A lecture held in conjunction with the exhibition In the Russian Tradition.

My talk examines how the Severe Style draws on and parallels traditions in Russian art. But first I want to talk about Socialist Realism because it’s in relation to Socialist Realism that we can appreciate just how important and innovative the Severe Style was.

From coming to TMORA and visiting its exhibitions, “Socialist Realism” is a term you’ve probably encountered but perhaps it’s one that like many others is hard to put your finger on. What is Socialist Realism? It was the official style of Soviet art from the 1930s inward. Socialist Realist artworks had a consistent goal—to transform the men, women, and children of the Soviet Union, to make them Soviet. In the words of Andrei Zhdanov, one of its leading spokesmen, it was to effect “the ideological remoulding and education of working people in the spirit of socialism.” It was to do so by presenting images of the glorious Communist future, images that presented a utopian vision of Soviet society in which people embraced socialism, the latest advances in agriculture and industry, and adored their political leaders.

In spite of the consistency of its messages, the ways in which they were rendered could vary—not only among the works created by a single artist but also among the works created within a single year. To demonstrate this, I want to show two of the most famous works of the 1930s, both dating to 1937:

1/ Georgii Shegal’, Leader, Teacher, Friend (1937)

The title of the work refers to Stalin, and the subject is the 1935 Congress of Collective Farm Shockworkers, that is, peasants who far surpassed their production quotas and for which they were entitled to monetary rewards, acclaim in the Soviet press, and the chance to meet Stalin. The peasants are portrayed as cultured individuals. The painting presents them as consulting with Stalin, who here almost takes on a grandfatherly quality.

2/ Leonardo da Vinci, The Last Supper (ca. 1495–98)

The way the peasants lean in toward Stalin is reminiscent of a painting everyone here is probably familiar with: the composition of Leonardo’s Last Supper.

3/ Arkadii Plastov, Collective Farm Festival (1937)

Arkadii Plastov’s Collective Farm Festival, from 1937, is also an image of Soviet peasants but a much less formal representation. It is more of a raucous, “loud” image than the previous one, featuring a gestural, impressionistic brushstroke. It is reminiscent of traditional peasant representations like those by the sixteenth-century Dutch Old Master Pieter Brueghel.

4/ Pieter Brueghel, The Wedding Dance (ca. 1566)

If we think about the year that Shegal’ and Plastov paintings were created, 1937—one of the darkest in Soviet history, the height of the Purge, when an individual could be arrested or shot for even the slightest hint of dissension—it makes us question the nature of “realism” in Socialist Realism.

The Italian Renaissance and the Dutch and Flemish Old Masters, which are suggested in Leader, Teacher, Friend and Collective Farm Festival, respectively, were among the permitted sources of Socialist Realism. Among the others were ancient Greek art and the work of the French painters Jacques-Louis David and Gustave Courbet, both of whom were associated with revolutionary events, the French Revolution and the Paris Commune, respectively. In spite of the diversity of these art forms and movements, they were all linked by a common thread: the banner of narodnost’. The Russian word “narod” means “people,” and narodnost’ literally means “people-ness.” It refers to the notion of art’s accessibility to the masses.

At the same time, there were forbidden art movements—styles banned from Soviet art, particularly under Stalin’s approximately 25-year-long rule, art forms said to be at odds with the concept of narodnost’. They included late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century European and Russian art movements like Symbolism, Cubism, Surrealism, Expressionism, and abstraction. Such movements were derided in such terms as “decadent,” “formalist,” and “subjective,” said to reflect an unwanted interest in inner psychology at the expense of the collective, and on form over content.

Just as Socialist Realism varied within the hands of a single artist or within the works of a single year, it also varied from decade to decade. New trends in Socialist Realism emerged after WWII and the incredible devastation it wrought—the number of Soviet deaths caused during the war has been said to be greater than that of all nationalities combined. In the aftermath of this devastation, there was an emphasis on a new beginning.

5/ Aleksandr Deineka, Spring (1950)

Spring provided a useful metaphor for the rebirth of Soviet society. This can be seen in the present painting by Aleksandr Deineka titled Spring, which features a smartly dressed woman and the backdrop of presumably the new architectural structures of the city of Moscow.

