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Totalitarianism and the problem of Soviet art evaluation: the Lithuanian case

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Abstract

By taking into account dissident/political and art historical interpretations of Soviet art, I analyze how polemics about totalitarianism in the West, which generally corresponded with Cold War debates and Eastern European dissident thought, shaped the post-Soviet evaluations of national artistic legacies. It is argued that the political relationship with the totalitarian past, like in many post-socialist areas where the immediate past was subjected to radical re-evaluation, affected Lithuanian artists’ and critics’ attitude towards local Soviet art. Because of an obvious lack of underground art in Soviet Lithuania, however, the retrospective usage of political categories here became problematic. Especially in international representations, the complexities of artists’ relationship with officialdom came to be routinely assigned to the phenomenon of non-conformism; this eventually obfuscated the differences between the Lithuanian Soviet art context as somewhat different from the Russian case.

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Notes

  1. Laqueur (1990), p. xviii. Here one could also see a thorough overview of the term and its usage among different schools of thought. See the chapter: “Is There Now, or Has There Ever Been, Such a Thing as Totalitarianism?”

  2. Contemporary scholars in the West, for example, not only continue to address the paradoxical sustainability of totalitarian or post-totalitarian conditions but also to argue over the very definition of the term. E.g., Thompson (2002), Losurdo (2004), and Rabinbach (2006).

  3. Yurchak (2006), p. 6. Yurchak here reasonably traced the popular division between ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ Soviet culture back to the dissident ideology of the 1970s. On the variety of ways the term totalitarianism was used in the former Soviet Union by dissidents as well as Gorbachev’s reformers also see Bergman (1998, pp. 247–281).

  4. Many relevant discussions exist in Lithuanian, especially in the Lithuanian émigré press. I address these issues more thoroughly in the article: Trilupaityte (2007, pp. 93–114).

  5. This article intends to stress the political connotations of certain artistic terms; therefore different stylistic tendencies and periods are not discussed unless they directly relate to the argument. Despite the fact that various terms are often used interchangeably, one might notice that ‘Socialist Realism’, ‘Severe Style’, ‘Soc Art’ etc. emphasize stylistic features, while ‘official art’, ‘dissident art’, ‘nonconformist art’, etc. are more politically and ideologically loaded terms. Different approaches to the same phenomenon underlie various periods (e.g., Stalinist art, Khrushchev’s ‘thaw’, art under Gorbachev), important events (‘Manezh scandal’ in 1962, ‘Bulldozer show’ in 1974, both in Moscow), different locales (e.g., Moscow conceptualism, art of the Baltic republics etc.) or even a particular media. Yet for historical clarity some general readings can be recommended. For an exhaustive overview of Soviet art evaluation trends in Western historiography see Bown and Taylor (1993a, b). For a more detailed description of the official art scene see Bown (1998). For alternative artistic tendencies in the former Soviet Union see Dodge and Rosenfeld (1995).

  6. A method of Socialist Realism which was to be applicable to all the arts was explicitly advocated at the First All Union Writers‘ Congress.

  7. Many discussions during the late eighties-early nineties could be found in the local art press. Russian examples are Iskusstvo, Dekorativnoe iskusstvo SSSR (during the period under consideration also attainable in Lithuania). The Lithuanian weekly “Literatūra ir menas” (Literature and Art) as well as the cultural magazine “Kultūros barai” (Fields of Culture) were important. The magazine of the Lithuanian Artists‘ Union “Dailė” (Art) also appeared occasionally during this period. While in the Baltic States castigation of the totalitarian past often implied the symbolical shedding of the ‘alien’ Soviet system in arts, in other locales most critiques could be reserved only for the ‘darkest years.’ One can see a typically passionate approach towards repression of culture during the Stalinist years in the writings of a famous Soviet Russian art critic Aleksandr Kamenski (in 1969 the critic coined a term Severe Style to describe some Russian and Latvian paintings of the sixties, and in the seventies Kamenski spoke about the new ‘metaphoricalness’ of the Soviet art). For Kamenski’s judgment on the falsity of zhdanovshchina (Zhdanov’s principles in art) see Kamenski (1993b).

  8. Haraszti (1987). First published in Hungary unofficially, the book expressed a moral judgment not so much of totalitarian repressions but of the false ‘freedom’ that state artists are trapped in under the conditions of ‘liberal’ socialism.

