ABSTRACT
Visual sources have been overlooked for a long time by scholars who were more interested and fascinated by traditional sources (political history of course but also literature when it comes to culture). With two main centres of interest – the avant-garde and socialist realism under Stalin – art in the Soviet Union tended to be reduced to its extremes. This polarized vision of Soviet followed the ‘totalitarian’ narrative according to which the ‘left art’ creative, original and of high quality, inevitably came to be subordinated to Stalin’s autocratic rule and turned into ‘socialist realism’, usually judged as mediocre art. Very little attention was paid to the transitional period of 1928–32. Stalinist art has also become a historical object in itself, and transitional period of 1928–32 better studied, in particular the renewal of figurative painting in the 1920s. Other forms art, apart from painting and propaganda posters have gained the status of legitimate historical source (photography, book illustrations, decorated objects, architecture).
Art allows to question the relation between art and power and to challenge the ‘totalitarian’ model according to which art was an ideological weapon completely controlled by the state. Visual sources allow to look at the big questions (Stalin’s Great Turn, Five-Year Plan, Terror, nationalities question, situation of art and artists), from a somewhat more marginal point of observation. At the crossroads of political, social and cultural history, it allows to understand not only how the political power tried to shape the new society but also how the society received the official ideology, and how the artists contributed to the transition from ‘left art’ to figuration. It helps to grasp the scale and extent of the constraints and margins of freedom left to artists. Analysed in conjunction with other sources (press, memoirs, archives), the visual sources are not just a representation of the official dogma but also a mirror of the individual concerns and project of a specific social group with its own divisions, internal competitions and economic problems, attempting to reconcile their creativity and the political and social constraints.
