by Jan Plamper
Critics were also concerned that paintings might be ambiguous, where an unrelated object, person, or body part might be viewed as belonging to Stalin. In one painting Maxim Gorky’s hat and cane “seem like Stalin’s!” but “belong to Gorky,” as Pavel Sokolov-Skalia exclaimed.113 In a similar case, it was feared that an elderly lady in Lenin’s proximity would be seen by contemporary viewers as Nadezhda Krupskaia, Lenin’s wife. The art soviet bemoaned the anachronistic reading this elderly lady was likely to produce among viewers, who remembered Lenin as having died young but were used to seeing Krupskaia as an elderly lady from the 1930s onward. In truth, they figured, Krupskaia had been young in the historical scene depicted. “This old woman, she remotely resembles Krupskaia and that is unfortunate, because at the museum the visitor will go up to the painting and say: ahh, Krupskaia! She is so much older than him! But Krupskaia was young and beautiful then. Maybe she should be given a shawl or her face should somehow be changed so that she no longer reminds one of Krupskaia. My first thought, for example, was ‘Krupskaia’! Even though I know this episode very well. It is bad when the viewer thinks this way, he ought to interpret these things painlessly.”114
ART CRITICISM: PORTRAIT, OBRAZ, DIALECTICS
So much for discussions of Stalin portraits at the art soviet. But on what theoretical foundations did these discussions rest?115 A precondition for the development of art-critical theory about the leader portrait was the reevaluation of the portrait.116 In modernism broadly understood, the portrait had undergone a process of devaluation. During the 1920s, realist artists and their critics restored the portrait to its former important place because it allowed them to celebrate the Soviet new man, by which they had in mind not a specific individual but a generic person who stood in for an entire social group. “The ‘social portrait,’ according to Lunacharsky, was one in which the artists should ‘in a particular face, in a particular individual see and show us a whole layer of society.’”117 This was the concept of “typicality” (tipazhnosf). But pragmatic reasons also played a role: many of the commissions for realist art during the 1920s came from such institutions as the Red Army, and portraits of leading soldiers were extremely popular. Not surprisingly, “the 1923 Red Army show was three-quarters portraits.” And in 1928, “the critic A. Mikhailov, reviewing the tenth AKhR exhibition, counted 121 portraits out of 283 works.”118 By decade’s end the portrait had returned to the top of the hierarchy of painting genres, a place it had firmly occupied in the realist art of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There it remained until at least Stalin’s death, even if the justification for its position at the top changed: during the 1930s “personality” (lichnost’) replaced 1920s tipazhnost’ and it became entirely acceptable to portray individuals for the sake of their personal achievements rather than as anonymous proxies for social groups.119
The portrait was not only elevated to the master genre of socialist realist art, it was also presented as a sign of Soviet humanism, of Bolshevik care for man. Conversely, the decline of portraiture in Western art was portrayed as a symptom of the West’s antihumanism. “[The portrait] is the point of departure from which realist art emerges,” declared Aleksandr Gerasimov in 1950. He continued: “in one of the French journals there was a story about the attempt to organize an exhibition of the modern portrait in Paris, and this exhibition was a complete failure.” Gerasimov concluded that “it apparently was a failure because the artists have no respect for man, whom they portray. This respect for man disappeared in the age of bourgeois art, and together with it disappeared the portrait.”120 Similarly, the journal Iskusstvo argued in 1947 that individual portraiture had been effaced with the mid-nineteenth-century arrival of capitalism in the bourgeois West, while portraiture was rising to new heights in socialist Russia. Capitalism reduced the human person to a cog in the machine, while the Bolshevik Revolution had ushered in the flowering of the individual.121
Art criticism of Stalin portraits revolved around a taxonomy of canonical obrazy vozhdia, images of the leader (a similar taxonomy prevailed in other sectors of the arts). These images were not only schematic and the boundaries between them fluid, but also rather crude from today’s perspective. They were the result of an interactive process between the artists, the art-critical press, and the general press. No matter how crude, for painters these images confined and configured the thematic range of pictorial possibilities for their Stalins. They were also congruous with the thematic rooms of the Stalin exhibitions.122 They included the “leader” (vozhd’), the “people’s tribune” (narodnyi tribun), the “father of peoples” (otets narodov), the “builder of communism” (stroitel’ kommunizma), the wartime “commander” (polkovodets), and the postwar “generalissimo” (generalissimus). Each of these verbal designations triggered a cascade of pictorial associations: Stalin as the “father of peoples” invariably was shown with representatives of different Soviet nationalities; Stalin as the “builder of communism” was depicted amidst the factories and tractors of the First Five-Year Plan; Stalin as the “commander” was placed either in the Kremlin over a map, planning the war, or on the battlefield with binoculars; and Stalin in the role of “generalissimo” was unimaginable without his white uniform.