  9. Golomstock (1990).

  10. Golomstock (1990, p. xii).

  11. For example, in his study of Socialist Realism, Bown demonstrated how conservative proponents of Socialist Realism eventually accommodated certain elements of modernism in their works. See Bown (1998). As such, even the legitimate art of the Stalinist period could elude systematic and generic definitions such as ‘totalitarian’ art. In her detailed analysis of the Russian artistic life during the first years of Khrushchev’s ‘thaw’ Susan Reid showed that de-Stalinization in a wider sense of cultural and institutional dynamics started before the death of Stalin. Reid (2006, pp. 161–175).

  12. Bown (1991).

  13. Still, the foreword to the book entitled “Stalin’s art through Soviet Eyes” (by Aleksandr Sidorov, the leading member of the USSR Academy of Arts) gives the impression that the study is an attempt to legitimate, rather than abandon, the official line. Such a ‘softening’ attitude towards the liberalized Soviet cultural system could be effectively contrasted with aforementioned dissident incredulity expressed by Haraszti.

  14. A critical attitude towards the modernist creed of freedom can also be found in a book by Christine Lindey, who, at the same time when Golomstock ‘polished’ his concept of totalitarian art, analyzed the Cold War era art phenomenon. See Lindey (1990, p. 182).

  15. Here one can see not only the Soviet intellectuals’ common rejection of Marxism in the early nineties, as well as reassessment of ‘local’ and ‘Western’ realities, but also a new flurry of Cold War stereotypes unexpectedly showing up in academic conferences, seminars and less formal meetings. While some routinely criticized the very nature of their capitalist consumption oriented culture, others tried to characterize, as ironically noticed by Susan Buck-Morss, their “totally unique, totally totalitarian past.” See Buck-Morss (2000, p. 237). In 1996, an American art critic Eleanor Heartney in her review of Russian and Soviet art exhibitions in the USA also noticed that “Western observers eager to identify with the heroic struggles of the Soviet intelligentsia have been puzzled and disappointed by the way former dissidents have embraced nationalism, religion and mysticism. It seems that notions like liberty, opposition and political radicalism had very different connotations on each side of the ideological divide.” See Heartney (2006, p. 175).

  16. Golomshtok (1977, p. 53).

  17. E.g., M. Epstein (1990, pp. 15–21).

  18. Groys (1992).

  19. Todorov saw the “actualization of the Wagnerian project of the total work of art” as a common ground for political extremists and avant-garde artists in legitimating violence: Todorov (2007, pp. 51–66).

  20. Goldfarb (1989, pp. 66–69).

  21. Goldfarb (1989, p. 78).

  22. E.g., Slovenian philosopher Aleš Erjavec employed the work of French historian and political philosopher Claude Lefort and his theory of totalitarianism in an attempt to get at the essence of socialist art. Lefort’s 1970s description of totalitarian discourse does not allow separating identities and ideologies from the center of power. It remains unclear, however, how the artists of late socialism that Erjavec chose to review were practically able to embark on an approach of political critique, therefore articulating in their works what Erjavec calls “a secondary discourse in the form of the primary ideological discourse”—the approach which somehow becomes “no longer equally totalitarian.” Erjavec (2003, pp. 8–10). No less complicated is the question of totalitarian art’s correspondence to postmodernism in the context of Soviet art. In the aforementioned book by Groys (1992, German edition 1988), the author related the artworks of the well-known proponents of Soc Art, Komar and Melamid, to postmodernism no less than to totalitarianism. See Groys (1992, pp. 70–80).

  23. In 1993 Charles Jencks (a well-established US cultural critic who originally introduced the concept of postmodernism in Western architecture) celebrated the ironic variety of the first post-Soviet and postmodern art and architecture exhibition in Moscow. In the institutional context of the ‘modernist’ Tretyakov gallery “all positions—modern, post-modern, totalitarian and libertarian—were displayed as ‘art’, appearing to contain similar if not identical meanings. Does the museum eat up everything in this ‘repressive toleration’”? Jencks (1994, p. 9). On the other hand, the actual collecting and accumulating of non-official Russian artworks from the late Soviet period was not eventually undertaken by the local museum institutions. See, for example, curatorial comments about the realities and losses of Russian nonconformist art in: “Sem’ let konformistkogo iskusstva”, ARTCHRONIKA, Moskva (2003).

  24. Belting (2003, p. 57).

  25. The unofficial or nonconformist art phenomenon, as it was generally considered, ran from about 1956 to about 1986. See Scammell (1995).

  26. Dodge and Hilton (1977, p. 7).

  27. See: Sjeklocha and Mead (1967, p. xiii), and Scammell et al. (1977, p. viii).

  28. Golomstock (1977, pp. 81–82).

  29. According to Amei Wallach, “What was permitted one year was forbidden the next, and vice versa; what was tolerated in literature was condemned in painting; what one artist might be permitted would bring dire consequences to another; what one bureaucrat endorsed, another might veto—then meting out punishment to the artist who had been foolhardy enough to believe in such good fortune.” Wallach (1991, pp. 75–83), here p. 76.

