Resurrecting Aleksandr Deineka

In order to properly underscore the importance of this exhibition, one might note that it is the first major solo retrospective in Spain of the work of Aleksandr Deineka, one of the most important Soviet artists of the 20th century and the greatest representative of "social realism." This artistic trend was not only official and hegemonic in the USSR and other communist countries, but was also present and prestigious in Western democracies until relatively recently.

Outside Spain, Deineka's work has not been extensively shown, either. And when it was, it was without the ambition or intelligence displayed by the Juan March Foundation's exhibition, which not only brings 250 artworks to the show, but also extensive literature on the painter and his art, as well as provides a selective historical and artistic context to understand the work on display.

But it is not enough to talk about the excellence of this particular exhibition, because there is a bigger picture. Discovering Deineka brings us face to face with an essential part of 20th-century art. For starters, Deineka is part of a broad international movement that flourished in between the two world wars, which was alternately dubbed "realism," "return to order," "neoclassicism" and a variety of other terms. In any case, it was a current with a decisive influence on other avant-garde movements, such as surrealism.

Additionally, the prestige of the October Revolution, which the world saluted as the first step towards the transformation of the old order into a new model for humanity, made eyes turn with anxious admiration to anything produced in the USSR from 1917 onwards, and that included art. Following Stalin's merciless repression of intellectuals' cultural aspirations, the West preserved a cult for the exalted, visionary projects of the quashed Russian avant-garde, whose work was broadly disseminated in the second half of the 20th century. But together with this generalized passion for recovering the memory of this "lost path" of the Russian avant-garde, there was another line of thought that deliberately ignored and scorned any and all artistic manifestations that survived in the USSR.

This is what happened to Aleksandr Deineka (1899-1969), whose unquestionable originality and talent have been systematically denied for decades. As well as unfair, the situation has led us to analyze contemporary artistic reality like a one-eyed man; it is as though we had taken the liberty of ignoring the existence of, say, Hopper, Balthus, Morandi, Spencer, Gutiérrez Solana, Beckmann or Schad, to name just a few of his contemporaries. Some day, when the work of all these artists comes together, we will not only appreciate its interesting conjugation, but also the role and real value of Deineka, who experienced each and every one of the periods - both hopeful and sinister - that made up the astounding communist utopia.

The son of a railroad worker from Kursk, Deineka trained as an artist in Jarkov. The October Revolution placed him at the center of the postrevolutionary artistic debates, and he had first-hand contact with the ideas of the constructivists, productivists and other "-ists" of the Russian avant-garde, which was very legitimately obsessed with finding a new definition and role for conventional artistic activity.

In the second half of the 1920s, Deineka joined a group called OST, an acronym for Society of Easel Painters, an expressive name, especially since the constructivists had demonized this harmless piece of equipment. But what Soviet authorities were wary of was any type of art that escaped political control, as was later demonstrated by the fall from grace of painters and engineers alike. In any case, Deineka's almost unique capacity for survival was not entirely down to his ideological fanaticism or his servile attitude, nor any other type of trick. It was mostly down to his talent for creating a figurative art outside the odious, ultraconservative mold that socialist realism eventually became. And he managed this by sowing doubts among political commissars over whether his own style, deep down, might not be the only genuinely Soviet type of art.

How to retrospectively define that particular style of Deineka's, which reached its peak during the very dangerous decade of the 1930s? In the first place, it is evident that Deineka understood the importance of great mural decorative painting, from the Italian frescoes of the 15th century to Puvis de Chavannes and Ferdinand Hodler. But he modernized everything with a wonderful Art Deco touch and a shrewd grasp of every interesting development in figurative painting of the 1920s.

In my opinion, one of his tools of persuasion was the way he rescued the archaic simplification of the Quattrocento frescoes and their timeless noonday light - by applying the technique to his own work, he brought a solid kind of optimism to his own monumental compositions. But he also added an ideological element that is clearly explained by Boris Groys in the exhibition catalogue: instead of the racial, aristocratic way in which German National Socialists tried to appropriate the historical tradition of classicism, in which the Aryan greatness of the ancient Greeks culminated in the Third Reich, Deineka idealized the proletariat, whose serene beauty was, in principle, within everybody's grasp, even if it was meant to serve the great transformational power of the goddess "Technique."

Deineka's radiant images are filled with young, athletic-looking people bubbling over with decisiveness and joy against a backdrop of factories and sports arenas. And yet the Russian master always managed to slide in a subtle trace of the shadows of real life, a je-ne-sais-quoi of sex and melancholy, and even the odd laugh or two.

Aleksandr Deineka. Until January 15 at Fundación Juan March, c/ Castelló 77, Madrid. www.march.es