Soviet Art—The Contemporary Scene

Abstract

While in the West there is a constant interest in all movements in Soviet Art which openly rebel against accepted doctrines—so called “underground” art—there is still a regrettable lack of any attempt to appreciate how contemporary official attitudes are themselves changing and how works of interest are being produced within the context of established artistic circles. These, it is assumed, are dominated by self-appointed politicians whose only concern is to preach communism and repress any progressive tendencies; the artist of integrity is, almost by definition, the outsider who produces for himself alone—and if such an artist becomes accepted, it means that he is guilty of compromise. A visitor to the Soviet Union expects to find “bad art” and, with a very clear conception of what this will be like, usually does find it. The attitude of a Western visitor I met recently was typical: he was disgusted with the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow because the paintings in it, he assured me, “were so incredibly bad that it was quite obvious the director was a mere party-hack with no knowledge whatsoever of art history.” He himself, of course, knew nothing of the history of Russian art, and judged the paintings purely in terms of what he was used to seeing—with no realization at all of a Russian tradition independent of Western movements.