Ukrainian Socialist Realism Art Exhibit

The turnout on the opening day of the“Ukrainian Socialist Realism” exhibit of paintings at The Ukrainian Institute hit an all-time high for its programs, said Olena Sidlovych, the Institute’s General Manager. More than 300 nattily-dressed, fashionable, and arty types -- including Ukrainians, Russians and Americans -- attended the exhibit on the evening of Sept 14. They spent their time convivially viewing and commenting on this unprecedented display of Soviet era paintings -- while  drinking wine and partaking of an array of dainty pastries -- at the Institute, which is housed in the historic Fletcher-Sinclair Mansion at 2 East 79th Street and Fifth Avenue.

The decision to sponsor this exhibit was not an easy one, reflected Terence Filewych, who serves as legal counsel for the Institute. It was the result of much heated debate among the Institute’s board members about how this Soviet-era art coincided with the Institute’s mission to promote Ukrainian culture -- a culture that was much damaged by the very government policy that produced the paintings on display here. After all, it was Stalin who declared “Socialist Realism” the official art form of Soviet-occupied Ukraine, and required artists to follow this mandate or risk death. A typical result of that policy was the clichéd uninspired soul-less “happy peasant” and “heroic factory worker” art, which existed solely to glorify the building of the Soviet state.

And indeed a lot of what viewers saw here was predictable propaganda. Yet, when taken out of their historic context and put on display in a gallery space abroad for the perusal of curious and detached observers as items of historic interest, these commissioned paintings seemed to lose their original impact as works of indoctrination. "In America, we can talk about it more objectively and more dispassionately,” commented General Manager Sidlovych, referring to the art form of Socialist Realism. And indeed, in this apolitical context, some paintings seemed almost to work against their obvious didactic intent. A painting of a formidable solidly built “heroine” of the revolution, much decorated with medals, became an almost laughable caricature. A grand-scale painting of Soviet leaders (a winner of the Stalin Prize) called to mind those outsized looming portraits of Lenin (that replaced religious icons) and those larger-than-life statues that were toppled over after the overthrow of the Soviet regime. A landscape of a factory that was peopled by industrial workers became inadvertently subversive, its gloomy colors hinting at naturalism and exploitation of labor rather than implying a march toward a bright Communist future.

Here and there, however, some paintings did command more than passing attention from the crowd for their traces of lyricism -- in an expressive look in a portrait of an artist; in the thoughtful gaze of a girl in a gallery, in a still life with a rustic ethic motif . A portrait of an elderly woman in profile, wearing a billowy skirt and framed in an art-deco like border of grapes, stood out and was much commented on as an example of modernism – while its background incongruously depicted female workers toiling in the fields in the approved Soviet style.

Such an obvious political overlay made many of these works seem jarringly uneven in composition when  simply viewed as works of  art. A portrait of a young school girl was marked by the requisite reminder of the regime: the symbolic Soviet red badge on her pinafore. A scene of an attractive woman waiting alone at a train station had an ominous foreground – pointed out to this viewer by one of the gallery-goers -- that included a tattered red ribbon and a dark shadow of what could  be interpreted as a symbol of protest -- a raised fist.

"This phenomenon explains precisely why contemporary art rather than realism is now so popular in Ukraine," commented another gallery-goer.

It was somewhat disconcerting for those of us who understood the obvious political context of these paintings to actually see them in a gallery that typically exhibited works of solely aesthetic merit, as they served as reminders of an amoral autocratic regime that visited inordinate pain upon our families. It was also troubling to realize that the artists whose works were displayed here worked within that regime, while so many of that generation who refused to sacrifice their principles perished.

Nonetheless, these Soviet-era paintings -- whose style was discredited after the collapse of the Soviet state -- are now clearly sought-after as examples of a once-dominant art form. Collected and assembled by Jurii Maniichuk for the purpose of study by future generations, they undoubtedly will remain of historic and aesthetic import and interest, serving to document the era when Ukraine was a Soviet state. A selection of these paintings – from The Jurii Meniichuk and Rose Brady Collection -- will remain on view on the fourth floor of the Ukrainian Institute until 2018.

 

Ukraine's Soviet-era Cinema

 Now that Ukraine has been an independent nation for a while, its culture -- which had long been suppressed, first by the czarist regime, then by the Soviets -- has been experiencing a resurgence. Ths revival was evidenced by an unprecedented showing of Soviet-era films from Ukraine by The Film Society of Lincoln Center last week, that ran from September 7 – 12, entitled, ”Capturing the Marvelous: Ukrainian Poetic Cinema.”

At first the term “poetic cinema” -- used to describe the series -- seemed perplexing and paradoxical to the uninitiated movie-goer, particularly when tied to the reigning "Socialist Realist" aesthetic of the Soviet era. It was Stalin, after all, who declared that “the production of souls is more important than that of tanks” and termed artists “engineers of the human soul.”A typical result of that mandate was what was often referred to as that uninspired “girl meets tractor” art, which existed in a soul-less vacuum to glorify the building of the Soviet state.

And all the more remarkable, then, was this retrospective, where one could see film-makers pushing the limits of what was allowed, at  the inevitable cost of invoking the wrath of the censors Its kaleidoscope of forbidden national folkloric and religious images on the movie screen served as an all-encompassing metaphor for the indomitable Ukrainian “spirit”: 

For example, the film that forms the cornerstone of the series,“Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors,” is nothing less than a spiritual story of transcendence. ("Satan," is its subversive message says, "exists only in the deeds of man.") Produced by Sergei Parajanov in 1965, the movie focuses on the tragic love story of Ivanko and Marichka that takes place among the colorful Hutsul folk in the “god-forsaken” harsh terrain of the Carpathian Mountains. The film contrasts the sweet and tender spiritual love of Marichka (that is not meant to be in this misbegotten world) with the carnal and treacherous love of Palagna that ultimately betrays and kills Ivanko. .It floods the viewer with allegorical images: a star, a lamb, for Marichka; an apple, a kiss of betrayal, for Palagna. The movie can be seen as a meditation on the existence of evil in this world, and it ascribes to a medieval-type Christian world view that life is but an arduous journey. Toward the ending of the film, the camera spins and twirls out of control as indifferent villagers dance a folk dance in a drunken frenzy at Ivanko’s wake. Yet it is he who triumphs in the end as he experiences a mystical reunion with his true love Marichka
.
A simple jewel of a film, Leonid Osyka’s “The Stone Cross,” made in 1968 – also strikingly illustrates this spirituality. It is a story of sin and redemption. As the film begins, a hardened peasant curses God for the parched soil that yields so little that he must leave his native land to survive. When a thief breaks into his larder, the enraged old man summons the village elders to exact their crude justice. The old man has a change of heart and experiences a transformation not unlike that of Scrooge in Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol.” Nonetheless, the unyielding elders kill the thief. Next, we see the old man struggling to drag a stone cross up a hill, a scene rife with allegory. The meaning of the cross is complex, multi-layered, and endless. It serves as a memorial of the thief and others who have died; as a sign of the old man’s renewed faith; as a memorial to himself as he prepares to embark to Canada. The film ends in a joyous celebration of good will, and it speaks, in particular, to the nation’s uprooted diaspora.

As their film-makers moved on beyond the confines of a narrow proscriptive art, the films featured in this series speak to and about the Ukrainian  “dusha” (or “eternal soul”),  to address the larger questions of the human condition.