Socialist Realism: Foundations and in Flux
In 1988, at the X. Congress of the Art Association of the German Democratic Republic, the last before the collapse of the state, a chorus of literary and art critics proclaimed the death of Socialist Realism, prophesying an end that had already been tacitly acknowledged by artists for decades.11 In its traditional guise, Socialist Realism is described as a restrictive artistic style that depicts “reality in the course of its revolutionary development,” first mandated at the level of Soviet state policy by Andrei Zhdanov and Josef Stalin in 1934.22 Socialist Realism is marked by a set of different temporalities: traditionally it has been considered to have ended in certain contexts, like Poland, with de-Stalinization in 1956, and in others to have continued until the end of state socialism. Everyone thinks they know Socialist Realism when they see it, but the exact meaning of the category shifted over time and has been hotly debated by later critics, leading to there being no singular, decisive definition. In 2020, thirty years after the end of state socialism, art historian and curator Magdalena Moskalewicz discerned that “a second life for Socialist Realism” was emerging from a spate of recent exhibitions delving into material from Central and Eastern Europe, which had become “hidden” from public view and “a source of shame” since the early 1990s.33 Whereas it had once been put to sleep by the last generation of socialist art historians, the legacy of Socialist Realism is now being revived by a younger generation of scholars who know of state socialism only as a memory.
ARTMargins, Volume 15, Issue 2, pp. 29-45.
doi:10.1162/ARTM.a.374
https://direct.mit.edu/artm/article/15/2/29/137302/Socialist-Realism-Foundations-and-in-Flux
Content for this article is available at MIT Press. It is available as: No Access/Subscription Only . Click here for more information.
