ArtsNational - Art for the new Russian Society

Already in1917 the leader of the new Bolshevik State, Vladimir Lenin, proclaimed that culture should support political needs, which effectively meant that all culture was now viewed as propaganda. Like Lenin, Trotsky believed that ‘the essence of the new culture will be not an aristocratic one for a privileged minority, but a mass culture, a universal and popular one.’ This lecture will examine the impact of the 1917 revolution on artists and the quest of the new government for a new form of proletarian art. In particular Lenin’s Plan for Monumental Propaganda - a strategy that revolutionary slogans and monumental sculpture as an important means of propagating revolutionary and Communist ideas. In this
lecture we will look at the new role of art and avant-garde artists after the 1917
October Revolution. Was art useful for the socialist revolution or was revolution useful
for art?