  30. After being donated to the museum, Dodge’s collection was extensively presented in an aforementioned book. See Dodge and Rosenfeld (1995). For the reception of Dodge‘s collection exhibition in US in 1996 see: Heartney (2006). Collector’s penchant for the dissident concept of art was also discussed by his bibliographer John McPhee. See McPhee (1994).

  31. Groys (2003, p. 56).

  32. See Rueschemeyer (1985, p. 160). The opposite way to adjust the institutional arrangements of global art world was also popular. As later noted by Belting, “Eastern art has always lived off the Western market where artists from the East also find niche, if they are prepared to work for it and, for example, to exhibit their works in New York’s Greene Street.” See Belting (2003, p. 57).

  33. See Ross (1990). Also see the bookjacket blurb in Bown (1991).

  34. Dondurei (1996). In a somewhat similar way, during the eighties ‘socialist’ art from GDR also entered the international art market, primarily because of the Western German buyers. See Rueschemeyer (1993).

  35. Elliott (1999, pp. 029–030).

  36. Bown and Taylor (1993a, b, p. 9).

  37. Bown and Taylor (1993a, b).

  38. The attention to Socialist Realist aesthetics is particularly noteworthy, although serious interest of this kind could still be hardly imagined in the context of Lithuanian art history. On the immanent aesthetic significance and impacts of Socialist Realism see Efimova (1997, pp. 72–80). Also see Heller (1997).

  39. In 1993, for example, a big exhibition under the provocative title “Post-Modernism and National Cultures: Art of the USSR from the 1960s to 1980s” was staged in Moscow’s Tretyakov gallery (see Jencks (1994)) In New York (P.S.1 center) during the same year an exhibition “Stalin’s Choice” featured a selection of paintings once awarded the Stalin Prize. According to art historian Alla Efimova, the latter event “turned out to be one of the most reviewed exhibitions of the season,” See Efimova (1997, p. 72).

  40. In her review of the Bown’s book on Socialist Realist painting, Susan E. Reid poignantly showed that the major methodological and historical flaws of the study were rooted in academic publishers’ and sponsors’ market-oriented approach in promoting the subject of the Socialist Realism as a ‘collectible art’. Reid (1999, pp. 310–316). The politics of publishing in a broader picture, of course, reveals the quibbles for recognition in the market, which has been ruled by the common logic of late capitalism. This logic most perfectly manifested itself in commodification of Sots Art. One could follow here the rhetorical question of Thomas Lahusen since “on the New York Stock Exchange of culture, sots art, for example, ‘did well’—and, for that matter, so did (Groys’s) The Total Art of Stalinism. What are the method’s chances of enduring into the future?.” See Lahusen (1997, p. 23).

  41. See for example Burroughs (2006, p. 31).

  42. According to Belting who, like many others, saw unofficial art turn into official art (or, more precisely, into art for the market), art from the East had always been interpreted in the West as being at another stage of development because of its different social role. The lack of contact with Western modernism and modernist crisis constituted East European art‘s “state of innocence, as it were, especially since it could easily justify itself by its resistance to official state art.” Belting (2003, p. 58).

  43. On the broader overview of the Baltic States’ arts during the years of Soviet occupation in English see Jurėnaite (1996) and Dodge and Rosenfeld (2002).

  44. I discussed these circumstances at length in my PhD thesis “Lithuanian Institutional Artistic Life, Late Eighties–Early Nineties,” Vilnius Academy of Arts, 2003.

  45. For the examples see Lubyte (1997).

  46. Correspondingly, there were few attempts in Western historiography to evaluate Lithuanian Soviet Art as something more than just a marginal part of the Soviet Russian art legacy. For example, Bown’s lengthy study on Socialist Realist painting relied on the Russian magazine Khudozhnik from the mid sixties in describing the ‘post-thaw’ art from the Baltic republics. It was characterized rather typically—“Latvian art as ‘strong-willed and tough’, Lithuanian art as ‘emotional’, Estonian art as intellectual.” See Bown (1998, p. 452).

  47. In many accounts of the local artistic heritage, the totalitarian past looked simply incompatible with Lithuanian culture—it was widely alleged that totalitarianism crippled the natural development of national art yet was not able to alter it. For an explanation of this kind in an English-language art catalogue see, for example: Jurėnaite (1996, p. 16). Such observations run counter to the above-mentioned attempts in Western historiography of Russian art to reexamine the art of the Stalinist period apart from repressive politics and to interpret the style of Socialist Realism as a part of national heritage rooted in Russian culture. In particularly see Bown and Taylor (1993a, b) and Bown (1998), Socialist Realist Painting, ibid.

