Christine Lindey looks at the role of the Artists International Association in supporting the cause of the Spanish Republic.

The early 20th century’s momentous upheavals politicised many people and artists were no exception. The mechanised carnage of the First World War, the 1920s Hunger Marches, the increased immiseration caused by the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the concurrent rise of fascism galvanised the left’s calls for peace and social justice.

The Bolshevik Revolution and its fledgling worker-state offered hope and inspired many to discover Marxism. Clive Branson, Betty Rea and James Boswell were among several artists who joined the newly formed Communist Party of Great Britain. Rea and others travelled to Russia to see for themselves, and Pearl Binder and Cliff Rowe were among those who stayed on as working artists. Unlike in Britain where the Depression dried up sales and commissions, work for artists in the Soviet Union was plentiful.

Cartoon by James Boswell in Left Review of September 1936

Meanwhile working-class artists such as James Fitton and Percy Horton were already politicised by the British socialist and labour movements.

For socially committed artists the question was: how best to put their work at the service of political change? One way was to organise and in 1933 a handful of artists founded the Artists International (AI). Rowe initiated it on returning from the USSR, having being impressed by the professionalism and internationalism of Soviet artists’ organisations and the country’s egalitarian cultural policies and social integration of artists. The AI was also influenced by socialist and communist artists’ groups in Mexico, France and the US.

In 1934 as membership grew to 32, the AI defined itself as: ‘…The International Unity of Artists Against Imperialist War on the Soviet Union, Fascism and Colonial Oppression…’ It outlined its intention to spread Marxist beliefs through exhibitions, the press, lectures and meetings and by collaborating on posters, illustrations, banners and stage designs and maintaining international contacts with similar groups.

Poster by Priscilla Thornycroft

Just as the AI opposed establishment politics, so it challenged the dominant Art for Art’s sake aesthetic. Preached by Roger Fry and Clive Bell, this held that art should address purely formal problems and not be tainted by politics; whereas politically committed artists depicted the realities of working-class life and opposed individualism with collectivism. Influenced by William Morris’s socialist aesthetic, they challenged the hierarchy which placed ‘pure’ Fine Art above the Applied Arts. Indeed some artists rejected easel painting for being unique, exchangeable commodities, and turned to socially useful public arts such as banners and prints which democratised art. Boswell gave up painting in 1932, and he, Binder, Fitton and James Holland contributed biting condemnations of poverty and fascism in illustrations for Left Review (1934-38).

Henry Moore, Spanish Prisoner, 1939

In 1935 Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia and Hitler’s increasingly threatening belligerence caused the AI to temper its Marxist stance in the inclusive spirit of the Popular Front. Renamed the Artists International Association (AIA), it widened membership, including attracting established artists such as Laura Knight and Henry Moore, so gaining public gravitas and funds.

But it was the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War which truly united and galvanised artists into action. Appalled by the French and British governments’ unjust refusal to aid the Spanish Republic, numerous artists rallied to its defence in the belief that a second world war could only be averted by defeating Franco, Hitler and Mussolini in Spain. AIA membership surged to 700 in 1937 and had increased to 1,000 by the Second World War.

Felicia Browne, 1936, Tate Archive                                                                         Letter, Portsmouth Evening News

For politicised artists the question was not whether to, but how to defend the Spanish Republic. Some, including Julian Bell and the communists Clive Branson and Felicia Browne, argued that in times of such political urgency direct political action superseded artistic commitment. They joined the British volunteers of the International Brigade, in which Browne became the only British woman combatant. She was killed in action, as was Bell.

The British Battalion's silk banner being held by Communist Party leader Harry Pollitt at Mas de las Matas, Aragón, Christmas 1937. The banner and carved pole were the collective work of Phyllis Ladyman, Jim Lucas and Betty Rea. 

Other artists argued that they could be most useful by raising public consciousness and funds. The AIA arranged numerous events including exhibitions such as Artists Help Spain. Organised in 1936 by women in just two weeks, it raised the enormous sum of £500 for the Artists’ Ambulance and its medical supplies. Artists produced numerous leaflets, posters, floats, illustrations and fundraising events such public lectures, a cabaret and ‘Portraits to Help Spanish Medical Aid’. The British Battalion’s silk banner was made collectively, as Phyllis Ladyman embroidered Jim Lucas’s design and Rea carved a clenched fist for its carrying pole. Some works, such as Peter Perí’s emotive relief sculpture Aid Spain, conveyed anti-war content through traditional means.

Surrealist artists impersonating Chamberlain, 1938. Image from ‘The Story of the AIA’ by Lynda Morris and Robert Radford (1983)

Two hundred artists marched as a contingent in the 1938 May Day parade, including the street action by four Surrealists, who dressed and masked as the Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and danced minuets with his trademark furled umbrella. In 1939 Priscilla Thornycroft collaborated with Fran Youngman to paint ‘Spain Fights On, Send Food Now’, from tall ladders on a gigantic public hoarding, knowing that this action by two young women would publicise the cause by attracting the press. Even artists such as Henry Moore and Julian Trevelyan, whose works normally avoided overt political content, contributed posters or banners.

AIA artists were not alone in producing art for Spain. But the AIA was the largest and most organised group to do so. And its clear political focus acted as a forum for the exchange of ideas, particularly during collaborative projects such as banner-making and staging exhibitions.

While most artists still remained in their ivory towers, this minority took the radical view that artists could not escape the issues of their time. Rea explained: ‘The future of art hangs on the future of civilisation. It is time the artists began to think what sort of future they want and what they can do to get it.’

