Summary of Totalitarian Art
A defining feature of totalitarian rule is that it imposes rule by force and by ideology. Art and culture play a decisive role in facilitating the latter. These regimes - five in the modern era: fascist Italy and Germany; and communist Soviet Union, China, and North Korea – tend thus towards art whose message is unequivocal and direct, with Socialist Realism and Neoclassicism the dominant styles. Often dismissed as kitsch by modern commentators and artists, Totalitarian Art is derided chiefly because it sits in diametric opposition to the cherished contemporary Western values of freedom of imagination and expression; values that are taken as given by artists living and working in democratic societies. A salient demand of Totalitarian Art is that it functions as propaganda, a necessary tool of all regimes whose job it is to disseminate the official ideology and to manipulate the emotions (such as hate or pride) of its citizens. Propaganda also works in support of the “cult” of the leader who is typically framed as the heroic Savior of the reborn nation. Totalitarian Art is thus associated with utopian ideals and illusions that distract from a political backdrop of oppression and human rights abuses.
Key Ideas & Accomplishments
- Socialist Realism and Neoclassicism are the preferred modes of art in totalitarian states. The former, unambiguously direct in its message, serves to glorify ordinary workers and military personnel. The latter, especially in respect of its architectural design, links the state to the timeless values of the ancient civilizations of Greece and Rome. It is common for these two genres to exist side-by-side.
- Propaganda is used by all countries, especially at times of national crisis (such as war). But totalitarian regimes employ propagandist art as a matter of daily routine. Its primary function is to inhibit independent thought - it instructs the public “what to think” rather than encourage them “how to think”. Propaganda uses art, print media, radio, film, (and latterly, television, and social media), to keep its citizens in line with state ideology.
- Totalitarian Art is closely knitted with the phenomenon of the “cult of personality”. All totalitarian leaders, - Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Il-Sung - use art and mass media to propagate idealized, heroic, quasi-religious images of themselves. Art is used to legitimize their rule and to magnify their power.
- While it is true that Socialist Realism and Neoclassicism are the dominant modes of Totalitarian Art, there are examples that, while remaining thematically consistent with the official dogma, have been tolerated, in the short-to-medium term at least, by the incumbent regime. The Futurists in Italy, the Constructivists in the Soviet Union, and the Chosunhwa genre in North Korea are some more adventurous styles that were supported in by the state.
Overview of Totalitarian Art
The historian Igor Golomstock writes, “Totalitarian Art is, after modern art, the second international style of 20th century culture”.
Progression of Art
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin
In this portrait, Stalin is depicted in a three-quarters semi-profile pose. He is stood behind a table, warmly addressing (and half-smiling at) a gathering, possibly Communist Party officials, who are outside the pictorial frame. The work’s perspective requires that the viewer look up slightly, as if placed within the reverential audience, listening as Stalin reads from the pamphlet he holds in his right hand. The color palette of warm browns and reds, infused with light from the left, emphasizes his stature. Outlined against the red curtain, Stalin radiates a kind of paternal benevolence. The work was chosen as the official state portrait, in part because of its aura of warm sincerity.
In this portrait, Stalin is dressed in his trademark military-like tunic (widely known as the “Stalin tunic”). The tunic alluded to Stalin’s position as Vladimir Lenin’s rightful heir. The latter had adopted the uniform of the “french”, named after British field marshal John French, and as worn by the Imperial Russian Army in World War I. However, the “Stalin tunic” is modified by removing the two lower pockets and softening the turned-down collar, according to his own preferences. This portrait was mass reproduced and displayed in public places. Although members of the public weren’t required to hang a copy of his portrait in their living quarters, many did. In Imperial Russia, people often had what was called “a red corner” in their home where they would display sacred icons such as the Virgin Mary or the Saints. This portrait of Stalin took on a similar iconographic purpose. The “french” style tunic, meanwhile, was later worn by communist leaders in China and North Korea.
In 1937, Brodsky submitted a new portrait of Stalin, As the Russian Museum writes, “It is presumed that this portrait was submitted for a closed competition among the most authoritative Soviet artists. […] Brodsky’s work was criticised for being too cold and for showing excessive naturalism in its detail which, in actual fact, were particular traits of the official works of this master: it lent them a near-photographic, documentary accuracy that conflicted with the canons of Socialist Realism, according to which depictions of Stalin were to arouse reverence and near-filial love. [In the new submission] the image clearly lacked the requisite sense of warmth, which aroused the dissatisfaction of the commission in charge of the competition”.
Oil on canvas - State Museum and Exhibition Center ROSIZO, Moscow
Profilo Continuo Testa di Mussolini (Continuous Profile of Mussolini)
Although this bust resembles a chess piece, the original sculpture was some thirteen inches high and almost eleven inches in width (at its widest point). Mussolini’s profile is reduced to its most distinguishing features – the cap he often wore, his “Roman nose”, strong chin, and wide lips – so that it is identifiable at any point of 360 degrees. Art historian Ara H. Marjian writes, “The leader’s visage appears doubled, facing in opposite directions, from nearly any angle. Throbbing yet utterly still, the sculpture conjures up at once the gyration of some mechanical contrivance and—equally apparent to an Italian public—ancient depictions of Janus (the Roman god of beginnings, transitions, and time itself)”.
