Stalin, an image

Art and Propaganda, by Toby Clark

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Stalin employed a stable of court painters to produce hundreds of official portraits, some of which were of immense size and painted by brigades of artists working under production-line conditions. The financial rewards and privileges for favoured artists could be substantial, but painting Stalin was a dangerous occupation. Those who worked closely with him, such as his political colleagues, secretaries, interpreters, and bodyguards, had a tendency to "disappear," to be arrested, executed, or secretly murdered according to his paranoid whims. In reality, Stalin was short, fat, and bandy-legged with a pock-marked face, narrow forehead, and withered left arm. But an official artist would have been unwise to depict his physical appearance with any degree of accuracy.

As a young man at the time of the October Revolution, Stalin had played no more than a peripheral part in the Bolshevik uprising. This potentially embarrassing fact was glossed over by fctional biographies, which exaggerated the revolutionary adventures of his youth, and descibed his warm friendship with Lenin. Evidence in fact suggests that Lenin viewed him with distrust and personal dislike. Stalin, in turn, came to fear all the "Old Bolsheviks" and anyone who had been involved in the original revolutionary movement. From the mid-1930s, he set about purging the Party leadership and armed forces in waves of show trials and mass-executions. Among those caught up was the Constructivist artist Gustav Klucis, who died in a prison camp in 1944, where he was interned for having fought for the Bolsheviks in the Ninth Regiment of Latvian Rifles in 1917. For Socialist Realist history painters, the depiction of the October uprising had to be approached with caution. The historical insurrection had to be recounted in a manner which stressed that the rebellion had been contained, like the continuing revolutionary process under Stalin, by strict obedience, self-discipline, and respect for authority.
This conservation revision is seen in The Winter Palace is Taken by Vladimir Serov (1910-68), which was completed a year after Stalin's death.

Two battle-weary soldiers stand in the hall of the captured palace. Spent cartridges at their feet suggest the fading echoes of gunfire. Their victory, rewarded with a quiet cigarette break, marks the pivotal event of Russian history. But it is a sombre scene with an air of order and harmony enhanced by the symmetrical composition and the laborious academic style. Ostensibly, the painting's purpose is to venerate the Workers' State by dignifying its moment of origin, though its effect is to reconstruct that moment as one of the grim stasis, drained the rebellious energy.

After Stalin's death in 1953 there was some relaxation of cultural regulations. In February 1956 the new leader, Nikita Khrushchev, formally denounced Stalin at a closed sesson of the Party Congress, and subsequiently thousands of works of art of the Stalinist period, especially those which depiected him, were destrpyed or hidden and disappeared from the art history books. Although the excesses of Stalin's personality cult were not repeated by his successors, the heroization of Soviet workers continued as the principal theme of Socialist Realism.

Builders of the Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station by Viktor Popkov lines up the stock characters and assigns to them their required qualities; even while taking a work-break they look sober, industrious, and vigilant. But during the 1960s and 1970s nonconformist and dissident art groups were increasingly active. Technically, it had never been illegal for an artist to work in unorthodox styles, but attempts to exhibit outside the official framework frequently met with police harassment. In the 1970s numerous small exhibitions were held in defiance of Party regulations and were duly closed down, sometimes within hours of opening. In Moscow in September 1974, an open-air exhibition on a patch of suburban wasteland was broken up by bulldozers and water cannons. The "Bulldozer Exhibition" was widely reported in the Western press.

model for the future

Art and Propaganda, by Toby Clark



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Tatlin's tower reveals a highly centralized vision of both government and propaganda and it typified the Russian avant-garde's naive enthusiasm for mass-media technology. Tatlin's friend, the poet Velimir Khlebnikov (1885-1922), called the radio "the main tree of consciousness;" "The radio will forge the broken links of the world soul and fuse together all mankind." In cinema, photography, and graphic design, techniques of montage were developed to high levels of sophistication in the 1920s by avant-garde film-makers such as Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948) and designers such as Gustav Klucis (1895-c.1944), Aleksandr Rodchenko (1891-1956), Varvara Stepanova (1894-1958) and the Stenberg brothers.

