by Jan Plamper
Yet there were dangers inherent in quoting Stalin’s remarks on particular paintings and art in general. Aleksandr Gerasimov was well aware of these: “I will not quote what Joseph Vissarionovich said because when such a great man speaks, every word is valuable, and I am afraid of leaving something out.”82 The authority to canonize statements by Stalin through their publication belonged, after all, not to the artist, but to the Party and Stalin.
BOLSHEVIKS DON’T MODEL!
One of the most vexing questions for artists and Party leaders was the issue of posing live, of standing as a model, of allowing the leader to be painted “from life” (s natury).83 Some realist artists required thirty and more posing sessions, each lasting many hours, for a single portrait—a considerable sacrifice in time, especially considering that many Party leaders deemed painting frivolous or, in keeping with the imperative of modesty, were concerned that their posing might be interpreted as lacking in that Bolshevik virtue.84 No artist voiced this problem more directly than a certain Isaev, who, during the preparation for the 1939 Stalin anniversary exhibition “J. V. Stalin and the People of the Soviet Land in the Fine Arts,” complained about the difficulties of getting Stakhanovites and other Soviet heroes of the Second and Third Five-Year Plans to pose because they “believe that posing will lead others to accusing them of doing nothing, of wasting time on modeling, therefore they escape posing or pose at the desk.”85 Another painter in the early 1930s proposed to Kaganovich that he first watch Kaganovich at work, in order to photograph him “in the pose that will be most characteristic” and then do a sketch in color that was to eat up no more than an hour of Kaganovich’s time. The artist would then work by himself in the studio, and finally request that the leader sit for another “one or two hours in order to enliven my work from nature.” “I know,” he wrote very typically, “that you, Lazar Moiseevich, are extremely busy, that you don’t have a free minute, and that you need every second. But look at it like this: this is not a whim but my work, I do this not just for art but because of its great social significance: a good, truthful portrait of a leader is just as needed as his speech or live performance.”86
Few professions could match the intimacy of a Party boss’s sitting for a painter.87 For painters, working with their leaders s natury both posed a threat and offered immense opportunities. In the intimate working atmosphere of the studio, personal relations between painter and leader usually developed. In a highly personalized and patronage-oriented power system, painters could use their close access to a leader to ask for favors, such as a new apartment, the release of a loved one from prison, a larger studio. And given the notoriously ambiguous definition of socialist realism, they could ask a leader for his interpretation of the Party line at the given moment. On the other hand, a brush stroke that aroused the ire of the portrait’s subject, or the kind of visceral antipathy that sometimes arose between portrayer and portrayed, could hurl the painter’s life into an abyss.
Portraitists’ accounts of their sessions with members of the Party elite are extremely codified. Invariably, the painter feels anxious and nervous before the meeting but is soon put at complete ease by the “simplicity” and “warmth” of the vozhd’.88 Gerasimov kept recounting publicly how nervous he had been at the famous July 1933 meeting at Stalin’s dacha: “I had to pour the tea. There was a real Russian samovar. I was so nervous that I somehow poured milk from the milk jug into the teapot instead of my tea glass. We all laughed.”89 Kats-man described how, before the same 1933 dacha meeting, the three painters had been both nervous and ecstatic. Voroshilov calmed them down by saying “that he had been just as nervous when he first went to Lenin and walked up to his apartment.” But the effect of Stalin’s appearance was even more soothing: “Joseph Vissarionovich immediately made everything simple and clear. His calmness and cheerful hospitality delighted us.”90 In 1949 Katsman commented on the occasion of the opening of Stalin’s seventieth birthday exhibition: “And you always sense a special nervousness, when you meet, when you see and hear those great people, whom at first only your fantasy drew. I always wondered, ‘What is he like in real life?’”91