Christine Lindey's book ‘Art for All, British Socially Committed Art from the 1930s to the Cold War’ is published by Artery Publications and is available here. This article first appeared in ¡No Pasarán!, the magazine of the International Brigade Memorial Trust, see here.

Christine Lindey reviews a new exhibition at Tate Britain, called Aftermath: Art in the Wake of World War One. It includes powerful, angry and sorrowful anti-war and anti-capitalist paintings, and some rarely shown, politically committed realism rooted in a socialist understanding of the capitalist greed which fuelled the carnage.

An earnest hush pervades Tate Britain’s exhibition as the public engages with an emotionally demanding topic whose relevance is all too sadly universal, but which for many, also has personal resonances. Seniors may have childhood memories of ancient, shell-shocked relatives whose crazed behaviour was indulged. Younger people may recall family stories or heirloom photos, war medals or regimental badges.

Paul Nash - Wire, 1918-19

The exhibition analyses the diverse new imagery and ways of making art provoked by British, French and German artists’ experiences of the war and its aftermath from 1916 to 1932. Many fought in the war. Like their fellow beings they struggled with the shock and incomprehension at the sheer scale of the destruction and devastation of human lives, lands, villages and towns brought by the world’s first mass mechanised warfare.

Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson - Ypres After the First Bombardment, 1916

While many lifeless commissioned war memorials were produced a few artists created powerful expressions of helpless pain at the loss and mutilation of so many young lives. Charles Jagger’s moving bronze relief No Man’s Land, renders living, dead and dying soldiers in a traditional academic manner; but their miseries are unflinchingly observed and partly conveyed through modernist means. The soldiers are trapped in an expressive, angular composition within narrow, trench-like proportions and the bronze surfaces are strafed with frantic lines as if by whistling bullets or barbed wire.

Wilhelm Lehmbruck’s larger than life-size sculpture The Fallen Man also compromises between modernist simplification and realism. Its portrayal of a naked youth, lithe as a dancer but crawling head down unlikely to ever raise himself is profoundly emotive. Käthe Kollwitz’s woodcuts convey the despair endured by grieving widows and parents such as herself. The heartfelt sorrow with which she angrily slashed and grooved her woodblocks to delineate the figures expressive her emotional wounds.

Marcel Gromaire - War, 1925

Kollwitz’s anger shared by others stemmed from their socialist understanding of the capitalist greed for resources which fuelled the carnage. Their accusatory works called for political change. The French Communist Marcel Gromaire’s anti-militarist painting War, portrays soldiers as dehumanised tubular and globular forms in identical grey-blue uniforms which morph them into metaphors of their lethal weapons. Yet the foremost soldier’s naturalistically painted hands imply a touching vulnerability and the potential for resistance.

Otto Dix - Prostitute and Disabled War Veteran, Two Victims of Capitalism, 1923

Such indictments of capitalism were particularly numerous by German artists because they supported their country’s influential Communist and Socialist movements. John Heartfield’s magazine photomontages pulled no punches in resisting the nation’s militarist revival. Otto Dix’s savage distortions indicted the state’s shoddy treatment of amputees and of working class deprivation. George Grosz’s satires accused bourgeois complacency, corruption and exploitation through biting distortions and claustrophobic spacial recessions which sandwich their subjects.

 George Grosz - “Daum” Marries her Pedantic Automaton “George” 1920

While umpteen European artists fretted over formalist dilemmas, a minority argued for an accessible, socially responsible art with which to combat capitalism. They exposed social injustice and asserted working class power. The narrow, cropped composition of Portrait of a Worker by the British Communist Clive Branson, focuses on the sitter’s intelligent, questioning gaze which refuses to shy away from the realities of life.

Clive Branson - Portrait of a Worker, c.1930

Gromaire’s Labourers demonstrates the social value of the building labourers’ work - particularly essential for France’s postwar reconstruction - while the labourers’ uncompromising confrontation of the viewer expresses their class’s political power. Seasoned socialists will be familiar with Otto Griebel’s famous painting The International, in which massed workers singing the Communist anthem march determinedly towards the viewer.

 Otto Griebel - Die Internationale, 1929

That many of these works will be new to most of the British public stems from the cultural establishment’s long history of ignoring, marginalising or mocking such politically committed realism. The curators have done well to include them.

But the brief explanation of the complex ideological and stylistic postwar ‘Recall to Order’, which questioned the march of pre-war modernist styles, is ineffectual, and would be better served by a separate exhibition. The exhibition ends with a more relevant section about visions of new modern cities which would benefit from being larger, and which includes a stunning Léger.

The exhibitions’ intellectual base is weakened by a failure to adequately account for the differences between the three nations’ art, which is rooted in a glossing over of political contexts. The wall texts do not mention the Weimar Republic, yet its fostering of patronage of innovatory political art sprang from being the most politically and culturally progressive of these nations, which explains the dominance of progressive German art. The Bolshevik Revolution is also ignored, yet since this single, most seismic event of the postwar shaped the era’s socio-political and cultural debates throughout Europe.

But this otherwise intelligently curated exhibition dares to address a serious and important topic. The inclusion of copious contemporary documentation brings to life the period’s ambiences and preoccupations. As does the inclusion of ‘soldier art’- souvenirs fashioned by soldiers from spent shells in the trenches. Highly recommended.

Runs until September 23rd 2018. Box office: tate.org.uk. This review was also published in the Morning Star, 30 June - 1 July

Christine Lindey explains how the 1917 Russian Revolution inspired the transformation of the visual arts into instruments of popular liberation.

