Socialist Realism

The official style of the Soviet Union from 1932, when all independent artists' groups were dissolved, until the 1980s; later imposed across the Eastern Bloc and China. Art had to be realistic in form and socialist in content: understandable to the masses, optimistic and heroic, showing the Party and the people building communism. Isaak Brodsky and Aleksandr Gerasimov painted Lenin and Stalin; Aleksandr Deyneka athletes and workers; Arkady Plastov collective-farm life; Fyodor Reshetnikov the schoolboy of Low Marks Again; Aleksandr Laktionov the soldier's Letter from the Front. Beneath the rules, many painters produced works of real skill and feeling, and a later 'severe style' brought harder truths.

How to tell it apart: confident, academic realism about happy workers, collective farms, leaders and Soviet daily life; Social Realism criticises society instead of celebrating it.

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Artists

Pyotr Konchalovsky · Isaak Brodsky · Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin · Aleksandr Deyneka · Igor Grabar · Martiros Saryan · Konstantin Savitsky · Ilya Mashkov · Arkady Plastov · Aleksandr Gerasimov · Konstantin Yuon · Aristarkh Lentulov · Tetiana Yablonska · Matvey Genrikhovich Manizer · Arkady Rylov · Dmitri Zhilinsky · Sergey Gerasimov · Aleksandr Laktionov · Corneliu Baba · Dmitry Nalbandyan

Best-known works

“Grand opening of the Second Congress of the Comintern in the Uritsky Palace in Leningrad” — Isaak Brodsky, 1924
“Spring” — Arkady Plastov, 1954
“Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin” — Aleksandr Gerasimov, 1938
“To War” — Konstantin Savitsky, 1888
“V. I. Lenin in Razliv in 1917” — Arkady Rylov, 1934
“Expanse” — Aleksandr Deyneka, 1944
“USSR Athletes” — Dmitri Zhilinsky, 1964
“Repair work on the railway” — Konstantin Savitsky, 1874
“Defence of Sebastopole” — Aleksandr Deyneka, 1942
“Vladimir Lenin in Smolny” — Isaak Brodsky, 1930
“Relay race on the Garden Ring” — Aleksandr Deyneka, 1950
“First Snow” — Arkady Plastov, 1946
“Haymaking” — Arkady Plastov, 1945
“Moving party” — Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, 1937
“Welcomming the Icon” — Konstantin Savitsky, 1878
“Mother of a Partisan” — Sergey Gerasimov, 1950
“A Letter from the Front” — Aleksandr Laktionov, 1947
“Family at the Sea” — Dmitri Zhilinsky, 1964
“The Execution of the Twenty Six Baku Commissars” — Isaak Brodsky, 1925
“A girl with a doll” — Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, 1937
“Statue of Lenin, House of Government, Minsk” — Matvey Genrikhovich Manizer, 1933
“Speech by V. I. Lenin at a rally of workers of the Putilov factory in May 1917” — Isaak Brodsky, 1929
“Cherry Branch in a Glass” — Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, 1932
“Lenindenkmal Eisleben” — Matvey Genrikhovich Manizer, 1929
“Lenin's funerals” — Isaak Brodsky, 1925
“Lenin in front of Smolny” — Isaak Brodsky, 1925
“statue of Lenin in Petrozavodsk” — Matvey Genrikhovich Manizer, 1933
“Portrait of Haji Zeynalabdin Taghiyev” — Isaak Brodsky, 1912
“Lenin and manifestation” — Isaak Brodsky, 1919
“Self-portrait” — Martiros Saryan, 1942