Soviet Union art comes to Midwest

PEORIA, Ill. -- Call it a glimpse of a lost world, a world that never was but remains still, preserved in oil and canvas -- a world of workers united and equal, struggling to build a new society of justice and peace.\nSuch was the Soviet Union's official view of itself in state-sanctioned artwork created between 1917 and 1991, a selection of which goes on display in "Behind the Iron Curtain: Russian Impressionism," which opened recently at Lakeview Museum of Arts and Sciences.\nThe exhibit is testimony to the power of art -- and the eagerness of revolutionary leaders to use that power to help build a new kind of society. It is also testimony to the resilience of the artists themselves, who managed to create notable work even within the rigid strictures of a totalitarian state that banned abstraction and other forms of nonrepresentational 20th century art.\n"There is a widespread belief that 20th century Russian art is somehow limited to only two-story high portraits of Stalin, Marx or Engels and the Communist Party leadership -- or it is limited to the assumption that Russian creativity ceased with the Russian avant-garde period, which is generally considered the 1910s and the 1920s," said Brad Shinkle, president of the Bloomington, Minn.-based Museum of Russian Art, which loaned the paintings to Lakeview.\n"While we acknowledge that cult art -- that is, portraits of the founders of the Russian Revolution -- certainly existed, what people don't generally realize is the breadth and depth of artistic variety that was created by the very same country that supported Mikhail Baryshnikov, that supported, trained and provided an international reputation for (Dmitri) Shostakovich in symphonic music or (Aleksandr) Pushkin in literature. Russian and Soviet graphic art is every bit as deep and broad as Russia's artistic accomplishments in the other areas of the fine arts."\nExamples of such accomplishments generally have been inaccessible in the United States until the creation of Minnesota's Museum of Russian Art in 2001, Shinkle said. Thanks to the more open atmosphere created by perestroika, international art dealer Raymond E. Johnson and his wife, Susan, amassed 14,000 officially sanctioned, Soviet artworks created between the Revolution and the breakup of the Communist empire.\nThe Museum of Russian Art borrows freely from this extensive collection. Lakeview is exhibiting 54 paintings through a special arrangement with the Minnesota museum, Shinkle said.\nThe paintings create the uncanny illusion that art history stopped just a few years into the 20th century, that the visual revolution inaugurated by Picasso and others never happened. The images are a straightforward, if idealized, representation: a robust worker scales a telephone pole in Fedor V. Shapaev's "Collective Farm Electrician" (1964); the steady gaze of a woman with a stethoscope meets the eye of the viewer in Oksana D. Sokolovskaya's "The Doctor" (1960); a smiling farmer leans against a farm machine in Konstantin Maksimov's "Finished Plowing" (1955).\nOne of the most daring images in the show is Vladimir F. Stozharov's "The Last Sunbeam" (1972), which is almost a straight imitation of Claude Monet's studies of haystacks. Although rules for making art were never codified, Soviet artists knew better than to depart from the ideals of socialist realism, which stressed uplifting highly realistic artwork that celebrated Communism and which could be easily understood by the masses, said Kristan McKinsey, Lakeview's vice president of art and collections.\nMany Marxist philosophers considered modern art a symptom of Western decadence and decline -- and such assertions became new clothing for an even older Russian distrust of outsiders.\nThe exhibition runs through Nov. 6.