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 clichés 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.

What makes these books significant is how successfully they present the totality of two Soviet artists’ careers as each negotiated the heroic revolutionary period’s transition into the Stalinist era. They take us deep into the individual artist’s creative processes, so that the shift from avant-garde to socialist realism—often framed in rather binary terms—is revealed as a complex negotiation, especially in the transitional period of 1928–34, when artists faced new ideological pressures and a more intrusive centralized art system. The authors bring a welcome level of nuance and sophistication to exploring how these artists functioned and how their work reflected a constantly shifting landscape of demands and possibilities. Every facet of their career is treated with equal care to construct a fully fleshed-out picture—the monographic study becomes a portal to the whole era. Each offers crucial insight into the formation and practice of the revolutionary or socially engaged artist who is also an inventor of new communicative systems.

Samuel Johnson’s Lissitzky on Paper: Print Culture, Architecture, Politics, 1919–1933 brings an important new integrative perspective to the career of an artist often treated in terms of a dominant gravitational center, whether the experimental Prouns (“waystations between painting and architecture”) or his visionary Wolkenbügel (horizontal skyscrapers).Footnote ¹ In Johnson’s telling, Lissitzky’s seemingly disparate activities—embracing book design, advertising and print media, photography, exhibition design, and architecture—were in fact part of a continuous and coherent process towards the dematerialization of the book in order to liberate architecture from the page into the world. As the title suggests, for Johnson the paper on which Lissitzky thought through his ideas becomes the connective tissue for his output and the medium for testing his vision of a new Soviet architecture. Each of the book’s six chapters is a link in the chain of this dynamic unfolding towards the goal of a new architectural integration, each link in close dialogue with its successor and each conveyed in a rich sequence of visualizations on paper. The book charts Lissitzky’s successive experiments with the rapidly changing system of modern means of communication, starting with the book and the Proun. In one chapter exhibitions, typography, and the printed page are compared as “spaces of assembly and transmission” (42). In another Lissitzky’s two unbuilt Wolkenbügel are read along two distinct axes—one the constructivist debate around productivism, the other keyed to contemporary western ideas about the mobile viewer’s shifting perceptions and orientation within the city (121). Even when struggling to find his place between warring Soviet art groups or representing their ideas in exhibitions and publications abroad, Lissitzky is seen to have pursued his own continuously evolving thought process, both in individual projects and in collaboration with members of the European avant-garde.

An essential aspect of Lissitzky’s avant-gardism, for Johnson, is his belief that the need to reach a new mass audience required continued experimentation (173). His 1927 essay, “Our Book,” summarizes his thinking around the dematerializing art object—transformed by the exigencies of the new socialist reality—and its role in mediating viewer experience. It tracks the move away from the traditional book to the poster (153), then to the cinema and illustrated weekly for which “the great masses” had become the audience (168). By 1931 Lissitzky writes that, because the illustrated press is closer to film than the book for a semi-literate audience, producing a book is closer to film production than preparing a manuscript for publication. As he explores the expanding world of polygraphy—a term encapsulating all aspects of print media, photography, and photomechanical reproduction—he is constantly alert to forms that change the viewer’s consciousness and feeling, in response to the need to orient within the modern city with its new forms of transportation and mass communication like advertising and film. No matter the medium or technology invoked, Johnson reads images and the spaces that contain them with meticulous care and insight that sets Lissitzky’s more famous projects within a broader context of experiments that gives them their full meaning.

In Christina Kiaer’s Collective Body: Aleksandr Deineka at the Limit of Socialist Realism, another kind of Soviet artist emerges, one for whom inventing a new language for the proletarian body was no less a life’s work than Lissitzky’s desire to replace the book with new, more relevant types of media. Since her first article on Deineka appeared in 2006, Kiaer has championed his distinctive kind of figuration as an alternative path that socialist realism might have taken were it not for Stalinism and the effects of the Terror. She frames her work as an effort to “recover the potential of Socialist Realism as a collective art system” (14) in the face of more recent nationalist efforts to present Deineka as a great Russian master.

Kiaer traces Deineka’s progression from mass media illustrations for the journal Atheist at the Workbench in the mid 1920s through to the monumental paintings that made him an exemplary socialist realist painter from the mid-1930s on. At the end of his life, he would become an inspiration for the Severe Style artists of the 1950s and 1960s, the Soviet answer to Pablo Picasso. Here she wishes to reclaim the early revolutionary force of Deineka’s work as “the inventor of the collective body in Soviet Art.” She shows him drawing on modernist ideas to create a distinctive new language for depicting the workers, sportswomen, and mothers of the new Soviet reality. Contemporary critics sought for new words to register what they saw in his work—from grafichnostʹ and plakatnostʹ to describe his flat style of illustration to lyricism, emotionality, and pafos for his nudes. Kiaer adopts her own set of terms (affective, haptic) to encompass the innovations that made Deineka such a significant model for Soviet art’s potential development.

