Other judgments were more difficult, even for the most committed socialist realist critic. Did a portrait of a worker have to be precisely realistic, or could the artist’s brushwork show? If the lyrics of a song were “progressive,” did it matter whether the tune was difficult to sing? Could a nonrhyming poem still express positive socialist attitudes, or did communist poetry need to follow a certain form? In practice, these questions were decided not by critics or artists but by cultural bureaucrats whose judgments were often made for political or personal reasons. One Polish art historian has argued that what mattered was the attitude of the artist: if he agreed to abandon all pretense of individualism, if he strove to create the right mood on his canvas—however the right mood was defined at that particular moment—then he was a successful socialist realist.22 A pliant, regime-friendly artist might therefore be allowed to get away with the odd splash of unnatural color, a green face or a purple sky, and a cooperative poet would be allowed some difficult figures of speech. But those who were under suspicion for whatever reason might well have their work banned for precisely the same things.23
In practice, cultural bureaucrats used their constantly evolving definition of what was “good” socialist realism in order to keep artists and intellectuals under control. After it was premiered for a select group in 1951, for example, the opera Lucullus—music by Paul Dessau, libretto by Brecht—was sent back for an overhaul. Some of the critics had found that the music contained “all the elements of formalism, distinguishing itself by the predominance of destructive, caustic dissonances and mechanical percussive noise.” The party was probably more bothered by the opera’s antiwar message—the Korean conflict had just begun—as much as by the aggressively nontraditional music (nine kinds of percussion instruments, no violins). Brecht wrote to Wilhelm Pieck, promised to add three arias that were “positive in content,” and eventually Lucullus opened again in October, though only for one night. The changes had been very minor: the main point of the delay, presumably, was to make sure Brecht and Dessau understood that the party, not its artists, had the final say.24
Other artists fell victim to changes in socialist fashion. In 1948, Horst Strempel painted a mural titled Clear the Rubble! Rebuild! in the new Friedrichstraße underground station. Abstract and metaphorical, the mural was highly praised—at first—as a “colorful symphony of reconstruction.” But after Dymschitz’s article, Strempel publicly registered his objections to the Soviet attack on “formalism.” The party’s critics retaliated and denounced the mural for its “slave-like lack of clarity.” Eventually the Tägliche Rundschau called it a “senseless product.” In February 1951, just as Lingner was working on his own design for the Aufbau mural, Strempel’s mural was painted over and lost forever.25
The artistic establishment also exercised control because it could. In Germany, just as everywhere else in Eastern Europe, the artists’ union—the Association of Fine Arts—had ceased to be a self-organizing organization in the 1940s. By 1950 it had become a centralized bureaucracy, with a single registry of membership. In order to buy paints and brushes, artists had to have a tax number issued by the association and a membership card confirming the tax number. Anyone who wanted to paint, in other words, had to conform at least enough to remain a member of the association.26 Choosing not to join could mean choosing not to work as an artist at all.
