Revolutsiia Demonstratsiia: Soviet Art Put to the Test

After visiting the small but excellent Soviet art display at the University of Chicago's Smart Museum, I was overwhelmed with the size and variety of the Art Institute of Chicago's exhibit on Soviet art, entitled Revolutsiia Demonstratsiia:  Soviet Art Put to the Test.  Like the Smart Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago has done an excellent job of displaying Soviet artistic trends in all their originality and variety.  After visiting the display, it's difficult not to get a sense of the extent to which artistic innovation was intertwined with political innovation.

The Art Institute has, understandably, created a much more impactful display than its University of Chicago counterpart, if only because its exhibit enormous. The Art Institute's exhibit displays Soviet architectural drawings, magazine covers, avant-garde pieces, theater sets, propaganda posters, furniture, and porcelain figures.  The overall effect is to demonstrate that early Soviet artists were able to experiment with both form and content in the service of the revolutionary impulse.  The exhibit also demonstrates that even totalitarian regimes can continue to generate well-designed art.  Even if Soviet art was often dedicated to the glorifications of party leaders, it remained vital and dynamic.  After its initial burst of creativity, the exhibit suggests that Soviet art seems to have settled down to some relative stable tropes.  These included the importance of ordinary workers to Soviet production, the extent to which women contribute to the efficiency of the economy, the achievement of the Soviet Union in creating a truly multinational or multiethnic political entity, and the omnipresence of technology in the Soviet present.

More than anything, I came away from the Soviet exhibit thinking about the universal nature of creativity.  From an anthropological point of view, all societies seem to generate high quality art. The exhibit's catalog is almost as good as the exhibit itself, and is well-worth the purchase price.  My favorite piece in the exhibit was a chess set that posed villainous bourgeois pieces against heroic, hardworking proletarians.