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The avant-garde artists of the Russian Constructivist movement, of which Tatlin was a founding figure, viewed design practices linked to mass production as a means of integrating art with the reconstruction of society. With designs for communist clothing, textiles, furniture, architecture, and even entire cities, Constructivists sought the creation of a total design aesthetic for changing the behavioral habits of the Soviet population, or, as they called it, for "organizing the psyche of the masses." Because of the low levels of industrial technology and materials, few Constructivist designs went into production. By the late 1920s, the Constructivists' vision for their project veered between a radical utopianism and a sinister fantasy of social engineering. On the one hand, Tatlin's design for an "air-bicycle," a human-powered flying machine based on bird anatomy, was devised for the physcial and perceptual liberation of the travelling worker - unfortunately his prototype failed to fly. On the other, there were plans

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in Consturctivist architecture to enforce communal living in vast housing blocks where private habits could be rigorously policed, children would be raised collectively, and, in one proposal, residents would carry out all activities (including sex) according to a twenty-four-hour timetable.

Between Lenin's death in 1924 and Stalin's rise to power some five years later, the Party leadership maintained its policy of permitting relative pluralism in the arts, but it became increasingly clear that realist approaches were officially favoured more than the avant-garde's experiments. Among the many artistic groups of the 1920s, the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russai (AKhRR) had been the largest, and gained support for its realist art among influential trade union and Red Army officials. In 1928 the party launched the Cultural Revolution, which aimed to reinvigorate the revolutionary process, and was expressed by a drive to "proletarianize" the arts.


Serafima Ryangina's Red Army Art Studio captures the mood of the artistic and literary groups which sought to train up a new generation of working-class artists. Some of the leaders of these groups, themselves often middle-class and too yong to have been involved in the original revolution and civil war, took to shaving their heads and wearing khaki fatigues to express their militant "class-war" spirit. This prepared the ground for the autocratic cultural policies of Stalinism.

Propaganda in the Communist State (part 1)

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In theory, communism views revolution as a continuous process which transforms consciousness alongside the transformation of social reality. As implemented by state communism, national programmers of reconstruction, like industrialization or the collectivization of agriculture, were intended to have profound effects on people's habits of thought and behavior, to an extent that would far exceed the mere proaganda of words and images. In practice, communist regimes have represented social change through a screen of censorship and illusion, producing a condition which some have described as dream-like because the official version of reality is so far at odds with everyday life. For the long-lasting regimes, like that of the Soviet Union, the term "propaganda" has not had negative connotations among communists, and because communism is said to provide an objective and scientific understanding of the world, little disctinction is made between propaganda and education. In art, the main expression of state communism has been Socialist Realism, formally defined and introduced under Joseph Stalin in 1934 as the official aesthetic of the Soviet Union and later imposed by communist states throughout the world. It has been one of the most widely practised and enduring artistic approaches of the twentieth century.

It has often been argued that Socialist Realism was essentially similar to the official art of Nazi Germany. There are certainly many points of comparison. Both emerged fully in the 1930s and produced images which idealized workers and peasants and elevated their leaders in personality cults. Both used easily readable populist styles. The Soviet and Nazi regimes both backed up the persuasive techniques of propaganda with brutal methods of coercion which included arbitrary imprisonment and mass-murder. But

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a closer look at the iconographies of the two systems reveals important differences. Ideologically, communism and fascism took very different views of nature, technology, work, warfare, history, and human purpose. These ideological distinctions were moulded by deeply rooted cultural and social traditions specific to each national context. A conspicuous contrast, as noted earlier, was between Nazism's mythic glorification of the past and Soviet communism's enthusiasm for progress. Nazism emerged partly as a reaction against the instability produced by Germany's rapid modernization. In the Soviet Union, however, as in other communist nations such as the People's Republic of China, Cuba, and the Afro-Marxist states in post-colonial Africa, political revolution took place in advance of substantial modernization. The achievement of modernity was an aspiration closely linked to the establishment of communist society.