Kiaer uses her exceptional gift for close looking and probing visual analysis as the principle means of exploring the ineffable quality of collective feeling she discerns in Deineka’s work. The pictures themselves are her primary evidence because, she argues, “We can trust the picture itself” to convey what is needed (182). Informing her argument is the language of affect studies—appealing to the emotions rather than to thought—and “haptic” and “affective” are recurring descriptors for Deineka’s work. Kiaer pays close attention to how workers’ bodies are molded to work (41). Her particular focus falls on women’s bodies, and here she makes one of her primary points, that the emergence of a female proletarian body in Deineka’s work of the 1920s communicated a profound socialist feminism. She reads his lyrical nudes of the late 1920s as resisting an objectifying gaze, through techniques such as cropping and fragmentation. By contrast, the paintings he made of Americans during a 1935 trip reveal the other side of the coin—bourgeois bodies bored and objectified.

Johnson and Kier’s accounts reveal how fervently the search for a new visual language preoccupied Soviet artists across a wide aesthetic spectrum. Despite the obvious differences in style, Lissitzky and Deineka remained committed to the project of a collective viewer experience, their language and mediums evolving and adapting, but holding to the same core truths for as long as they could in the Soviet art system before its centralization under Stalin. Each according to their lights, they deployed the formal devices of modernism (fragmentation, cropping and flattening, dematerialization) and the richness of the polygraphic repertoire as weapons in the fight for a new Soviet art and viewer.

The default mode of Soviet art history has largely been to privilege the heroic revolutionary period and the triumph of the avant-garde. But in these two books we find richer ways to understand how individual artists navigated the pressures of the Stalinist system, what Johnson calls the “ethical gray areas” (187) facing artists who survived the Terror and continued to make work for the state. This is something scholars in the past have struggled to address, but as a central point of rupture and trauma in the history of Soviet art it deserves closer attention and understanding. In Lissitzky’s work under the Stalinist system Johnson finds no meaningful break with his earlier production, nor does he find “the search for one a productive avenue for future research” (187). Far from extinguishing Lissitzky’s distinctive creativity, Johnson shows how his celebrated layouts for the Stalinist propaganda project USSR in Construction utilized all that he had learned about photomontage and photo-painting (fotopisʹ), and the way captions can bring images to life.

But there is a tragic irony in Lissitzky’s claim that “we fought against art … and we got what we wanted,” when in fact, Johnson suggests, “his status as an artist was being instrumentalized in his work for the regime” (182–83). In Deineka’s monumental painting commissions of 1937, Kaier sees “models for reading the Terror symptomatically,” “signs of repressed trauma” and what the “‘affect of fear’ might look like,” felt but not speakable (245). Acquiescing to the new gender and class demands of the mid-1930s, she argues, Deineka nevertheless finds indirect ways to maintain the “lateral interactions” between women that made his earlier work standard bearers for a new proletarian and feminist sensibility.

To read these two finely observed and argued books in dialogue with each other is to see this period through fresh eyes—not siloed along the familiar vertical lines of avant-garde experiment vanquished by socialist realist conformism, but laterally, responding to a shifting variety of what Kiaer calls forcefields, from the strident constructivist camp to the imperatives of the First Five Year Plan. Especially rewarding are the points of contact between figures generally portrayed as restricted within their own group, whether Proletkult types or formalists, productivists, or easelists. The figure of Gustav Klucis appears frequently in both books, for instance, his experiments in photomontage a point of reference for both Lissitzky and Deineka. This is the “laterality,” a collective rather than hierarchical approach that Kiaer advocates for understanding Deineka’s new forms of expression and that can be applied across the board to reanimate the familiar terrain of this period.

Nearly a decade ago, a flurry of international exhibitions marked the centenary of the 1917 revolution in a celebration of the Soviet avant-garde’s achievements. It is perhaps not too soon to be anticipating the centenary of the 1934 declaration of socialist realism a decade from now. In Lissitzky and Deineka we have important examples of survival and adaptation by artists whose lives were committed to the socialist cause of creating a collective proletarian society. More monographs of this caliber are needed, microhistories of what was achieved, what might have been, and what was lost, one artist at a time. In their scrupulous parsing of images, weighing of words by artists and critics, and understanding of art history’s tasks, these books take us back to the work itself, an evolving system of communication within a lateral Soviet art system that was remarkably capacious and interconnected. Nor should we overlook the extent to which each author’s subjectivity might reflect the relevance of Soviet art’s lessons for the present—for Johnson “a precondition for the intelligibility of our own era’s art and architecture” (187), for Kiaer, the “collectivist aspirations of today’s political figuration and social practice art” (x).