The Commisars' Art

...As often as I have passed the Buddhas, I am still struck dumb by their sheer power, and among the figurines, I always find something that I had not detected before...

...Was it necessary to exhibit this collection in order to borrow other more worthy exhibitions ? Perhaps...

...Meanwhile, in descriptive statements affixed to the exhibit's walls, the Met speaks of "the establishment of the Ministry of Enlightenment...

...The museum's motives, in any event, remain as baffling as those of its Egyptian sphinx...

...But if Sinyavsky could confront the bear in its lair, it may not be asking too much for the Met, from its palatial security on Fifth Avenue, to moderate its servility to his oppressor...

...Definitely a man of centrist, gradualist instincts, he wants to build a social democracy while loosening some of the state's centralizing powers (if this is possible...

...There is "Putting the Shot," featuring a powerful woman shot putter...

...Only recently, abstract artists had found their work ravaged by bulldozers in Red Square...

...Stalin and Khrushchev, like modern Medicis, are spoken of as patrons of the arts...

...For daring to write this and other truths, Sinyavsky was dispatched to Siberia...

...To make sure you receive your copy of The Alternative regularly (we are rarely found on newsstands), use this handy order form and subscribe today...

...In fact, by revealing what the Soviets think art is--sententious political advertising for the virtues of hard work, patriotism, technology, and the Communist Party--it may even hurt their cause...

...No, what is most disturbing is that the Met seems to be lending its inestimable prestige to the assertion that art is not only possible in a totalitarian system, but can actually thrive there as a result of official effort...

...Savrasov's "Sunset over the Bog" belongs in a travel brochure, Vasnetsov's "Battle of the Scythians and the Slavs" resembles a cowboy and Indian picture in an Arizona county historical society, and Shishkin's "Pine Forest in Viatsk Province" reminds one of the drab reproductions found in dentists' offices...

...In order to reach it, one had to pass through a portion of the ancient Chinese collection, including a room dominated by two enormous statues of Buddha and a room of exquisite animal figurines...

...Hoving, the Met became known for its spectacular "blockbuster exhibitions": the tremendously popular French Impressionist show of 1974, for instance, or the slickly banal "World of Jefferson and Franklin" of the bicentennial year...

...In gushing prose on the "unprecedented creativity and versatility of the avant garde" from 1908 to 1925, it is somehow 22 The Alternative: An American Spectator June/July 1977 omitted that the Party extinguished that remarkable phenomenon and continues to hide its work from the Soviet public to this very day...

...To do less is to perform not only a disservice to the spirit of freedom, but also to the spirit of art itself...

...Its big new exhibit is "Russian and Soviet Painting," and the other night a friend and I attended the opening...

...And once there, it was obvious from overheard remarks that, aside from the portraits of Lenin and Brezhnev, the paintings were well received...

...Meanwhile, Chirac, whether because he senses that this is politically hopeless or undesirable, or because he has fewer anxieties about the need for reforms, is for taking the left head-on with the argument that social legislation in a period of economic difficulty is unrealistic (even if this means losing left-of-center votes...

...Milton Friedman Join Milton Friedman, William E. Simon, Irving Kristol, William F. Buckley, Jr., and thousands of other thoughtful Americans who read The Alternative...

...For calling for prudence in austere times, for warning of the stick-in-the-muddish redistributionist follies of the opposition, Chirac has been called a fascist...

...Dehumanization of the opponent and corruption of the language travel together, as always...

...He needs, therefore, political support from the left-of-center, and is trying to break the rigidity of the left and right...

...Even in its insults, especially in its insults, the French left sticks to its dear old symbols...

...Even his detractors concede Hoving his sophistication, and no one, I think, can imagine that paintings of the quality of most of these would be shown if they had come from any other country (except, presumably, China...

...Of course, the show may merely be sound and fury signifying nothing, anyway...

...Its leadership is littered with classic capitalist establishment types, the chairman of the board being that sturdy pillar of Wall Street, C. Douglas Dillon...

...But the charge is serious...

...But they are all but submerged by innumerable illustrations of quintessential schmaltz...

...And a pair of hagiographical studies of V.I...

...Now, art surely does not require a free society--in fact, most great art has probably been produced under authoritarian regimes--but in a totalitarian system where the aim is to produce a New Man and indoctrination is a chief means to this end, great art is simply abolished to the extent it can be replaced by propaganda...

...After all, a banality so pervasive as to dominate even the paintings' titles ("There Will Always Be Sunshine...

...Who, in the midst of this, could not be awed...

...It is unquestionably the greatest museum in the United States and quite possibly the greatest museum in the world...

...Under its former director, Thomas P.F...

...But what really impresses, of course, is what is inside the edifice...

...it also entails knowing nothing of totalitarianism...

...This is highly unlikely...

...As Sinyavsky put it: The Purpose is an all-embracing ideal, toward which truthfully represented reality ascends in an undeviating revolutionary movement...

...The Alternative is a consistently interesting, thoughtful, and lively magazine...

...Box 877 Bloomington, IN 47401 [] New subscription El Renewal [] One year (10 issues) $10 [] Two years $18 [] Three years $25 [] Payment enclosed [] Please bill me PLEASE PRINT Name Address City State Zip X71 The Alternative: An American Spectator June/July 1977 23...

...The plain fact is that the leaders of the French left need to believe there are fascists abroad in order to justify to themselves and to the electorate the measures they will take to ensure that the right does not get a chance to turn the clock back...

...Nor was all of this in the remote past...

...with long years of imprisonment at hard labor...

