Socialist Realist Painting.

By Matthew Cullerne Bown. New Haven: Yale University Press. 506 pp. 544 black-and-white illustrations. $75.

J. Hoberman

The last uncharted territory in twentieth-century painting, Soviet Socialist Realism has something for everyone - historical pathos, political minimalism, modernist hubris, postmodernist irony, mixed-media extravaganzas, pop iconography, mad conceptualism, proto-photorealism (among fifty-six other varieties of figurative art), and a host of unknown masters. It's an altogether underleveraged franchise - although Matthew Cullerne Bown's massive Socialist Realist Painting makes a strong bid for a friendly takeover.

Socialist Realist Painting is a lavish, albeit physically unwieldy, amalgam of scholarly history and deluxe picture book. If the text exudes a sense of mission, it may be because Socialist Realism has been doubly repressed. Almost from its inception, the mode was ridiculed throughout the non-Soviet world as an egregious form of soul-destroying, Stalin-worshipping kitsch. Even in the Soviet Union, classical Socialist Realism became, as Boris Groys wrote in The Total Art of Stalinism, ultimately and officially "no less taboo than the art of the avant-garde" it had supplanted. Indeed, during the thirty-five years between the death of Stalin and perestroika, the two tendencies might well have been crated up and hidden together in Soviet museum basements.

Strictly speaking, true Socialist Realism existed in the Stalin era alone - it was forged in the fiery debates that began with the 1928 Central Committee Conference on Agitation and Propaganda and the mandate that literature, drama, and film be designed to reach the entire population per the requirements of the first Five-Year Plan. Socialist Realism ruled Soviet art from the "bright reality" declared by fiat on the eve of the Moscow Trials through the so-called Spring of Communism that began after World War II and ended only with Stalin's death in 1953. Bown covered this terrain in his 1991 Art Under Stalin. Classic SR combined strict idealization of the present with naive, almost goofy idealism. Frequently defined as a "utopia in lifelike forms," it differed from the naturalism of Zola in that, like Lenin, it dared to dream.

Yet, because Socialist Realism was also opposed to "all other-worldly idealism" (per Nikolai Bukharin), it sought to ground visionary extravagance in concrete historical circumstance, presenting its ideal world as a second reality. Bown rephrases this optimistic script in formal terms: "Broadly speaking, the move during the 1930s away from a neo-classical, frieze-like, shallow space towards deep baroque perspectives may be understood as reflecting a growing realisation among artists that space was a metaphor for time . . . [T]he eye that beheld vast spaces was also conquering the road to paradise."

Call it the golden road of unlimited devotion. In the totality of its enterprise, Socialist Realism was a modernism come to power, a modernism that, however disguised in nineteenth-century drag, was mighty enough to project a new mass consciousness - beyond truth or falsehood. By the mid-1930s, as Bown points out, the work of nearly all Soviet painters was founded on official commissions. But the '30s canvases can have a certain spontaneity of composition and brushstroke - adopting unusual aerial perspectives or depicting the not-yet-existent "New Moscow" in a pointillist haze - whereas SR's last stages suggest the fixed gaiety of rigor mortis. While American action painters enacted private dramas on huge canvases, Soviet art brigades collectively produced portraits of collective celebration on even larger canvases. Instead of existential angst, there was the Theory of Conflictlessness: the idea that Communism was but one step from being achieved. Serafima Ryangina's dizzying Higher and Higher, in which a radiant pair of male and female workers climbs toward total electrification, had been criticized in 1934 for applying a "Michelangelesque power" to the "sickly sweetness of an old chocolate-box picture." In the 1950s, its ferociously bland joyousness was canonized.

Now, with an assist from Bown, art historians will get to create their own Socialist Realist canon. I don't share the author's discreet enthusiasm for the Kolkhoz pastorales of Arkadi Plastov, and I wish that he'd told us more about the weirdly expressionist Vasili Svarog, but it is satisfying to learn that two other SR mannerists, Aleksandr Deineka and Yuri Pimenov, had both been "formalist realists" in the 1920s - inspired by machines, mass-production, and industrial architecture to develop an aesthetic language of simplified geometric forms in a stylized fiat space. I am also grateful for the opportunity to glimpse unknown masterpieces as varied as Yuri Annenkov's 1923 cubofuturist portrait of Trotsky, and the 1950 collectively painted "brigade canvas," A Song of Peace (Paul Robeson's Performance in the Pickskills, [sic] USA), an epic - totally conceptual - representation of the 1949 Peekskill riot. The history of twentieth-century painting would hardly be complete without them.

Bown sees Socialist Realism less as a scandalous digression-cum-regression in the narrative of modern culture, than as an organic development in Russian art. With impressive erudition, he traces its roots back to Ilya Repin and the Itinerants, as well as to Lenin's comrade Anatoli Lunacharski's 1903 prescription for political art, Foundations of a Positive Aesthetic; he tracks it through the Khrushchev thaw to the last days of Leonid Brezhnev. Although the movement evidently required the presence of a terrifying death pharoah (witness its drastic post-Stalin decline into sentimental genre pictures and Norman Rockwell-like illustrated anecdotes), Bown dispenses with the totalitarian model that brackets SR with Nazi art. Instead, he stresses its theatricality. In what is surely the subject for another book, Bown compares SR to Hollywood, citing not only SR's idealizations, but the common influence of Konstantin Stanislavski on Soviet painting and on American movies. Like method actors, SR artists were required to create full mental biographies of their characters.

Amazing, no? Still, Bown has little patience for the theoretical extravagance of a Boris Groys or Slavoj Zizek. He passes over the sotsart ironies of Komar and Melamid, proposing rather the grotesque realism of Geli Korzhev as SR's culmination. Resolutely down-to-earth, he resists the spell of SR craziness. Even when he describes the Soviet sponsorship of realistic art on a scale unmatched anywhere in the world, he makes Socialist Realism seem . . . almost normal.

J. Hoberman's The Red Atlantis: Communist Culture in the Absence or Communism is forthcoming in the fall of 1998 from Temple University Press.