Bertelli became famous for this work. As art historian Marco Moretti wrote, “The specific morphology of the Continuous Profile, consisting in the superimposition of circles whose protrusions form solids-voids in which one can discern a stylized profile ... originated as a highly idiosyncratic reinterpretation of Boccioni's Futurist principles revisited through a static déco form”. Moretti adds that if we examine the bust “in the proper light at eye level, we will note that the static nature of its mass tends to become lighter and lighter until we are under the illusion that it is revolving in space, emanating the dynamism that we intuit in [Umberto] Boccioni's rounded forms from every point of its protruding surfaces”.
The work bears an inscription, “Bertelli R.A. XI”, which refers to the sculptor’s name and Year Eleven (in Roman numerals), the length of Mussolini’s rule to date. With the Fascist leader’s approval (the bust confirmed Mussolini's vision of himself, and Italy, as a technological and cultural pioneer) Bertelli took out a patent on the sculpture and sold it to a manufacturer who mass produced it in different sizes. Bertelli also continued to make signed reproductions from the original terracotta to aluminum. During the war, after Mussolini was overthrown by his former colleagues in the Fascist government in 1943, and following his death at the hands of Italian partisans in April 1945, many of the pieces were destroyed, often by the liberating Allied forces. Some pieces did survive, however. One such piece was owned by photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, who created his own rotating Self-Portrait in 1985. The Anglo-German sculptor Tony Cragg also took inspiration from Bertelli, in works such as Constant Change (2005).
Terracotta - Imperials War Museums, London
The Four Elements (Fire, Water and Earth, Air)
Adolf Ziegler’s The Four Elements: Fire, Water and Earth, Air, holds the dubious distinction of taking pride of place in Adolph Hitler’s Munich apartment (where it was hung above the fireplace). Ziegler had joined the Nazi party in the 1920s and soon became Hitler’s advisor on matters of fine art. When the Nazi Party came to power in 1933, Hitler promoted Ziegler to the position of Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. Three years later, he was made President of the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts (Reichskammer der bildenden Künste). In this role, Ziegler took charge of all aspects of the visual arts under the Third Reich. As its title indicates, the women are the personifications of the four elements: The woman on the left carries a torch (“fire”). Water is represented through a small bowl. Earth is signalled by the sheaf of wheat. To represent air, finally, Ziegler shows a slight breeze flowing through the hair of the figure on the right.
Like other Nazi sanctioned art, the work is not overtly political but rather promoted the values of the regime. Hitler saw Greek and Roman culture as the pinnacle of cultural achievement, with the triptych format, which evoked the great altarpieces of the Renaissance, giving the painting a spiritual significance. The women, rendered in a seamless academic style, function here as a metaphor for the essential elements that (according to Ancient Greek philosophy) made up the universe, and which underpinned the values of classical civilization. The representation of such idealized body types was also meant to stir sexual desire in the male viewer, and desirability among female viewers, thereby encouraging procreation and a steady supply of children for the new Reich. This might account for the inclusion of pubic hair that renders the women more human than the “hairless” goddesses of antiquity. Historian Laura Morowitz writes, “Women’s highest role in Nazi society was to be the bearers of as many children as possible and thus to continue the Aryan master race. […] It is hardly an accident that all of the women are blonde and Nordic types, reflecting Nazi belief in racial superiority of the Germans. In this way even subjects seemingly far removed from political content nevertheless bear the stamp of Nazi ideology”.
Triptych, oil on canvas - Modern Art Collection, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Germany
Worker and the Collective Farmer (Worker and Kolkhoz Woman)
Worker and the Kolkhoz Woman is a 24.5-meter (80 ft) tall stainless steel monument created by Vera Mukhina for Boris Iofan’s soaring façade at the Soviet pavilion at the 1937 Paris World's Fair. A man, the Worker of the title, holds a hammer aloft, while the Kolkhoz Woman holds up a sickle. They are united in their surge forward. The work is an early example of Socialist Realism, but the movement of the figures, the swirling arabesques of the woman’s skirt, and the scarf flailing behind her, draws upon the Art Deco style, as does, indeed, the use of polished, highly reflective stainless steel. The pair were, as historian Patrica Manos, notes, “one of the most recognizable couples of the 20th century [and] well-known to anyone who ever watched a movie produced by Mosfilm after 1947”. (Mosfilm, the oldest Russian film studio founded in 1920, began using the image its logo in 1947.) A kolkhoz was the name for a communal farm. Organized as a productive cooperative, the kolkhoz replaced the hierarchal feudal system after the October Revolution of 1917. The sculpture brings together industrial and agriculture work, as well as equalizing the roles of men and women in the workforce. As Manos writes, “[the sculpture] underscores the artist’s investment in instilling in the viewer a sense of awe that extends beyond Soviet technological development under the ongoing Five-Year Plan” (Stalin’s timescale for turning the Soviet Union from an agricultural society into an industrial superpower).
Mukhina drew upon classical Greek sculptures for inspiration, including Winged Victory of Samothrace (ca 200-190 BCWE), and Harmodius and Aristogeiton (ca. 477-76 BCE), as she worked with Boris Iofan to realize his vision for the Soviet pavilion. As Mukhina said, her intent was “to continue the idea inherent in the building, and this sculpture was to be an inseparable part of the whole structure”. Anna Bogoyavlenskaya, a telephone operator, was the model for the woman, while the man was more piecemeal in conception. As The Moscow Times reported, “his face was modeled after Sergei Kasner, a metro worker; his torso was based on that of ballet dancer Igor Basenko; and other parts of his body came from ironworker Nikolai Vasilievich”.