“In the land of the Soviets every kitchen maid must be able to rule the state,” said Lenin and the arts were an intrinsic part of the Bolshevik revolution’s attempt to achieve this momentous step forward. But it was no mean task. For a population — 80 per cent of whom were illiterate — serfdom, abolished in 1862-4, was still within living memory. And it was by expressing the revolution’s aims through imagination, emotion, humour and joy, that the arts opened the people’s minds and boosted their self-confidence to seize power.

How best to do this was hotly debated. Rejecting unique works of art as self-indulgent bourgeois commodities, some artists heeded the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky’s dictum that “the streets are our brushes, the squares our palettes.” Turning to agit-prop — agitation and propaganda — they created ephemeral posters and street pageants and decorations to educate and enthuse support for the revolution. Thus in 1920 artists including Nathan Altman organised the ambitious re-enactment of the storming of the Winter Palace, involving decorated buildings, factory sirens and 2,000 Petrograd proletarians. Perhaps a few kitchen maids were among them.

Nathan Altman's proletarian futurism

Trains were transformed into “moving posters,” with vivid images and slogans painted on them, and were filled with travelling theatre companies, film shows, books and literacy classes to bring socialism to the countryside. Such actions were possible because the worker state became patron of the arts. Recognising the importance of culture, Anatoly Lunacharsky, Minister for Enlightenment, immediately revolutionised cultural institutions.

Anatoly Lunacharsky

The arts would now serve the people, not the aristocracy or bourgeoisie.The art market was abolished, museums nationalised and their contents reorganised and reinterpreted from a working class perspective. Two radical artists ­— washerwoman’s son Alexander Rodchenko and bourgeois ex-lawyer Wassily Kandinsky — jointly founded 22 new museums and purchased contemporary art for the young state. Museums worldwide still envy these collections.

The 19th-century progressive intelligentsia had already challenged tsarist Russia’s near mediaeval socio-political conditions and their expression through equally polarised aesthetics. The aristocracy favoured Western academic art as a mark of their superior sophistication, while denigrating their serfs’ woodcut prints (luboks), icons, carvings and embroideries as “crude” and “primitive.” But the early avant garde upturned these aesthetic criteria. Arguing that photography liberated them from academic art’s fussy illusionism, they were inspired by the flat shapes, bold colours and outlines through which folk art succinctly expressed visible and inner worlds.

The Resolute Brothers, by Alexander Apsit, showing the gigantic proletarian clubbing Czar Nicholas II and his allies

So lubok-inspired revolutionary posters, illustrations and textiles appeared after 1917, energising peasants and workers by affirming their own, hitherto denigrated, cultural traditions. But artists also embraced the social progress promised by industrialisation and the surge in the recent technological inventions — film, recorded sound, telephones, flying machines and motor cars. Their forms and functions symbolised the speed, dynamism and energy of modernity and of the revolution.

As art education was reorganised, the Marxist Vladimir Tatlin headed the innovatory VKhUTEMAS, the technical workshops in a Moscow art school which influenced the globally influential German craft and fine art Bauhaus movement from 1919 to 1931 and beyond. Inspired by the machine age, VKhUTEMAS dispensed with traditional art to investigate forms, spatial organisation, materials and processes as a basis for producing cheap mass-produced goods, accessible to all. Rejecting the bourgeois concept of the artist as individual male genius, they defined themselves as classless, self-effacing “constructivists,” collectively constructing the revolution alongside other workers, regardless of gender.

Varvara Stepanova’s textile designs

Lyubov Popova’s transportable theatre, Rodchenko’s posters and Varvara Stepanova’s textiles shared the abstracted forms of modernity — the circles of factory cogs and wheels, electricity’s lightning zig-zags or the soaring grace of flying machines. At Vitebsk Art Academy Kazimir Malevich founded UNOVIS, a group in which students and teachers collaborated in explorations of the essence of form and volume to create futuristic architectural models as prototypes to inspire designers, engineers and architects. And they did.

Marc Chagall, painter of poetic evocations of Jewish village life and art commissar of his native province, founded the Vitebsk academy during the revolution and Lunacharsky’s pluralist aesthetic policies enabled Malevich, pioneer of geometric abstraction, to teach in the same academy. Similarly Alexander Deineka, who argued for realist paintings to represent the revolution and workers’ lives, taught in the same Moscow institution as Tatlin, renowned for his soaring design for a monument to the Third International (1919-20).

Tatlin's Tower, 1919

During the hardships of war communism (1917-22) artists concentrated on speculative research but some of these reached fruition afterwards. Kitchen maids sported dresses printed with modernist motifs celebrating technology and socialism. Buildings such as Moisei Ginzburg’s Narkomfin Communal House of 1930, incorporated communal facilities such as laundries, dining halls, kitchens and reading rooms.

Inspired by UNOVIS, its horizontal banded windows sweep across the facade, providing maximum light and air, behind wide, heated corridors in which tenants could interact. Together with parallel developments in the other arts, the visual arts made real differences to people’s lives. In the coming centenary year of the 1917 revolution, numerous exhibitions will repeat the neoliberal mantra “great art, shame about the politics,” perpetuated since the 1920s.

In fact, it was great politics which generated such a blossoming of the arts.

This article first appeared in the Morning Star on 31 December 2016.

Christine Lindey reviews the current Royal Academy exhibition, and recommends the art - but not the didactic, vindictive and reactionary curation.

In January 1918 the Russian Soviet Republic was the first state in the world to officially support the avant-garde. Fired by the revolution’s socialist ideology, artists rejected the tsarist regime’s fussy forms and fusty techniques, to embrace the latest technology. They incorporated industrial forms into art, design, architecture and film which epitomised and promoted modernity. The avant-garde’s dynamic axes, rapid juxtapositions, startling close-ups and pared-down geometric forms expressed revolutionary dynamism. From Lyubov Popova’s designs to Dziga Vertov’s films, the cogs and wheels of mechanisation, the magic of flying machines and electrification’s bright rays embodied and promised social progress.

