Title:
Totalitarian art : in the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, Fascist Italy and the People's Republic of China
Author:
Added Author:
Edition:
[2nd ed.]
Publication Date:
2011
Publication Information:
New York, N.Y. : Overlook Duckworth, c2011.
Physical Description:
xxxvi, 420 p. : ill. (some col.), ports. ; 25 cm.
ISBN:
9781590203170
9781590206706
Abstract:
Totalitarian Art achieves nothing less than a thorough and serious comparative study of the official art of Stalin's Russia, Hitler's Germany, Mussolini's Italy, Kim Jong-Il's North Korea, and Saddam Hussein's Iraq. In the Soviet Union, and later in Maoist China, theories of mass artistic appeal were used to promote the Revolution both at home and abroad. In Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy they asserted the putative grandeur of the epoch. All too often, art that served the Revolution or the new millennial society became "total realism, " and always it became a slave to the state and the cult of personality, and ultimately one more weapon in the arsenal of oppression. Igor Golomstock gives a detailed appraisal of the forms that define totalitarian art and illustrates his text with more than two hundred examples of its paintings, posters, sculpture and architecture, and includes a powerful comparative visual essay which demonstrates the eerie similarity of the official art of these very different regimes.
General Note:
Translation of Totalitarnoe iskusstvo, originally published in a shorter form in 1990 by Collins Harvill.
"Preface to the Second Edition. The first edition of this book was published in the UK and the USA in 1990; it was also published in French and Italian translations."--p. [xxxv].
Contents:
Chapter 1. Modernism and totalitarianism. The artist and "the revolution of the spirit" (1907-17) ; Art and social revolution : futurism under the red flag at the service of two revolutions (1917-23) ; The avant-garde and the left artists (1917-23) ; The contribution of the avant-garde -- Chapter 2. Between modernism and total realism. When those who had fallen silent began to speak : the end of the avant-garde (1922-28) ; The interim style (1922-32) ; Encounter in Venice (1924-34) ; The German avant-garde and "Kulturbolschewismus" (1905-33) ; The battle for art (1923-33) -- Chapter 3. From words to action. Ideology : "socialist realism" and "the principles of the Führer" ; Organization : the megamachine of totalitarian culture ; Terror : totalitarianism against modernism ; Italy on the path to total realism -- Appendix : the Chinese variant -- Prologue [of Part two] : encounter in Paris (1937 and beyond) -- Chapter 4. The present, the past and the future (inheritance and traditions). New heights ; From the future to the past ; From the past to the present -- Chapter 5. Function and language. Propaganda, mass appeal and Volk spirit ; Myth and life, art and reality ; The semantic revolution and the new man -- Chapter 6. Structure. Theme art ; The hierarchy of genres : the centre ; The official portrait (iconography of the leaders) ; Historical painting ; Battle-pieces ; The hierarchy of genres : the periphery ; Genre painting ; Landscapes, still lifes, and nudes -- Chapter 7. Architecture and style. Ideology in stone ; Restoration or revolution? ; "To the golden age of the cathedrals" -- Epilogue : encounter in Berlin -- Postscript on Iraq -- Album of totalitarian art.
Language:
English
Additional Language:
In English; translated from the Russian.