This is thought to be the first ever welded sculpture, its steel plates welded together on top of a wooden frame. It was created in a Moscow factory over a period of several months and, on completion, was personally inspected by Stalin. Once in place at the World’s Fair, the sculpture made an immediate impression on Pablo Picasso who said, “How beautiful the Soviet giants are against the lilac Parisian sky”. Although she initially studied art in Paris, where she worked with Jan Metzinger and Henri Le Fauconnier, Mukhina turned to Socialist Realism after the Revolution. Initially, she worked on Lenin’s plan to make city monuments, such as Liberated Labor and Revolution (1919). By the early 1920s she had become the leading sculptor of Socialist Realism. Mukhina was awarded the Stalin Prize in 1941, and named “People’s Artist of the USSR” in 1943. She would be awarded the Stalin Prize on four more occasions before her death in 1953. The sculpture continues to be a symbol of Russian pride. A celebration, including fireworks, marked the unveiling of the restored monument when it was placed at VDNKh Park, the all-Russian Exhibition Centre, museum, and recreational complex, in Moscow, in 2009. The statue was also featured in the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.
Stainless steel on a wooden frame - VDNKH, Exhibition of Achievements of National Economy, Moscow
Courtyard of Honor, New Reich Chancellery
This photograph shows the Courtyard of Honor at the New Reich Chancellery in Berlin. Its classical simplicity conveys the (false) impression of an impenetrable military bastion. Commenting on this photograph, art historian Bernard Leitner wrote “Four columns form the entrance symbolically, accentuating the single entrance door. Final. Majestic. No windows. No view in either direction. Rejecting. ‘Simple’ and ‘discreet’—to let the emblem of Hitler’s Reich work: silent symbol of dominating brutality. But the composition would not be balanced without the two soldiers dressed in black uniforms. The ‘simplicity’ of this architecture emphasizes the importance of those soldiers. On the other hand, the passionless, cold, inhuman character of the entrance is emphasized by two frozen human bodies. A refined, artful, diabolic feedback in scale. An architectural masterpiece for Hitler. With Speer’s unpolitical, purely architectural talents”.
Complaining that the existing Reich Chancellery of Imperial Germany was only “fit for a soap company”, Hitler assigned the task of building the new Chancellery, adjacent to the old building (which was used subsequently as a residential block), to his favorite architect, Albert Speer. No expense was spared in the construction, with some 4500 workers completing the new Chancellery within a year. A proud Speer described his finished project thus: “an arriving diplomat drove through great gates into a court of honour. By way of an outside staircase, he first entered a medium-sized reception room from which double doors almost seventeen feet high opened into a large hall clad in mosaic. He then ascended several steps, passed through a round room with domed ceiling, and saw before him a gallery 480 feet (150 m) long. Hitler was particularly impressed by my gallery because it was twice as long as the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Hitler was delighted: ‘On the long walk from the entrance to the reception hall they'll get a taste of the power and grandeur of the German Reich!’”.
The New Reich Chancellery was destroyed during the Battle of Berlin, as German troops fought the Russian Army. Hitler, along with other leading party officials, cowered in the Führerbunker, in the grounds between the two buildings, where they committed suicide. Andrea Gromyko, a Red Army soldier, described what he found amongst the ruins: “All around lay heaps of crossbeams and overhead covers, both metal and wood and huge pieces of ferro-concrete. On both sides of a narrow corridor, there were certain cells, all eroded by explosions. […] All this produced a grim and distressing impression. If photography of this underground citadel of Hitler existed, they would become a proper illustration to Dante's [nine circles of] Hell; just select which circle”.
Limestone - German Federal Archive, Berlin
Apotheosis of Fascism (detail)
Apotheosis of Fascism was Luigi Montanarini’s first state commission, a remarkable honor for a young artist who had had no previous experience of monumental muralism. The Foro Mussolini (Mussolini’s Forum), conceived of in the late 1920s by Renato Ricci, president of the Opera Nazionale Balilla, was the flagship architectural project of Mussolini’s rule. The open-air plaza, recalling those at the heart of public life during Roman antiquity, was surrounded by civic and public buildings, churches, covered walkways and arcades. It also boasted an elite sports complex built to support a (failed) bid by Rome to host the 1940 Olympics. Montanarini’s mural was positioned in the grandiose Aula Magna, a major conference and presentation center. The Aula Magma was positioned, according to Italian history specialists, Carter and Martin, “in the most important room of the most important building at what at the time was one of the most important Fascist sites in Rome (and by extension Italy)”. The mural itself “would occupy the most important wall, behind the dais for speakers and honoured guests”.
Apotheosis of Fascism, which reworks Giotto’s depiction of Christ and his disciples in the fresco, The Last Judgement (1304-13), in the Arena Chapel in Padua, shows a crowd of Mussolini’s “disciples” rapt in his of his presence. Mussolini stands on a draped red banner of rug featuring the Roman eagle, draped over a marble altar. Il Duce is here treated as the divine Savior of Italy. In the lower left foreground, Montanarini depicts Communism in the figure of a dead warrior. With serpents for hair, he has been slain by the semi-naked soldier who holds the fascist flag aloft. Italian warplanes fill the sky above warships as a winged Victory (or winged Nike, the goddess who heralds victory) signals the rebirth of the Roman Empire.