Liubov Popova, Space-Force Construction, 1921

It is always a joy to see these works and the Royal Academy’s exhibition Revolution: Russian Art 1917-1932 is no exception. But they are familiar, due to their depoliticisation and incorporation into the Western modernist canon in the early cold war which, by the same token, denigrated socialist realism and ignored Bolshevik pluralist cultural policies. So, to this day, Soviet representational art of the 1920s and 1930s has remained little known in the West and, by displaying the multifaceted Soviet art and design of the interwar years, the exhibition redresses a serious distortion of art history.

We encounter history paintings such as Alexander Deineka’s Defence of Petrograd, in which a stoic militia crunches determinedly through the snow, against a deadly, snow-laden sky. Liberated Bolshevik women soldiers take centre place, in a geometric composition formed by repeated upright bodies, diagonal rifles and the stark industrial bridge overhead. As in his other paintings and posters, Deineka modified modernist simplifications of form and space into a legible but contemporary style.

Alexander Deineka, The Defence of Petrograd, 1928

Many others sought such compromises, albeit in different ways. Aristarkh Lentulov’s Tverskoy Boulevard depicts its people and buildings in kaleidoscopic shapes which marry Parisian cubism with the riotous colours of Russian folk art, conveying the speed of modern Moscow life. Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin’s measured compositions combine discrete multiple viewpoints and intense primary colour to convey immersive and layered states of mind. In contrast, the academic realism of Issak Brodsky’s Lenin at Smolny has an almost hyperrealist presence, due it’s meticulously uniform rendering of all surfaces, be it an electric socket or the folds on Lenin’s jacket.

Unfortunately, instead of explaining these artists’ intentions, their works are framed as the last gasp of artistic freedom by focusing on the contents of a major 1932 exhibition. The Association of Artists for Revolutionary Russia, formed in 1922 to call for a progressive but accessible art, is not mentioned, nor is its influential manifesto. Yet its many members included Deineka, Brodsky, Lentulov, Petrov-Vodkin and Boris Grigoriev.

Pedrov-Vodkin, Self-Portrait, 1918

The exhibition’s stunning array of art and design is marred by vindictive, anti-Soviet curating. Wall texts and captions constantly point to the Revolution’s cruelties, failures and hardships, with not one word of praise for its achievements. Nor do they explain its difficult conditions, exacerbated by attacks from White Russians and international armies. More worryingly, the works are manipulated to score such curatorial points.

An example is the room ominously titled The Fate of the Peasants, which is a lachrymose lament for imagined, pre-revolutionary bucolic idylls. It greets us with Grigoriev’s lugubrious Land of the Peasants, which blends expressionism and cubism to convey impoverished peasants’ anger, dismay and oppression — as does his portrait of a careworn, wizened dairy maid. The wall text states that the villagers’ “ancient way of life was wiped out” by collectivisation. Yet even the Times Book of Russia in 1916 described the peasants’ lives as an “existence of privation of everything except vodka. His body was roughly clad. Bare necessities, reduced to a minimum, supported life. His soul steeped in ignorance.” And since both Grigoriev paintings are dated 1917, they indicted tsarist peasant life, not collectivisation.

The wall text to the room devoted to “Eternal Russia” informs us that “many” artists “were nostalgic for the beauty and charm of old Russia, rapidly disappearing under the boots of the proletarian masses.” It mourns the influence of the Orthodox religion and displays landscapes and depictions of onion-domed churches as if socialism and the love for one’s native land are mutually exclusive. And it includes Mark Chagall’s Promenade, dated 1917-18, which surely cannot represent nostalgia for tsarist days. That period was not rosy for this Jewish artist, whose tsarist shtetl past was characterised by brutal pogroms and exclusion of Jews from the professions. Chagall’s rose-tinted idealisation expressed the euphoria of being in love and it is this which projected he and his wife to metaphorically soar above shtetl life.

Marc Chagall, Promenade, 1918

In sum, this exhibition is a didactic attack on the Bolshevik revolution, permeated by the sour outlooks of descendants of dispossessed Russian emigres bemoaning their lost jewels, lands and servants. Go for the exhibition’s marvellous art and design. But arm yourself with scepticism about the curating.

This review was first published in the Morning Star, on March 11th. The exhibition runs until April 17.

Christine Lindey reviews the current Royal Academy exhibition, and recommends the art - but not the didactic, vindictive and reactionary curation.

In January 1918 the Russian Soviet Republic was the first state in the world to officially support the avant-garde. Fired by the revolution’s socialist ideology, artists rejected the tsarist regime’s fussy forms and fusty techniques, to embrace the latest technology. They incorporated industrial forms into art, design, architecture and film which epitomised and promoted modernity. The avant-garde’s dynamic axes, rapid juxtapositions, startling close-ups and pared-down geometric forms expressed revolutionary dynamism. From Lyubov Popova’s designs to Dziga Vertov’s films, the cogs and wheels of mechanisation, the magic of flying machines and electrification’s bright rays embodied and promised social progress.

Liubov Popova, Space-Force Construction, 1921

It is always a joy to see these works and the Royal Academy’s exhibition Revolution: Russian Art 1917-1932 is no exception. But they are familiar, due to their depoliticisation and incorporation into the Western modernist canon in the early cold war which, by the same token, denigrated socialist realism and ignored Bolshevik pluralist cultural policies. So, to this day, Soviet representational art of the 1920s and 1930s has remained little known in the West and, by displaying the multifaceted Soviet art and design of the interwar years, the exhibition redresses a serious distortion of art history.