6/ Mikhail Khmelko, To the Great Russian People (1946)

Some of the formal and thematic trends in postwar Soviet art were the use of warm colors (reds, colds) and the representation of ceremonial settings, as in this sketch. They reflected the Theory of Conflictlessness, which helped unite the Soviet people under the banner of nationalism and intensify the utopian message of Socialist Realism.

7/ Aleksandr Laktionov, Letter from the Home Front (1952)

Perhaps the most noticeable trend in Soviet art of the postwar era was the emergence of a highly polished academic style, seen in works such as the one on the screen, Aleksandr Laktionov, Letter from the Home Front of 1952, the second of the artist’s three versions of the painting. The neo-academic style was directly related to the founding of the USSR Academy of Arts in 1947 and it involved academic practices like underpainting and the preliminary study. It was a style that was virtually photographic and absent of any traces of the artist’s hand. The insightful—and obviously bold—critic Aleksandr Kamenskii described the illusionism of the neo-academic style’s intense illusionism, as a means of increasing the power of Socialist Realism to deceive.

Letter from the Home Front was one of the leading exemplars of this style. It presents a nearly photographic rendered of an injured veteran sharing another soldier’s letter with the latter’s family. In spite of the solemn subject matter, it projects a mood of nearly ebullient optimism, in part through two of Socialist Realism’s importance devices: a brilliant light and a clear blue sky.

8/ Geli Korzhev, Anxiety (1965–68)

It was in response to works like Spring, To the Great Russian People, and Letter from the Home Front that the Severe Style emerged. Geli Korzhev’s Anxiety is a good example of the style. In contrast to the high degree of finish and polish seen in Laktionov’s Letter from the Home Front and its stylistically anonymous quality—lacking marks of the artist’s hand—Anxiety has a blotchy, expressive quality. Korzhev is a Moscow artist who was one of the important figures associated with the movement. One critic described Korzhev’s work as reflecting “a conscious lack of desire to find in nature transparent tones, beautiful shades, decorative combinations.”

This is well seen in Anxiety, in a father’s nightmares of WWII are contrasted with his daughter’s hesitant dreams of the future. It looks like the father’s been prematurely aged by the war.

As seen in the very title of this work—Anxiety—the Severe Style was a striking departure from the norms of Socialist Realism, particularly that practiced in the postwar years. It replaced the pomp, ceremoniousness, prettiness, and utopian optimism of Socialist Realism with work that presented a more truthful look at Soviet reality. It often focused on the difficult conditions of Soviet existence and also, as in Korzhev’s case, on the aftermath of WWII. It conveyed messages and drew on art forms forbidden throughout Soviet art of the previous 30 years, styles that were rehabilitated under Khrushchev.

The Severe Style emerged in 1957 and is said to have concluded in the early 1960s (although works were made by its practitioners for many years afterward), so its history basically coincides with that of the Khrushchev thaw. The thaw began in 1956, the year Khrushchev denounced the Stalin cult of personality as well as his crimes against the Soviet people in his Secret Speech to the Twentieth Party Congress. The thaw was a very exciting, hopeful period in which for the first time in many years Soviet citizens felt free to speak honestly without fear of immediate arrest or execution. It gave the citizenry a sense of empowerment during the thaw, one that led to the Severe Style and to works like Korzhev’s Anxiety.

The style was largely initiated by young artists in Moscow and the Latvian capital of Riga. Along with Latvia, the other Baltic Republics were at the forefront of the movement (it was interesting to note that it was in the Baltic Republics that the events of 1989-91 that led to the downfall of the Soviet empire began). The Baltic republics’ proximity to Western Europe was important, and indeed the Severe Style has important links with Italian Neo-Realism and British school of Kitchen Sink Realism.

The chief promoter of the style was the critic Alexander Kamenskii (the same writer we encountered a few minutes ago who described the neo-academic style in terms of Socialist Realism’s increased powers to deceive). In 1961 he wrote that the leading figures had an “organic aversion to any kind of pose, bombast, falsity, to stock illustrations of a ready-made subject.” He later characterized the Severe Style artists as “furious, passionate commentators on society”—and that they were. It was he who coined the term “Severe Style” retrospectively, in 1969. In Russian “Severe Style” is “Surovyi stil.” “Surovyi” is often translated as “severe” but it could also be translated as rigorous, bleak, or austere.