Carter and Martin write, “The Apotheosis survived the brief flurry of iconoclasm that accompanied the fall of Mussolini in 1943, when crowds particularly targeted images and statues of the fallen dictator. It also survived the Allied occupation following the liberation of Rome in June 1944, when the Foro Italico – hastily renamed in 1943 – functioned as a US army rest centre. The Aula Magna became the officers’ lounge with the Apotheosis initially serving as an incongruous backdrop to a music stage The survival of the mural – and, indeed, of all the overtly Fascist elements of the Foro Italico, which remained an American base until 1948 – contrasts with the situation in occupied Germany after 1945, where ‘[The] Western Allies eradicated ‘Nazi art’ and excluded all military subjects or themes that could have military and/or chauvinist symbolism from pictorial representation’”. The mural remained hidden from public view (behind a curtain) until 1996 when Rome’s department of Environmental and Architectural Heritage decreed that the fresco should be uncovered for “purposes of restoration and display” in the original conference room.
Fresco - Conference room, Foro Italico, Rome
Moscow State University
This 36-floor skyscraper dominates Moscow State University, its wings extending horizontally to define the complex’s courtyard, while its central tower ends in a spire topped with a five-pointed star. At the base of the central tower, the main entrance, with its Neoclassical portico, its large columns in variegated stone, and its entablature with two friezes, evokes the entrance to a secular temple. Rather than figures from history, the friezes show valiant Soviet workers, men and women, often in family groups engaged in a variety of professions; from farmers to construction workers; to teachers; to builders. The entrance is topped by a statue honouring Lenin, as he is depicted in profile on a medallion at the center of a display of lances shrouded with flags. The grandeur of the building was emphasized by its location, along the Moskva River in Sparrow Hills, at the time named Lenin Hills. The site was the highest point in Moscow and also a place of great significance to Russian culture. Built of reinforced steel, and using thick concrete for ceilings and foundations, the building was the tallest in Europe for decades, and remains the world’s tallest educational building to this day.
This was the first of the so-called “Seven Sisters”, the name given to seven skyscrapers built in Moscow between 1947 and 1953. Prior to the German invasion in 1941, Stalin planned to have the Soviet Union’s first skyscraper built in Moscow, but the materials that would have been needed to build the Palace of the Soviets were redirected to the city’s defense. Following the war, Stalin announced, “We won the war ... foreigners will come to Moscow, walk around, and there are no skyscrapers. If they compare Moscow to capitalist cities, it's a moral blow to us”. The other Sisters were hotels or residential towers, often assigned elite housing status. Moscow State University was built remarkably quickly (as were the other Sisters) as much of the work was done by thousands of Gulag prisoners. As Alexander Dobrovolsky wrote, “In the Gulag system, there was a ‘Construction-560,’ which was transformed in 1952 into the Department of the ITL of the Special District (the so-called ‘Stroylag’), the contingent of which was engaged in the construction of a university high-rise [the] number of prisoners in Stroylag reached 14290 people”.
Stalin chose from a new generation of emerging but accomplished architects. Lev Rudnev was awarded this project, and he worked with architects S. Chernyshev, P. Abrosimov, and A. Hryakov; VN Nasonov was the chief engineer. Rudnev won the Stalin Prize in 1949 for his design of the University and went on to play a major role in rebuilding Stalingrad, Moscow, and Voronezh. Rudnev also constructed major projects in the Soviet bloc. As art critic Owen Hatherly writes, “Rudnev became one of the major designers of Stalinist architecture, the regime’s analogue to Albert Speer or Edwin Lutyens—an imperial architect”.
Steel frame, concrete, masonry - Ramenki District, Western Administrative Okrug, Moscow
Great Hall of the People
Seen here at night, the Great Hall of the People takes on a palatial golden glow. Paired with the red seen in the columnar bases, the central seal, and the tiles of the roof, the color palette evokes the themes of good luck and prosperity associated with the Chinese New Year. In this case, the building testifies, not to a new year, but to a new age, and not to the supremacy of all Chinese emperors, but to the supremacy of Chairman Mao. Located at the west of Tiananmen Square, this building was one of the “Ten Great Buildings” project, undertaken in Beijing in 1959 as part of Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” (towards a “New China”) plan. The ten buildings were completed in less than a year, and in time for the tenth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Additionally, the façade of Great Hall of the People has ten columns. The number ten, or “shi” in Chinese numerology, symbolized unity and perfection, and is a sacred numeral reserved for the gods, and for the Forbidden City in Beijing (home of the emperor). Directly facing this building, the National Museum of China mirrors this monumental style.
The architects of the Beijing Institute of Architectural Design designed buildings by combining Socialist Realism, a style it borrowed from the Soviet Union, that featured glorified monumentalism, and detailed ornamentation, Neoclassicism, and the element of historicism that directly references traditional Chinese architecture. Art historian Toby Lincoln notes that, “The roof is known as a ‘big hat roof’ [that looks] like the roof on a Chinese temple. […] In the 1950s, they were sometimes criticized for being extravagant and expensive, but many Chinese politicians and architects felt that they also preserved the long tradition of Chinese architecture. Moreover, advisors from the Soviet Union, who were helping the Chinese to build their cities, also supported the 'big hat roof'. […] With the mixing of these two styles from Europe in such an important building, it is perhaps not surprising that architects wanted a Chinese style roof”.