A similar situation pertained in Poland, where the prewar Union of Polish Fine Artists had been reconstituted in Lublin in 1944, and had remained close to the communist party ever since. The union saw its tasks as including “the control and assessment of artistic production” as well as the organization of exhibitions and courses and even, in the early days, making living arrangements for artists. Control over artists was also exerted through art schools and academies. Over the course of 1950 and 1951, for example, the directors of the department of painting at the Academy of Fine Arts regularly discussed the poor material conditions of their students and the lack of artistic materials. They also regularly announced that they were searching for student “volunteers” to complete political tasks—exhibits dedicated to Stalin, decoration of conference halls for party celebrations—for which they would receive lucrative payments. Clearly some of this “voluntary” work may have been nothing more than a lifeline for penniless art students.27
Like its German counterpart, the Polish artists’ union was also, along with the party, the government, and occasionally factories, one of the primary buyers of art. Private galleries had disappeared almost entirely, along with the rest of the private sector. A Polish Ministry of Culture document from 1945 stated explicitly that “because of the changes to structure of the economy, the state as well as local governments must take on the role of the client who purchases art.” If artists wanted to sell their works, they had to stay in the union’s good books. By 1947 the union had nearly 2,000 members all over the country, as well as branches such as one in Częstochowa that proudly reported that its members executed “posters and portraits” for the local government as well as decorations for events, lectures, and May Day demonstrations.28 Not all of its branches were so cooperative: traditionalists, “colorists,” realists, and a young avant-garde competed for influence in Kraków throughout this period.29
There were carrots as well as sticks. Artists such as Otto Nagel, long an outsider in Germany—he had even spent time in Sachsenhausen—now found themselves warmly embraced by the state for the first time in their lives, and discovered that the state could meet all kinds of needs. In 1950, the president of the German Academy of Art issued Nagel ration cards for a pair of shoes as well as fabric for a good suit and an overcoat lining. Nagel also received a personal letter from Pieck upon joining the academy—“as a child of Berlin workers, you have been long associated with workers”—and when he helped with some designs for the Berlin youth festival, he received warm personal thanks from Honecker.30
Lingner would have known every detail of Strempel’s fall from grace and of the rewards available to Nagel and others. He also would have known that despite being a member of the artists’ union, he still had much to prove. He had spent more than twenty years outside the country; his links were to the French communist party, not to the Soviet Union; and at one point he was directly accused of “formalism.” In a 1950 letter to the leadership of the German trade unions, he apologized for the “difficulties” that had arisen with his May Day parade decorations (the colors had faded due to bad weather). He felt obliged to reassure them on political grounds as well. For two decades, he said, he had “put pencil and brush to the service of the progressive working class in France,” but of course he would now do the same for Germany: “You can be sure that you and the Berlin working class, and not only the Berlin one, can always count on me.”31 His apologies were accepted and he was awarded the commission to paint Aufbau—but only on the condition that he design it in close collaboration with Otto Grotewohl, at that time the prime minister of East Germany.
The official art world was enthusiastic about this arrangement. In a pamphlet published at the time, an art critic explained that with the Grotewohl–Lingner partnership, the relation between the party and the artist had been “taken to a new level, one that now corresponds to the new relationship between Art and the People.”32 From now on, the critic declared, artists would cease to paint for themselves, for their friends, or for rich patrons. Instead, they would paint for the party, under the party’s tutelage.
What this meant, in practice, was that Grotewohl criticized each draft of Lingner’s mural, compelling him to add and subtract figures, change colors, and emphasize different details. Following the first draft, he declared that “the painter had not understood the importance of industry to the development of socialism,” since “heavy industry was not presented as the first precondition to future success.” He also objected to the fact that the main figure at the center of the painting was an intellectual, not a worker: “It is the working class who is the real initiator and
