auto-
castration '' among party artists and — the worst fact
of all — that they were not forced to paint what they
did, but produced it voluntarily.
Andre Breton, in Arts, (the 11th of January, 1952),
asked "Pourquoi nous cache-t-on la peinture russe
contemporaine?" He showed depressingly poor
examples of contemporary Soviet art, and gave choice
"Cezanne est a condamner
Matisse ne sait pas dessiner
Picasso est putrefiant
Tout artiste qui ne suit pas l'exemple de l'art
sovietique est un ennemi de socialisme..."
THE OXFORD ART JOURNAL — October 1980
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Fig. 6. Andre Fougeron: 'Civilisation Atlantique', 1953, 600 x 400 cm.. Collection of the artist, Paris.

After Aragon's ripostes in Les Lettres Francaises, soyez pas pretentieux a ce point, votre talent n'est
Breton followed this up in April with 'Du 'realisme pas a la hauteur de Staline." Small wonder that for
socialiste' comme moyen d'extermination morale'. the huge commemorative exhibition in May, De
He quotes Aragon's prophecy of the death of painting Marx a. Staline, Picasso sent only a drawing of
made in 1930 {La Peinture au Deft), points to Maia- Thorez done in 1945. Fougeron, on the other hand,
kowski's suicide, the innate hostility of the totalita- submitted not only a drawing of Auguste Lecoeur,
rian regime to the arts and the fact that Aragon's but Les paysans francais defendent la terre and Marx et
latest convocation of two hundred "artistes, plasti- Engels au milieu d'un cercle de travailleurs socialistes, Paris
ciens, membres du parti communiste francais" 1844. 'History painting' was in full sway: the exhibi-
represented but one per cent of the artists in Paris at tion was crammed with imaginative episodes in the
the time. He concludes with Picasso's parallel be- life of Marx, Lenin and other communist heroes.
tween Stalinist party leaders and the Spanish The final crisis was provoked at the Salon
Jesuits, whose fervour he had admired in his youth. d'Automne of 1953, when Fougeron tackled contem-
This, alas, was all too premonitory of the censure porary problems in a vast 6.00 x 4.00 metre canvas
that was to fall on Picasso in 1953, with the 'Affaire called Civilisation Atlantique (Fig. 6). The resulting
du portrait Staline'. rupture in the Aragon-Fougeron relationship marked
Nine days after Stalin's death on the 3rd of March the beginning of the end of socialist realism in France.
1953, Les Lettres Francaises published a commemora- Civilisation Atlantique is distinguished from its prede-
tive issue, its front page blazoned with Picasso's cessors by a collage-type of space, capable of present-
stylised, almost byzantine sketch of Stalin in his ing various narrative incidents at once, as opposed to
youth. (Was this perhaps a deliberately non-commital the frozen mise-en-scene of Houiller. Dominated by the
gesture?) It showed none of the expected qualities of ferocious American car, replete with S.S. sniper, an
the official portrait — the intellectual, moral and allusion to the rearmament of Germany in 1953, it
spiritual attributes of a leader. Official censure was represents, according to Fougeron: "Le capitalisme
registered on the 17th of March. Andre Fougeron europe'en qui s'incline devant le symbole d'Ameri-
wrote: "J'ai le regret d'informer la direction de mon que" — notice the bull-necked bourgeois raising his
Parti, que je me refuse par avance ce soi-disant por- top hat. Between him and the car, raised on a pede-
trait." Aragon published a series of letters which in- stal like a throne, is the electric chair in which the
cluded such statements as "Allons, Picasso... Ne American Communists, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg
THE OXFORD ART JOURNAL — October 1980 67
 were executed, accused of having betrayed atomic
secrets to the U.S.S.R. (this was not the only refer-
ence to the Rosenbergs at the Salon that year). The
upper left corner of the canvas shows the Centrale
de Melun, the prison where Henri Martin was in-
carcerated. The air is blackened dramatically by
smoke from factory chimneys, beneath which dance
the "enfants d'Aubervilliers", immortalised in a
popular song — Aubervilliers being a particularly
depressing and unhealthy industrial suburb north of
Paris. Beneath the dancing children are depicted
various aspects of the post-war crise de logement.