Severe Style paintings are characterized by not only a sense of unvarnished truthfulness and grittiness, by simultaneous psychologism and aloofness, but by formal qualities and devices as well. They’re generally large—Anxiety is 79 x 59 in. (or about 7 x 5 feet), which led to the Severe Style’s alternate name of Monumentalism.

9/ Geli Korzhev, Before a Long Journey (1970–76)

Severe Style artists also generally shared a common palette, one that’s composed of drab, sometimes muddied, browns and grays. This is seen in the current work, Before a Long Journey, also by Korzhev. Like the previous painting, Before a Long Journey is about WWII, in particular a young solider about to leave for the war. It features another recurrent aspect of the Severe Style—the tendency to distance the viewer from the subject of the work. Here it is seen in the artist’s presentation of the subject from the back; we see her reflection in the mirror (a reversal of the mirror effect seen in Edouard Manet’s famous Bar the Folies-Bergere).

10/ Edouard Manet, Bar at the Folies-Bergere (1881–82)

11/ Geli Korzhev, Morning (1958)

Another work by Korzhev that presents a female subject from the back is Morning. Interestingly, just as the previous work by the artist evokes Manet, the quiet, reflective quality of the present painting, titled Morning, suggests works by Degas, in particular his images of women after the bath.

12/ Edgar Degas, After the Bath (ca. 1883–84)

On the screen is one of these works. It should be noted that French Impressionism was one of the forbidden traditions in Soviet art of the Stalin period, among those rehabilitated under the Khrushchev thaw.

13/ Leonid Kabachek, On the Way (1961)

Leonid Kabachek’s On the Way features many of the characteristics of the Severe Style. Like Anxiety, it’s a scene of a father and daughter. Like one of the previous Korzhev works, this painting is about a journey and perhaps the beginning of a new life—but one that is not eagerly anticipated. This was created in 1961—at the height of the Khrushchev thaw, the Severe Style, and the same year that Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was written. It has the typical Severe Style palette—very drab colors.

It is also imbued with a sense of the cinematic—the father and daughter look to the right, out of the canvas, implying the continuation of the scene beyond the borders of the picture frame. In fact, the cinema, particularly Italian Neo-Realist cinema, was an important influence on Severe Style painters. The painting also has an unusual perspective and sense of fragmentation. We can see through the window in the back only the bottom of a truck, while most of the girl’s right arm has been cut off in the composition.

There’s also an interesting tension in this painting, reflecting the artist’s desire to simultaneously distance and draw the viewer in: It distances the viewer by submerging the father in darkness, making his features very hard to make out. At the same time, the artist draws us in, bringing the viewer into the composition by means of the table and the painting’s expressivity.

Expressivity was one of the goals of the Severe Style artists, an important part of these painters’ efforts to arrive at a form of realism that was “contemporary”—the antithesis of the work of artists such as Aleksandr Laktionov and the neo-academic strain of Socialist Realism it embodied. Expressivity is often conveyed by a sketchy quality and visible bruskstrokes. Certain areas of this work are very painterly, composed of patches of expressive brushwork. The expressive brushstrokes—literal traces of the artist’s hand—and the way in which they break up forms into patches of color, reflects another important source for the Severe Style, the early-twentieth-century Russian avant-garde group known as the Jack of Diamonds.

14/ Vasilii Rozhdestvenskii, Still Life with Green Bottle (1921) P

On the screen is the painting Still Life with Green Bottle, by the artist Vasilii Rozhdestvenskii, one of the members of the movement. The Jack of Diamonds was a Moscow-based association that looked to Picasso, Gauguin, Matisse, and Cézanne. Five of its leading members were often described as the Moscow Cézannists. It was among the modernist groupings forbidden under Stalin. The influence of Cézanne can clearly be seen in the painting on the screen. The patches of brushstrokes break up the forms of the objects, making the two bottles appear as if they’re melting into each other.

15/ Petr Konchalovsky, Floor-Polisher (1946)

Petr Konchalovsky was another member of the Jack of Diamonds artists. A retrospective of his work was mounted in 1956, at the beginning of the thaw.