From the early 1930s until Stalin’s death, artists constantly pleaded, demanded, and conspired for him to pose for them. And yet there are competing stories as to how many times and for whom Stalin posed. The first known post-1917 artistic representation of Stalin is an infamous pencil and pastel drawing by Nikolai Andreev, dated 1 May 1922 and autographed by Stalin. This drawing, produced three weeks after Stalin had become General Secretary of the Bolshevik Party, is the only example to take realism to the extreme of including Stalin’s pockmarks. (Also, Stalin had a stiffened left arm from an improperly treated injury.) Despite the fact that Stalin signed this painting, it is known that he attempted to censor at least one version of it and wrote on one of the copies: “This ear shows that the artist doesn’t know anatomy. J. Stalin. The ear screams, is a gross offense against anatomy (krichit, vopiet protiv anatomii). J. St.” (Plate 9). Likely Stalin was irked not by the ear, but by the pockmarks. While parts of the story remain unknown, it is proven that Andreev’s drawing was exhibited throughout the Stalin period and called, in an introductory article to the catalogue of the 1939 Stalin anniversary exhibition, a “perfectly finished portrait. No details, everything is concentrated on the representation of the decisive and powerful movement of the head and the penetrating gaze. But most valuable in this work is the fact that the freshness and power of the direct impression has been preserved in it. The signature of Joseph Vissarionovich on this work suggests that he saw it positively.”92 To be sure, Stalin was never again portrayed with his physical imperfections, neither the pockmarks nor the stiffened arm.93
The first written account of depicting Stalin describes two sculpture sessions in 1926. Marina Ryndziunskaia, a sculptor from Moscow, who had already produced busts of several high-ranking Bolsheviks (including one of Aleksei Rykov, to be destroyed in 1938 when Rykov was denounced as an “enemy of the people” during the purges), was asked—probably by the Museum of the Revolution in the context of the sculpture series of prominent Party leaders—to fashion a sculpture of Stalin.94 She began with a Stalin photograph she had received from the Central Committee. “Then came a moment when I ran into difficulties in my search for the image. I want to and must see Comrade Stalin.” Having been told that she “would not, of course, succeed” in getting Stalin to pose, Ryndziunskaia appealed to Stalin’s wife, Nadezhda Allilueva, who facilitated a meeting with Stalin in his office at the Central Committee during the late summer of 1926. In keeping with Stalin’s canonical image of modesty, Ryndziunskaia emphasizes the “silent sparseness (molchalivaia skupost’)” of the office, an “unpretentiousness of the word, unpretentiousness of movements, nothing superfluous.”95 As for Stalin himself: “I was met by a man of medium height, with very broad shoulders, who firmly stood on his feet. . . . And exactly molded from one metal with his torso, a head and strongly developed neck, with a calm and resolute face. To use the language of us artists, I saw a strong composition from the top of his head to the heels of his feet, relating a single thought. A man of exceptional inner will, in an unbelievably calm pose, without the slightest movement. A force, amazing and thrilling, with a head that seemed to sit firmly, a head you cannot imagine moving to the right or to the left, only straight and only forward.”96 Here we have a dress rehearsal for most of the tropes of Stalin representations: the modesty, calmness, immobility, metal-like quality, Nietzschean willpower, and linear, progressive movement— “only straight, and only forward.” Clearly, this account was refracted through the prism of the Stalin iconography that developed during the 1930s.
“Without hope of seeing him again,” Ryndziunskaia then tried to “use the limited time to study his movements and the bearing of his head.” But Stalin agreed to sit for her during a second session at her own studio. Stalin arrived together with his wife, Nadezhda Allilueva:
I met a completely different person in c
omparison to our first encounter. He was unpretentious, cheerful, joked, criticized my works, and noted a shortcoming in terms of anatomy once in a while (“Please don’t laugh, I do know anatomy,” he said). . . . I felt at ease with him, chattered, told him everything that came to my mind, and did not think about what was permissible or not. I even told him that, had I known “that you can be this cheerful and simply talkative, I would not have asked Nadezhda Sergeevna to come with you, because I was so nervous about visiting you at the Central Committee that I was somewhat embarrassed.” Comrade Stalin laughed: “Don’t tell me you got cold feet, got scared?” “I didn’t get cold feet, I ran away worrying my head off, that’s how frightening it seemed at your office.” “I’m very, very glad, that’s the way it’s supposed to be,”—he said with a good-natured smile. [Ryndziunskaia:] “Is it true that you wouldn’t have come to me if it were not for Nadezhda Sergeevna?” Comrade Stalin burst out laughing: “Of course, she talked me around day and night, and only now, after finishing up with important affairs, I told her that I can go.”97
The following passage in Ryndziunskaia’s memoirs is crucial and projects back on the 1920s the 1930s socialist realist formula of showing the main character traits of the portrayed object (rather than trying to represent mimetically, all blemishes and details included): “In answer to Nadezhda Sergeevna’s wish to see a perfect likeness, I said that I was working not for the family, but for the people. If one part or the other will be a little bigger or smaller, by that I emphasize and strengthen the image, not a photograph. . . . ‘For example, your chin goes backward, but I will make you one going forward, and the same with everything else. After all it is no secret that you and I lived under the tsar—remember how the people, when they walked by the tsar’s portrait, were searching for, wanted to see and understand from the image why he was tsar. But then this was hereditary, now I want the public, when it walks by my depiction, to understand why you are one of our leaders.’ ‘You are absolutely right,’ said Stalin.”98