The National People’s Congress assembled in the hall’s main theater, which could seat ten thousand people. The seats were designed in a semi-circle so all the attendees could clearly see the stage, where the party leaders would deliver speeches (often lasting hours). In order to give the theater a more spacious feeling, moreover, the theater was designed around a five-pointed star, red with a gold edging, from which three waves of light, representing the people, radiated. As Lincoln noted, “Other than serving a practical purpose, the waves of lights were supposed to represent the people of China united behind the Communist Party. They in turn, so the design suggested, would be able to rely on the party’s strong and careful guidance to develop the country after the victory it had achieved in the Communist Revolution ten years before”.
Marble, Tile - Beijing, China
Chairman Mao Goes to Anyuan
London’s Victoria and Albert Museum calls this poster “one of the most important and widely reproduced art works of the Cultural Revolution period (1966-76)”. A young Mao strides across a mountain terrain, his solitary form dominating a landscape where snow-capped mountains merge into the white-cloud-filled sky. His right arm holds a rolled-up umbrella, his left hand is formed into a fist. Mao’s uncompromising gaze is focused fully on the path ahead. Chunhua stated, “To put him in a focal position, we placed Chairman Mao in the forefront of the painting, advancing towards us like a rising sun bringing hope to the people. Every line of the Chairman’s figure embodies the great thought of Mao Zedong and in portraying his journey we strove to give significance to every small detail. His head held high in the act of surveying the scene before him conveys his revolutionary spirit, dauntless before danger and violence and courageous in struggle”. All the elements of the work were meant to testify to Mao’s superior character and his commitment to the Chinese people with the well-worn umbrella signifying the Chairman’s “hard-working style of travelling for the revolutionary cause”.
This Socialist Realist portrait was a masterworks of propaganda. As a member of the Red Guard studying at the Central Academy of Industrial Arts, Chunhua was encouraged to create the work, which subsequently hung in the Museum of the Chinese Revolution. Art historian Stefan Landsberger noted that the portrait “became ‘perhaps the most important painting of the Cultural Revolution period [...] It is believed that more than 900 million copies of the painting were eventually printed; it was displayed at meetings and carried around during demonstrations, mass meetings and processions, and many found their way onto walls, next to Mao’s official portrait”.
This version of the poster carries a subtitle: “In the spring of 1921, our great Chairman went to Anyuan, and ignited the Anyuan revolution”. It is a reference to striking coal miners, protesting terrible working conditions, and the support they received from the communist party played in achieving their demands. However, it was the party’s Vice Chairman, and viewed by most as Mao’s natural successor, Liu Shaoqi, who played the leading role in the miners’ struggle. The artist Hou Yimin portrayed Shaoqi in his widely celebrated oil painting, Comrade Liu Shaoqi and the Anyuan Miners (1961). However, Mao, who had come under criticism, not least from Liu himself, for the great famine of the 1950s, and the perceived failure of his “Great Leap Forward” industrial plan, singled out Shaoqi as his enemy and Hou’s painting was destroyed. During the Cultural Revolution, Mao branded Liu a "traitor” and a capitalist "scab". Mao placed him under house arrest in 1967, and he died in custody two years later.
Lithograph - Victoria and Albert Museum, London
The Miracle of Chongchon River
In 2017, a journalist for the Korean Yonhap News Agency, Woo Jae-yeon, conducted an interview with BG Muhn, an artist and professor at Georgetown University, USA. Since 2011, Muhn had been granted entry to North Korea on nine occasions. During these visits - which he attended under the tight supervision of “state minders” - Muhn interviewed artists, museum officials, art historians and art school faculty members. He soon discovered that there was more to North Korean art than “kitsch propaganda posters vowing to destroy the ‘American war-mongering imperialists’". In 2012, he timed his visit to coincide with the opening of the National Art Exhibition where Chosunhwa artworks - “the unique genre highly prized in the North” - were on display. Given that North Korean artists had never been exposed to outside influences, these pieces represented what Muhn called the most uniquely “realistic expression of socialist ideology” since the birth of North Korea in 1948.
Rendered in the Chosunhwa style, The Miracle of the Chongchon River portrays construction workers toiling through harsh, wintery, conditions, to complete the Chongchon River power plant. The image captures the sense of collective effort and heroic sacrifice to complete the project in record time. Moreover, the painting propagates the North Korean concept of “speed battle”, a slogan (dating back to the mid-1970s) used by the state to mobilize large numbers to workers who toiled day and night to finish large-scale projects (such as this) in minimum time. On the Chongchon River project, North Korea utilized groups called “Speed Battle Youth Assault Troops”. Those who do not attend college, or who do not serve in the military, are assigned to such groups.
Of the Chosunhwa genre, Woo Jae-yeon states, “Contrary to two-dimensional and mostly monochrome Oriental ink paintings of East Asian nations, North Korea's Chosunhwa is painted with rich colors and delicate brush strokes, exhibiting a much more dynamic feel. Painting on Korean traditional paper hanji […] requires extreme dexterity and mastery of brushwork since there is no room for fixing by applying more paint like in oil painting”. Muhn adds, “the particular nature of the rice paper that is used allows the artists to efficiently create these gigantic paintings. Large sheets of rice paper are glued together for any desired width. After completion, the paintings can be easily folded for storage prior to being mounted for display”. Muhn was permitted to observe the group of six artists working together on The Miracle of Chongchon River. He said of the experience, "Art laymen would find it hard to fathom North Korea's realism art since it is so rich and deep in content. There is no contemporary art there, so artists only go deeper and deeper to get the essence of Chosunhwa as if extracting magma from a volcano".