"Organizing the Psyche of the Masses"

The imposition of Socialist Realism in 1934 marked a substantial increase in the Soviet state's control over art and was characteristic of Stalin's rule over the Party, exercised since the late 1920s. But it was preceded during the years which followed the October Revolution of 1917 by a period when the leadership had allowed and encouraged the experiments of many different communist art groups and the heated debates between them. These debates were not onl about the most suitable style for communist art, but concerned wider quiestions about the function of art in this new society. From the outset it was clear that the revolution which created the world's first Workers' and Peasants' Government had entirely altered conditions for the patronage, audience, and sites of art. Soviet art was to be principally state-funded, public, and directed to a mass audience. But how were "the masses" to be conceived? What was to be their role in the production of art; what was the status of their tastes; and what was art supposed to do to them? These issues provoked a cluster of further questions: Should culture become "proletarian", or should it just be called "socialist" and aspire to be classless? Should it incorporate the achievements of bourgeois culture, or were all traditional kinds of art irredeemably tainted with capitalism and therefore to be abandoned?


Black Square by Kazimir Malevich (1878 - 1935) encapsulates a radical view of this unique situation. It consists only of a black square on a white background. Painted shortly before the revolution and exhibited in 1915, Malevich originally conceived it

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as an extremist avant-garde gesture which announced the end of tradition in painting and the beginning of a transcendetal, or what he called "Suprematist," level of perception and representation. He declared: "I have transformed myself into the zero of form and dragged myself out of the rubbish-filled pook of Academic art." The meanings of the painting were altered by the new context of the October Revolution of 1917. From that date, he used it to symbolize a rupture in history, the termination of the old order and the birth of the future out of revoution. For Malevich and his followers in the group UNOVIS (Affirmers of the New Art), old-fashioned approaches to art could only

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confine the human mind to conservative ways of thinking. Against this, they developed abstract art in which a vocabulary of pure geometric forms, usually brightly coloured, were designed to address the viewer's senses with dynamic effect. The Russian avant-garde had described this effect as sdvig - a sudden enlightenment or "shift" of perception. Though he called them "non-objective," meaning abstract, some of Malevich's paintings refer in their titles and appearance to a cosmic or interplanetary environment signifying the transcendence of earth-bound habits of thought and the creation of a new world. Malevich's ideas drew on Apocalyptic beliefs that had long been nurtured in Russian culture, predicting the revelation of God's will to humanity along with the end of the material world and the creation of a celestial realm of pure spirit. A feature of this belief is the idea that divine knowledge will be revealed in abstract form, unmediated by language. Beyond the partial revelations of the Old and New Testaments, a "Third Text" will communicate directly to the human soul. Malevich saw this as a model for the imminent illumination of the consciousness of the proletariat.

The Bolsheviks' leader, Lenin, more pragmatic and suspicious of avant-garde extremes, viewed the function of art as lying within the broader framework of education, for which tackling the illiteracy of 80 percent of the population and the scarcity of basic technical skills were the real priorities. Conservative in taste, he felt that socialist culture should build on the best achievements of the past and, by developing these, "raise" the cultural standards of the masses. This was linked to his view of the role of the Party, the main theoretical element of Marxism-Leninism. To Lenin, the Russian working classes, mainly rural peasants, were not ready to generate revolutionary consciousness by themselves. The outbreak of strikes and rioting in cities in the winter of 1916-17, which forced the abdication of the Tsar, had been what Lenin called with some disdain "spontaneous": a premature, disorganized rebellion uninformed by political awareness. Lenin himself, like many other Bolsheviks, was in exile at the time and had to return to Russia to take charge of the uprising and oust the weak provisional government in the coup of October. The Party was to provide leadership and formulate the theoreical basis of policy. As in Lenin at Smolnyi by Isaak Brodsky (1884-1939), which was painted six years after Lenin's death, many paintings of Lenin show him writing or holding a book; these validate his self-appointed position as the legitimate interpreter of doctrine.