Art criticism often did not go beyond identifying the obraz that a particular picture or sculpture was trying to convey. The Stalin obraz appears to have been the functional equivalent of the podlinnik, the collection of model drawings from which icons were painted. Indeed, art-historical dissertations were written in this vein.123 The art-historical “expertise” of these dissertations boiled down to recognizing one obraz or another, or several obrazy in a single work of art. Thus the sculptor A. V. Protopopov in his 1953 dissertation’s review of existing Stalin sculptures credited S. D. Merkurov with realizing, in his Yerevan Stalin statue, the obrazy of “strategist of genius” and “wise commander.” The sculptor N. V. Tomsky, according to Protopopov, “wants to show the figure of the leader in his generalissimo’s uniform, with which the artist managed to personify the wisdom of the leader, the genius of the commander.” M. G. Manizer’s Stalin bust is treated as follows: “The calmly looking, expressive eyes convey the image of the statesman, the wise leader and teacher.”124 Another sculptor wrote in a dissertation about his own statue, J. V. Stalin in His Youth: “I did not want to show an individual episode of his activity, but to do a synthetic solution of the theme, to show the young leader of the revolutionary proletariat, who was already an important theorist, a thinker and revolutionary-praktik.”125 One painter described the “main goal” of his picture in the following terms: “To create a synthetic image of the great Stalin—the great Bolshevik strategist and commander of the Soviet land.”126 And the painter V. G. Valtsev in 1953 summarized as the “main idea of his picture,” J. V. Stalin among the Yenisei Fishermen, the “more truthful portrayal of the relationship between Stalin and simple people—fishermen.”127 Noticeably, the “synthetic” fusion of more than one obraz in a single work of art was valued highly. Aleksandr Gerasimov was lauded for showing in his Stalin portraits several obrazy at the same time: “The great value of Gerasimov the portraitist lies in his ability to convey in the images of the leaders the unity of the features of the state leader, the tribune of the people, and the man.”128
Art criticism regarding the leader portrait was constructed around the poles of mimesis on the one hand and psychologism on the other. Both harked back to nineteenth-century intelligentsia discussions about the arts, but as far as mimesis was concerned, photography was the major new element.129 As Ivan Gronsky wrote to Central Committee member Aleksei Stetsky in 1933, “the difference between the artist and the photographer lies in the fact that the photographer records the object, whereas the artist notices typical, characteristic features of people and things and gives, in his work of art, an artistic image which is composed of separate traits and details, taken from a multitude of people or things. This is the fundamental difference between realism and naturalism
, between art and simple photography.”130 In other words, the doctrine of socialist realism was budding in Gronsky’s letter—the artist fulfilled both the photographer’s function of mimetic representation and took care of the painter’s task of interpretation. An article in Iskusstvo, also published in 1933, spelled out more clearly this aim of socialist realism, synthesis: “Here we need authenticity (podlinnost’) and likeness (skhozhes’), which can only be attained through a realistic perception of reality, synthesized through socialist realism. Nothing in the portrait can be indifferent, neither the pose, nor the setting, nor the dress. [The portrait] must be truthful, reflect the inner life, and give a profound social synthesis of the person.”131 Compact theoretical statements like this one strove to serve as orientation for portraitists in the early 1930s, when the doctrine of socialist realism had only recently been proclaimed and when there was still a great deal of uncertainty about how to carry it out.
Artists were one thing, but how were such theoretical statements put into practice by art critics? In other words, how did art critics apply the theoretical proclamations to specific pictures? Consider how one art critic closed a journal discussion of Sergei Gerasimov’s Stalin Among the Cadets ( 1932): “All in all, despite a certain portretnost’ [“portraitism”] of individual faces that were painted from life, the painting is solved with a fair amount of generalization and the flatness of monumental murals.”132 Both naturalism (“a certain portretnost’ of individual faces that were painted from life”) and abstraction (“a fair amount of generalization”) were present in the painting. Thanks to this dual presence, the painting was considered “solved.” Sergei Gerasimov had produced a successful synthesis that truly deserved the hybrid label “socialist realist.”
An article such as this one, in a thick journal on an individual artist and his realization of socialist realism, constituted one approach to educating artists on how to put the new doctrine into practice. Another approach was used by the artists’ union MOSSKh during the first half of the 1930s: the holding of meetings to discuss the portrait as a socialist art form, at which artists listened to exegesis of socialist realist tenets by different critics (and some artists). The critics used many examples of existing paintings by artists present at these meetings. (Here one can detect parallels to the “criticism” and “self-criticism” rituals, borrowed from the communicative culture of Party cells.) The newspaper Sovetskoe Iskusstvo then described and summarized the meetings and guided the artists as to who had been wrong and who had been right among the critics, thereby mapping the route to be followed for the benefit of the wider artist public outside Moscow.