agent of his alliance.”33 Following the second draft, Grotewohl’s commentary was more directly aesthetic: he felt the colors were unbalanced, and he found some of the figures too static. They failed to reflect society’s great march forward, he declared: those looking at the painting would thus be drawn to particular details, instead of concentrating on the meaning of the painting as a whole.34
Lingner took all of these comments on board and worked on several more drafts, some of which were shown to “scientists, women, and Young Pioneers” as well as parliamentarians and other politicians, all of whom were allowed to have their say. In the course of this process, Lingner went through a kind of psychological transformation as well. He had to learn to abase himself before his political critics, and soon he began to do so in other ways as well. During the course of the project, he even composed an essay of self-criticism. He had, he said, been reproached on the grounds that “I have lost touch with life in the GDR and therefore only depict schematic schemes and masks.” But he would now change his tactics:
I studied those works that I had created since returning to Germany and came to realize that these reproaches are rightfully made. I have suffered from intellectual laziness, my inability to adapt to an environment from which I had become estranged after twenty-four years of absence, and a certain tendency to rest on old laurels … I have resolutely addressed these deficiencies and hope to very soon be able to present a draft for a mural that has come into being during several months of collaboration with the head of the government.35
This “confession” was not the result of direct violence or fear of arrest: Lingner wanted to conform. He was now receiving commissions and acclaim in his own country for the first time in decades. He was no longer an exile but had instead found acceptance at home. He also appeared to believe, at some level, that the party really did know best: if he himself was unable to understand the purpose of some of Grotewohl’s commentary, if he thought the painting ugly, then that must be because he himself was insufficiently enlightened.36
Aufbau was finally unveiled on January 3, 1953—Pieck’s birthday—to general acclaim that rapidly faded. Too obviously a work of propaganda, and too clearly the product of a political discussion, it eventually became something of an embarrassment. In a catalogue of Lingner’s work published in the final years of the German Democratic Republic, the East German art establishment held itself at arm’s length from the mural: “Was it the very short delivery time, or was it because the enlargement of the draft and the transfer of the drawing onto tiles could only be done by a third hand? Or was it that this ‘painting’ is more than 25 meters wide, and that this is not the right place for it?” Whatever the reason, the critic concluded: “The result satisfied neither one side nor the other.”37 Lingner died in 1959, though his mural remains. In the final years of his life, he supposedly avoided even walking past the House of Ministries, so as to avoid looking at it.
“The masses were cut off from the beautiful things of everyday life, as well as from the greatest joy of all: the joy of developing their artistic gifts.” In the introduction to her 1954 book, Folk Creativity in Contemporary Design, the director of the Polish Industrial Design Institute, Wanda Telakowska, painted a dark picture of prewar Poland. The 1920s and the 1930s had, she wrote, been “characteristic of the capitalist epoch.” The wealthy had “sought confirmation of their own worth through possession of the most ostentatious objects.” Those lacking means had been forced to seek cheap and tacky imitations. Factories, mostly belonging to foreign capitalists, “followed foreign design—third-rate of course, since the better designs were reserved for their own means of production—as a result of which output for the masses was ugly, and above all incompatible with our culture.”38
Telakowska did not begin her career using the language of orthodox Marxism. At different times an art teacher, designer, critic, and curator, Telakowska had previously been best known for her association with a Polish artistic group called Ład. Connoisseurs of design history would recognize Ład as a cousin of the British Arts and Crafts movement. Its members sought to study the folk and peasant craftsmen who still thrived in parts of southern and eastern Poland, and to use their work as the basis for a new and authentically “Polish” vernacular design. The artists associated with Ład believed that “contemporary” did not have to mean “modernist” or futuristic. Not everything had to be sleek or simplified in the machine age: folk designs for furniture, textiles, glass, and ceramics could, they believed, be brought up to date and even used as inspiration by industry.
