How the West corroborated Socialist Realism in the East

313


6. Andre Fougeron, The Judges, 1950, 195 x 130 cm, Paris, Musee National d'Art
Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou

separation of these two strands of research and to look more closely at two of those hidden
paintings: a political still life and the portrait of a political prisoner. Both of them are
French, and both were acquired from a 'blockbuster' exhibition of French Communist art
in Warsaw in 1952. I want to investigate their social life and social visibility before they
were expelled to the storage area of the National Museum in Warsaw. What kind of viewer
were they addressing? What messages were read into those works? Did they ever return to
the public gaze afterwards? Finally, and most importantly, to what extent, if at all, did they
shape the emerging 'socialist realist critique' in Poland of the early 1950s? In other words,
what bearing did they have on the process of the corroboration of the doctrine of socialist
realism, which, as I have argued elsewhere, came to Poland from Moscow via Paris,
having received the endorsement of the Parisian Left Bank.21
Andre Fougeron's still-life appears to be less at odds within the prevailing mood of the
Old Masters' screens, being sharply painted and bright, fully in command of the trick of
trompe l'oeil applied by them - adopted here, in a Courbet-like or even somewhat surreal
mood, to the illusionist depiction of a miners' humble working tools. His lamp and hat, as
well as his meal, are set against a uniformed surface of boards of unpolished pinewood
(ill. 5). The painting looks like a collage, its background turned into the picture plane; the
miner's possessions, pushing forward, are intruding the space of the beholder. The most
disquieting feature is the lamp hanging on a nail crudely hammered into a board, which
appears so 'real', and touchable that it creates an impression of inviting the viewer to take
it down, as if transferring him or her into the body of the miner, while at the same time
reminding the observer about the artistic skill of the maker, about the ultimate illusion of
Parrashios's curtain. But the painting was not meant to be a reflection on the process of its

21 K. MURAWSKA-MUTHESIUS, Paris From Behind the Iron Curtain, [in:] S. WILSON et al., Paris: Capital of the
Arts ..., op. cit., pp. 253-6.