Dmitrii Nalbandyan, The False Values of Abstractionism. August 9, 1975
Original Source: Ogonek, No. 32, 9 August 1975, pp. 20-21.
The museums of modern art in West Germany, the USA, France and Italy have few visitors. The walls of these galleries are hung with absurd paintings composed of meaningless batches of color, lines and geometric figures, works reminiscent of the ravings and nightmares hatched by sick imaginations, and surrealist canvases on abstract mystical and religious themes, I have been told that sometimes only two or three people a day – often just curious tourists – visit these museums. But next door galleries that exhibit classical paintings are always crowded.
Artists have always considered it their task to affirm lofty, humanist ideals; they have appealed to lucid reason and to people’s noble feelings. The great masters portrayed the complexity and beauty of life; they reflected on serious social and moral problems and on the relationship between man and society.
Museum-goers draw inspiration from the pictures painted by our best masters, receiving joy and the charge of creative energy and invigoration that comes from communing with beauty,
But advanced Soviet art does not suit bourgeois ideologists, since it serves the cultivation of communist ideals and the development of socialist society.
Some time ago the Western press and radio, in a transport of panegyrics, informed the whole world about our so-called “avant-gardists” whose works were exhibited in Moscow’s Izmailovskii Park and at the Exhibition of Achievements of the National Economy. What attracted the attention of these “connoisseurs” of art? What was the object of their enthusiastic eulogies ?
The answer is abstract productions, and not very sophisticated ones at that, lagging far behind the stuff of this sort that is done in the West. They were painted by D. Plavinskii, E. Shteinberg, A. Masterkovaia and A. Tiapushkin. V. Iakovlev’s primitives, V. Nemukhin’s surrealistic symbols and E. Drobnitskaia’s and P. Belek’s mystical subjects were also on show. Finally, there was the vulgar scandal- mongering and peevishness of 0. Rabin, who showed his latest creations, such as “The Shirt” -a soiled woman’s undergarment and a breast against a background of dilapidated wooden structures. A drunken doll in a village street, a dead chicken outside a crazily leaning hut – these are the themes of this ideological paragon, the uncrowned king of our country’s “avant-gardists. ”
This junk is a treasure trove for those who wish us ill, who claim that these anti-esthetic, unartistic productions by people who have no specialized education or are undertrained are advanced art.
Such paintings suit our ideological adversaries to a T. Instead of bright ideals, the heroic spirit of day-to-day existence under socialism and a profound, thorough understanding of life, what they reveal is gloomy mysticism, malignant, overblown generalizations, hopelessness and spiritual squalor.
Imperialist monopolies spend millions of dollars to support formalistic trends in art and to propagandize them throughout the world. At the same time, realistic art addressed to the people is not only not encouraged, it is persecuted.
One of the principal arguments of the formalist “avant-garde” is its thesis about the notorious freedom of creativity and the artist’s independence from the social and political movements of his time. For 70 years the apologists of formalism have been claiming that the artist is free and stands above politics, but every work by these artists continues to demonstrate that they are not free from bourgeois purchasers or from the tastes and demands of capitalist society. We should recall Lenin’s sage words to the effect that “absolute freedom is a bourgeois or anarchistic phrase. ”
Bourgeois society presents artistic “freedom” as unrestricted freedom of self-expression, with one “minor” reservation: The artist must not involve himself in the real life of the people or depict the actual contradictions in capitalist society. This nullifies the very nature of art – the recognition and depiction of life -and art’s influence on people struggling to reorganize the world on a new, humanist basis. So, when the essence of art has been extracted, the artist is free to “express himself. ” For decades, formalists have continually amazed mankind with various clever “isms”: cubism, futurism, abstract expressionism, existentialism, orphism, action painting, suprematism, neoplasticism, dada, absurdism, pop art, op art, body art, “mobiles. ” etc., etc.
Realism is not obsolete; each year brings new proof of its vitality and creative inexhaustibility. Realism cannot become obsolete, because it is living, eternally developing art that retains close continuity with the great artistic discoveries of the past and maintains close ties with the people’s life. Will people ever cease to marvel at the Greek Parthenon or the Kremlin in Moscow?
The masses’ requirements for genuine art are growing every year. Every honest artist can find a broad field of activity in our country. Public and Soviet organizations, factories, collective farms and state farms want to have paintings, sculptures, mosaics, frescoes and stained-glass windows in their Palaces of Culture and clubs. In recent decades, monumental propaganda has been developing at an especially rapid rate; wonderful monuments and entire ensembles have been erected in cities and settlements and at sites of military and revolutionary glory.
But unfortunately, mediocre, uninspired works that fail to express the heroic enthusiasm of our people as creators still appear, Sometimes museum-goers are not demanding enough when it comes to the ideological and artistic quality of works that exhibit influences alien to our ideology.
It seems to me that the Ministry of Culture, the Academy of the Arts and the Artists’ Union are faced with a serious and important task -taking a more stringent attitude toward the works to be shown at exhibits, so as to protect our museum-goers from flawed and mediocre works, and, of course, showing the greatest possible concern for improving our artists’ skills. True innovation is impossible without the mastery of a very rich arsenal of artistic means.
Source: Current Digest of the Soviet Press. Vol. XXVII, No. 40 (1977)