More specifically, under the title, “Discussion of the Portrait,” Sovetskoe Iskusstvo in November 1935 published its own treatment of such a MOSSKh meeting. Any artist anywhere in the Soviet Union reading this article would have come away with a sense of which paintings to emulate and which critics and artists to listen to, since all were given individual assessments. The article started by recapitulating its verdict on a first meeting in the spring of 1935: “As we noted earlier, the discussion in the spring about the Soviet portrait, organized by MOSSKh, ended in failure. I. E. Grabar’s talk at the first meeting on the portrait was too abstract, it did not mention a single Soviet artist. Therefore this talk did not serve as a basis for any fruitful discussions.” This criticism must have been voiced earlier and have struck a chord, for MOSSKh organized a second meeting:
The packed room in the Tretyakov Gallery, which assembled the main Moscow painters, graphic artists, sculptors, and art historians, was testimony to the huge interest in the subject of the meeting. Igor Grabar repeated the points of his spring lecture and emphasized that portrait painters ought to convey a living image of a given person with his exterior and interior content, that the portrait ought to be similar to the original, and that the artist’s work on the portrait ought not to be obscured by scholastic theorizing. . . . Even though he pointed out a photographic quality (fotografichnost’) and a naturalistic approach to the depicted people in the portraits of Brodsky and Kosmin, Comrade Grabar still thought that their works completely satisfy the main criterion of a true portrait—they resemble the original. Comrade Grabar contests the claim that Katsman is a naturalist. On the contrary, there is not the slightest illusiveness in his portraits. . . . In Konchalovsky’s portraits Comrade Grabar sees vestiges of the still-life approach to the living person. Aleksandr Gerasimov and Denisovsky made enormous progress in the area of the portrait. But no one comes close to the achievements of the seventy-year-old Nesterov.
Yet Grabar was the critic to turn a deaf ear to, while Beskin deserved to be listened to: “The vagueness of the criteria that I. E. Grabar proposed was the basis of O. M. Beskin’s criticism of his points in a great speech that the audience listened to with enormous interest. . . . ‘Of course,’ says Beskin, ‘the portrait must resemble the original: this is indisputable. But this is only the first stage in the work of the portraitist, who, without violating the individual characteristics of the model, must elevate reality to some level of generalization that will elicit a whole series of associations. At the same time the portrait must represent what the artist thinks of the depicted person, because art is the fusion of the subjective with the objective, as Hegel put it.’” This was one of many times that Hegel was cited as the direct inspiration for the dialectics of the portrait.
Beskin next turned to the background against which the person was portrayed. Because this environment had been created by the new Soviet person during the construction of socialism this background could be shown more cheerfully than was conventionally done. This meant using brighter colors than “the conventional bluish or grayish background.” Finally Beskin appraised concrete artists, surely one of the most reliable ways of guiding other artists: “In evaluating individual masters of Soviet painting, Comrade Beskin emphasizes that the portraits of Katsman and Kosmin cannot serve as positive examples. To be sure, Comrade Katsman has attained virtuosity, but this virtuosity is only exterior and does not contribute to progress.”133
Meanwhile the purely theoretical discussions of the dialectics of the portrait progressed. As L. Gutman elaborated in the thick journal Iskusstvo in 1935, with the October Revolution the demands on the portrait had changed: no hidden reality had to be exposed, but this did not mean that pure realism was needed—too many portraits were realistic-naturalistic. What was needed was to show both the real traits of the leader and his inner genius, his idea. To prove his point, Gutman quoted Hegel at length and concluded that portraits had yet to become genuinely dialectical. He used the following sets of binaries that truly socialist realist portraiture of the leaders was to overcome: “the factographic record of the appearance of a leader” vs. “the solution of formalistic problems of the portrait genre”;134 “content” vs. “form”;135 “the concretization of individual features” vs. “deep and broad generalizations”;136 and finally, a “double view of reality,” that is “from outside” vs. “from inside.”137
By 1937, thanks to the portrait competitions and the general emphasis on portraits, many more representations of Stalin in this genre had been produced. Consequently an article in Iskusstvo did not dwell on telling artists in abstract fashion how to portray Stalin, but rather critiqued existing Stalin portraits in order to give artists practical advice. To be sure, the article also quoted a well-worn dictum by Marx and Engels about Rembrandt, but its main source of verbal inspiration was the hagio-biographical accounts of Stalin’s life. Henri Barbusse was credited with conflating Stalin with history, and his personal development with historical development. Thus the task of the ideal Stalin portrait was to depict “society” and “history” through the personal: “‘The ‘personal’ (lichnoe) and the ‘social’ (obshchestvennoe) flow together. The image of the leader comes to light in historical reality, in the manifold situations of the revolutionary past and present, in his contact with people and with the masses.”138