Formation of the New Hero Image in Russian Art of the 1920’s and 1930’s

Abstract

The art of the Soviet era attracts more and more attention of researchers and the public year by year. The exhibitions held over the past decades in Russia and abroad, the published monographs dedicated to works of art of the era and particular artists, the international creative contacts in cultural field — all of that has introduced previously unknown works into art history studies, which has allowed to re-evaluate the objectives and tasks of the art of the period and the development of the artistic process in general. That is why it is of great interest to study the ways the plastic arts formed and developed in the 1920’s and 1930’s. The 1917 revolution in its foundations had not just a change in social and political reality, but also a change in the very essence of man. The new era demanded a new hero, shaped his appearance in its works. The soviet man, thought of as a new man, became a fundamentally new object of art. If the 1920’s became the time of the search in proletarian art and the flourishing of avant-gardism, then in the 1930’s the objective of art in building the lifeworld of a new man began to be understood much narrower and stricter, and this Man who perceives art began to be described as a “normal” (that is, average, “ordinary”) consumer of cultural tradition. The “New Man” in the plastic arts of the 1920’s and 1930’s was formed as the new hero of society; avant-garde artists sought his originality in the images of generalized and abstract aviators, peasants, women; artists of socialist realism began to form the images of “typical” heroes of the time (military men, athletes, rural workers, scientists) as new “Renaissance people”, equally ready for work and defense. At the same time, two main tendencies, two directions that correspond to the two tasks of socialist realism, clearly lie in the image of the “new” Soviet man: the depiction of reality (that is, the new Soviet man that really exists) and the depiction of the ideal (that is, the ideal man).