...For through the doors and beyond the glorious rotunda always filled with enough fresh flowers for a gangster's funeral, is art so numerous and varied, so staggering in delicacy and power that one is almost forced to entertain the possibility of the eventual salvation of the human race that created it all...

...Could the Met leadership, then, be sympathetic to Soviet ideology and welcome the opportunity to be of some assistance...

...With the twentieth-century paintings, the story is even worse...

...The exhibit begins with a room of fourteenth- to seventeenthcentury religious icons of uneven quality, several truly beautiful but some rather awkward...

...It is nothing but the rancid odor of the cacklings of gloating little commissars, sensing the nearness of the time when their unspeakably boring dreams will become everyone's nightmare...

...And "Higher, Ever Higher" depicting a strapping couple performing work for the motherland on an electrical tower...

...Let Us Plant Gardens," "Under Peaceful Skies," "Toilers of the Mountains," etc., etc., etc...

...Among the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century paintings are a few powerful portraits--an earthy study of one of Peter the Great's drinking buddies, for example, and an oddly affecting Catherine the Great seen as a little old lady--but as time passes the proportion of greeting card scenes, cornball illustrations, and dreary landscapes becomes positively oppressive...

...An enormous singular presence on the rim of Central Park, it confronts the east side of Manhattan with an overwhelming stately grandeur that reduces the facing towering apartment houses to insignificance...

...The implication of this was made clear to me when I revisited the show...

...For despite much talk of periodic cultural "thaws," this after all was a system that rewarded its greatest poet, Mandelstam, with death, that honored its Nobel Prize winning novelists by forcing one, Pasternak, to reject the award and another, Solzhenitsyn, to leave the country, and that rebutted the satire of Sinyavsky and Daniel Thomas Halper is chairman of the political science department at Baruch College in the City University of New York...

...The general p.ublic reception may well be even warmer, for the Met is a legitimating force that has the power to define not only "good art" but " a r t " itself to those thousands of visitors who "don't know anything about art but know what they like...

...It manages to maintain a firm commitment to individualism and freedom without being doctrinaire, boring, or doleful...

...A pair of portraits by the great Serov are lovely, but they are nearly hidden by the surrounding aesthetic debris...

...Please check the appropriate boxes and mall this form to: The AIternative Subscription Department P.O...

...is hard to ignore...

...There is a high wind over the country," announced Mitterrand when the results of the municipal elections came in...

...I had seen the exquisite gold of the Scythian exhibit lent by the Soviets a few years earlier, but I was nonetheless skeptical about this show...

...Is it possible that the powers-that-be at the museum actually thought all this stuff worth exhibiting and considered the editorial remarks mere expressions of a differing, but entirely legitimate point of view...

...Tapestries and urns, medieval gates and jousting armor, sarcophagi and statuary, and, above all, paintings upon paintings upon paintings...

...The New Yorker, for example, called the show "well worth the visit," and the Times pronounced it "not at all negligible" and "a great step forward," singling out a hackneyed illustration of a mound of skulls with a few vultures as "one of the most compelling of all pacifist apologias...

...Lenin...

...What are such dismal paintings and ridiculous Newspeak doing at the Met...

...Yet the press reception, while hardly enthusiastic, was quite respectful...

...tradition of opportunism and pretentiousness, has been trying to introduce some fresh air into French society, and it has been his bad luck to want to improve his compatriots' standard of living during a period of oil crisis and high inflation...

...The Met's leaders, lacking Sinyavsky's literary gifts, can hardly be required to demonstrate their commitment to artistic freedom and integrity in a similar fashion...

...This appears absurd...

...They were simple didactic illustrations, for" the most part, and this naturally has a strong appeal, but what made them "art," I am convinced, is that they hung in the Met...

...What may be most disturbing, however, is not the Met's cynicism or the public's taste for mediocrity or even the fact that the show seems to be taken so seriously...

...By exhibiting these paintings, the Met is placing its imprimatur on them by certifying that they are worth the focus of attention at the nation's greatest museum...

...for either Chirac really is a fascist, willing to overthrow the Republic to block his enemies, or he is merely a "fascist," anything the left is prejudiced against...

...Thomas Halper The Commissars" Art Soviet painting at the Met The Metropolitan Museum of Art is where aspiring sophisticates go to church...

...Certainly, it is hard to see how it could convince knowledgeable people that art can bloom under totalitarianism...

...There is indeed, and he and Comrade Georges Marchais of the Communist Party are well placed to smell what it carries...

...There are a couple of fine Kandinskys, a striking study of a young woman by Bakst, and a few others of geunine interest by such modernists as Malevich, Rodchenko, and Popova...

...With its magnificent da.~sic facade, dozens of intimidating entry stairs, and fountained plaza the length of a football field, the museum is surely one of the most impressive structure~ in a city full of impressive structures...

...having] afforded the artist unique opportunities," of the Soviet effort "to create a revolutionary art for a revolutionary society," of the "traditions of Soviet culture," and so on...

...But committed to his art, he continued to write secretly, even there...

...And a flattering portrait of Chairman Brezhnev...

...But to the mob of visitors around me, these rooms were mere hallways, the Buddhas mere obstacles in their path, the figurines not even noticed, as they pushed on toward the Russian art...

...Believing this not only entails knowing nothing of art...

...To direct this movement toward its end and to help the reader approach it more closely by transforming his consciousness--this is the Purpose of socialist realism, the most purposeful art of our time...

...But if so, the Met has missed the fact that its prestige is such that lending it paintings is a far greater honor for the lender than the borrower...