We encounter history paintings such as Alexander Deineka’s Defence of Petrograd, in which a stoic militia crunches determinedly through the snow, against a deadly, snow-laden sky. Liberated Bolshevik women soldiers take centre place, in a geometric composition formed by repeated upright bodies, diagonal rifles and the stark industrial bridge overhead. As in his other paintings and posters, Deineka modified modernist simplifications of form and space into a legible but contemporary style.

Alexander Deineka, The Defence of Petrograd, 1928

Many others sought such compromises, albeit in different ways. Aristarkh Lentulov’s Tverskoy Boulevard depicts its people and buildings in kaleidoscopic shapes which marry Parisian cubism with the riotous colours of Russian folk art, conveying the speed of modern Moscow life. Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin’s measured compositions combine discrete multiple viewpoints and intense primary colour to convey immersive and layered states of mind. In contrast, the academic realism of Issak Brodsky’s Lenin at Smolny has an almost hyperrealist presence, due it’s meticulously uniform rendering of all surfaces, be it an electric socket or the folds on Lenin’s jacket.

Unfortunately, instead of explaining these artists’ intentions, their works are framed as the last gasp of artistic freedom by focusing on the contents of a major 1932 exhibition. The Association of Artists for Revolutionary Russia, formed in 1922 to call for a progressive but accessible art, is not mentioned, nor is its influential manifesto. Yet its many members included Deineka, Brodsky, Lentulov, Petrov-Vodkin and Boris Grigoriev.

Pedrov-Vodkin, Self-Portrait, 1918

The exhibition’s stunning array of art and design is marred by vindictive, anti-Soviet curating. Wall texts and captions constantly point to the Revolution’s cruelties, failures and hardships, with not one word of praise for its achievements. Nor do they explain its difficult conditions, exacerbated by attacks from White Russians and international armies. More worryingly, the works are manipulated to score such curatorial points.

An example is the room ominously titled The Fate of the Peasants, which is a lachrymose lament for imagined, pre-revolutionary bucolic idylls. It greets us with Grigoriev’s lugubrious Land of the Peasants, which blends expressionism and cubism to convey impoverished peasants’ anger, dismay and oppression — as does his portrait of a careworn, wizened dairy maid. The wall text states that the villagers’ “ancient way of life was wiped out” by collectivisation. Yet even the Times Book of Russia in 1916 described the peasants’ lives as an “existence of privation of everything except vodka. His body was roughly clad. Bare necessities, reduced to a minimum, supported life. His soul steeped in ignorance.” And since both Grigoriev paintings are dated 1917, they indicted tsarist peasant life, not collectivisation.

The wall text to the room devoted to “Eternal Russia” informs us that “many” artists “were nostalgic for the beauty and charm of old Russia, rapidly disappearing under the boots of the proletarian masses.” It mourns the influence of the Orthodox religion and displays landscapes and depictions of onion-domed churches as if socialism and the love for one’s native land are mutually exclusive. And it includes Mark Chagall’s Promenade, dated 1917-18, which surely cannot represent nostalgia for tsarist days. That period was not rosy for this Jewish artist, whose tsarist shtetl past was characterised by brutal pogroms and exclusion of Jews from the professions. Chagall’s rose-tinted idealisation expressed the euphoria of being in love and it is this which projected he and his wife to metaphorically soar above shtetl life.

Marc Chagall, Promenade, 1918

In sum, this exhibition is a didactic attack on the Bolshevik revolution, permeated by the sour outlooks of descendants of dispossessed Russian emigres bemoaning their lost jewels, lands and servants. Go for the exhibition’s marvellous art and design. But arm yourself with scepticism about the curating.

This review was first published in the Morning Star, on March 11th. The exhibition runs until April 17.

Christine Lindey explains how the 1917 Russian Revolution inspired the transformation of the visual arts into instruments of popular liberation.

“In the land of the Soviets every kitchen maid must be able to rule the state,” said Lenin and the arts were an intrinsic part of the Bolshevik revolution’s attempt to achieve this momentous step forward. But it was no mean task. For a population — 80 per cent of whom were illiterate — serfdom, abolished in 1862-4, was still within living memory. And it was by expressing the revolution’s aims through imagination, emotion, humour and joy, that the arts opened the people’s minds and boosted their self-confidence to seize power.

How best to do this was hotly debated. Rejecting unique works of art as self-indulgent bourgeois commodities, some artists heeded the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky’s dictum that “the streets are our brushes, the squares our palettes.” Turning to agit-prop — agitation and propaganda — they created ephemeral posters and street pageants and decorations to educate and enthuse support for the revolution. Thus in 1920 artists including Nathan Altman organised the ambitious re-enactment of the storming of the Winter Palace, involving decorated buildings, factory sirens and 2,000 Petrograd proletarians. Perhaps a few kitchen maids were among them.

Nathan Altman's proletarian futurism

Trains were transformed into “moving posters,” with vivid images and slogans painted on them, and were filled with travelling theatre companies, film shows, books and literacy classes to bring socialism to the countryside. Such actions were possible because the worker state became patron of the arts. Recognising the importance of culture, Anatoly Lunacharsky, Minister for Enlightenment, immediately revolutionised cultural institutions.

Anatoly Lunacharsky

The arts would now serve the people, not the aristocracy or bourgeoisie.The art market was abolished, museums nationalised and their contents reorganised and reinterpreted from a working class perspective. Two radical artists ­— washerwoman’s son Alexander Rodchenko and bourgeois ex-lawyer Wassily Kandinsky — jointly founded 22 new museums and purchased contemporary art for the young state. Museums worldwide still envy these collections.

