Christina Kiaer, "Collective Body: Aleksandr Deineka at the Limit of Socialist Realism" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

episode

New Books in Intellectual History not yet transcribed

▲ 0

Transcript

This episode hasn't been transcribed yet Upvotes decide what gets transcribed next — 0 so far. Sign in to upvote

More from New Books in Intellectual History

Leonhard Emmerling, "The Idiots: The History of the Homo Nullus" (Seagull Books, 2026) 54 min · 09 Sep 2026

Kwame Nkrumah and Pan-Africanism’s High Tide: A Conversation with Howard W. French 48 min · 20 Dec 2025

All episodes from New Books in Intellectual History →

Report any issue

Source

Recorded26 Feb 2025

Publisherfeeds.megaphone.fm

Handlerec:5049936

Show notes

Dislodging the avant-garde from its central position in the narrative of Soviet art, Collective Body: Aleksandr Deineka at the Limit of Socialist Realism (U Chicago Press, 2024) presents painter Aleksandr Deineka’s haptic and corporeal version of Socialist Realist figuration as an alternate experimental aesthetic that, at its best, activates and organizes affective forces for collective ends. Christina Kiaer 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. In so doing, she demonstrates that Socialist Realism is best understood not as a totalitarian style but as a fiercely collective art system that organized art outside the market and formed part of the legacy of the revolutionary modernisms of the 1920s. Collective Body accounts for the way the art of the October Revolution continues to capture viewers’ imaginations by evoking the elation of collectivity, making viewers not just comprehend but truly feel socialism, and retaining the potential to inform our own art-into-life experiments within contemporary political art. Deineka figures in this study not as a singular master, in the spirit of a traditional monograph, but as a limit case of the system he inhabited and helped to create. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Ask this episode

“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.