Since re-opening in 2007, Rome’s Palazzo Delle Esposizioni, the city’s largest exhibition space, has increasingly played host to a number of traveling, internationally themed exhibitions, known in some parts of the world as blockbuster exhibitions.  

It seems fitting that one of Rome’s most monumental public buildings has temporarily been given the role of custodian of a collection of often epic scale works from a variety of Russian collections in an attempt to showcase the twentieth century Socialist Realism movement of the former Soviet Republic.

Socialist realism was the Soviet Union’s officially sanctioned form of art that dominated the country for much of the twentieth century, and was often used as a tool of propaganda to idealize the ‘real’, and to elevate the appreciation not only of the labour movement, but the Soviet Union’s objectives in relation to socialism, communism and progress.

For many, Russia and Russian art are like icebergs, where so much of the integral nature of the culture and identity are not immediately visible beyond their most iconic and iconoclastic forms.  Realismi Socialisti: Grande Pittura Sovietica 1920-1970 tries to demystify this to some extent, taking on the challenge of chronicling the relentless change of a period of political, social and cultural upheaval by surveying the stylistic and thematic shifts in Russian painting during this time.

Trying to capture the essence of significant cultural changes within any art exhibition is a vast and complex undertaking by any stretch of the imagination, but Realismi Socialisti seems to accomplish this with aplomb.
Although the task is monumental, undoubtedly hindered by monumental ideologies and visitor’s preconceptions, Realismi Socialisti is helped not only by the large scale of the works which embody some of the grandest of philosophies that arose during the tumultuous Soviet era, but also by a curatorial approach which allows you wherever possible to make an informed and direct judgement of your own about what it is that you are looking at without being bogged down by overly intellectual interpretations.

In Realismi Socialisti, dozens of large scale paintings, consistently of an incredibly high quality, have been selected to demonstrate the sheer breadth of mid twentieth century Russian painting and draw attention to the way in which artists responded, or more realistically, were constrained to respond to these often tense political contexts and ideologies.  

As such, Realismi Socialisti is at times an exhibition that makes strong demands of your attention, but equally, one that rewards you in kind, and repeatedly, with paintings that are regularly enthralling both in theme and in artistic accomplishment.  The sequentially designed layout of the exhibition, which separates the assembled collection mostly into decades, places a strong educational focus on explaining the changes in Russian society throughout the decades by providing explanatory texts about the periods and the Proletarian authority’s (responsible for cultural and educational policy in the former Soviet Union) changes in approach to  the propaganda cause, rather than individual synopses of each work.  

Aleksandr Laktionov, Captain Judin, Hero of the Soviet Union Visits the Tank Corps-Komsomol, 1938
oil on canvas,, Scientific Research Museum of the Academy of Arts of Russia, St. Petersburg.

These bilingual (Italian and English) explanations give you ample introductions to how Soviet policy and society were constantly changing, leaving you then free to make your own informed decisions about how the art then evolved both thematically and stylistically.  
 
Aleksandr Laktionov, Captain Judin, Hero of the Soviet Union Visits the Tank Corps-Komsomol, 1938
oil on canvas,, Scientific Research Museum of the Academy of Arts of Russia, St. Petersburg.

One of the first, particularly arresting images is that of Aleksandr Laktionov’s Captain Judin, Hero of the Soviet Union Visits the Tank Corps-Komsomol, painted at a time in which the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War (the term commonly used in Russia to refer to World War II and for Russia’s engagement against the Nazis) was just around the corner, and after a period in which artists and painting schools had more commonly been orienting themselves towards romantic and idealistic imagery and content.

With the outbreak of Civil War and then international war, artistic and thematic concerns shifted away from experimentation and romanticism that had dominated in the decade before hand, and back towards a pragmatism which was called for in the new socio-political setting.

In this expansive painting, Captain Judin, is seen paying a visit to the Komsomol (The Communist Youth League).  The grandeur of St. Petersburg’s canals in the background, and the treatment of the study in which the meeting is taking place illustrates how many of these paintings seemed elevate the propaganda cause to a level of artistic achievement.
   
The play of light and attention to detail in the elaborate work, which seems both like a product of its time and timeless, invites you in, making you feel as if you are amongst the meeting yourself, the painting’s large scale, like many in the exhibition, instead, requiring you to stand at a distance to take it all in.  

