Futurism - 1914-

Influences
Millenarism
apocalypse; millenium;
fuse Marx and Christianity together; not an individual but a collective form

Marx, Solov'ev (new religion - the divine in man), Nietzsche (God is dead)
Science will make man immortal; overcome death - Superman

Bogdanov - the Artist as Messiah; an instant transformation of society

Malevich - Futurist

Theory - to fuse art with technology and create the new utopian society
borrow from Taylor, Ford

1921 Establishment of the People's Commissariat of Enlightenment - Narkompros

Avant-Grade division called Izo - Visual Arts Section

Artist is the engineer of the future (Stalin)

Cult of the artist - shift away from the Lenin's vanguard

They lived and used their own designs as models

Constructivists -

Avant Garde through the early 1920s
turned to design and architecture; united art, labor and technology; a utilitarian image
some move to neo-realism
focus on everyday life - clothes, factories, cities for utopia

Alexander Rodchenko - cover for Mayakovsky's poems (Photocollage)

NEP (1923-1928) ended freedom of leftist artists after the revolution; created some
competition in the economy - instituted by Lenin; ended by Stalin after Lenin's death

Led by Mayakovsky - experimental poet and playwright "Poet of the Revolution"
Rodchenko
"the production of a new human being through art"

• active participation of the viewer who would be transformed by the work of art

Maxim Gorky 1868-1936– founder of Socialist Realism with "The Mother" – Stalin shaped it

Party view ; the new socialist person in stereotype, and russian reality
Friends with Tolstoi and Chekov and Lenin.
Founder of Socialist Realism along with Stalin

"The Mother" -

Heroine Pelageia Nilovna adopts the cause of socialism in a religious spirit after her son's arrest as a political activist in Czarist Russia. Her husband is a drunk and dies. Her son Pavel changes from a thug to socialist role model and starts to bring his revolutionary friends to ths house. Pavel is arrested on May day for carrying a forbidden banner. While continuing to believe in Christ's words, she joins revolutionaries.

Based on the real person Anna Zalomova - distributed revolutionary pamphlets after her son had been arrested during a demostration

A utopian view of the communist future; of the new communist person set in the near future as a model for which the viewer, reader, should strive for.

byt - everyday life

bytie - dialectically perceived reality in a state of perpetual formation

beauty - everything that bears the sign of human influence

Expose the sprouts of the future, ripen into visible reality

To show life truthfully - not just objective reality

reality as revolutionary development

1922 Stalin becomes Party Secretary
1924 Lenin wanted Trotsky to take over for him Lenin dies.
1924-8 Stalin consolidates his power.
1928-1932 First 5-year plan
1925-27 Stalin forces out Poets, scientists, artists who did held conflicting beliefs.
1932 Officially formulated by the newly created Union of Soviet Writers - Avant-garde found their art rejected.
1934-1938 The "Purges" over 7,000,000 people disappeared were exiled to labor camps or shot.
Leading Bolsheviks given "Show Trials" - false confessions
Stalin rewrites Russian history, changes schoolbooks. Children paste over portions they are not supposed to know. Revision of History