The 19th-century progressive intelligentsia had already challenged tsarist Russia’s near mediaeval socio-political conditions and their expression through equally polarised aesthetics. The aristocracy favoured Western academic art as a mark of their superior sophistication, while denigrating their serfs’ woodcut prints (luboks), icons, carvings and embroideries as “crude” and “primitive.” But the early avant garde upturned these aesthetic criteria. Arguing that photography liberated them from academic art’s fussy illusionism, they were inspired by the flat shapes, bold colours and outlines through which folk art succinctly expressed visible and inner worlds.

The Resolute Brothers, by Alexander Apsit, showing the gigantic proletarian clubbing Czar Nicholas II and his allies

So lubok-inspired revolutionary posters, illustrations and textiles appeared after 1917, energising peasants and workers by affirming their own, hitherto denigrated, cultural traditions. But artists also embraced the social progress promised by industrialisation and the surge in the recent technological inventions — film, recorded sound, telephones, flying machines and motor cars. Their forms and functions symbolised the speed, dynamism and energy of modernity and of the revolution.

As art education was reorganised, the Marxist Vladimir Tatlin headed the innovatory VKhUTEMAS, the technical workshops in a Moscow art school which influenced the globally influential German craft and fine art Bauhaus movement from 1919 to 1931 and beyond. Inspired by the machine age, VKhUTEMAS dispensed with traditional art to investigate forms, spatial organisation, materials and processes as a basis for producing cheap mass-produced goods, accessible to all. Rejecting the bourgeois concept of the artist as individual male genius, they defined themselves as classless, self-effacing “constructivists,” collectively constructing the revolution alongside other workers, regardless of gender.

Varvara Stepanova’s textile designs

Lyubov Popova’s transportable theatre, Rodchenko’s posters and Varvara Stepanova’s textiles shared the abstracted forms of modernity — the circles of factory cogs and wheels, electricity’s lightning zig-zags or the soaring grace of flying machines. At Vitebsk Art Academy Kazimir Malevich founded UNOVIS, a group in which students and teachers collaborated in explorations of the essence of form and volume to create futuristic architectural models as prototypes to inspire designers, engineers and architects. And they did.

Marc Chagall, painter of poetic evocations of Jewish village life and art commissar of his native province, founded the Vitebsk academy during the revolution and Lunacharsky’s pluralist aesthetic policies enabled Malevich, pioneer of geometric abstraction, to teach in the same academy. Similarly Alexander Deineka, who argued for realist paintings to represent the revolution and workers’ lives, taught in the same Moscow institution as Tatlin, renowned for his soaring design for a monument to the Third International (1919-20).

Tatlin's Tower, 1919

During the hardships of war communism (1917-22) artists concentrated on speculative research but some of these reached fruition afterwards. Kitchen maids sported dresses printed with modernist motifs celebrating technology and socialism. Buildings such as Moisei Ginzburg’s Narkomfin Communal House of 1930, incorporated communal facilities such as laundries, dining halls, kitchens and reading rooms.

Inspired by UNOVIS, its horizontal banded windows sweep across the facade, providing maximum light and air, behind wide, heated corridors in which tenants could interact. Together with parallel developments in the other arts, the visual arts made real differences to people’s lives. In the coming centenary year of the 1917 revolution, numerous exhibitions will repeat the neoliberal mantra “great art, shame about the politics,” perpetuated since the 1920s.

In fact, it was great politics which generated such a blossoming of the arts.

This article first appeared in the Morning Star on 31 December 2016.

Christine Lindey reviews an exhibiton by Mona Hatoum at Tate Modern, London.

Mona Hatoum manages the rare feat of creating art about politics and the human condition without dry didacticism, but with barbed wit, elegance and subtlety. And has done so for over four decades. Born in Beirut in 1952 to Palestinian parents, she became marooned in London by the 1975 Lebanese war, having recently arrived there to study art. She subsequently settled in London but retained a lifelong internationalist outlook.

Her work blossomed while studying on Stuart Brisley’s radical MA course at the Slade School of Art which stressed socio-political content and expanded the artist’s means of expression to include performance, installations, video, film and print media. In resistance to the sexist cultural climate of the late 1970s, budding women artists like Hatoum were particularly receptive to these new art forms, which freed them from the oppression of centuries-old, male-dominated traditions of painting and sculpture.

Hatoum’s work positively fizzes with the breadth of expression this opened up. Her rigorous but imaginative choice of the most apt forms, processes and materials to suit each work’s content led to installations, posters, sculptures, film, posters and documented performance art. The most mundane objects and materials of everyday life such as soap, light bulbs, sand, hair, kitchen implements and neon tubes are transformed into visual poetry whose meanings can be teased out by the viewers’ active engagement rather than passive consumption.

Some works relate to specific topical events. The early performance Roadworks of 1985 (above) was spurred by that year’s protests against the police’s racist implementation of Thatcher’s hated stop and search laws which erupted into riots in Brixton. Wearing a boiler suit, Hatoum attached the laces of Doc Martins boots to each of her bare feet and “walked” laboriously through Brixton market, each step hampered by the bulk of the heavy boots. Commonly worn by policemen and National Front skin-heads, the Doc Martins referred to their racist harassment of Brixton’s Afro-Caribbean community, while Hatoum’s dogged physical perseverance and moral courage in facing the banter and bafflement at her action by the market’s public testify to human resilience.