The October Revolution was followed by almost four years of civil war, which saw an emphasis on "agitational propaganda"

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or agit-prop, a term that descirbed the more immediate, emotional techniques of propaganda. Of early agit-prop practices, street festivals and mass-action dramas revealed a version of public art which stressed popular involvement. Aiming to maintain the momentum of revolutionary enthusiasm in th face of the hardships of the civil war, agit-prop gorups sought to create an atmosphere of colourful celebration. Alongside the posters, murals, and huge decorations on buildings, elaborate floats using trucks, trams, or horse-drawn crats carried tableaux of revolutionary themes. Derived partly from festivals of the French Revolution, they also combined the tradition of Russian Orthodox ceremonial processions with the carnivalesque styles of folk entertainment, incorporating clowns, life-size puppets, street criers, and circus acrobats as wellas the ballet of the Bolshoi Theatre. The third anniversary of the October Revolution was celebrated by a reenactment of the storming of the Winter Palace performed by a cast of thousands mobilized by the drama groups of the Red Army and Navy. Outside the palace a stage had been built with two platforms, a red one for the workers and a white one for the aristocrats. A battle was fought out on a bridge between them. The aristocrats were routed and fled in trucks pursued by military searchlight beams and accompanied by artillery salvoes and a volley fired from the Aurora battleship anchored nearby on the River Neva. Inside the palace, with what the director called a "cinematic effect," each

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window in turn was lit up by a spotlight to reveal a sequence of fighting scenes. Victory was announced by a firework display on the roof while a massed band played the Internationale.


The dramatic reinvention of the revolution as carnival related to a vein in Marxism which envisages the future as a condition in which all human activities, harmonized by collective endeavour, become playful or creative. By the late 1930s, this ludic spirit would begin to decay into the dour and ominous parades of marching athletes and military hardware that characterized Stalin's state rituals and that would increasingly resemble the morbid cremonies of Nazi Germany. But in its earliest years, under the slogan"the theatricalization of life," mass drama, evised by artists more than politicians, sought to dissolve distinctions between actors and spectators, and between the production and reception of propganda. This presaged later Nazi methods of mass-participation in propaganda events, but the Soviet version was motivated by more egalitarian values. The implied ideal of ending artistic professionalism and beginning a culture of universal creativity was close to the spirit of the network of proletarian culture organizations called the proletkults. Founded in 1917, the proletkults were a movement of utopian adult education, seeking to generate collective working-class culture from the roots. By the end of 1918 the movement was said to have some 400,000 members, 1,000 traning studios and cells in every major factory. Its leading theorist, Aleksandr Bogdanov (1873-1928), was a philosopher, science fiction novelist and maverick Party member who believed with mystical fervour in the supernatural powers ready to be set free by

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the collectivization of the working classes and the harnessing of their creative potential. Bogdanov also insisted that art develops independently of economic and political spheres, and sought the autonomy of the proletkults from Party control. To Lenin, however, this amounted to a challenge to the Part's authority and in 1920 he moved against the organization, limiting its powers and bringing it under Party jurisdiction. Bogdanov was forced out of the proletkults and turned his attention to medical experiments. He was fascinated by the potential of blood transfusions, which embodied his faith in science and human regeneration. As if confirming his belief in the sacrifice of the individual for humanity's future, he died in 1928 while experimenting on himself.

Lenin acknowledged the value of the mass dramas, but wanted a more dignified statement of Bolshevism's cultural standards. His own contribution to this was known as the plan for monumental propaganda, which he announced in April 1918 in Pravda under a healine which called for "The Removal of monuments Erected in Honour of the Tsars and their Servants and the Production of Projects for Monuments to the Russian Socialist Revolution." Lenin proposed putting the unemployed to work in pulling down Tsarist statues and replacing them with new monuments commissioned to celebrate revered figures of the past. A list of more than sixty of these was to include historic revolutionaries such as Marx, Engels, Robespierre, and Spartacus, as well as cultural figuers such as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Rublev, Chopin, and Byron. The statues, in bust or full-length, were hastily knocked up in temporary materials like wood and plaster, and formally unveiled in numerous town squares and on street corners.

Lenin's plan was designed to convey a number of messages about his own views on the role of art. Its ethos was educational - each statue bore a plaque with a brief biography and history lesson - and in contrast with Bogdanov's grass-roots proletarianism, Lenin's was an exercise in sober didacticism aimed at elevating the popular taste. The inclusion of politically conservative writers and artists may also have been intended to reassure the non-communist bourgeoisie about the Part's aesthetic tolerance and respect for Russian heritage.