In other words, the common purpose of tsar and communist vozhd’ portraits was to demonstrate to the population that their ruler deservedly ruled. The portrait was supposed to express his legitimacy; legitimacy was inscribed in the way he was portrayed. The difference lay in the nature of this legitimacy: in the case of the communist leader he deserved to rule because of his personal qualities, because he represented the people, and because he embodied the Marxist march of history. The tsar, by contrast and in Ryndziunskaia’s reading, had done nothing to deserve his elevated position. His only merit was to have been born a tsar’s son. Ryndziunskaia may have had in mind the famous court portrait of Nicholas II by Ernest Lipgart (Plate 10). Dating from 1900, this painting shows the tsar in the White Hall of St. Petersburg’s Winter Palace, wearing the uniform of a colonel of the Horse Artillery Guards Brigade attached to the Imperial Escort. His decorations include some that identify him as a member of the Romanov dynasty with international dynastic ties: a commemorative medal of the coronation of Alexander III, his father; a commemorative medal of the reign of Alexander III; the badge of the Danish Order of the Danenbrog, since his mother, Empress Maria Fedorovna, had originally been Princess Dagmar of Denmark. Apart from that, people might have looked for dynastic continuity in Nicholas’s bodily features and would have noticed the same blue eyes as those of his grandfather, Alexander II. Thus portraits of the tsar indeed placed emphasis on symbols and bodily attributes that signified dynastic continuity.
Stalin’s portrait session with Ryndziunskaia concluded with a reminder that the sitter had intended to spend only twenty to thirty minutes but had ended up staying almost two hours. “Then I asked him to take off his hat once more, he looked at me with his head up, and I instantly became aware of his face with its bushy eyebrows, which were somehow reminiscent of a mountain bird. We said farewell simply and easily (prosto i legko)—how often have I repeated these words so befitting him!”99 Ryndziunskaia apparently attempted to get Stalin to come for another session, but in vain. “And so I stayed behind all by myself with my work. I left [the sculpture] as it was, having fixed reality, and nothing but that. A year or two later I already began to work differently and, with Stalin’s agreement, sometimes departed from the real model, added something, took away something, always trying to maintain the likeness. I tried and try to give the portrait of the leader with all of his inner will and force, to the utmost amazing and thrilling. But when I remember his warm good-naturedness, I feel like incorporating into the portrait of the great leader this rich part of his nature. A difficult task, a task that should be, rather, must be tackled.”100
Ryndziunskaia seems to have kept in contact with Nadezhda Allilueva while working on the Stalin sculpture. It appears, however, that the sculpture was never exhibited widely and was purchased by the Museum of the Revolution only in 1958, after the deaths of both the sculpted and the sculptor. Ryndziunskaia’s career never took off; until the end of her days she worked at the Museum of Ethnography and depicted the national minorities of the Soviet Union.101
It also appears that Stalin posed twice, in 1920 or 1922 and in 1926, for the star painter of the 1920s, Isaak Brodsky.102 There are various stories of Stalin posing after the 1920s, but these stories might be apocryphal. During the 1930s, Stalin supposedly sat as a model for the painter Dmitry Sharapov, who “came from Leningrad to Moscow to do Stalin’s portrait; he was arrested after two sessions because Stalin was displeased with the way he was portrayed.”103 After the war, Stalin allegedly attempted to get Vera Mukhina to make a sculpture of him. Mukhina, however, resisted by demanding that Stalin pose for her, “which request, she knew, Stalin would not submit to.”104
One solution was to engage someone else to pose as Stalin. Gerasimov’s heir and son-in-law, Vladilen Shabelnikov, claims to have shared Stalin’s height of 162 cm and to have sat as Stalin for Gerasimov in an authentic army greatcoat and with a pipe, both supplied as props by the Kremlin.105 The fact that painters engaged a Stalin model (naturshchik) remained secret. Clearly the Soviet state feared sacral doubling, that Stalin’s sacrality would inhabit more than one body.106 The other side of the restriction in general of Stalin to Stalin’s body and the taboo placed on Stalin models in particular was the countless stories of Stalin doubles (dvoiniki) in oral lore.