16/ Eduard Bragovskii, Logging on the Vetluga River (1964)

On the screen is Eduard Bragovskii’s Logging on the Vetluga River. Bragovskii’s work was strongly influenced by the Moscow Cézannists. This painting also suggests the influence of another artist forbidden under Stalin and rehabilitated under Khrushchev: Henri Matisse, particularly in the bright palette and decorative patterning on the woman’s skirt. In fact, the patterning and the palette seem to act as a foil for the serious subject of the work and the stern face of the female logger.

The coloring of this work is perhaps surprising given the other works we’ve seen thus far, suggesting the diversity within the Severe Style. In fact, the statement by Bragovskii quoted in the exhibition catalogue is all about color, in particular the color red: “Vetluga is a Volga River tributary. We were boating from the city of Nizhniy when logs were being rafted along the Vetluga River. I am still impressed by the steep riverbanks that appeared almost red in the distance. I always base my palette on a single color that acts as a tuning fork. An impressionistic ‘color’ serves as a hollow in the space. I create colors in and around the space.” This statement reflects the fact that Severe Style artists were not only social commentators but artists very much engaged with the materials of their medium, with the act of painting.

Another striking aspect of this work is the distortion of the scale; the woman in the foreground is impossibly large in relation to the tiny men in the background. Such distortion is an important feature of Russian icon painting, a source for numerous Severe Style painters.

17/ Viktor Popkov, Remembering. Widows (1969)

Old Russian religious art informed the work of the Severe Style artist Viktor Popkov. This painting, titled Remembering. Widows, comes from Popkov’s most famous series of works, devoted to the old women of the Mezen region in Russia who were widowed by WWII.

The work is set in a Russian izba (peasant hut). It, along with the izba, is one of the leading symbols of Russia. We can see a photo of presumably one of the widow’s husbands killed in the war as well as what may be two nods to Communist orthodoxy/history: a photo of Karl Marx and a lightbulb (perhaps a reference to Lenin’s electrification program). Also the color red has various associations in Soviet art: political, religious, art historical.

Popkov himself was tragically shot by mistake by security guards.

18/ Viktor Popkov, Family in July (1969)

A very different mood is seen in Popkov’s Family in July. Rather than tragic remembrance, the atmosphere in this painting is one of quiet serenity as a family of three enjoys its time together.

The work has an unusual perspective perhaps informed by the realm of cinema: the viewer is placed above the blanket. He almost feels like an intruder on this private moment as he’s confronted by the father’s gaze.

19/ Pavel Nikonov, Geologists (1962)

From the family idyll seen in the last painting we go to our last Severe Style painting in this talk, one of the most famous works of the movement.

This very somber painting shows frostbitten workers in the Siberian winter. It was produced as the result of the artist’s accompaniment of a geological expedition to the far Northeast, which was retracing the steps of an earlier failed expedition.

The state was angered not only by the message of the painting, but by its form. The people have shrunk and don’t take possession of space or challenge the viewer; they are anti-monumental. The lack of spatial articulation, use of outline, sketchiness, and figures’ schematic features look to early-twentieth-century Russian avant-garde artists such as Pavel Kuznetsov, Nadezhda Udaltsova and Aleksandr Drevin. It also looks to Russian icons.

Geologists was on view in the December 1962 exhibition Thirty Years of Moscow Art—the “Manezh exhibition,” as it has often been known—which was visited by Khrushchev himself along with a delegation. Several months later, in April 1963, amid the new governmental crackdown on the arts that followed the exhibition, the very conservative and influential artist Vladimir Serov described works such as Geologists at the sixth plenum of the Russian Federation Artists’ Union: “Look how our miserable innovators have portrayed our fellow man in recent times. In the works of P. Nikonov, N. Andronov and others ugly, bettle-browed, brutish figures have appeared. And all of this has been done ostensibly in a struggle against the varnishing of reality, to show Old Mother Truth unadorned, the grey ‘truth’ of life. But is this really truth? Is our life really grey, are our people really coarse and primitive? The depiction in such works of man today, of the builders of Communism, whether the authors intended it or not, has proved false and insulting.” The next day Pravda, the official newspaper of the Communist Party, contained a report accusing Geologists and other contemporary works of being formalist and depicting Soviet people as ugly and downtrodden.

