Art: Red Realism

In heavy silence, thousands of East Berliners last week shuffled through their city’s Pergamon Museum, on Museum Island. On view, guarded by alert People’s Police, were 95 paintings, drawings, and woodcuts by modern and “prerevolutionary” Russian artists, the first big exhibit of Russian art to travel outside the U.S.S.R. since the war.

Only one picture was designed to remind Germans of Big Brother’s big fist. Its title: The End. Subject: Hitler in his last moments in his crumbling Berlin bunker, a drooling, raving maniac surrounded by besotted generals. The rest of the exhibit was thoroughly predictable: noble Lenins, fatherly Stalins, travel-poster vistas of sunny harvest fields, hefty milkmaids, stern-jawed Stakhanovite workers, a tired, heat-racked oldster peering into the furnace glow whose portrait was entitled Esteemed Old Steel Puddler F. I. Sveshnikov. (Not to be confused with Esteemed Steel Puddler of the Hammer and Sickle Works, M. G. Gusarov and His Brigade, which was also on display.) Only occasionally, beneath the pictures’ painful precision and the dutiful glorification of the Soviet paradise, was there a glimpse of real feeling. Warmest and least inhibited were a few animal lithographs, in which furry bear cubs tumbled and played joyously with twigs.

More interesting were the works of Russia’s pre-revolutionary artists. Not so concerned with depicting Utopia, they showed pathetic trains of cold-numbed peasants crossing the steppes on sleighs, a stooped little stoker with immense gnarled hands, weary Volga boatmen, a slushy country road stretching across endless plains.

Before the show moved on to Dresden this week, East Germany’s Premier Otto Grotewohl picked the exhibit’s “best.” His choice: a drab and dreary panel of tea-swigging functionaries, painted by seven artists and called Meeting of the Presidium of the Academy of Science of the U.S.S.R. Declared Grotewohl: “It is colossal.” And so it was—19 ft. 6 in. long by 9 ft. 10 in. high.