To Touch on the Raw: The Aesthetic Affections of Socialist Realism

By Alla Efimova, Art Journal, Spring 1997, pp. 72-80

The aesthetics of our era, our understanding of beauty, must be embodied in every painting, must be the most important part of Soviet art, which powerfully attracts the viewer to itself.

—Konstantin Yuon, 1957.

This statement by the Soviet painter Konstantin Yuon, taken from his article in anticipation of the First Congress of Soviet Artists in 1957, may contain a number of surprises for the contemporary reader, for the life of the Soviet era hardly calls to mind any associations with aesthetics or beauty. On the contrary, Soviet life is most often imagined as the incarnation of the anti-aesthetic: drab, colorless, and lacking in style or design, especially when compared with the spectacular, colorful, and stylish surface reality of commercial capitalism during the same period. Further, Soviet art (i.e., the official art from the 1930s to the 1980s, the period of which Yuon speaks) is rarely imagined to be “attractive,” that is, capable of exercising an almost magic power over viewers, capturing their hearts and minds. Traditionally described by the term “propaganda,” this art is seen, especially in the West, as dry, lifeless, and didactic. Yuon's rhetoric—Soviet art must not merely instruct or educate but “powerfully attract”—speaks of an aesthetic intentionality that contradicts this view. A Soviet artist was expected to affect viewers with a powerful magnetic force.