In 1932, when the term “Socialist Realism” was officially used for the first time, all artistic organizations in Soviet Russia were dissolved, to be replaced by the Artists’ Union of the USSR, controlled by the state. That November the State Russian Museum in Leningrad held an exhibition, “Fifteen Years of Artists of the Russian Soviet Republic.” Those years had been full of bold attempts to mix experimental art with propagandist modes, and the current show at the Royal Academy is a tribute to the 1932 exhibition, which the curators describe as “the last call for freedom of the arts,” before avant-garde art was suppressed and the ruthless utopianism of Socialist realism was the only approved style. This is a big, dynamic, disturbing exhibition, a blaze of artistic hope undermined by suffering, death, and despair. It is all about power and its perils.
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www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/03/08/when-art-meets-power-russia-revolution/
