The Artistic Journey of Aleksandr Deineka

Aleksandr Deineka lived and worked in the early beginnings of the Stalinist regime during the “imposition” of the official art style of Socialist Realism, a time period highly mythologized in both Eastern and Western art history. In the East, the myth is that all of the artists were unified under the banner of Socialist Realism and that their commitment to the collective nature of the Soviet Union’s new culture was unflinching. In the West, the opposite idea is held, and that these artists were merely left to do the bidding of their totalitarian dictator and that they had lost all aspects of their own agency. However, neither of these interpretations are justified, especially in the case of Deineka.

This was Deineka’s piece Building New Factories made in 1926, and the first piece that author Christina Kiaer focused on in her article. This is the height of his avant-garde work, far before Socialist Realism came into the realm of Soviet art. He played with the avant-garde idea of the photomontage, making it seem as the the figures of the two women did not naturally exist in the space of the factory and had been pasted in, like a collage of sorts. This “dislocates” the two figures from the space of the factory, almost in the modernist sense of abstraction, although both are clear representations of women. It also focused on the Constructivist aesthetic of machinery and space, specifically the usefulness of both the tools of industry and the proletarian and how they interact with the new industrialized socialist space. This was Deineka at his avant-garde height, as he, by this time, had not yet succumbed to the whims of the non-existent Socialist Realism yet.

Once Socialist Realism was mandated from Stalin, this became more characteristic of Deineka’s work, depicting scenes of the collective like this The Conversation of the Collective Farm Brigade. While working under the artistic contract system, he was presumably given the title and told to depict it in a painting. This led to a sort of freedom, in an ironic way, for Deineka to depict whatever he wanted because of such a vague assignment. Thus, he created the rough, pseudo-abstract faces of the collective farmers and took away the classical depth in keeping with the flatness of the modernist aesthetic, while still working within the confines of Socialist Realism by displaying the scene of the smiling faces and the internationalism of the farmers, all seemingly unified under the state collective farm. The biggest takeaway from Deineka’s Socialist Realism is that his pseudo-abstractions allowed for the individualized interpretations of the viewer, almost allowing them to insert themselves into the meeting or the race or the soccer game (other works he painted), in a way the Western modernism had no discourse between the viewership, the painting, and the author, as the Western artist has “withdrawn from life and retired into the studio.” In essence, Deineka’s works found a certain usefulness in society and certainly worked within this idea of the collective towards building the bright Soviet future of his avant-garde days.