Posted by John Wilson on May 30, 2002 at 06:54:41 from 202.154.130.212 user hugo.
The following extract from Chapter 7 of “The Crisis in Russia” (1921) has some sensible conclusions about Artists (obscure) and Officials (controlling):
Arthur Ransome saw two of the five (or four) Bolshevik propaganda trains, the “Lenin” and the “Red Cossack”; the “Lenin” had been painted 1˝ years ago when revolutionary art was dominated by the Futurist movement:
“Every carriage (of the “Lenin”) is decorated with most striking but not very comprehensible pictures in the brightest colours, and the proletariat was called on to enjoy what the pre-revolutionary artistic public had for the most part failed to understand. Its pictures are “arts for arts sake” and cannot have done more than astonish and perhaps terrify the peasants and the workmen of the country towns who had the luck to see them. The “Red Cossack” is quite different.
As Burov put it with deep satisfaction “At first we were in the artists’ hands, and now the artists are in our hands”. A sentence suggesting the most horrible possibilities of official art under socialism, although of course, bad art flourishes pretty well even under other systems”.