January – April 1992
It was at the first All Union Congress of Writers, held in Moscow in 1934, that Socialist Realism was officially formulated. Its origins were based in 19th century paintings critical of Tsarist society; by the 1930s however, Socialist Realism was a cog in the machinations of the Communist Party, attempting to portray the Soviet Union as free of suffering. Art was to be a servant to the needs of the party, the artist configured as, in Stalin’s words, ‘an engineer of the human soul’.
Engineers of the Human Soul comprises 60 paintings, charting the development of Social Realism across a span of 40 years, moving from primitivism, to Stalinist romanticism, and culminating in the Severe Style of the late 50s and early 60s. The work, which was drawn from private collections in Britain and artists’ studios in the Soviet Union, featured industrial, agricultural, and military subjects, as well as portraits and landscapes.