Ink wash painting
Beginnings of Totalitarian Art
The history of totalitarianism dates back to 430 BCE where the ancient Grecian state of Sparta controlled all aspects of life which it enforced through the military. Around 375 BCE, Plato wrote of a society where the citizens served the state (rather than vice-versa), and in Ancient China, the Quin Dynasty (221–207 BCE) ruled by “Legalism”, a system by which all political activity was prohibited, all literature was destroyed, and citizens who questioned this rule were put to death. In the modern era, however, totalitarianism is a phenomenon associated chiefly with the 20th century, and with five nations: the fascists in the West: Italy and Germany; and the communists in the East: Soviet Union, China, and North Korea (a regime that is still in place today). Most historians and sociologists agree that these regimes emerged out of the chaotic aftermath of WWI and WWII.
There are distinctions to be drawn between totalitarian states and authoritarian states. While both operate as autocracies (a single center of government that prevents the formation of opposition parties) that place restrictions on individual freedoms, totalitarianism does this by coercive control of its citizens’ public and private lives. In order to achieve this, moreover, the populus must be in thrall to a charismatic leader. Authoritarian states demand a form of blind submission to its authority, but provided that authority remains unchallenged, the authoritarian state does not usually move to interfere in its citizens’ social and private lives. Totalitarian states have a very clearly stated belief system that comes with the demand for the “social re-engineering” of its people to conform to that ideology. The totalitarian state apparatus - which includes its art and culture - will often suppress traditional social organizations in its forward-looking push, whereas authoritarian regimes typically focus more on the past and continuity and are generally more tolerant of existing customs and interests. It is also true that authoritarian states, such as Francoist Spain (1939–1975) , lack the power or the will to mobilize an entire population in pursuit of a defined national goal. Similarly, theocracies such as Iran, Vatican City, and Afghanistan, will demand strict obedience in line with the rule of sacred religious laws.
Italian “totalitario”
In 1922, Italy’s new Prime Minster, and leader of the National Fascist Party, Benito Mussolini - or “Il Duce” (“The Leader” or “The Commander”) as he was known to the Italian public - promoted the motto: “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State”. He called this political philosophy “totalitario” (totalitarian). Whilst the economic realities of living under his “revolutionary nationalism” differed markedly according to one’s location (urban or rural; north or south), and social status, state-imposed restrictions on civil and private liberties were tolerated on the promise of social and economic stability, and a post-WW1 renewal of national pride. In its arts policy, the Italian state initially accommodated a mix of modernism and tradition to the ends of building a modern state that restored Italy, and Italian culture, to its past international eminence. One of Il Duce’s closest allies was F.T. Marinetti, the leader of the Italian Futurist movement. Marinetti and Mussolini had both been arrested during the pro-war nationalist riots in 1915. In 1919, Marinetti's Futurists, and Mussolini's Fasci di Combattimento (Italian Fighting Bands), then came together to seal a direct bond between fascism and modern art. Indeed, Marinetti said of Mussolini, “His recent actions, his attitudes and his rebellion are clear demonstration of a Futurist consciousness”.
Later, in 1923, the group Novecento Italiano, formed with the aim of reviving the tradition of large format History Painting and sculpture, was launched by artists including Achille Funi, Carlo Carrá, and Mario Sironi. Margherita Grassini Sarfatti, Mussolini’s lover, and a great art collector, championed the movement in the cause of “a modern restoration” that would connect contemporary Italian art to its proud classical and Renaissance traditions. Having convinced him that “an orderly society produced an ordered art”, Mussolini was persuaded to sponsor the movement by giving a speech at the inaugural exhibition in Milan in 1923 (a speech he would later disavow). But, as historian Ara H. Marjian notes, while the Futurist and Novecento Italiano “enjoyed a relatively broad choice of aesthetic modes - from the academic to the avant-garde - subject matter could never openly flout the imperatives of Party or patria. Those who did dissent faced censorship, imprisonment, exile, or worse. An air of tolerance and pluralism, in other words, masked a more insidious system of surveillance and coercion. In tune with Italy’s imperialist ambitions [...] Fascist culture made increasing appeals to the Roman past, particularly its Mediterranean empire”. By the 1930s, Mussolini had all but abandoned artistic pluralism in favor of a more austere style that favored monumental art, and an architectural policy that connected modern Italy with the concept of “Romanità”: the ideal of ancient Rome, and Mussolini as its new emperor.
The Soviet Union
Although they were ideological opposites (fascism and communism) the situation in Italy shared some similarities with Post-Revolutionary Russia. Like the Futurists, the Constructivists were supportive of a national renewal in the hands of the Bolsheviks. The Constructivists were united in their drive to produce artworks and buildings that would provide a new visual language for a new society. The Constructivists sought, in artist and theorist Aleksei Gan’s words, “to find the Communist expression of material construction [and] to establish a scientific base for the approach to constructing buildings and services that would fulfil the demands of Communist culture”. Having evolved into Productivism by the mid-1920s, Soviet art extended fully into the sphere of industrial production for everyday life. While it retained the geometric shapes and primary colors of Constructivism, Productivism moved away from the “self-indulgences” of abstract art as they applied this new visual language to furniture design, ceramics, textile design, graphic design and advertising, and theater set design.
