Komar and Melamid

Carter Ratcliff, Komar and Melamid, New York: Abbeville Press Publishers, 1988, p.140, No.130 ill.

A-Ya (Unofficial Russian art Review), 1986, No.7, p.19 ill.

Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid are most widely recognized as the originators of the Sots Art movement in the 1970s. During the 1980s, they started developing the Nostalgic Socialist Realism series, in which the artists satirized Soviet culture by adopting the ideological style of Socialist Realism, founded on a spirit of unfailing optimism.

In What Is to Be Done? Komar and Melamid sarcastically mimic the ideal exemplars of the New Soviet Man, selflessly devoted to the goal of building the bright Communist future. The painting alludes to Soviet political art that relentlessly emphasized the intense effort required to achieve the paradise said to await the Soviet people. With his stressed upward movement, heroic pose, and pointing to a ceremonial red curtain, the worker signifies the New Soviet Man of the Stalin era, a perpetual builder of Socialism. The colour red is resonant in associations both political (left-wing politics, Soviet political posters) and religious (Russian Orthodox icons).

In Soviet art and literature, ideas concerning the development of human nature were expressed in various formulations of the New Soviet Man. The concept of the New Man originated as a literary device in the work of the Russian revolutionary democrats of the 1860s. The New Man came to personify political ideals whose purpose was to demonstrate exemplary behaviour and attitudes. Nikolai Chernyshevsky articulated these notions in his novel What Is to Be Done? (1863), which includes characters whose conduct, habits, and relationships comprise a comprehensive value system. The title—a question perennially posed by Russians since the appearance of Chernyshevsky's work—was later used by Leo Tolstoy and Lenin. It served as the title of Tolstoy's non-fiction work dedicated to the social conditions of the Russia of his day (1886), while Lenin used it as the title of his most important book, on the tactics of the future Bolshevik Revolution (1902). In Komar and Melamid's painting, a teenager standing next to the worker holds a book containing this title. The two heroes of What Is to Be Done? address the famous question with a grandiosity that promises much idealistic fervour but few concrete accomplishments.

We are grateful to Dr Alla Rosenfeld for writing the note for this lot.