Rereading Socialist Realism: Podcast on Comparative Perspectives on Socialist Art

In recent years, US scholarship has succeeded in establishing a new perspective on the art of the ex-GDR that overcomes the dichotomy between so-called “dissident art” on the one hand, and “official art,” on the other. Rather than cementing this dichotomy, scholars of this new trend in art historical research points out and study the interconnections and entanglement between official and non-official art. At the same time, they have developed a discourse that subjects the well-established narrative of Socialist Realism as the Great Other of 20th century art history to a long-overdue reevaluation.  Conferences such as “Was Socialist Realism Global? Modernism, Soc-modernism, Socially Engaged Figuration” in Warsaw (in May 2021), to name but one, gave as much validity to this new approach as the exhibition Cold Revolution at the Zachęta National Gallery (also in Warsaw). This podcast takes up the aforementioned reinterpretation of Socialist Realism and addresses questions of figuration in the global postwar era. In the process it assesses Socialist Realism’s social function and utopian potential, seeking to embed different national historiographies of Eastern European art in a global context.

This roundtable was organized by the UC Santa Barbara Graduate Center for Literary Research and participants include Constanze Fritzsch, Magdalena Moskalewicz, Jitka Šosová, and Gregor Taul.

Constanze Fritzsch

Constanze Fritzsch is a postdoc fellow in the research group Ethico-Aesthetics of the Visual at the Kunsthistorisches Institut, Florence, and was the Fulbright Fellowship holder for the Getty Research Institute in 2023/2024. With the support of a fellowship from the Bundesstiftung Aufarbeitung, she spent 4 months in 2024 and 6 months in 2022 on a research trip to Prague and Warsaw to prepare a series of workshops in cooperation with the art academies in Prague and Warsaw as well as the TU Chemnitz. As an art historian and freelance curator, she specializes in the art of the GDR and former Eastern Europe. She holds a doctorate from the Catholic University in Eichstätt-Ingolstadt after getting her MA in art history from the University Paris Nanterre and her BA in art history from University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. She got a fellowship of the ENS de Paris as a foreign exchange student. She is a former member of the “Own Reality” research project run by the German Forum for Art History in Paris and worked as an assistant curator at the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. She has been on the academic staff at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden and the University of Leipzig and Dresden and worked as a student assistant at the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art in Paris.

Magdalena Moskalewicz

Magdalena Moskalewicz, PhD is an art historian and curator specializing in Eastern European art in a global context, whose scholarship mostly focuses on socialist modernism, the neo-avantgardes, and art making/reception under Communist state patronage. She is currently Chief Curator & Associate Director for Curatorial Affairs at Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska–Lincoln. In her curatorial practice, Moskalewicz collaborates with living artists to critically investigate particular histories, localities, and identities with the goal of reshaping dominant narratives. Born in Warsaw, Poland, Moskalewicz worked at collecting, exhibiting, and higher education institutions internationally, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the 56th Venice Biennale, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is a serving member of the CAA Museum Committee and an editor of the journal View: Theories and Practices of Visual Culture.

Jitka Šosová

Jitka Šosová is an art historian based in Prague. She studied at Charles University and UMPRUM, both in Prague, as well as Université de Bourgogne in Dijon, France. She holds degrees in Art History and Theory and History of Design and New Media. Her doctoral project at UMPRUM explored the construction of the cannon of Czech postwar art. She has worked extensively as a curator and lecturer, collaborating with institutions such as the Kampa Museum in Prague, the National Gallery Prague, and Prague City University. In 2018, on the occasion of the centenary of Czechoslovakia, Jitka together with Markéta Ježková prepared an exhibition Go Ahead and Buy It, Then!, detailing the creation and functioning of the presidential collections of Prague Castle from 1918 to 1953. In her art historical research, Jitka primarily focuses on the social and political dimensions of the art world and the methodology of art history.

Gregor Taul

Gregor Taul a teacher, critic and curator based in Tallinn working as a lecturer in the departments of Interior Architecture and General Theory Classes at the Estonian Academy of Arts. Taul studied semiotics at Tartu University and art history in the Estonian Academy of Arts where I defended my master thesis on public monuments in Tallinn's Freedom Square. He was a PhD student in the Lisbon Consortium between 2016–2020 and defended his thesis on late Soviet monumental-decorative art in the doctoral school of the Estonian Academy of Arts.