From Post-Impressionism to WWII Debbie Lewer Artists and intellectuals on the Left across Europe had been inspired

by the revolution in Russia at the end of the war, Soviet culture to the mid-1920s, and their own hopes for the revolutionary potential of art. However, by the mid1930s, evidence of the regimentation of Russian culture under Stalin, the campaign against formalism, and events such as the show trials of prominent Figure 5 The interior of the Great German Art Exhibition, Munich, 1937. (Photo by author from Kunst im Dritten Reich [Art in the Third Reich], no. 9, 1937.) Figure 6 The House of German Art, Munich, 1937. (Photo by author from Kunst im Dritten Reich [Art in the Third Reich], no. 2, 1938.) 235 intellectuals and activists (in Moscow in 1936 8) increasingly convinced Western observers of the repressive nature of Stalinism. In America especially, many Marxist intellectuals who remained committed to their envisioning of the revolut ionary function of the artist and writer became attracted to the ideas of the exiled Leon Trotsky.16 Indeed, Greenberg traced the development of American abstract painting to the Trotskyite context: Some day it will have to be told how anti-Stalinism which started out more or less as Trotskyism turned into art for art s sake, and thereby cleared the way heroically for what was to come. 17 Trotsky had been a leading figure in the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 and subsequent Russian politics; he was People s Commissar of War from 1918 to 1925, before fiercely opposing Stalin in 1925 7, for which he was persecuted and deported. In peripatetic exile, he continued to condemn Stalin and Stalinism and , in the 1930s, Nazism. Instead, he urged freedom for art and new impetus not least from artists and writers for the continuation of the true revolutionary movement. It is easy to see the appeal these ideas had for cultured left-wing intellectuals; art and revolution were to be mutually empowering and liberating. As Trotsky wrote in his letter to the founding conference of the Fourth Internat ional: Only a new upsurge of the revolutionary movement can enrich art with new perspectives and possibilities . . . Poets, artists, sculptors, musicians will t hemselves find their paths and methods, if the revolutionary movement of the masses dissip ates the clouds of scepticism and pessimism which darken humanity s horizon today.18 By 1938, just before the outbreak of World War II, Trotsky was in exile in a suburb of Mexico City, where he was later assassinated by an agent of Stalin. He had been staying in accommodation provided by the painters Frida Kahlo and her husband Diego Rivera,19 when Andre Breton, an avid admirer of Trotsky, came there on a visit. Trotsky did some cursory preparatory reading before receiving the Surrealist, including of Breton s First Surrealist Manifesto (see Part I).20 A result of their several meetings, not all harmonious, was another manifesto, Towards a Free Revolutionary Art, published in the New York Partisan Review in that year at the height of the journal s Trotskyite period and in London soon after, and reproduced here. The text was primarily Trotsky s, but he thought it expedient to substitute Rivera s name for his own for publication. Attributing the intolerable situation for art and science to the unholy alliance of reactionary politics with the arsenal of modern technology, the manifesto opposes its visions of a vital, true, revolutionary art to the servile , degraded, palliative, and mercenary profession under both Hitler and Stalin. The analogies with psychoanalysis, the emphasis on creative subjectivity in the constant flowering of the powers of the interior world . . . common to all men and the insistence that the imagination must escape from all constraint

are where the influence of Breton is perhaps most discernible. For his own part, Trotsky admired Freud, but was skeptical about the Surrealists s approach to 236 psychoanalysis, asking whether it was not an attempt to smother the conscious under the unconscious. 21 The manifesto also, significantly, argues not only for socialism, but also for anarchism as the crucible for creativity. In the event, the envisaged International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Art was never realized, but the text s significance for the period s cultural politics lies in its attempt to delineate an art of, simultaneously, freedom and engagement. The last essay in this section, Boris Groys s The Birth of Socialist Realism from the Spirit of the Russian Avant-Garde, deals with the situation for the arts in Soviet Russia as, already in the 1920s, the avant-garde came to be seen as eliti st and therefore counterrevolutionary, and then as, after 1934, Socialist Realism w as imposed as the official aesthetic (the conditions of which Trotsky and Breton so despaired). Groys s work in the field of Soviet studies and art history is known i n particular for the revisionist argument he proposes here and elsewhere; namely that the monumental, heroic aesthetic of Soviet Socialist Realism represents not the regression to traditionalist kitsch, overpowering an innocent avant-garde, as it has often been understood in the West, but in many ways, can be seen as proceeding from the avant-garde s methods such as those of Constructivism and Suprematism and even succeeding where the latter had failed, to achieve the elimination of boundaries between art and life and a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk or total work of art.22 As such, Groys challenges the false perspective of the museum exhibition from which he argues the avant-garde and Socialist Realism have been unhelpfully seen.23 In so doing, Groys also complicates accounts that throw Socialist Realism into the same pot as Russian nineteenth-century realism (which includes Greenberg s Kitsch arch-villain Repin), or indeed as the official art of Nazi Germany. Though Groys s argument is controversial, and indeed employs its own generalizations that can be seen as problematic, his essay offer s a new perspective on Socialist Realism as well as on the political role of the a vantgarde in a wider sense, the failure of which, as Groys casts it, echoes Burger s diagnosis of the historical avant-garde. Groys is writing from a different persp ective, but, notably, he expresses in common with Burger ambivalence about the desirability and even viability of the autonomy of the artist and the work of ar t in the face of political reality. Thus, in Groys s account, inevitably, the avant-garde artist, having negated the autonomy of art, ends up himself subordinated to political reality. Notes 1 Williams, who died in 1988, was a well-known and prolific writer on Marxism an d literature and the broader sociology of culture. 2 See Jurgen Habermas, Modernity: An Incomplete Project, in Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (London: Pluto Press, 1985), pp. 3 15; European Avant-Garde: New Perspectives, ed. Dietrich Scheunemann (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000); Richard Murphy, Theorizing the Avant-Garde: Modernism, Expressionism, and the Problem of 237