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With the help of the Russian Ministry of Culture, curators Joseph Bakshtein, Kathrin Becker, Zdenka Gabalova and Alanna Heiss have done a remarkable job on a very tight budget. A sampling of Socialist Realism was included in a broader Russian exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1977, but otherwise nothing like this show has been seen in America before. The very notion of an American museum asking for Stalinist paintings seems so weird that any interest in them is bound to seem morbid. To look at, say, Vasili Svarog's ebullient 1939 painting of Stalin and the jolly butchers of the Politburo frolicking with smiling children in Gorky Park is like hearing a particularly ghastly fairy tale told from the point of view of the ogre.
Every painting in the show is kitsch by high-Modernist standards. And it is not easy to don the expectations of the original audience. The paintings presuppose a knowledge of Russian society, and above all a saturation with its period propaganda, that few in the West can claim. Why did it matter for political purposes that the writer Maxim Gorky should be depicted taking lessons on the rifle range from Marshal Voroshilov, the commissar of war? It mattered because Gorky, though a literary favorite and a devoted friend of Lenin's, was opposed to shooting, and this bothered Stalin.
It is worthwhile to remember that such art -- which, mutatis mutandis, has also been the formal state style of Hitler, Mao Zedong and not a few minor figures including Saddam Hussein -- has meant more to more people in the past 60 years than all the sanctified Modernist styles, from Fauvism to Pop, rolled together. Like Modernism's, its roots lay in the 19th century. If Modernism grew from Manet, Monet and Cezanne, Socialist Realism emerged from their conservative opposition -- the academic and narrative work that was the institutional art of Europe a century ago. In Russia the hugely popular landscapes and genre scenes of the Peredvizhniki, or Wanderers, led by Ilya Repin (1844-1930), were promoted as a mirror of the Russian soul by the most nationalistic of all 19th century Czars, Alexander III. Socialist Realism, violently nationalist in its rhetoric, inherited this aura.
What strikes a modern non-Russian viewer most is Socialist Realism's unabashed fantasy. Realism in Stalinist terms did not mean painting things as they were or even as they might be: the inevitability of Socialist progress erased that conditional "might," along with the gap between present and future. That which will be already is, under the world-sustaining gaze of Comrade Stalin. Ideology ascribed to Stalin the actual role of God, the creation of reality itself.