Title of the article:

PUBLIC ART AS A FORM OF VISUAL SUBLIMATION OF POWER

Author(s):

Marina E. Vilchinskaya-Butenko

Information about the author/authors

Marina E. Vilchinskaya-Butenko — PhD in Pedagogy, Associate Professor, Saint Petersburg State University of Industrial Technologies and Design, Bolshaya Morskaya St., 18, 191186 St. Petersburg, Russia. ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8874-4527. E-mail: marina.gutd@gmail.com

Section

History of Arts

Year

2021

Volume

Vol. 59

Pages

pp. 330–342

Received

April 13, 2020

Date of publication

March 28, 2021

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.37816/2073-9567-2021-59-330-342

Index UDK

7.036.1

Index BBK

85.7

Abstract

Public art of the USSR and Mexico during the 1920s and early 1950s was chosen as the object of research. Both powers saw public art, especially frescoes, as the most direct and appropriate way of expressing a new revolutionary system of values, and considered it an ideal medium for creating metahistory. Established chronological framework is determined by the fact that during this period, similar changes took place in a political structure of both countries, which led to a transformation of the understanding of artistic production. The author highlighted the relationships between socio-political transformation of images in Mexican muralism and Soviet socialist realism of the 1920s and 1950s (prior to the period of Soviet modernism); she also identified the relationships between the system of images and their influence on the viewer and detected stylistic similarities and differences between both artistic trends, bearing in mind historical and political differences. Similarities in the relations of art and power in Mexico and the USSR manifested in redefining the structures of power; rethinking the concept of the nation and history; recreating the past and controlling it to build the future; rejecting contemporary trends in art of that time and turning to didactic art to educate people and transmit the ideals of the new state. They were also displayed in artistic legitimization of the new political order and creation of public art through appealing to a complex of beliefs, feelings, universal images and fetishes be revered and turned into national cults.

Keywords

public art, socialist realism, Mexican muralism, mural, mosaic, monumental art of the USSR.

References

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