Full Description
A wide-ranging examination of Socialist Realism that shows it extended far beyond Eastern Europe.
Was Socialist Realism Global? takes up a question that was posed by art historian Piotr Piotrowski in his final book. It offers new perspectives both on socialist realism in a strict sense and on aspects of politically and socially engaged art of the twentieth century that employed broadly understood figuration. Contributors to the volume shed light on the genealogy of figuration, relate socialist art and socialist realism from Europe to analogous artistic practices in Latin America and beyond, and more. To date, they argue, the rewriting of the artistic canon of the postcolonial world has failed to sufficiently underscore the fact that through the period of decolonization and Cold War divisions internationally, artists across half the globe were educated according to doctrines of real socialism.
Contributors: Jérôme Bazin, Kate Cowcher, Tatiana Flores, Joanna Kordjak, Partha Mitter, Yevheniia Moliar, Magdalena Moskalewicz, Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius, Agata Pietrasik, Nadia Plungyan, Julia Secklehner, Zheng Shengtian, Mirela Tanta, Chuong-Dai Vo, Anthony Yung, and Carol Yinghua Lu
Contents
Magda Lipska, Piotr Slodkowski
Introduction
Partha Mitter
Modernism and Its Discontents: Some Reflections on the Vexing Problem of the Center and the Periphery
Magdalena Moskalewicz
Socialist Realist Genealogies, Retributions, and Retrospections
Julia Secklehner
Social Realisms, New Aesthetics: Women Photographers' Engaged Photography in Interwar Central Europe
Agata Pietrasik
Picking Out Paths: Retrospective Routes via the 1930s
Nadia Plungian
Proletarian Frescoes: Symbolist Influences in Early Soviet Monumental Painting
Piotr Slodkowski
Toward Socialist Art: Modernism, Socialist Realism, Soc-Modernism [working]
Jérôme Bazin and Joanna Kordjak
Images of the Awkward Class: The Peasant in Socialist Realism
Võ H?ng Chuong-Ðài
From the Academy to Revolution
Tatiana Flores
Afro-Muralism: Against Black Erasure in Modern Mexican Figurative Painting
Zheng Shengtian
Global Socialist Realisms: A Lost Experience? [working — accepted]
Mirela Tanta
Commissioned Modernism
Kate Cowcher
All That Glitters Is Not Gold: Genealogies of Realism in Ethiopia, and Beyond
Anthony Yung
Socialist Realism in Chinese Art
Magda Lipska
Postcommunism: A Condition without a Past?
Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius
The Battle of the Dust Jackets: Eastern Europe as Socialist Europe
Carol Yinghua Lu
The Long Shadow: The Legacy of Socialist Realism in Chinese Contemporary Art
Yevheniia Moliar
Inconvenient Cultural Heritage: Trigger or Gain
Roundtable Discussion
