Figurative in Form, Political in Content: On Recent Reassessments of Global Socialist Realism
This review examines the stakes and methods of studying Socialist Realism within the context of a horizontal global art history, as laid out in Was Socialist Realism Global? Modernism, Soc-Modernism, Socially Engaged Figuration (2023) and Soviet Socialist Realism and Art in the Asia-Pacific (2025). Both books reclaim Socialist Realism as a topic for in-depth investigation and narrate largely unknown histories from the Second and Third Worlds. They situate Socialist Realism within, rather than outside, Modernism and engage with the specific historical conditions in the numerous countries each book covers. Both books argue that Socialist Realism, like Western Modernism, contained both continuities and ruptures relative to what came before, in some cases establishing by mid-20th century values and practices which today are accepted as international standards. Left unresolved and in want of additional theorization is the question of whether Socialist Realism and socially engaged figuration should be conflated into a single historical phenomenon or treated as connected but distinct artistic modes. Finally, the books’ revisionist turn exposes a need to reassess how we discuss the ethical conundrums and societal blind spots that faced artists working within totalitarian regimes without falling into moralism, hagiography, or false dichotomies.
ARTMargins, Volume 15, Issue 2, pp. 85-98.
doi:10.1162/ARTM.a.376
https://direct.mit.edu/artm/article/15/2/85/137301/Figurative-in-Form-Political-in-Content-On-Recent
Content for this article is available at MIT Press. It is available as: No Access/Subscription Only . Click here for more information.