By instinct and by training, Telakowska was no communist either. Although many left-wing artists of the time, including the Bauhaus designers in Germany, spoke of sweeping away the past in the name of revolution and starting from scratch, Telakowska retained a distinctly un-communist determination to find inspiration from history. But she also wanted to continue Ład’s work after the war, and toward that end she joined the new communist government. She quickly found that her project—which favored peasant and folk art over the slicker modernism of urban intellectuals—overlapped with some of the aims of the communist party.39 As one cultural bureaucrat pointed out, folk art was more likely to appeal to the Polish laborer: “Our working class is closely linked to the countryside and feels more connected to the culture of folk art than to the culture of intellectual salons.” By the end of the 1940s, Telakowska’s promotion of peasant art also fit in with the assault on formalism that had been launched in Poland at the same time as in Germany. In the constipated words of one approving Marxist critic, “Unlike the art produced by the nobility and the Court, which became increasingly divorced from the national foundations, the uncontaminated culture of the countryside was able to resist cosmopolitan tendencies and to protect itself successfully against ossified formalism.”40
In Polish terminology, Telakowska was a “positivist,” or what an En-glish speaker would call a pragmatist. She accepted the communist regime as inevitable and was determined to work with it—even within it—in order to achieve goals she believed to be in the national interest. In the spring of 1945 she joined the new Ministry of Culture, even though that made her a member of the communist-dominated provisional government, and in 1946 she created the wonderfully named Bureau for Supervision of Production Aesthetics (Biuro Nadzoru Estetyki Produkcji, or BNEP). Under its auspices, she conducted surveys of folk artists and folk art groups around the country and persuaded Polish artists from Ład and from the Warsaw School of Fine Arts to work on her most ambitious project: the provision of Polish factories with new designs that could be mass-produced. Though this had long been her goal, she made an economic argument to her superiors. Better design could increase the appeal of Polish products: “Beauty and elegance raise the value of objects such as furniture, fabric, printed materials, curtains, clothes … French, Viennese, and German objects control the world market only because of their artistic form, not because of the quality of the materials.”41
At first, the artistic community was suspicious. Fearing that this new project might herald a crackdown on painting and sculpture, the artists’ union issued a defense of “pure” art, as opposed to “useful” art. More importantly, many didn’t want to collaborate with the Polish communists, who in 1946 were escalating their campaign against the Home Army. But Telakowska won at least some of them over, partly through her personal contacts, partly because she offered material help, and partly because she was genuinely passionate about her cause. One Polish painter, Bohdan Urbanowicz, remembered meeting her on his return to Poland from a German prisoner of war camp in August 1945:
I traveled back to Poland full of fears and uncertainty, without any papers. After crossing the border at Cieszyn, I headed for Warsaw. Soviet trucks passed me, decorated with seals and slogans. Herds of cattle are being driven to the east … At last, Warsaw. I’m lost in tunnels of former streets. There is a provisional bridge across the Vistula. In an enormous building in Praga, the former headquarters of the State Railway
s, there sits the Ministry [of Culture]. A dark stairway leads up to the department of fine arts. A big room, full of people, chatter and smoke … And suddenly, I am embraced. I’ve found myself in the arms of Wanda Telakowska.42
Telakowska reached into a drawer, pulled out 2,000 zlotys, and gave it to Urbanowicz, “without any accounting.” She also found him a place to stay and arranged for him to join the artists’ union. For several years, he and many others remained under her influence and protection. Because he also felt that he had a responsibility for the “reconstruction of our destroyed culture,” he too went to work at the ministry.43 Telakowska didn’t have the resources available to Becher in East Berlin—postwar Poland in general had less to offer returning émigrés—but neither was she competing, as Becher was, with an alternate, noncommunist Germany: the alternative to communist Poland was exile. Telakowska brought people on board by appealing to their patriotism and by convincing them it was important to reconstruct Poland, no matter what Poland’s political leadership might be.
Many did cooperate. Under the slogan “Beauty is for every day and for everybody” Telakowska’s bureau commissioned and purchased dozens of strikingly original designs for fabrics, furniture, cutlery, dishes, crockery, ceramics, jewelry, and clothes.44 She sent one group of artists to a glass factory in Szklarska Poręba and another group to a glass factory in Silesia. Both were meant to cooperate with the workers and the management in order to create attractive, popular designs that could be mass-produced. One group created a series of glasses, etched with calligraphy in a prewar style. The other used older antique glass for inspiration. Telakowska also persuaded a prominent Polish sculptor, Antoni Kenar, to return to Poland from exile in Paris in order to organize a woodcarving workshop, and she sent designers to the Carpathian Mountains, where they worked with women weavers, helping them to update their designs. At one point, her bureau held a competition to encourage peasant carvers to design new wooden “folk” toys, prompting one art critic to exult that “a new type of toy-making is being born, one which breaks decisively away from the objects that, in the 1920s, persuaded children to play at ‘war.’ ”45
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