Dimitri Shostakovich

The Language of Repression and Defiance

Shostakovich is forced to compose in a style that

will save his life and keep him from prison or worse.

Instead of exploration into the new directions in

music, Shostakovich must revert to older styles and

conceal his rebellion deep within the music.

Amid the conflicting pressures of official requirements, the mass suffering of his fellow

country men, and his personal ideals of humanitarianism and public service,

Shostakovich succeeded in forging a musical language of colossal emotional power.

His work was described as …

“derivative, trashy, empty and second-hand”

“brutally hammering…and monotonous”

“coarse, primitive, vulgar”

“(His) music quacks, grunts and growls.”

Russian Avant-Garde

An umbrella term to define the wave of modernist art that flourished in Russian between 1890-1930.

Includes suprematism, contructivism, and futurism. Between 1917 and 1932, the avant-

garde clashed with the state-sponsored direction of Socialist Realism.

Marc ChagallThe Wedding

1950

Marc ChagallI and the Village

1911

Propaganda

Constructivists were heavily involved with the Bolshevik public information campaign (1920).

These artists took an artistic outlook aimed to encompass cognitive, material activity, and the

whole of spirituality of mankind.

Suprematism

An art movement focused on fundamental geometric forms, 1915-16

Kazimir Malevich

Black Square

1915

Kazimir Malevich

Black Circle

1915

Kazimir Malevich

White on White

1918

Kazimir Malevich

Supremus No. 58

1916

Wassily Kandinsky

On White II

1923

Constructivism

An artistic and architectural movement in Russia from 1919 to 1934. Dismissed as “pure” art versus art used as an instrument for social purposes. Constructivism

was replaced by Socialist Realism.

Constructivists believed that art should accompany man through all parts of life, not just art for arts sake.

Vladimir TatlinTatlin’s Tower

1919

Proposed Monument to the Third International

Productivism

Art movement founded by a group of Constructivists who believed that art should have a practical, socially

useful role as a facet of industrial production.

1929. Shostakovich, Meyerhold, Mayakovsky and Rodchenko rehearsing Mayakovsky's play

Alexander Rodchenko

Film Poster, 1926

Alexander RodchenkoAn Objectless Composition

1915

Alexander Rodchenko

Stairway, 1930

Rodchenko’s work was abstract to the point of non-figurative, but during the 1930’s, the official party guidelines governing artistic practice forced him to change.

Although he concentrated on sports photography and the like, Rodchenko was expelled in 1931 for “formalism.”

Socialist Realism