Book Discussion: Collective Body: Aleksandr Deineka at the Limit of Socialist Realism, by Christina Kiaer

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Brief Description

Professor Kiaer’s long-awaited book (just out this month from University of Chicago Press) is expected to have a major impact on Soviet art history, offering a critical account of the rise of Socialist Realism in Soviet visual art. Dislodging the avant-garde from its central position in the narrative of Soviet art, Collective Body presents painter Aleksandr Deineka’s corporeal Socialist Realism as an alternate experimental aesthetic that, at its best, activates and organizes affective forces for collective and liberatory ends. The book traces Deineka’s path from his avant-garde origins as the inventor of the proletarian body in illustrations for mass magazines after the revolution through his success as a state-sponsored painter of monumental, lyrical canvases during the Terror and beyond. Collective Body accounts for the way the art of the October Revolution continues to capture viewers’ imaginations today by evoking the liberatory elation of collectivity. In order to highlight the interdisciplinary interest of the book beyond the field of art history or indeed the Slavic field more broadly, I have assembled a group of scholars from the fields of Slavic literature, Russian cinema, and English literature as well as art history, to participate in the discussion.

Sub Unit

• Arts I: Visual Culture, Material Culture, Applied and Fine Arts

Chair

• Adrienn Kácsor, Bauhaus U, Weimar (Germany)

Roundtable Members

• Molly Brunson, Yale U

• Jonathan Flatley, U of Chicago

• Michael M. Kunichika, Amherst College

• Jane Ashton Sharp, Rutgers, The State U of New Jersey

• Emma Widdis, U of Cambridge (UK)