Present Tense of 1996 is a more subtle but equally specific political statement. The deceptively simple installation carpets the floor with a rectangle of small, cream blocks softly gleaming in the light. Closer examination reveals these to be 2,200 bars of handmade olive oil soap from Nablus, upon which a map of the 1993 Oslo Peace Accord is marked out in tiny red glass beads as delicately as embroidered beadwork. That Israel has since then further encroached on Palestinian land rather than honouring this agreement, makes the continuing relevance of this instillation all the more poignant. Typical of most of Hatoum’s work, it initially seduces with sensory beauty only to provoke with the seriousness of the issues it raises.

Over My Dead Body was a poster displayed in 1988 on adverting hoardings in cities including Glasgow, Leeds and Derry. A toy soldier, wielding a gun threateningly, is ridiculed by being placed on Hatoum’s nose as she glares angrily back at him. Using a form which demands directness, Hatoum made this powerful, anti-militarist statement through humour and dramatic changes of scale.

Other works engage with socio-political injustice and oppression in more general ways, allowing for multi-layered associations, complexities and contradictions. Light Sentence, whose title reinforces its allusion to imprisonment, is a large installation made of galvanised, wire mesh lockers stacked taller than a human being, to form a three-sided rectangle inside a smallish, rectangular space. A single, bare light bulb travels through the mesh throwing intimidating, but visually alluring, moving shadows whose cage-like forms entrap the viewer into a dizzying disorientation.

Similar vertiginously conflicting emotions are elicited by Impenetrable, a visually stunning ethereal sculpture consisting of a large rectangle formed by delicate, parallel metal rods apparently free floating from each other, hovering in space without any visible means of support. Closer inspection reveals the slim rods to be barbed wire suspended from the ceiling on transparent fishing wires. Aesthetic attraction turns to repulsion then back again, the work’s unsettling elegance nudging us to take nothing for granted.

The contemporary artist’s dilemma is how to make meaningful statements in a society saturated with images reproduced ad infinitum. The form of much of Hatoum’s work defies reproduction, so stressing the importance of primary experience. With fertile imagination and open-mindedness, Hatoum invents ever varied forms through which to express progressive ideas and responses to the world with acute moral and political judgement, passion, humour and beauty.

Tate Modern’s intelligently and deftly curated exhibition does justice to this truly important living artist. As one of the most exciting exhibitions of contemporary art staged in London in a long time it is not to be missed. You won’t be disappointed.

See http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/mona-hatoum. Until August 21 2016.

Although he has used a wide variety of media, Jeremy Deller is perhaps best known for orchestrating large numbers of the public to create artworks such as his collaboration with ex-miners to re-enact the Battle of Orgreave in 2001.

In his current exhibition and catalogue, 'All That Is Solid Melts Into Air', he further expands traditional artists' means of expression to encompass curating, an activity for which he claims artistic freedom to interpret his theme in a personal manner.

Acting as a social cartographer, Deller links the impact of the industrial revolution on popular culture with its legacy today. He has programmed a 1950s juke box with traditional folk and heavy metal music, creating resonances or disjunctures in our experience of the artefacts according to songs which the public selects for free.

A section of 19th century works shows the physical effects of industrialisation on the landscape. John Martin's massive apocalyptical painting The Destruction Of Sodom And Gomorrah dominates, with its depiction of a society imploding due to sin and disease.

Deller repeats the frequently voiced interpretation that this painting's subject was a metaphor for Victorian anxieties about the pernicious effects of rapid industrialisation on society.

But by also displaying Martin's plan drawings as evidence of his decades-long campaign to solve London's sewage problems which caused cholera epidemics, Deller expands the social definition of this academic artist to include his self-imposed environmental contribution. This hints at the social content of Deller's own works.

Other links between past and present are less convincing. Deller argues that the noise and shuddering of machines that shook the bodies of youths of both sexes in heated proximity in 19th-century factories created an atmosphere of moral chaos and danger similar to that of 1980s raves attended by later generations. Yet that raises the question of whether the consciousness of malnourished, poorly housed and often sickly mill children, working tedious hours to survive, bears any relation to that of ecstasy-fuelled teenagers dancing at a rave in the knowledge that cosy duvets in heated bedrooms await their return home.

More convincing are Deller's juxtapositions of past and present unjust and inhumane employment conditions. An 1830s mill poster enumerates heavy fines for often minor offences such as being a few minutes late and states that employees must give one month's notice but the masters can sack them instantly.

That's counterposed with a text message to a zero-hours worker which cynically reads 'Hello, today you have day off.' An 1810 clock measuring productivity stands near a digital tracking device worn by today's zero-hours warehouse workers which admonishes them if their pace is too slow. Ben Roberts's photograph of Amazon workers dwarfed by endless repetitive shelves emphasises their regimented working environment.

William Clayton's portrait photographs of unnamed, weary Victorian iron workers in their tattered dresses bring these women to life as individuals, their expressions seething with sullen resentment. In contrast, Francis Crawshaw's untutored paintings of the named workers in the 1830s factories which he ran portrays them as meek citizens in their Sunday clothes.

Deller's choice of contemporary workers focuses on a few men who escaped factory or colliery for successful, glamorous careers. Large wall drawings trace the genealogies of pop musicians such as Shaun Ryder through generations of their working-class ancestors. Photographs lionise Adrian Street, a miner who became a model and gaudy showman wrestler, including one of him in long blond wig, make-up and glittery wrester's regalia posing at the pit head with his bemused father and workmates.

Deller interprets Street's triumphant return as part-prodigal, part-prophet 'enlightening the coal serfs' of future deliverance from industrial toil. These appraisals of working-class escapees perpetuate a capitalist definition of success based on individualism and superficial glamour. They ignore the more laudable successes of self-educated workers who also rebelled but stayed to organise collective resistance against exploitative conditions.

