M HKA Ensembles

Article, 25 x 18 x 1.5 cm.

Collection: Collection MHKA, Antwerp.

Iskusstvo (literally: 'Art') was a bi-monthly art magazine and the main publication of the Union of Soviet Artists founded in 1933 after the abolition of all non-official periodical press as a consequence of the April 1932 decree. The volume opens up with an extensive article titled 'Formalism in Painting' by the editor-in-chief and one of the most notorious soviet art critics, Osip Beskin. The most pejorative, but extremely vague term 'formalist' was applied to any artist whose creativity was marked by an aesthetic practice outside of the 'realist' method and devoid of ideological content. Through an analysis of artistic methods of avant-garde artists, such as Kazimir Malevich, Ivan Klyun, NikolaiSuetin, Pavel Filonov, David Shterenberg and others, Beskin concluded that formalist art was in conflict with Soviet socialist reality. According to the critic, it is the different mind-set and the individual language of formalist artists that make them dangerous, as their art may influence the workers’ minds and thus distort their perception of reality. The article is an early example of the stigmatisation of any artistic practices that differed from the Socialist Realism doctrine.