Extra reading:
Engineers of the Masses: Fordism, Fascism and the Theatre

Art and Propaganda, by Toby Clark

Introduction


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The neutrality of the word "propaganda" was lost in the First World War, when the collision of obsolete infantry tactics with advanced military technology - especially the machine gun and fast-loading artillery - killed soldiers in such large numbers that traditional methods of recruiment were no longer adequate to replace them. The government at war were required to view public opinion as a matter of national importance, and through the developed media of mass communication such as cheap newspapers, posters, and cinema, individuals became aware of being addressed by the message-making insititutions of the state on a more or less daily basis. The wartime perception of propaganda's links with censorship and misinformation was compounded by its incresed application as psychological warfare waged against the morale of enemies.

After the First World War, government propaganda continued in democratic countries, though official agencies now preferred to refer to it with euphemisms such as "information servies" or "public education". This avoidance of the word, caused by a new sense of its incompatibility with the ideals of democracy, meant that " propaganda" was increasingly associated with the emergent one-party states, such as Sovient Russia from 1917 or Nazi Germany from 1933, which both used it unashamedly in official terminology. In the Western democracies "propaganda" became linked with "totalitarianism", a largely polemical term, which until 1945 was used in the main to describe fascist dictatorships and thereafter, during the Cold War, was frequently applied to the Soviet Union and other communist states.

The present-day connotations of "propaganda art" in the West were to a great extent shaped in the Cold War climate of the United States. From the mid-1940s, New York emerged as the leading centre of modern art, just as the United States now led the world economy. The dominant artistic values of the period were most influentially voiced by the critic Clement Greenberg (1909-94) who since 1939 had warned against the corrupting effects of what he called "kitsch", which he saw both in American mass culture and in the populist official art of Nazi Germany and the Sovient Union. To defend true art against this, artists, should attend to purely artistic concerns; to make, in effect, abstract art which would be immune to political exploitation. The idea that the artistic imagination should remain uncompromised by ideological commitments was not new, but, as argued by critics such as Greenberg in the decades which followed the Second World War, the view gained a special force by its reiteration throughout a growing system of museums, galleries, and publications devoted to modernist art.

These supported a persuasive historical account which implied that the highest achievements of Western art since the mid-nineteenth century were the result of art's liberation from its traditional patron groups: church, monarchy, aristocracy, and government. Freed from serving these patrons, art could be devoted to the progressive development of its formal qualities and paid for by consumers who appreciated artistic innovation as evidence of the natural creativity of the human spirit.

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The numerous international exhibitions which exported Abstrat Expressionism were coordinated by New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in the late 1940s and 1950s and accompanied by curators' statements in which nationalist rhetoric contrasted the "mark of freedom" in American painting with the regimented kitsch of Soviet communism. The realization that some of these exhibitions had been secretly funded by the CIA, a fact widely known by the mid-1970s, made a deep impression on a generation of artists and critics radicalized by the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement, some of who, challenged the idea that art should or even could remain separated from political concerns. Among these was the critic Lucy Lippard (b. 1937), who in 1980 wrote an artical for the feminist magazine Heresies called "Some Propaganda for Propaganda". She argued for the rehabilitation of the word, and encouraged artists to try to make "good propaganda": "Such a 'good propaganda' would be what art should be - a provocation, a new way of seeing and thinking about what goes on around us." This positive use of the word has not caught on widely, but the question of whether art can be both political and "good" remains a live issue ofr contemporary artists.

Beyond the controversies provoked by modern motions of propaganda, the use of art in the service of politics has a deep and enduring history. Rulers of the city-states, kingdomes, and empires of the ancient world used art on a monumental scale to reiterate their power, glorify their victories, or to intimidate and defame their enemies. The political symbols and rituals of imperial Rome were highly elaborate under the first-and second-century emperors, whose images were commemorated in monumental statues and a flow of coins and medals distributed throughout the empire. Architectural spaces in Rome were designed for spectacular ceremonies of triumph, obedience and unity, and for parading the booty and captives of war.

Throughout the Middle Ages, art was closely bound to politics because the spheres of religious and worldly authority were largely indivisible. Medieval works of art that ostensibly represented Christian themes were often intended primarily to support the ideological interests of the church bodies or secular powers who commissioned them. Under these conditions, the artist's arims were invariably subsumed within those of their patrons. From the early sixteenth century, particularly in Renaissance Italy, a few artists achieved personal fame, but even the most celebrated were sometimes required to use their skills to design their masters' political accessories, such as heraldic devices for banners, clothing, and armour.