I have discussed some of the traditions on which the Severe Style drew, many of which had been forbidden during the Stalin era and had recently been rehabilitated under the liberalizing policies of the Khrushchev thaw.

At the same time, the Severe Style in many ways calls to mind one of the most venerated movements in Russian art, one that was upheld throughout the Soviet art period as a model for Socialist Realism: the work of the late-nineteenth-century Peredvizhniki movement, also called Itinerant Realism. Although the Severe Style painters pursued a path in opposition to the type of realism associated with Peredvizhniki (seeking an idiom that was more expressive and about the materials of painting itself), there are many interesting parallels worth exploring.

The Peredvizhniki was the first Russian art movement devoted solely to the portrayal of Russian subject matter. It emerged approximately a century before the Severe Style, in the 1860s, and lasted through the 1890s.

20/ Ilya Repin, Barge-Haulers on the Volga (1870–73)

Ilya Repin’s Barge-Haulers on the Volga is perhaps the most famous painting of the Peredvizhniki movement. It is an unflinching portrayal of the backbreaking labor of these late-nineteenth-century human packmules who transported cargo from ships traveling along the Volga.

Like the Severe Style, Itinerant Realism was anti-academic and opposed to the style with which the Academy was associated, neoclassicism. Neoclassicism was based on the ideal of beauty seen in ancient Greek and Roman art and looked to the Italian Renaissance. The Academy wanted its student to depict not Russian subjects but more traditional art-historical themes: classical history, legends, and myths.

21/ Karl Bryullov, The Last Day of Pompeii (1830–33)

This is one of the best-known works of Russian neoclassicism. Itinerant Realism emerged in response to works such as this, devoted to the volcanic eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 78 A.D.

Back to 20/ Ilya Repin, Barge-Haulers on the Volga

In particular, the movement started in 1863, when fourteen artists literally walked out of the Academy in protest of the proposed topic for the annual Gold Medal competition: the mythological subject of the Entrance of Odin into Valhalla. The artists felt that this subject was too remote from the real life of Russia and that the academic style of neoclassicism was too constricting. Seeking to create work that was of their time, Repin and the other Peredvizhniki chose Russian subjects—landscapes, portraits, peasants, scenes from history, and revolutionaries—and rendered them in a realist style that they felt better captured contemporary Russian life. In a similar manner, the Severe Style painters rebelled against the neo-academic style and the pomposity of postwar Soviet art. They rejected academic practices in their pursuit of “contemporaneity.”

Both Peredvizhniki realism and the Severe Style emerged in reformist periods. As discussed earlier, the Severe Style arose amid the liberalization of the Khrushchev thaw (although Khrushchev himself was not pleased with their works). Similarly, Peredvizhniki realism is often linked to the period in which it emerged, the reformist era that followed the death of Tsar Nicholas I in 1855 and Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War in 1856. Peredvizhniki painters are often “men of the sixties” for their apparent links to progressive social and political developments. Peredvizhniki realism was concurrent with the Populist movement of the 1860s–1880s. In fact, the group’s practice of organizing traveling exhibitions of its artists’ work may be seen as a parallel to the Populists’ “going-to-the-people” excursions to the Russian countryside, in which they sought to raise the social and political consciousness of the “benighted” rural population.

Amid the reformist eras in which the Peredvizhniki and Severe Style emerged, the artists of these movements created work that functioned as social commentary. Much like how the Severe Style treated the grim conditions of Soviet life and the aftermath of WWII, the Peredvizhniki’s critical realism, as well seen in Barge-Haulers, often focused on the difficult conditions of the peasantry. As Repin himself said many years later: “The pictures of those days made the viewer blush, to shiver and carefully look into himself…. They upset the public and directed it into the path of humaneness.”

Back to 19/ Pavel Nikonov, Geologists

In a similar manner, the simultaneously unvarnished and stylized grim images of Soviet life produced by the Severe Style painters confronted their viewers with the harsh truths of the reality in which they were living at the same time that they turned to the ways in which this reality was to be depicted, to the material of painting itself. In this manner they, like Peredvizhniki, belong squarely within the Russian tradition by their very rejection of some of its traditions.

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