Although Lenin, the head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 until his death in 1924, was indifferent towards the movement’s aesthetic merits, he respected its support of the Bolshevik state. But by the time Joseph Stalin took total power of the Soviet Union in 1929, Constructivism/Productivism, which Stalin dismissed as Western influenced and elitist, made way for the unifying style of Socialist Realism, henceforward the official art of Soviet Russia. In 1934, beneath two banners depicting poet Alexander Pushkin and novelist Leo Tolstoy, writer Maxim Gorky (many believe under state coercion) made the following statement at the first Congress of Soviet Writers: “Socialist realism ... demands from the artist a truthful and historically concrete representation of reality in its revolutionary development. Moreover, the truthfulness and historical concreteness of the artistic representation of reality must be linked with the task of ideological transformation and education of workers in the spirit of socialism”. Those artists who did not conform to this mantra risked dire repercussions. As the Brookings research center writes, “The great [Soviet] purges and trials of the years 1937 and 1938 altered the literary and artistic scene beyond all recognition. The number of writers and artists exiled or exterminated during this time […] was such that Russian literature and thought emerged in 1939 like an area devastated by war, with some splendid buildings still relatively intact, but standing solitary amid stretches of ruined and deserted country”.
Nazi Germany
The concept of “der Totalstaat” (“The Total State”), introduced by the political theorist Carl Schmitt in 1927, provided the political impetus for the Nazi Party. Under the rule of Adolf Hitler, the Nazis assumed power in 1933. Once in office, they converted their fanatical hatred of modernism into policy. Guided by Schmitt’s Total State philosophy, Hitler denounced all forms of “modernist degeneracy” and ordered that German art and architecture take its lead from the timeless values of Greek and Roman classicism. The Nazis had been producing anti-modernist propaganda, aimed at “re-educating” educated elites, as early as 1928. Hitler claimed that “chatterboxes, dilettantes and art swindlers” were responsible for the destruction of German culture, and that, under the rule of the Third Reich, works of art that “need some pretentious instruction book to justify their existence, will never again find their way to the German people". Influential figures like architect and author Paul Schultze-Naumburg went so far as to argue that modern art was an indicator of mental disability. When he became Chancellor, Hitler - “Der Führer” (“The Leader”) as he preferred to be known - initiated a purge of museums and established a state-controlled arts culture.
In July 1937 the Nazi Party opened synchronized art exhibitions in Munich. The Great German Art Exhibition (which ran annually until 1944) featured works, in the Neo-Classical and Realist styles, that promoted the idea of Aryan supremacy. The notorious Degenerate Art Exhibition on the other hand featured “degenerate” and “corrupt” expressionist and abstract works (juxtaposing a number of works by now-renowned modernist artists alongside images created by institutionalized psychiatric patients, to further insist upon the “obvious insanity” of the former). The exhibition was divided into categories: blasphemous art; art by Jewish or communist artists; art that criticised German soldiers; and art that offended the honour of German women. One hall, reserved for purely abstract works, was labelled "the insanity room".
Art historian Giles Macdonogh writes, “Few regimes in history devoted as much thought to the arts as the Third Reich. [The] Third Reich encouraged conformist painters, offering them huge prizes and incentives”. Indeed, much more to Hitler’s liking were works such as Hermann Otto Hoyer’s, In the Beginning Was the Word (1937) (exhibited at the Great German Art Exhibition). In his painting, rendered in the manner of a History Painting, Hoyer conflated elements of the New Testament with Hitler’s Mein Kampf (the texts were of equal historical significance to Hitler’s followers). Hoyer presents Hitler as a Christ-like figure (the bringer of the “true light” of the Nazi world) as he delivers his fascist sermon to his rapt gathering. Hoyer’s image was mass-produced and hung in public places, party gathering sites, and in schools.
The 1937 Paris World Fair
The 1937 Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (International Exposition of Art and Technology), better known simply as the Paris World Fair, set out to showcase European modernity. For some, however, the Exposition became an ideological battleground between Germany, the Soviet Union, and (to a lesser extent) Italy. The architect Albert Speer had convinced Hitler that the Exposition was an ideal stage to flaunt Germany’s architectural supremacy. Speer designed an elevated façade rising from a classical temple, topped by a statue of an imperial eagle perched on a medallion featuring a swastika. Josef Thorak’s two monumental sculptures, expressing the Aryan ideal of the Nazi regime, stood guard at the pavilion’s entrance. Lit by floodlights at night, the German pavilion was deliberately designed to face (ergo, confront) the Soviet pavilion. The Soviet pavilion featured a soaring façade, designed by Boris Iofan, and crowned by Vera Mukhina’s monumental statue of male and female farm workers holding aloft a hammer and a sickle. Constructed of stainless steel, the sculpture dazzled under the illumination of the sun. The Moscow Times noted that, “To understand how the sculpture would be illuminated by natural light in Paris [Iofan and Mukhina] put a model of it in the Moscow Planetarium and simulated the position of the sun in the French capital from May to October — the duration of the expo”.
Rather less bombastic that its German and Soviet counterparts, the Italian pavilion was designed to emphasize the orderliness and timelessness of Italian civilization. The main building, with its many columns and classical dimensions, referenced Rome’s iconic Coliseum, and conveyed the view that Mussolini’s “benevolent dictatorship” (“sunny, open, and Mediterranean”) shared a lineage to Imperial Rome. Marcello Piacentini designed the building exterior using a framework of reinforced concrete to create colonnades, terraced courts and galleries. Giuseppe Pagano oversaw the exhibits and the “Hall of Honor” through which visitors entered the pavilion. Featuring a two-storey tower, the Hall of Honor housed Mario Sironi’s L’Italia corporativa (Corporate Italy) (1936), a mosaic with various figures celebrating Italian corporatism. Somewhat ironically (so far as the three totalitarian states were concerned at least) the most celebrated artwork at the exposition was Pablo Picasso’s monumental monochrome mural, Guernica (1937), which took pride of place in the Spanish Pavilion. One of the most powerful anti-war statements in the history of art, Picasso’s masterpiece is a stirring condemnation of the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica by fascist German and Italian planes in support of the nationalist dictator, Francisco Franco, during the Spanish Civil War.
