page_title: Soviet art
section_title: Soviet Art of the Post-Revolutionary Period
hierarchical_section_title: Soviet art / Soviet Art of the Post-Revolutionary Period
context_page_description: Soviet art is the visual art that was produced after the October Socialist Revolution of 1917 in Soviet Russia and the Soviet Union.
context_section_description: The birth of the Soviet Art was preceded throughout the 1920s by an era of intense ideological competition between different artistic groupings each striving to ensure their own views would have priority in determining the forms and directions in which Soviet Art was to develop, seeking to occupy key posts in cultural institutions and to win the favour and support of the authorities.
  This struggle was made even more bitter by the growing crisis of radical leftist art. At the turn of the 1930s, many avant-garde tendencies that had appeared back in the 1910s had exhausted themselves and began depicting real-life objects, as it attempted to return to the traditional system of painted images. That is what occurred with the leading Jack of Diamonds artists. In the early 1930s Kazimir Malevich returned to figurative art.
  Prominent supporters of leftist views included David Shterenberg (head of the Fine Arts department of the People's Commissariat for Education; before the revolution a member of the Jewish Labour Bund, who lived in exile in France, where he became acquainted with Anatoli Lunacharsky), Alexander Drevin, Vladimir Tatlin, Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Osip Brik, Sofya Dymshits-Tolstaya, Olga Rozanova, Mikhail Matyushin and Nathan Altman. They formed a fairly powerful group that initially determined the policy of the Fine Arts department within the Soviet government and also of the local Moscow and Petrograd Soviets.
  The position of the Fine Arts department was most fully expressed by Nikolai Punin in 1919, who wrote: «If the depiction of the world does aid cognition, then only at the very earliest stages of human development, after which it already becomes either a direct hindrance to the growth of art or a class-based interpretation of it», and that «The element of depiction is already an element characteristic of a bourgeois understanding of art».
  The danger of a break with the traditions of progressive pre-revolutionary art and the artistic school was being pointed out chiefly by representatives of Russian art who had begun their careers back before the revolution and, in contrast to the leftists, initially boycotted the new regime. Among them were Dmitry Kardovsky, Isaak Brodsky, Alexander Savinov, Abram Arkhipov, Boris Kustodiev, Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, Arkady Rylov, Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva, Mikhail Avilov, Alexander Samokhvalov, Boris Ioganson, Rudolf Frentz and others. The formation of these two camps whose members held positions that were to a large extent diametrically opposed put its distinctive stamp on the development of art and artistic education in the 1920s. It was in this atmosphere of incessant polemics and a contest between various artistic tendencies that the Soviet art and artistic school come into being.
  Other post-revolution movement was initiated to put all arts to service of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The instrument for this was created just days before the October Revolution, known as Proletkult, an abbreviation for "Proletarskie kulturno-prosvetitelnye organizatsii" (Proletarian Cultural and Enlightenment Organizations). A prominent theorist of this movement was Aleksandr Bogdanov. Initially Narkompros (ministry of education), which was also in charge of the arts, supported Proletkult. However the latter sought too much independence from the ruling Communist Party of Bolsheviks, gained negative attitude of Vladimir Lenin, by 1922 declined considerably, and was eventually disbanded in 1932.
  The ideas of Proletkult attracted the interests of Russian avantgarde, who strived to  get rid of the conventions of "bourgeois art". Among notable persons of this movement was Vladimir Tatlin, Mikhail Matyushin, and Kazimir Malevich who was director of Petrograd State Institute of Artistic Culture (GinKHuk) since 1923 up to close in 1926. However the ideas of the avantgarde eventually clashed with the newly emerged state-sponsored direction of Socialist Realism.
  In search of new forms of expression, the Proletkult organisation was highly eclectic in its art forms, and thus was prone to h
caption: Kazimir Malevich. Mower. 1930.
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