No sociālistiskā līdz "iekšējam" reālismam: Hruščova "atkušņa" un tā beigu faktors rakstos par mākslu Latvijā (1953-1964)
From Socialist to "Intrinsic" Realism: Khrushchev's Thaw and Its End as a Factor in Latvian Art Writing (1953-1964)

Summary/Abstract: The doctrine of Socialist Realism affected different levels of Latvian art writing during the Soviet occupation. Latvian historians referred to anthropologist Alexei Yurchak’s thesis that Iosif Stalin was the main arbiter deciding what conforms to the Socialist Realist canon. After his death, interpretations multiplied; they had to comply with the idea of building communism, but this compliance turned out to be equally subjective. The aim of this article is to tackle the Thaw period in the evolutionary context of Socialist Realism. Materials were drawn from local newspapers, the magazine “Māksla” (Art) and collections of articles “Latviešu tēlotāja māksla” (Latvian fine art). The structure is chronological, and methods are close to discourse analysis and the social history of art, as political context is seen as a dominant factor of transformations in art writing. The beginnings of liberalisation in the understanding of Socialist Realism date back to the early 1950s. Such efforts first affected literature in the USSR and criticised the conflictlessness theory, claiming that conflict and drama need to be returned to the arts. The first series of articles discussing these issues in visual art appeared in the local culture weekly “Literatūra un Māksla” (Literature and Art) in 1954. The subject was the republican art exhibition from which writer Jezups Laganovskis singled out the future restorer Āfolfs Kozorovickis’ painting “Parents’ Meeting at School” as a good example of Socialist Realism, reflecting conflict in a fresh manner. Several young art historians (Miķelis Ivanovs, Rasma Lāce and Judīte Baga) disagreed and responded in a collectively signed article that Kozorovickis’ work was too “dry” and naturalistic in comparison with other equally valuable works, as diversity was fully consistent with Socialist Realism. Although an anonymous editorial favoured the discussed painting in the end, admission of diversity had far-reaching consequences for the doctrine. The best achievements of world culture were still essential to Socialist Realism, but didactic messaging and naturalistic details gradually fell out of this pool of best achievements. These changes were promoted by the historical 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1956) that condemned Stalin’s personality cult. Around 1956, local publications by art historians Herberts Dubins or Jānis Pujāts emphasised the need to exonerate Latvian artists whose painterly approaches were so far excluded from Socialist Realism, like Leo Svemps, Konrāds Ubāns, Ārijs Skride and others. Svemps also headed the Latvian Soviet Artists’ Union and remarked at its 1958 congress that Socialist Realism was not a sum of “outer” features established in some formulaic way. For his part, painter Ojārs Ābols praised the interwar-period modernist Riga Artists’ Group as romantics who were essentially still realists while literary historian Kārlis Krauliņš appreciated the Fauve-inspired painter Rūdolfs Pinnis’ brightly coloured works as reflecting Soviet optimism instead of bourgeois formalism. The core of such arguments, stressing the essence of things instead of “outer” traits, is close to the early 20th century art-theoretical ideas. They rejected academic and realist attitudes in favour of individual visions of nature, allowing to speak about the Neo-Romanticist phase of Socialist Realism. However, this episode was short-lived. By the late 1950s, conservatives in the USSR were scared by the rising interest in Western art. The so-called Manege exhibition (1962), involving Nikita Khrushchev’s confrontation with modernists, launched a crusade against formalism. Signals emerged in Latvia even earlier when, after the Second Young Artists’ Exhibition (1958), painter Gunārs Cīlītis’ work “Self-Portrait on the Bridge” (1957) became the target of an ideological campaign. That likely made the artist switch from painting to graphics and caricature. The launch of the magazine “Māksla” (1959–1996) coincided with this conservative turn. Among the most active fighters against formalism was stage designer Arturs Lapiņš who repeated Stalinist dogmas already in the late 1940s. Now he praised the ideal of the “living hero” and declared that the connection between art and life should refer to the Soviet and not any other life. The subject in art was deemed its main component. In terms of specific examples, positive qualities were assigned to clear depictions of dynamic movements while scenes of repose and contemplation emerged as ideologically suspicious. Rasma Lāce who became the period’s leading art critic, tried to differentiate between positive and negative trends, warning against “alien, borrowed form”, “unclear subjects”, “passivity” and similar faults, extolling “freshness in the perception of life”. This allows the speculation that Socialist Realism, at least partly, interpreted life not as a social but as an organic phenomenon. Although the All-Union background played a decisive role, different nuances appeared in reactions against this external element. If Lāce was quite critical of the modernised artistic language, Dubins was more supportive, explaining it with objective factors like the development of science. His term “associative image” implied the lack of an obvious subject but asked for more activity from the viewer. This was noticed by ideologues who blamed him for attempts to justify what was not obvious abstractionism or surrealism but not realism either. Dubins’ outlook is comparable to “intrinsic realism” voiced in Russians Igor Golomstock’s and Andrei Sinyavsky’s both very popular and censored book on Pablo Picasso (1960). Regardless of conservative relapses, there was no return to the classical model of Socialist Realism, as its criteria slipped into subjective assessments (“inner activity”, “spiritual depth”, “freshness of perception” and the like). The 1970s saw the doctrine’s last, “open” version, integrating the modernised understanding of art into official discourse that ended along with the end of the Soviet occupation of Latvia in 1991.

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