Socialist Realism in Real Time: Early Soviet Monumental Painting as Proto-Television

• In Event: Radio, Television, Social Media: The Art of Transmission as Liberation

Abstract

This paper analyzes the work of the October Association's monumental painting section. It shows that the members the section, led by the Hungarian émigré artist Béla Uitz, understood monumental painting as a kind of proto-television that offered a “live” broadcast of the experience of the new Soviet reality through its use of color and its proximity to live radio transmissions in public space. It aims to bring to light the importance of the painterly medium to the October Association and begins to elucidate the medium’s impact on early Soviet theories of visual broadcast media, which provided the foundation for what would eventually become concrete televisual transmissions.

Author

• Angelina L