Komar and Melamid, b. 1943 and b.1945

Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid are widely known as the founders of the Sots Art movement of the 1970s. The two-artist collective satirised official Soviet culture by transforming stereotypes of Soviet propaganda into a new, contemporary artistic language. Works by Komar and Melamid were destroyed by the Soviet authorities at the infamous “Bulldozer Exhibition” held on the outskirts of Moscow in 1974. That same year, Komar and Melamid were expelled from the Moscow Union of Artists, charged with the “distortion of Soviet reality and deviation from the principles of Soviet Realism.”

Since the 1970s, Komar and Melamid have collaborated on various conceptual projects. In the early 1980s, soon after their emigration to the West in 1978, Komar and Melamid began a series of paintings entitled Nostalgic Socialist Realism. This series, which consists of thirty works, reflects its creators’ nostalgia for the lost fictional model of the world created by the Soviet system while simultaneously delivering sharp, critical barbs at Soviet culture.

Lost Paradise is one of the last paintings in the series. It is based on the biblical story of mankind’s fall from grace, the original disobedient act of Adam and Eve and the aftermath thereof. The central idea of the story is that human sin is rooted in mankind’s desire to “be like God” and to have life revolve around its own wishes. Because of the fall, the positive relationship mankind had with God was broken, and all evil and tragedy were explained as a result of this initial act of defiance.

Komar has observed that before the time of Khrushchev, the Soviet populace “believed that the West is Hell and the East is Paradise.” However, during the Khrushchev thaw, when many political prisoners were freed from the Siberian labor camps, some individuals began to understand that the real hell was in the East. Suddenly everything was completely reversed in the minds of the Soviet people, and it was the Western way of life that now became associated with paradise. Likewise, in Lost Paradise Komar and Melamid deconstruct traditional Socialist Realist references and shift contextual meanings.

Although in Lost Paradise Komar and Melamid employed a pompous style reminiscent of that of Socialist Realist paintings, the artists infused the work with parody and irony, juxtaposing incompatible elements and combining figures from Soviet society and biblical imagery. Instead of depicting the canonical Garden of Eden from which the first man and woman were driven because of their breach of divine law, Komar and Melamid feature a typical Russian landscape painted in the nineteenth-century realist mode. In another ironic twist, traditional images of Adam and Eve have been replaced with those of ordinary Soviet citizens. The figures’ sexual encounter on a platform shrouded in drapery reminiscent of a red banner is suddenly interrupted by an approaching angel, seen at the distance and emerging from the glowing divine light. The kitschy quality of the scene challenges the angel’s elevated status. Lost Paradise juxtaposes the sacred and profane, high and low, God and evil. The harsh lighting of the work calls to mind the chiaroscuro of Caravaggio or the use of candlelight in the paintings of Georges de la Tour. The title of the Komar and Melamid work also alludes to the famous poem Paradise Lost (1667) by John Milton.