This juxtaposition between intimacy and grandeur is a spatial theme that occurs time and again throughout the exhibition, while thematically the homogeneity and uniformity of the figures (here, the Communist Youth, who are all young, fair, and dressed in military garb) demonstrates the thematic idea of uniformity that marks many of the earlier works in the exhibition, where individuality is secondary to the often delicate balance that had to be struck between the robustness of the Proletarian ideal and the fragility of an ever changing socio-political context.

One of the strengths of this exhibition in general is how artworks such as these are presented in a non-judgemental setting; there is enough didactic information to steer you towards an understanding of the realities even if you know next to nothing about the Soviet era, but mostly, the artwork is left to speak for itself, offering up a mirror of a vast and diverse collection of peoples.

Dimitri Zhilinsky, Gymnasts of the USSR, 1965
tempera, acrylic painting on paperboard, The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg

The collection repeatedly offers grand, large scale works which play with the iconic imagery for which the Soviet Union was famed.  One of these themes is the interest in physique, particularly in relation to the powerful, disciplined nature of the male figure in Soviet art and the role this played in both propaganda and in the utopian ideal.  

 
Images such as Aleksandr Deineka’s Lunchbreak in the Donbass (1935) and Arkadi Plastov’s the Bathing of the Horses (1938) are as much studies of the human body as they are snapshots of a Russia that no longer exists, but Dimitri Zhilinsky’s  Gymnasts of the USSR, explores the cult of the body in more detail, using the unparalleled greatness of the USSR’s gymnasts and their iconic status as a vehicle.  

Viktor Popkov, Builders of Bratsk, 1960
oil on canvas, The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

Here Zhilinsky divides the picture plane so that it is reminiscent of a mural, and portrays the figures in a style you come across repeatedly in this exhibition, where the human body is stylized and idealized, whilst the faces are distinctly characterized.  The overarching uniformity of the Russian ideal is present again, but the multicultural nature of the Republics is now hinted at, and more intimately portrayed elsewhere in the exhibition, particularly in Semyon Chuikov’s A Daughter of Soviet Kirghisia, 1948 where a Kirghiz school girl of the Central Asian republics, stands in a vast, sunlit field, books in hand, looking into the distance, an image that symbolised the radiant future of the Soviet Union that apparently awaited.

Although much of the early part of the exhibition is given over to grand gestures of nationalism, mid to later works that are included in the exhibition reveal artists were beginning to break through the constraints and the nationalism that the Soviet Union was so famous for, to give us glimpses of the individuals; the humanized subjects rather than the poster children of a movement.  

In images such as Sergei Grigorev’s He Has Come Back (1954), a tender, almost pointillist painting depicts the return of an alcoholic father, much to the fear of his waiting wife and children, commenting on the disillusion and eventual failure of the Communist system, whilst Aleksandr Lationov’s A Letter From The Front (1962), set in the town of Zagorsk, makes reference to life outside of the Proletarian cities, where life was thoroughly different to the problematic centres of the Communist project.

 
Viktor Popkov Builders of Bratsk, oil on canvas, 1960, The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
Popkov’s Builders of Bratsk, exemplifies the new mentality that was being ushered in.  Gone are the expansive agrarian backdrops and sunny skies or the institutional settings, replaced instead by a thoroughly modernist and industrialist sentiment.  Nightfall, and lure of a new economy provides the backdrop for the workers who are not just symbolic workers, but now individuals, emboldened, empowered, spent from their toil.  Their rugged, beautiful figures loom against the backdrop like stars on a movie poster.  This is the new Russia, a place where yet more change was on the horizon and where the old idealist sentiments were beginning to lose steam. 

Popkov’s figures are inscrutable, their thoughts are inward and private, and they stand as a testament to a new approach to heroism and a dramatic shift away from the collective mentality that previously dominated.
This huge painting, like the 50 or so others that accompany it in the exhibition demonstrates not only the colossal nature of many of the works on display, but the accomplishment of the artists and the exhibition at large.  

Realismi Socialisti is a thorough and engaging exhibition, contradictorily full of monumental, iconic imagery and individual studies that is so consistently high in quality that any visit will be rewarding, regardless of your pre-existing knowledge or understanding of Russian art or history.

The exhibition runs until January 8, 2012 and is also accompanied by a photographic retrospective of Aleksandr Rodcenko.  Palazzo Delle Esposizioni is located on Via Nazionale, a short walk from Metro station Reppublica (Line A) or serviced by a number of buses that run via Piazza Venezia and Termini station.