  48. The prime example in search of common denominators for unofficial Soviet art is an above-mentioned book which directly related to N. Dodge’s Soviet art collection: Dodge and Rosenfeld (1995). Articles aimed at representing the art from the Soviet Baltic republics in this book almost invariably used the term ‘non-conformism’, while treating the specifics of local Soviet art alongside the common theme.

  49. Andriuškevičius (1995). The article originally appeared in Lithuanian cultural magazine “Kultūros barai” in 1992.

  50. Andriuškevičius (2002, pp. 26–27).

  51. Andriuškevičius (2002), p. 28.

  52. The best example here could be the well-known Lithuanian modernist painter Jonas Švažas who, according to Andriuškevičius, “was not only a non-conformist painter but also a member of the board of the Artists’ Union of the Soviet Union, and the chairman of the Painting Section of the Artists’ Union of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic.” Andriuškevičius (2002, p. 27). The very fact that the artist “opposed Stalinist canons” in his painting long after Khrushchev’s ‘thaw’ did not mean that this type of ‘opposition’ was ever subjected to repression or even more systematic public criticism. The other semi-non-conformist example provided by Andriuškevičius—a Lithuanian painter Silvestras Džiaugštas—ironically is the same artist whose colorful work “The Death of an Activist” (1969) is the only Lithuanian art illustration included in Bown’s “Socialist Realist Painting.”

  53. While already in 1992 assigning the majority of the Soviet Lithuanian artists’ the title semi-non-conformists (in an above mentioned article, which eventually was translated into English for the Dodge’s book “From Gulag to Glasnost”), Andriuškevičius, for example, admitted in 1998 in the same Lithuanian cultural magazine that in reality there exist no ‘ideal types’ such as conformists or nonconformists. See Andriuškevičius (1998).

  54. Any mentioning of the art from the Baltic republics is notably absent in many significant studies aimed retrospectively to evaluate the phenomenon of Soviet art. This lack, despite attempts to provide some information about different non-Russian areas, is apparent in Bown and Taylor (1993, b), as well as in Lahusen and Dobrenko (1997).

  55. Kovaliov (1995, p. 72). A significant factor in the processes of local art popularization was the establishment of the Soros foundation network in the region (in Lithuania the Soros Contemporary Art Center opened in 1993). Yet while generally engaging in exhibiting local art abroad, the center did not concern itself with representing and institutionalizing the Soviet art legacy.

  56. Dodge’s collection of the Lithuanian art, which includes some 1,100 works by 121 artists, became the most significant representation of Lithuanian Soviet art in an acclaimed Western museum of art. See: N. Dodge, “Introduction: Collecting Baltic Art of the Cold War Period,” in Dodge and Rosenfeld (2002). Artworks of the Soviet Lithuanian artists acquired by other Western collectors, e.g., P. Ludwig, are far less known.

  57. Svede (2002a, pp. 17–18).

  58. Svede 2002b, pp. 194–195). Svede here discussed the careers of Latvian painters Džema Skulme and Ojars Abols, an establishment couple in the Soviet period.

  59. The radicalization of this question could lead to contradictory and even schizophrenic answers, as recently shown by Laurie Koloski with the example of the post-war Polish artist Jonasz Stern: Koloski (2006, pp. 273–290). I would add that any search for political ‘responsibility’ in biographical circumstances has to be done on a case to case basis rather than relying on assumptions that artists collaborated with repressive authorities and at the same time protected their cultural autonomy. Attempts to come to terms with a discredited past should not automatically rely on the idea that artists‘ struggles for their own principles stands for ‚higher‘ loyalties. Under certain historical circumstances artists could be prone to exalting power relations over the autonomy of culture, which in some ‚extreme‘ cases unveil rather cynical realities. Take the example of the proselyte painter Aleksandr Gerasimov, the first president of the USSR Academy of Arts who, besides being a staunch proponent of the Stalin cult in arts, also lead repressive crusades against other artists. After the death of Stalin, Gerasimov tried to convince Khrushchev against de-stalinization in the Soviet art world by pointing towards the ‘good faith’ in his numerous portraits of Stalin and other related works, which were created ‘in accordance with artists’ consciences.’ Gerasimov‘s refusal to change his opinion resulted in a bitter argument with a new party leader and the eventual resignation of the artist from his positions. See Bown (1993)

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Trilupaityte, S. Totalitarianism and the problem of Soviet art evaluation: the Lithuanian case. Stud East Eur Thought 59, 261–280 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-007-9037-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-007-9037-4

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