page_title: Soviet art
section_title: Art of Socialist Realism
hierarchical_section_title: Soviet art / Art of Socialist Realism
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: Officially approved art was required to follow the doctrine of Socialist Realism. In the spring of 1932, the Central Committee of the Communist Party decreed that all existing literary and artistic groups and organizations should be disbanded and replaced with unified associations of creative professions. Accordingly, the Moscow and Leningrad Union of Artists was established in August 1932, which brought the history of post-revolutionary art to a close. The epoch of Soviet art began.
  In October, 1932, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars adopted a resolution On the creation of an Academy of Arts. The Leningrad Institute of Proletarian Fine Art was transformed into the Institute of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture. This drew a line under a 15-year period of constant change at the country's largest institution for art education. In total, over the period 1917-1991, the Institute graduated more than 10,000 artists and art historians. Among them were such major artists and sculptors of the USSR as Alexander Samokhvalov, Yevsey Moiseyenko, Andrei Mylnikov, Yuri Neprintsev, Aleksandr Laktionov, Mikhail Anikushin, Piotr Belousov, Boris Ugarov, Ilya Glazunov, Nikolai Timkov and others.
  The most known Soviet artists were Isaak Brodsky, Alexander Samokhvalov, Boris Ioganson, Aleksandr Deyneka, Aleksandr Laktionov, Yuri Neprintsev and other painters from Moscow and Leningrad School. Moscow artist Aleksandr Gerasimov during his career produced a large number of heroic paintings of Joseph Stalin and other members of the Politburo. Nikita Khrushchev later alleged that Kliment Voroshilov spent more time posing in Gerasimov's studio than he did attending to his duties in the People's Commissariat of Defense. Gerasimov's painting shows a mastery of classical representational techniques.
  However, art exhibitions of 1935–1960 disprove the claims that artistic life of the period was suppressed by the ideology and artists submitted entirely to what was then called «social order». A great number of landscapes, portraits, genre paintings and studies exhibited at the time pursued purely technical purposes and were thus free from any ideology. That approach was also pursued ever more consistently in the genre paintings as well, although young artists at time still lacked the experience and professional mastery to produce works of high art level devoted to Soviet actuality.
  Known Russian art historian Vitaly Manin considered that «What in our time is termed a myth in the works of artists of the 1930s was a reality, one,moreover, that was perceived that way by real people. Another side of life did exist, of course, but that does not annul that the artists depicted. ... One gets the impression that disputes about art were conducted before and after 1937 in the interests of the party bureaucracy and of artists with a proletarian obsession, but not at all of true artists, who found themes in the contemporary world and did not get embroiled in questions of the form of their expression».
  In the period between the mid-1950s and 1960s, the Art of Socialist realism was approaching its apex. Artists who had graduated from the Academy (Repin Institute of Arts) in the 1930s–50s were in their prime. They were quick to present their art, they strived for experiments and were eager to appropriate a lot and to learn even more. Their time and contemporaries, with all its images, ideas and dispositions found it full expression in portraits by Lev Russov, Victor Oreshnikov, Boris Korneev, Semion Rotnitsky, Vladimir Gorb, Engels Kozlov, landscapes by Nikolai Timkov, Aleksei Gritsai, Vladimir Ovchinnikov, Vecheslav Zagonek, Sergei Osipov, Alexander Semionov, Arseny Semionov, Nikolai Galakhov, genre paintings by Geliy Korzhev, Arkady Plastov, Nikolai Pozdneev, Yuri Neprintsev, Fyodor Reshetnikov, Yevsey Moiseyenko, Andrei Mylnikov. Art of this period showed extraordinary taste for life and creative work.
  In 1957, the first All-Union Congress of Soviet Artists takes place in Moscow. It establishes the USSR Union of Art
caption: Isaak Brodsky. A Portrait of Maxim Gorki. 1937. Tretyakov Gallery
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