Christina Kiaer, "Collective Body: Aleksandr Deineka at the Limit of Socialist Realism"
English | ISBN: 022682716X | 2024 | 360 pages | PDF | 20 MB
English | ISBN: 022682716X | 2024 | 360 pages | PDF | 20 MB
A study of the Socialist Realist aesthetic focusing on the artist Aleksandr Deineka.
Dislodging the avant-garde from its central position in the narrative of Soviet art, Collective Body presents painter Aleksandr Deineka’s haptic and corporeal version of Socialist Realist figuration as an alternate experimental aesthetic that, at its best, activates and organizes affective forces for collective ends. Christina Kiaer traces Deineka’s path from his avant-garde origins as the inventor of the proletarian body in illustrations for mass magazines after the revolution through his success as a state-sponsored painter of monumental, lyrical canvases during the Terror and beyond. In so doing, she demonstrates that Socialist Realism is best understood not as a totalitarian
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