Art: Bad Breath

Moscow’s Pravda had hounded Soviet writers, painters, composers and architects in turn. Last week the paper got around to art critics. The critics, Pravda barked, had “nothing in their souls but bad breath and inflated conceit … it is imperative to put an end, once and for all, to liberal toleration of all these esthetic cosmopolitans who lack a healthy love of country.”

The way to do it, Pravda grunted, digging deep into the Stalinist lexicon of euphemism, was by—ah, yes!—”ideological demotion.”

As a start, Pravda named nine critics who had made the mistake of criticizing the kind of calendar-art—heavily realistic pictures of Red politicians and soldiers in action—that Soviet bigwigs think uplifting. Some critics, it seemed, had dared to see a little merit in paintings done outside the Russian sphere, which “serve the selfish interests of the bourgeoisie, catering to their decadent and perverted tastes.” And a brave or venturesome man named Byeskin had even found fault with a picture by one Yar-Kravchenko entitled Gorky Reads to Comrades Stalin, Molotov and Voroshilov His Story, “Girl and Death”, which subsequently won a Stalin Prize.

In the face of such unpatriotic—not to say foolhardy—criticism, Pravda finished, “Soviet art stands immeasurably higher than everything produced in the last half-century in the countries of capitalism.”