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"Still Life and the Vanity of Socialist Realism: Robert Fal'k's Potatoes, 1955"

Reid, Susan E.

"Still Life and the Vanity of Socialist Realism: Robert Fal'k's Potatoes, 1955" Thumbnail


Authors

Susan E. Reid



Abstract

Still life occupied a position in the Socialist Realist canon so marginal that it could barely be called Socialist Realism at all. Although some artists attempted, in the Stalin era, to prove the genre's credentials at least as a component of Socialist Realist visual culture, a number of its genre characteristics rendered it ill‐suited and even antithetical to the mandatory tasks of “depicting reality in its revolutionary development” and demonstrating the role of the party‐state and its leaders in achieving the radiant future. The paper focuses on the work of Robert Fal'k (1886–1958), an artist multiply marginalized in the Soviet art establishment–both as a person and through his work in the lowly, liminal genre of still life–yet nevertheless central to the story of Soviet art. It examines, from different perspectives, the quiet challenge his work seemed to present both to the vainglory of Soviet power and the chiliasm of Socialist Realism. In his Potatoes (1955) the genre characteristics of still life which placed it in the basement of Soviet public culture are so hypertrophied as to become a kind of unspoken worm's eye critique of Socialist Realism and the faith in state‐led progress that it represented. It argues that, in the context of destalinization, when the modernist assertion of autonomy of art and artist presented a perceived challenge to party control over the arts, Fal'k's work alluded to the absence of the state and its powerlessness when faced with the ultimate projects of existence and of painting. Turning the tables on the Soviet state authorities that had marginalized it, his still life marginalized the state as irrelevant to art and life.

Citation

Reid, S. E. (2017). "Still Life and the Vanity of Socialist Realism: Robert Fal'k's Potatoes, 1955". Russian Review, 76(3), 408-437. https://doi.org/10.1111/russ.12137

Journal Article Type Article
Online Publication Date Jun 2, 2017
Publication Date Jul 31, 2017
Deposit Date Jan 14, 2020
Publicly Available Date Mar 28, 2024
Journal Russian Review
Print ISSN 0036-0341
Electronic ISSN 1467-9434
Publisher Wiley
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 76
Issue 3
Pages 408-437
DOI https://doi.org/10.1111/russ.12137

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Copyright Statement
© 2017 Loughborough University. The Russian Review published by Wiley Periodicals Inc. on behalf of The Russian Review. This is an open‐access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.




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