Искусство РСФСР

The mass political poster as an art form was engendered by the Revolution itself. Its primary functions were mass political propaganda, active aid to the young Soviet government during the years of Civil War and intervention. It also embodied certain aesthetic, artistic values, specific stylistic features whose development can be traced in the graphic and to some extent the monumental art of later periods. Many posters produced in the first years of the Soviet state are rightly looked upon by the Soviet people as classical, and are on view in the USSR’s largest museums. The posters of D.Moor and V.Deni, and the ROSTA window displays¹

of V.Mayakovsky and M. Cheremnykh are known not only in the Soviet Union, but abroad. Such artists as N. Kochergin, I.Simakov, V. Lebedev, A.Radakov, and A.Brodaty also made great contribution in this sphere. Their posters are not only evidence of an epoch; they were classics which set the ideological and artistic tone for the poster during the periods of socialist construction and the Great Patriotic War of 1941—1945.

Of continual importance for Soviet art was the famous Lenin plan for monumental propaganda. The trends of development of Soviet monumental art, its revolutionary-democratic orientation, its scale, and its role in the aesthetic education of the people took shape in those distant years when the young state was restoring its war-devastated economy. We now refer to the works of those far-off years as the beginnings of the art of socialist realism. One of the most interesting of the surviving examples created in fulfilment of the plan for monumental propaganda was the symbolic-allegorical memorial plaque To Those Who Fell in the Fight for Peace and Brotherhood of Peoples

, done in 1918 by S. Konionkov and set up at the Kremlin wall on Red Square in Moscow (it is now in the Russian Museum in Leningrad).

Easel paintings also contributed to the unique character of the art of the early twenties. The work of the artists of the older generation reflected the thoughts and feelings of those who welcomed the Socialist Revolution with deep satisfaction. Some of them expressed their ideas in images that were somewhat naively symbolic, but not devoid of charm. Kustodiyev’s canvas, The Bolshevik

(1920), can be considered the most memorable of such works. A different tendency is displayed in A.Rylov’s remarkable landscape The Blue Expanses

(1918). This landscape, executed in a consistently realistic tradition, is notable for the outstanding energy of the brushwork and its atmosphere of elation. Petrov-Vodkin expressed his own conception of the birth of the new in the canvas 1918 in Petrograd in which he depicted a young woman as a Madonna. In the fact that he turned to the traditions of Russian icons one clearly sees the artist’s desire to emphasize the lofty, poetic nature of the simple Russian woman.

The originators of Russian Soviet representative art were people whose artistic methods had been formed before 1917, artists brought up on the traditions of progressive Russian art, who were able to appreciate the importance of the Great October Socialist Revolution for their country. It took a rather long time for the social upheaval to be properly understood by them, to be deeply impressed on their minds and reflected in their work. But all the more bright and striking were the new qualities in the work of Russian artists who were linked firmly with Russian pre-revolutionary art. Such diverse painters as M. Nesterov, V.Baksheyev, A. Arkhipov, S.Maliutin, N. Kasatkin, K.Yuon, P. Kuznetsov, P. Konchalovsky, I. Mashkov, A. Lentulov, K. Petrov-Vodkin, and A. Shevchenko, the sculptors N. Andreyev, L. Sherwood, A. Matveyev, I.Shadr and many others passed through a stage of spiritual upsurge, eagerly absorbing the ideas, the needs and the mood of the time.