Document Type
Book Review
Publication Date
10-30-2025
Abstract
"Monographs on the visual culture of the Soviet period are infrequent enough that the appearance of two in one year is a cause for celebration. Chicago University Press has published long-awaited books on El Lissitzky (1890–1941) and Aleksandr Deineka (1899–1969), contemporaries who occupied very different spheres in the early Soviet art system and different niches within the historiography of Soviet art. Designer and architect Lissitzky was an acclaimed member of the international avant-garde, while the figurative painter and graphic artist Deineka is still relatively little known outside the context and cliches of Socialist Realism. Only rarely did their paths cross in the fractious Soviet art world of the 1920s and 30s—they were both members of the October group, for example, the last to embrace pluralistic dissonance before artistic associations were abolished in 1932. But as these books compellingly show, both artists shared a similar desire to invent new visual systems of communication and expression for the Soviet Union’s emerging mass audience. When viewed not as art-world opposites, but as occupying “adjacent and interconnected circles” (Kiaer, 124), Lissitzky’s multimedia experiments and Deineka’s proletarian bodies together offer an expanded field for rethinking Soviet art history."
Recommended Citation
Salmond, Wendy R. “Molding the Mass Viewer: New Insights into the Early Soviet Art System - Samuel Johnson. El Lissitzky on Paper: Print Culture, Architecture, Politics, 1919–1933. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2024. Viii, 240 Pp. Notes. Index. Illustrations. Photographs. $45.00, Hard Bound. - Christina Kiaer. Collective Body: Aleksandr Deineka at the Limit of Socialist Realism. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2024. Xi, 347 Pp. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. Plates. Photographs. Figures. $55.00, Hard Bound.” Slavic Review 84, no. 2 (2025): 377–80. https://doi.org/10.1017/slr.2025.10155.
Peer Reviewed
1
Copyright
The authors
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Included in
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Comments
This is a pre-copy-editing, author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in Slavic Review, volume 84, issue 2, in 2025 following peer review. This article may not exactly replicate the final published version. The definitive publisher-authenticated version is available online at https://doi.org/10.1017/slr.2025.10155.