Masters of the Dark Arts
Igor Golomstock: Totalitarian Art
The Wall Street Journal, June 25, 2011
Marszalkowska 1, Warsaw, September 1988 © Andrew Stuttaford
Twentieth-century totalitarian art did not just gild the cage; it helped to build it. Paintings, movies, sculpture, architecture and festivals of choreographed joy were vital elements in the Nazi and Communist attempts to remake man. It is key to our understanding of the nightmare states that resulted, argues Igor Golomstock, and deserves to be classified as a distinctive artistic genre alongside Modernism, of which it was both byway and heir. Like Modernism, totalitarian art was intended to help sweep away what had gone before, but unlike Modernism it was prepared to steal from the past to do so. The style of the 19th-century "bourgeois" academy was thus conscripted into the service of Reich and eventually revolution, as hallmark, teacher and, to us, cliché.
In his newly updated (it was first published in 1990) "Totalitarian Art in the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, Fascist Italy and the People's Republic of China," Mr. Golomstock convincingly demonstrates how the overlapping aesthetic values of these superficially disparate regimes underlined how much they had in common. This was never clearer than at the Paris exhibition of 1937. In an unsettling preview of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the Eiffel Tower found itself squeezed between massive Nazi and Soviet pavilions. Conceived as fusions of sculpture and architecture, both were expressions of brute power that played Neanderthal tribute to ancient Rome and were guarded by giant images, of the master race on the one hand, the master class on the other.
The strongest sections of the book concern the Soviet Union, as one might expect from an author whose career included membership in the Union of Soviet Artists and direct encounters with Stalinist brutality. Mr. Golomstock's father was sent to the camps in 1934, and then, some years later, his mother, taking the young Igor with her, signed up to work as a doctor at Kolyma, one of the worst of the Gulag's outposts.
Mr. Golomstock tracks the way that the smash-it-all-up trial-and-error of late imperial Russia's avant-garde (experiments that were paralleled, revealingly enough, by Italy's proto-fascist Futurists) initially meshed with the ecstatic starting-from-scratch of the Bolshevik revolutionary intelligentsia.
The extraordinary artistic innovation of the early Soviet years was rapidly replaced, however, by the stodgy conservatism of high Stalinist culture. The revolutionary past was sanitized, then mythologized. The hardscrabble present was transformed into a time of abundance by what Mr. Golomstock marvelously calls the "magic mirror" of Socialist Realism. The didactic, neo-Victorian paintings, the monumental if clumsily neoclassical architecture and, after 1941, the numerous evocations of martial valor and national pride, were all manifestations of an ersatz traditionalism that resonated with a people exhausted by decades of upheaval and were, of course, perfectly suited to the maintenance of a tightly controlled, rigidly hierarchical new order.
That said, for all Mr. Golomstock's experience and erudition, he falls some way short of conveying the ambition, allure and, well, totality of totalitarianism's cultural projects. While his examination of Nazi art takes useful detours away from the time-worn trudge through lumpen Arcadias and leaden Valhallas to include discussion of the centralized (Soviet-style) control of artistic production, he devotes relatively little space to the party's sometimes brilliant manipulation of design, its use of spectacle—Albert Speer's cathedrals of light—or, even, the films of Leni Riefenstahl. The whole picture never quite comes into view, and it was the whole picture that was the point.
It is no less frustrating that Mr. Golomstock allocates such a small portion of his book to China, the third of the 20th century's great totalitarian empires—particularly as he does find room for an addendum on Saddam Hussein's Iraq, a revoltingly bloody but basically traditional despotism that left little behind it of artistic interest to anyone other than connoisseurs of peculiarly servile kitsch. By contrast, as Mao's Cultural Revolution gathered pace from 1966 on, the mounting political hysteria was reflected, channeled and amplified in and by the arts in ways still terrifying today.
There were the dazibao, the giant-lettered, largely hand-made "big character" wall posters that signaled its beginning. There was the hectoring banality of revolutionary opera. And there were the images—sometimes reproduced in their millions—that both drew upon Socialist Realism and transcended it, a process that culminated in the depiction of Mao as essentially divine. As a demonstration of the fundamentally religious nature of communism, the deification of the Great Helmsman is hard to beat, and it represents the logical conclusion of totalitarian art. Unfortunately, you won't find any direct reference to it in Mr. Golomstock's fascinating, painstaking but ultimately incomplete book.