A print depicting the Merthyr Rising of 1831 and a single weather-beaten trade union banner are rare references to the labour movement. This banner and the broadsheets are the few genuine relics of 19th century proletarian visual culture, the majority being observations about the industrial revolution by middle-class bosses and artists.

Nevertheless, an exhibition about working-class experience is welcome. By naming the pop stars' ancestors and stating their livelihoods the genealogies validate the normally anonymous existences of these paperhangers, miners, labourers, weavers, housemaids, fitters, nurses and others, as do the named portraits and photographs of workers. Similarly the folk songs on the juke box and in the broadsheets are truly the art of the people.

Though Deller makes some telling points and his concern for social justice is heartfelt, it is rooted in a romantic fascination with working-class life both past and present which underestimates the necessity for organised working-class action if true change is to be achieved.

This is an edited version of an article which first appeared in the Morning Star.

How did the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 affect art and artists? It did so at every level: art education, production, patronage, distribution and reception were all transformed. Fierce debates about the form and function of art in the new worker state raised fundamental issues; from these stemmed so rich a flowering of the visual arts that its influence is still alive.

The revolution was itself partly the work of artists. Some had worked towards social and/or political change since Russian artists had taken the role of social critic in the nineteenth century. In the 1870s the Wanderers’ paintings had exposed social injustice in daily life. By the early twentieth century a well-informed Russian avant-garde was in touch with Paris and Munich, the epicentres of innovatory art. Embracing modernism, it debated how to transform and modernise Tsarist Russia. Some, like Goncharova, adopted the vivid colour and formal simplifications of ‘primitive’ Russian peasant art, rather than those of African art favoured by the French and Germans.

By 1913 Malevich had rejected all representation as antiquated, arguing that his revolutionary abstraction equated better to modern times. October 1917 brought radical cultural change. No longer for bourgeois and aristocrat, art would now be for the people. The art market was abolished and museums nationalised; the worker state became art’s patron.

Initially, most avant-garde artists welcomed the revolution because Lenin’s idea of a political avant-garde as an agent for social change legitimised their own calls for radical action to combat conservative attitudes to art and society. For Marxists like Tatlin, here was an opportunity to make real and meaningful change. He recalled: 'To Accept (sic) or not accept the October Revolution. There was no such question for me. I organically merged into active creative, social and pedagogical life’.

Others, like Kandinsky, were not sympathetic to Bolshevik politics, but welcomed the artistic freedom which it brought, while aesthetically or/and politically conservative artists feared a loss of private patronage and critical status. Contrary to western propaganda, no artist was sent to the salt mines: Lenin and Lunacharsky, (Commissar of Enlightenment 1917-1929) pursued a pluralist arts policy.

Nevertheless, for the first time in the world, the avant-garde was appointed to positions of power. Despite the material hardships and shortages of War Communism (1917-1922) it launched into a dynamic transformation of art and its institutions. Tatlin headed IZO, the visual arts section of Lunacharsky’s commissariat. Recognising Kandinsky’s international status as an innovator, IZO gave him the important role of reorganising art education and museums. Together with the younger Rodchenko he founded 22 provincial museums and acquired the important collections of Russian avant-garde art which now grace museums in Russia and the ex-Soviet republics.

Tatlin, Malevich, Kandinsky, Chagall, Popova, Stepanova , Rodchenko, Lissitzky and others taught at the newly created art schools where they pioneered innovatory teaching methods, which were later to influence the Bauhaus.

The debates about the role of art and artists raged on. Malevich and his group argued that the researches of innovatory artists would act as prototypes for practical application in architecture and design. Others took a less social view: Chagall continued his poetic depictions of his personal response to life, while Kandinsky pursued his investigations into the communication of heightened spiritual states of mind via colour, line and form.

Viewing such work as bourgeois self-indulgence, the politically engaged left heeded Mayakovsky’s dictum: 'the streets are our brushes, the squares our palettes'. They created 'agit-prop' (agitation and propaganda) using their talents to decorate propaganda trains and boats, make Rosta street posters and organise public pageants and events. For example, in 1920 Altman and other artists involved 2,000 members of the Petrograd proletariat in the re-enactment of the storming of the Winter Palace which included decorating buildings with gigantic abstract banners, and using factory sirens and arc lights.

Some Marxists, led by Tatlin and Rodchenko, called for the abolition of the art object which they saw as an exchangeable commodity belonging to the bourgeois past. Artists must leave their ivory towers and construct the new Socialist state alongside other workers by putting art at the service of the revolution. They became known as the Constructivists, and put the experiments conducted in the new art schools to practical use by designing posters, books, ceramics, theatre sets, etc. for the masses.

Under the slogan ‘Art into Production’ artists were to go into the factories to create modernist, mass produced designs because the new social order demanded new materials and new forms. For example, Popova and Stepanova designed textiles printed with the abstracted motifs of modernity: the zigzag of electricity, the whirl of aeroplane propellors, the cogs and wheels of trains and tractors.

Popova, who had begun her life as a painter is reputed to have said: ‘No artistic success has given me such satisfaction as the sight of a peasant or a worker buying a length of material designed by me.’ Meanwhile, artists such as Deineka argued that modernism was inaccessible to the masses. This was indeed often true. Abstract street decorations were said to frighten the horses. No less committed to the revolution, they argued for a representational art which would carry revolutionary messages. Seen as reactionary by the Constructivists, they were the forerunners of Socialist Realism.

The dilemma of creating innovatory art which is also accessible to the masses has yet to be resolved.

This is a version of an article published in the Digest of the Society for Co-operation in Russian and Soviet Studies. The society's library and archive includes a comprehensive collection of books and pictures about Soviet art and design.