Comment by AdamJacobMuller | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AdamJacobMuller | Hacker News Reader

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AdamJacobMuller

> “It is necessary to bear in mind that we are interested in the works of the realist movement,” [...] Kahlo’s Surrealist style was “alien to the principles of Soviet Realist art,” and therefore “the possibility of displaying such artworks in the Soviet Union is excluded.”

Even with my knowledge of how restrictive life is under communist rule I find it incredible that an artwork that was apolitical and relatively tame would just be wholly prohibited from display. Banning things which are considered subversive the the government or things which are seen as contrary to good morals I could understand happening (though I would never agree with it), but, this seems so more deeply restrictive than I imagined life in the USSR was like.

> Of the 300 or so works produced by Kahlo during her short life, more than half are either missing, confirmed to have been destroyed, or in the hands of private parties that refuse to loan them to exhibitions.

That's sad. I hope that statistic is heavily weighted towards private collections.

The Soviets wanted to create a new world in which everything was under control of the Party. Only approved artists were given opportunity to create and exhibit and those who weren't approved or had fallen from the Party's grace were essentially cancelled. If the painting ended up in Poland, it may have made its way from storage into private hands, in Poland or after 1989 in the West.

  artwork that was apolitical and relatively tame

there's no such a thing when your ideology is opposed to freedom. refusing to make art within the norms imposed by the state is an act of defiance and a political statement. putting that art on display would amount to political activism

> I find it incredible that an artwork that was apolitical and relatively tame would just be wholly prohibited from display.

Later times, but abstract expressionism was used as a propganda tool in cold war and propped up by CIA. Nothing apolitical in paint splattered at seemingly random fashion.

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20161004-was-modern-art-...

There is no such thing as apolitical art under communism. All forms of expression are meant to serve the state and to further spread the ideology.

So you get these highly ironic situations where openly pro-communist artists were excluded, just because their particular brand of art was not considered communist enough.

> “As we now know that Moscow did not really esteem the gift of Frida Kahlo’s painting, and found it not worth exhibiting and too expensive to transport,”

Art was extremely political. The Soviets had a robust censorship system about what was to become public art, put in the museum, shown on TV or published in books.

That style of painting would have been considered garish, ugly and decadent. And most of all, if capitalists produced it, enjoyed it or praised it, it became even more unacceptable.

> And most of all, if capitalists produced it ..

Probably worth mentioning that both Frida Kahlo and her husband Diego Rivera were well known members of the Mexican Communist Party and worked together and seperately on Revolutionary murals etc.

She was a friend of Trotsky who was hated enough that they sent an assassin to kill him. And while Frida and her circle were communists, Mexico wasn’t and American “imperialists” seemed to be appreciating the style, which made it even more unpalatable.

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