Socialist Realism

About

Vera Mukhina's Worker and Kolkhoz Woman (1937), a stainless-steel pair striding forward with hammer and sickle raised, crowned the Soviet pavilion at the Paris world's fair. Socialist Realism became the Soviet Union's official method after the Communist Party dissolved independent artists' groups in 1932, and was defined at the first Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934: art had to be accessible, optimistic and loyal to the Party, showing life as it was meant to become.

Look for legible academic technique drawn from 19th-century Russian realists such as Ilya Repin, heroic workers and farmers, abundant harvests, and leaders in staged settings, as in Isaak Brodsky's Lenin in Smolny (1930). Aleksandr Deineka brought a modern sense of movement to sport and aviation. After 1945 the doctrine was adopted across Eastern Europe and in China and North Korea. It loosened after Stalin's death in 1953, and unofficial artists defined themselves against it.