Avant-Garde

versus
Socialist Realism
Nikolay Punin
Punin and his wife poetesse
Anna Akhmatova

Punin, early 1950s

prison camp
“State Institute of Artistic Culture”
(St Petersburg, 1923-1926)
 Pavel Filonov

“Revolution”
(1924)

“Workers” (1916)
 Pavel Filonov

“Shostakovich’s
First Symphony”

(1935)

composer Dmitry Shostakovich.

He composed First Symphony in
1925, at age 19, influenced by the
avant-garde and the revolution
In the 1930s, some avant-garde artists tried to adapt
to the state’s demands of realist art

Filonov
“Shock workers at ‘Red Dawn’ factory”
(1932)
 Kazimir Malevich

“Worker woman” (1933)

“Self-portrait” (1933)

1916 “Portrait of Nikolai Punin” (1933)

 Pavel Filonov Isaac Brodsky
“Portrait of Stalin” (1936) “Portrait of Stalin”
(commissioned and later rejected)
Brodsky, “Portrait of Stalin”

Brodsky routinely based his canvases on photographs.

And photographs were routinely doctored by the new state
 Alexandr Deineka
Moving to “Socialist Realism”

“Woman’s Potrait” “Woman on Red” (1939)

(1920)
 Deineka “Textile Women” (1927)

“New workshops”
(1926)

“Two Models”
(1923)
 ALEXANDR DEINEKA

“The Happinness of Space” (1944)

 Alexandr Deineka

“Heroes of the 1st Five Year Plan”

(1937)

“Football”
(1924)
 Filonov 1930

Malevich 1913

Social Realism
versus
Avant-garde

Luppov “Sports Games at a Stadium” (1927)

Kitaev, “Just Graduated” (1952)
Lupov, “1st of May in Odessa” 1932
 Sergei Sevrikeyev.
“River Control”, 1960

Grigorii Riazhskii,
“Chairwoman of the kolkhoz” 1932

"Women of the Kolkhoz,"

“All flags will visit us” (1964)
Alexander Deineka “Conquerors of Space” (1961)
Deineka “Opening a collective farm” (1952)