Mother, child and shoeless daughter are living in a
tent; two faces peep out at the bottom of the canvas
from an abandoned blockhouse on the coast. In the
corner, two north African immigrant workers,
banished from the centre of the city, try to sleep under
a corrugated iron shelter. (This fragment was re-
worked in 1954 as Les nord-africains aux portes de la ville, achieved, it is obviously more effective as propa-
which later became part of a Tryptique de la Honte). Be- ganda — and more exciting to look at — than the
tween these homeless people, the couple of old age
symboles sans lien, sans respect de credibilite" — the
very elements, of course, which revitalise Fougeron's
painting, make it dynamic instead of static; the very
elements which John Heartfield had used in his
photomontages of the 1930s. Indeed, Aragon even
mentions "les vieux precedes de juxtaposition de
surrealisme dans la peinture et les photomontages",
Mexican mural painting and the German magazine
Simplicissimus, but concludes:
"Pour ceux qui savent que la France est occupee ... un
simple 'Go Home' sur les murs est plus significatif que
cette caricature."
Although Fougeron's collage of 'evils' expresses an
extremely partisan political opinion in the light of the
Cold War and Europe's need for military assistance
if a balance of power with the U.S.S.R. were to be
former 'situational' canvases designed to provoke an

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pensioners repeat an already successful motif. In emotion rather than to present issues demanding a
extraordinary contrast are the pampered dogs in the critical reaction. Fougeron himself sees the work as
foreground representing "un concours de chiens de an anticipation of the Pop era and the space of
beaute" and an American soldier reading a porno- Kitaj... but the experiment was not to be repeated.
graphic magazine above an exploited little negro
Was it really the formal elements that Aragon was
bootblack. The element of triomphalisme has completely
objecting to? Was it not perhaps that Stalin's death,
given way to a condemnation of moral decadence.
the subsequent de'gel and the increasingly frequent
Debates had waged furiously since the end of the revelations about Soviet prison camps augured
war about the importation of American culture. greater isolation for the P.C.F., and thus furnished
While Sartre had printed his own articles on Ameri- very pertinent reasons for Aragon's retreat from .the
can life in the journal Combat in 1945, and his review explicit? At the thirteenth Party congress, in 1954,
Les Temps Modernes showed a lively interest in all he praised a Soviet picture — On the river Dniepr as
aspects of its culture, and while St Germain-des-Pres ideal because of its "credibilite". "Ici rien de decla-
resounded to Boris Vian's jazz bands, the Com- matoire, rien d'hysterique." It is a history painting
munist journals seethed at the cultural invasion which "demonstrates the general development of
of la patrie — a corollary of the economic and military Soviet economy" — the calm, the order on the quay-
capitulation to the United States. side, "l'amenagement recent des villes...". Like
Dominating the right side of the canvas is the dark Gerard Singer's Vue de Laon, which he had preferred
wall of government propaganda exhorting enrolment to Civilisation Atlantique at the Salon d'Automne of
in the French wars in Vietnam. The modern-style 1953, Aragon valued this type of landscape as it could
flats built for American N.A.T.O. officers in be seen to interpret "un mouvement profond de
Napolean Ill's hunting grounds at St Cloud make a patriotisme" without getting into political hot water.
