| Chapter : | Introduction |
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The pursuit of cultural history has been greatly aided by a number of key texts from academics including Richard Stites, Katerina Clark, Benedict Anderson and Sheila Fitzpatrick, who have sought to find a way to link together the social and political approaches.54 More recently a younger crop of post cold war historians, such as Benjamin Alpers, Orlando Figes, Amy Kaplan and Francis Mulhern have also understood, and presented, culture as a potential epistemological bridge between society and politics.55 Furthermore, they have aimed if not to redefine the origins and composition of both Soviet and American society (and have certainly not compared and contrasted the two), then to challenge the current orthodoxy. The ambition here is to supplement this work by focusing on the visual arts in the two countries during the 1930s. Many historians of both the US and the USSR have studied the visual arts. Work on the subject can be broadly divided into three categories: meticulously (and often lovingly) researched discussions of artistic trends and aesthetics;56 chronicles of production histories and the politics of art industries;57 and finally, and (in a very general sense) most recently, historians have turned their attention towards more theoretical (and even philosophical) studies of the nature of iconographic representations of myths and the role of cultural producers and their task of injecting approved, authorised Truths into the Soviet and American bloodstream.58
Historically the visual arts have been the most important socio-political art form (from cave paintings to cinema) because, as Chomsky has eloquently pointed out, human beings think most immediately not just in terms of language but also, if not primarily, in terms of visual images.59 Whereas literature lacks a certain immediacy with its readership (it is after all a solitary activity requiring time, commitment and concentration) visual art has the power to trigger a rapid and complete rational analysis of the image in the mind of the viewer or audience member. Just by looking at a picture or watching a film an individual can, potentially, thoroughly absorb its tone, its message, and the message’s consequences, without having to surrender too much time or commitment (and, one could suggest, perhaps even concentration).