The only opportunity of painting Stalin in person, then, was at the public events at which he appeared. Only select artists were admitted to these, and the privilege of sitting, for example, in a front-row seat at the Bolshoi Theater during Party meetings was a clear mark of an painter’s high status in the artistic pecking order. At such meetings, artists hastily produced sketches that they later reworked into paintings. As early as 1927, Katsman recorded making a first “small sketch of Joseph Vissarionovich in my notebook . . . at the hippodrome, where Budyonny had brought me to watch horse races. . . . On the basis of these sketches from life, I did a profile portrait of Joseph Vissarionovich for his fiftieth birthday that was published in Izvestia.”107 Stalin’s 1933 visit to the exhibition “Fifteen Years of the Red Army” likewise offered artists an opportunity to study his physical appearance as closely as possible, as Katsman recounted: “The artists enthusiastically experienced this meeting and kept saying: ‘Now we saw enough of him, now we are going to depict him correctly. We give Stalin black eyes, but they are amber-colored.’ Everyone memorized the shape of his head, the body’s proportion, the color of the face, his posture.”108
Most famously, Stalin met with Voroshilov and the painters Isaak Brodsky, Aleksandr Gerasimov, and Evgeny Katsman, at his dacha on 6 July 1933.109 This meeting materialized in the immediate aftermath of the “Fifteen Years of the Red Army” exhibition. The meeting must be seen against the backdrop of the battle of the realists with the avant-garde, Voroshilov’s patronage role, and the individual interests of the three painters involved. The meeting was mythologized in a key painting by Gerasimov and, as is less well-known, in verbal representations—memoirs by the painters, all of
which stressed their closeness to the leader and some of which were presented to audiences such as the Central House of Art Workers, a club-like institution for painters and other artists. The meeting offered an opportunity for the painters to watch Stalin’s physical appearance closely and to register his pronouncements on art. One month after the meeting, Katsman reflected upon the meeting in a letter to Brodsky: “Well, what can we say—we won! But victory is not easy—we have to expand our offensive, we must work better and better.” After proclaiming the victory of the realists over the avant-garde, Katsman went on to discuss Stalin’s concept of art as he supposedly related it to the three painters at the meeting. Katsman began with the Bolshevik idea of a vanguard of realist painters, who would lead the entire field of art: “First of all, we must put together a group of masters and move on in a strong unit, pulling behind ourselves the entire visual arts front.” What kind of art should this vanguard of realist painters create and inspire? The new art should depict “the living person (zhivogo cheloveka), living water, living grass, sky, living Soviet everyday life, the living Soviet person. We must organize cheerful exhibitions, full of sun, joy, children, women, healthy bodies, and human emotions. Enough of perverts in art, of gloominess, distress, and depression, we do not need the poetry of decay and rot. . . . We ought to be the poets of living, sparkling life. Our country is full of life and the fighting spirit of communism, at its head is the man of genius Stalin—that is what our exhibitions are supposed to be like.”110 This letter can be read as Katsman’s attempt to repeat Stalin’s remarks on art. The adjective zhivoi, meaning lifelike, realistic, proliferates and conforms to Stalin’s highest praise, articulated with reference to specific paintings on a number of occasions in the late 1920s and early 1930s: “living people” (zhivye liudi).111 By repeating Stalin’s remarks, Katsman was trying to establish his closeness to Stalin and speak “with” Stalin. The danger was that this would be interpreted as speaking “for” Stalin, and after all, Stalin, not Katsman, held authority over Stalin’s words. Again, Gerasimov was more aware of the danger.