nice formal counterpoint to the prison of Melun — In other words, painting had reverted to "la res-
and of course stand as the antithesis to the homeless semblance peinte" — Aragon's phrase — and, as the
families on the left — while the dark coffins arriving "ingenieurs d'ames" found themselves with less and
at Marseilles demonstrate the truth about this im- less access to any real power, so their art, with its
perialist war. The French widow in black, the Viet- emphasis on virility and heroic struggle, became com-
namese widow in white, the weeping orphans, the pletely emasculated. A sub-impressionist landscape,
irony of the young boy staring at the poster, all devoid of all personality, remained after all the
emphasise the point. passion, the triomphaliste/miserabiliste extremes. From a
Although Aragon, too, spoke of "l'occupation pictorial point of view, the appeal to David and Cour-
americaine" and "la brutalite politique des Yan- bet, at first purely subject-oriented, had forgotten a
kees", his reaction in Les Lettres Frangaises, (the 12th of major revolutionary precept — that the medium is
November, 1953), was unexpected: "II faut dire die message. Leaving aside the political subject-
halte-la a Andre Fougeron." The painting was matter, the form, the size, the perspective, the very
apparendy "hative, grossiere, meprisante ... II ne media of Party painting betrayed it as essentially
peut que servir 1'opinion repandue par l'ennemi de la reactionary. Even Fougeron had felt the need to
grossierete de coeur et de pensee des communistes." break away. How ironic to recall Aragon on Matisse
Aragon criticises specifically "la composition anti- in 1943: "La Renaissance, c'etait la decadence,
realiste, sans perspective vraie, par enumeration des une terrible decadence... . " Three-dimensionality,

68 T H E OXFORD ART JOURNAL — October 1980

accuracy, "credibilite", "lisibilite": Aragon had
arrived at an aesthetic based on the criteria of the
lowest common denominator.
The revolutionary artists of the 1930s were men
like John Heartfield, while young artists like
Fougeron certainly contributed along with Picasso in
a moving response to the Spanish Civil War. In the
1940s, while accessibility to la base ouviere still posed
(and continues to pose) a problem, it was surely the
painters like Hartung, Wols, Dubuffet and Fautrier,
all passionately concerned with political as well as
personal liberty, who created the new beauty. It was
finally their ideas which created the new intellectual
avant-garde.
This research has been made possible by a grant from the
Leverhulme Foundation. I would particularly like to thank
Monsieur Fougeron for his help and generosity in the prepara- will be shown to the public at the exhibition Paris-Paris:
tion of this article.
L'HIVER 100 x 81
T H E OXFORD ART JOURNAL — October 1980
Bibliographic Note
For the period: Arts de France, Les Lettres Francoises, Cahiers de
Communism, and La Nouvelle Critique.
Louis Aragon: Pour un realisme socialiste, Edition Denoel & Steele,
Paris 1935; ed. La Querelle de Realisme, Editions Sociales et
Internationales, Paris 1956; pref. Henry Matisse, Themes et Varia-
tions, Martin Fabiani, Paris 1943; pref. Matisse, Editions Albert
Skira, Geneva, 1946; pref. Dessins de Fougeron, Editions Les
Treize Epis, Paris, 1947; L'Art et le Sentiment National, Edi-
tions Les Lettres Francaises et Tous les Arts, Paris, 1951.
Andre Fougeron: Vaincre, clandestine publication, 1944; Les Pays
des Mines, Editions de la Federation Regionale des Mineurs du
Nord et du Pas de Calais, 1951
Recent Studies: David Caute Communism and the French Intellec-
tuals, O.U.P., 1964; Jeannine Verdes-Leroux, 'L'Art de Parti.
Le Parti Communiste et ses Peintres, 1947-1954', Actes de la
Recherche en Sciences Sociales, no. 28, June 1979; Sylvain Lecombre,
'La Peinture francaise au lendemain de la seconde guerre mon-
diale, 1944-1953', Doctorat de 3 e cycle, Paris-Sorbonne I.
It is hoped that Hommage a Houiller (1949), and
Les Juges (1950), together with extensive documentation,
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Creations 1937-1957, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris,
1981.
Paintings and Drawings now in
private collections in France,
Belgium, Switzerland, Holland,
Canada, United States.
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