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DOI Artikel:Murawska-Muthesius, Katarzyna: How the West corroborated socialist realism in the East: Fougeron, Taslitzky and Picasso in Warsaw
DOI Seite / Zitierlink:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.49349#0320
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Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius
the despised culture of socialist realism began, to the polite astonishment or an even overt
disapproval of my Polish friends. This is finally where the memory of the misplaced group
of paintings, excluded from art-historical discourse and the anxious recollection of my
compliance with the hegemonie hierarchies, comes into the account of my own paradig-
matic shift.
This article, signalling, rather than elaborating on, the issue of the applicability of New Art
History to studies on socialist realism, focuses on those works of western socialist realism
which I found in the storage space of the National Museum in Warsaw. I want to revisit
some of those silenced images and let them speak. I want to listen, without irony or moral
outrage (hard to resist whenever one deals with socialist realism), to their own forgotten
stories about the social conditions of their production, circulation and reception, about the
circumstances in which they arrived in Poland. Who looked at them and wrote about them?
This kind of traditional, 'old art-historical' interrogation is rarely brought along in relation
to socialist realist works. Even if discussed by specialists, they seem to be reduced to
'texts-only', and de-realised, as if their physicality, their provenance, condition, their
copies and reproductions, their present location, and even their recording in the literature,
were of no importance, in contrast to the undisputed material presence and the legitimate
location in history granted to the 'real' works of art. And yet I do not intend to conduct this
kind of interrogation from the positions of the 'positive', celebratory art-history and its
preoccupation with an 'intrinsic value' and league-tables. Frankly, I am not interested in
value, whether we call it 'artistic' or 'economic'. I do not propose to argue for their inclu-
sion within the category of the 'proper works of art', measuring their worth either in terms
of their accomplishment in rendering spatial illusion, or expressivity, or the presence of
the modernist idiom, or just for the reason of completing the archives. What appears to me
much more relevant are the 'critical art history' kind of issues, regarding the shifting posi-
tion of those works within, as well as their contribution to, the discourses of art history,
which account for their presence or absence, make them central or peripheral, regard them
as heroic or mock them as hilarious.
Oxford, New York, Hamburg 1988, 'Introduction'; ed. H. GUNTHER, The Culture of the Stalin Period, London
(Macmillan in association with SSEES, London University 1990; P. WOOD, Realism contested, [in:] ed. K. Herding,
L'Art et les revolutions (Actes, XXVIIe congres international d'histoire de 1'Art, 1989), Strasbourg 1992, pp. 203-19;
B. TAYLOR, Ways of Seeing Socialist Realism, 'Art Monthly', 1992, 153, pp. 9-13; B. GROYS, The Total Art of
Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond [written: 1988], transl. C. Rougle, Princeton, NJ 1992;
idem, A Style and a Half: Socialist Realism between Modernism and Postmodernism, [in:] eds. T. Lahusen, E. Dobren-
ko, Socialist Realism Without Shores, Durham, London 1997, pp. 76-90; ed. S. E. REID, Design Stalin and the Thaw,
special issue of 'Journal of Design History' 10, 1997, 2; W. TOMASIK, Totalitarna czy totalna (Kultura stalinowska w
świetle współczesnych opracowań), 'Konteksty' LI, 1997, pp. 105-117; M. C. BOWN, Socialist Realist Painting, New
Haven, London 1998; W. TOMASIK, Inżynieria dusz: Literatura socrealizmu socjalistycznego w planie "propagandy
monumentalnej", Wrocław 1999; eds. S.E. REID, D. CROWLEY, Style and Socialism: Modernity and Material Cultu-
re in Post-War Eastern Europe, Oxford, New York 2000; eds. D. CROWLEY, S.E. REID, Socialist Spaces: Sites of
Everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc, Oxford, New York, 2003; also papers delivered at the conference Stalin's Cultural
Legacy, organised by Mike 0'Mahony at the University of Bristol, March 2003. The title of the conference provoked a
significant exchange of opinions on the issue of whether the term 'cultural legacy' is appropriate for discussing Stalin's
activities, which took place on the h-arthist website: http://www.arthist.net, see in Archives h-arthist discussion logs for
February 2003. The project of the revision of the Stalinist culture is an aim of a newly established interdisciplinary
periodical 'Blok: Międzynarodowe pismo poświęcone kulturze stalinowskiej i poststalinowskiej/ The International Jo-
urnal of Stalinist and post-Stalinist Culture/ Revue internationale de la culture stalinienne et poststalinienne', 2002 -,
published by: Katedra Kultury Współczesnej, Akademia Bydgoska, blok@ab-byd.edu.pl.
Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius
the despised culture of socialist realism began, to the polite astonishment or an even overt
disapproval of my Polish friends. This is finally where the memory of the misplaced group
of paintings, excluded from art-historical discourse and the anxious recollection of my
compliance with the hegemonie hierarchies, comes into the account of my own paradig-
matic shift.
This article, signalling, rather than elaborating on, the issue of the applicability of New Art
History to studies on socialist realism, focuses on those works of western socialist realism
which I found in the storage space of the National Museum in Warsaw. I want to revisit
some of those silenced images and let them speak. I want to listen, without irony or moral
outrage (hard to resist whenever one deals with socialist realism), to their own forgotten
stories about the social conditions of their production, circulation and reception, about the
circumstances in which they arrived in Poland. Who looked at them and wrote about them?
This kind of traditional, 'old art-historical' interrogation is rarely brought along in relation
to socialist realist works. Even if discussed by specialists, they seem to be reduced to
'texts-only', and de-realised, as if their physicality, their provenance, condition, their
copies and reproductions, their present location, and even their recording in the literature,
were of no importance, in contrast to the undisputed material presence and the legitimate
location in history granted to the 'real' works of art. And yet I do not intend to conduct this
kind of interrogation from the positions of the 'positive', celebratory art-history and its
preoccupation with an 'intrinsic value' and league-tables. Frankly, I am not interested in
value, whether we call it 'artistic' or 'economic'. I do not propose to argue for their inclu-
sion within the category of the 'proper works of art', measuring their worth either in terms
of their accomplishment in rendering spatial illusion, or expressivity, or the presence of
the modernist idiom, or just for the reason of completing the archives. What appears to me
much more relevant are the 'critical art history' kind of issues, regarding the shifting posi-
tion of those works within, as well as their contribution to, the discourses of art history,
which account for their presence or absence, make them central or peripheral, regard them
as heroic or mock them as hilarious.
Oxford, New York, Hamburg 1988, 'Introduction'; ed. H. GUNTHER, The Culture of the Stalin Period, London
(Macmillan in association with SSEES, London University 1990; P. WOOD, Realism contested, [in:] ed. K. Herding,
L'Art et les revolutions (Actes, XXVIIe congres international d'histoire de 1'Art, 1989), Strasbourg 1992, pp. 203-19;
B. TAYLOR, Ways of Seeing Socialist Realism, 'Art Monthly', 1992, 153, pp. 9-13; B. GROYS, The Total Art of
Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond [written: 1988], transl. C. Rougle, Princeton, NJ 1992;
idem, A Style and a Half: Socialist Realism between Modernism and Postmodernism, [in:] eds. T. Lahusen, E. Dobren-
ko, Socialist Realism Without Shores, Durham, London 1997, pp. 76-90; ed. S. E. REID, Design Stalin and the Thaw,
special issue of 'Journal of Design History' 10, 1997, 2; W. TOMASIK, Totalitarna czy totalna (Kultura stalinowska w
świetle współczesnych opracowań), 'Konteksty' LI, 1997, pp. 105-117; M. C. BOWN, Socialist Realist Painting, New
Haven, London 1998; W. TOMASIK, Inżynieria dusz: Literatura socrealizmu socjalistycznego w planie "propagandy
monumentalnej", Wrocław 1999; eds. S.E. REID, D. CROWLEY, Style and Socialism: Modernity and Material Cultu-
re in Post-War Eastern Europe, Oxford, New York 2000; eds. D. CROWLEY, S.E. REID, Socialist Spaces: Sites of
Everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc, Oxford, New York, 2003; also papers delivered at the conference Stalin's Cultural
Legacy, organised by Mike 0'Mahony at the University of Bristol, March 2003. The title of the conference provoked a
significant exchange of opinions on the issue of whether the term 'cultural legacy' is appropriate for discussing Stalin's
activities, which took place on the h-arthist website: http://www.arthist.net, see in Archives h-arthist discussion logs for
February 2003. The project of the revision of the Stalinist culture is an aim of a newly established interdisciplinary
periodical 'Blok: Międzynarodowe pismo poświęcone kulturze stalinowskiej i poststalinowskiej/ The International Jo-
urnal of Stalinist and post-Stalinist Culture/ Revue internationale de la culture stalinienne et poststalinienne', 2002 -,
published by: Katedra Kultury Współczesnej, Akademia Bydgoska, blok@ab-byd.edu.pl.