The idea that artitic production might be motivated by the artist's own political convictions barely existed until the late eighteenth century. The French painter Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825) stands out as an early example of an artist who chose to unite his aesthetic and political principles. he fervently progagated the ideals of the French Revolution, painting portraits of its leaders and designing itspageants. He also becaume a powerful politician in his own right, though he was imprisoned for his acitivities after the fall of his hero, the French revolutionary Robespierre (1758-94).

In contrast, the work of David's contemporary Francisco de Goya (1746-1828) exemplifies that of an artist paintfully divided by the transition between traditional and modern conceptions of the artist's role. Goya had been appointed First Painter to the King of Spain in 1799, and as a court artist he made portraits of Charles IV and other members of the Spanish and Bourbon royalty. Yet he was also a liberal-minded intellectural, critical of the repressive and corrupt policies of his employers, and in his own privately made graphic works he attacked the abuse of power and the barbarism of war.

Goya's ambiguous position was not unusual during the period of Romanticism, which lasted until approimately the mid-nineteenth century. Romanticism asserted the artist's individualism and social independence, as evoked in Shelley's famous pronouncement in 1821 that poets "are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." For the future of political art, this new notion of the "genius" had two crucial and conflicting effects. While it might imply that the artist could be a critic of society, it also promoted the idea that self-expression is the true function of art, and one which should not be reduced to everyday social or political concerns.

This conflict has reverberated throughout twentieth-century debates on the relationship between art and politics. These ebates have centred on questions which are still hightly relevant: Does the use of art for propaganda always imply the subordination of aesthetic
quality to the message? Alternatively, can the criteria for judging aesthetic quality ever be separated from ideological values? If propaganda art aims to persuade, how does it do this? And to what extent does it succeed?

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We can assume that each individual understands an image in a different way, and that sometimes the meanings inferred by viewers have been entirely at odds with those intended by the propagandist.

Propaganda in art is not always inherent in the image itself, and may not stem from the artist's intentions. Rather, art can become propaganda through its function and site, its framing within public or private spaces and its relationshup with a network of other kinds of objects and actions. The means of making an ideological statement are almost limitless: Architecture, theatre, music, sport, clothes, and haircuts can communicate a political view, as can spectacles of violence, such as book-burning, assassination, suicide, and terrorism. The aerial bombing ofcivilians, which has become a tourine feature of modern warfare, maybe often be conceived as a communicative action rather than a military one. Usually, the various modes of communication used by a government or political movement cohere to form a more or less systematic programme. And often, art operates within this system through a close relationship with compatible images in films, magazines, advertisements, popular music, and, more recently (and most potently), television and computer networks.

The history of modern propaganda is therefore intimately linked with the rise of mass culture. "Mass culture" is equally hard to define. While it connotes an old-fashioned and authoritarian idea of "the masses", it also implies the mass-production of images and messages by industrial techniques. Both Lenin in Soviet Russia and Hitler in Nazi Germany recognized that the cinema would be a far more effective instrument of persuasion than paintings. But they also placed great importance on art. In their differeny ways, Soviet communism and German Nazism were both viewed by their leaders as movements with a cultural and not just a political mission. Only hand-made works on art in the traditional forms of painting and sculpture could fully convey the prestige of high culture. However, under these regimes propaganda art was often produced in such large quantities and required to conform with guidelines so rigid, that even if made by hand, the results could be described as mass-produced art.

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Chapter One - radical traditons of art in the early decades of the twentieth century.
- Marxist ideas
- early feminist art and its links with avant-garde movements.
Chapter Two - art under fascism, the Third Reich.
Chapter Three - Sovient Union.
Chapter Four - wartime propaganda under Western democracies.
Chapter Five - protest since the Vietnam War.



Extra reading:
现代主义 on wiki
Political Science 312 by St. Francis Xavier University

Art and Propaganda, by Toby Clark
ISBN 0-297-83614-5

没有这样的心情

寒波淡淡起，白鸟悠悠下。

怀归人自急，物态本闲暇。






唉。我离田园已远。心寒。

Confirmed Tasks I

Painting & Photography.

Propaganda Paintings.

Manga & Comics.

Map.