Totalitarian Art in East Asia
Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea)
In 1940, having crossed the Korean border into Russia, the famed guerrilla resistance fighter Kim Il-sung volunteered for military service, winning a captain’s commission in the Soviet Red Army. After serving with distinction during WWII, and in the wake of Korea’s liberation from forty years of Japanese occupation (in August 1945), Stalin sent Il-sung to northern Korea as a communist proxy and to prepare him for leadership. In December 1945 he was named chairman of the Workers’ Party of Korea. With Stalin’s backing, North Korea invaded South Korea (which was supported by the US) in June 1950. The bloody Korean War (with an estimated 3 to 5 million deaths) lasted three years with the result being that Korea was formally divided into North Korea (communist), and South Korea (capitalist) along the 38th parallel line of latitude. (South) Korea’s National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art writes ‘[Japanese rule] saw the appearance of artworks revealing new sensibilities and the unique styles of artists. In the case of Western–style art, new artworks incorporated elements not only of impressionism, which corresponded to the ‘academism’ of the time, but also of fauvism, surrealism, and abstraction”. As leader of North Korea, Il-sung set about cleansing the country of all Japanese/Western cultural influences and, in line with its cultural, military, and economic ties with China and the Soviet Union, adopted the Social Realist doctrine for the arts.
Il-sung enforced an inflexible communist regime through which the state enforced a strict isolationist ideology known as “Juche” (“self-reliance”). Under this doctrine, Il-sung organized artistic output along the lines of “Juche Realism”, the name given to a Socialist Realist style that promoted fervent nationalism and total reverence of his leadership. Later, in May 1957, Il-sung initiated the “songbun” system (which is still in place today). Under this system, the North Korean people were sub-divided into three groups - “core”, “wavering”, and “hostile” – based on their political, social, and economic backgrounds. A citizen’s songbun status would determine their access to education, employment, housing and location, medical care, food rationing, and fitness to join the ruling party. Artists were drawn from the “wavering” and “core” pools. By the end of the 1950s/early 1960s, almost all art was produced through Pyongyang’s Mansudae Art Studio. It would become home to some 4,000 artists who produce revolutionary history, portraits and monuments of/to Il-sung (and his dynasty), scenes of heroic laborers, and romantic landscapes (emphasizing the natural beauty of North Korea).
People’s Republic of China
China had had to endure Japanese occupation (between 1937-45) and a civil war (between 1945-49) before Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong declared the creation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) on October 1, 1949. Traditional Chinese art, with its emphasis on calligraphy, landscape painting, and a search for spiritual themes, was associated principally with China’s social and political elites. There was, however, a noticeable modernist influence on early 20th century Chinese art. As historian Kristen Loring Brennan writes, “While some artists defended what is traditionally referred to as ‘literati painting’ (a self-expressive, conceptual, and often abstract mode of ink painting), others looked to European oil painting as the future of modern art in China. Even then, artists took wildly divergent paths—for instance, some emphasized the realistic techniques of European academic art, while others engaged with the more abstract approaches of European modernists”. These artists’ ambitions were crushed by the PRC that decreed that Chinese art would be founded on the tenets of Socialist Realism and must be put to the services of the state where its role would be to educate, inspire, and enrich the lives of workers, peasants, and the military.
The model for state-run art schools was The Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Here, artists were required to paint heroic images of Mao, and the lives of soldiers, peasants, and workers, with special emphasis placed on representation of female workers. During the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), the young party enthusiasts of the “Red Guard” (groups of militant university and high school students) were encouraged to attack traditional and modern artists and destroy their studios. Practitioners of classical arts, such as ink painting and calligraphy, traditional musicians, and the paper makers all came under attack. Elementary school books bore covers showing children as Red Guards, waving copies of Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (1964) (more commonly known as Mao’s Little Red Book) engaged in the vilification of dissenters. The teachings of Confucius were denounced, as were the status and values of the historically revered “elders”. Many artists and writers - the "reactionary literati" as they became known - were held captive, beaten, subjected to show trials, sentenced to labor camps where many starved, or were killed. It is estimated that as many as three million artists, teachers, intellectuals, scientists, and other educated people died during the decade-long Cultural Revolution.
Concepts and Trends
Art as Propaganda
For many film historians, the most chilling and insidious example of totalitarian propaganda is Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935). Riefenstahl, who directed, produced, edited, and co-wrote the film, was tasked by Hitler to film the Sixth Reichsparteitag (Nazi Party Congress), attended by 700,000 Nazi supporters, in Nuremberg in 1934. He instructed her, “I am not looking for a newsreel, but an artistic document” (few, despite their ideological reservations, have doubted that that is precisely what she delivered). No expense was spared for the project. The film features fluid tracking shots (including footage of Hitler’s procession down the boulevard to the Congress by affixing a camera to a following vehicle); oblique camera angles; and aerial photography that captures the enormous sweep of the event, and Hitler’s grandiose arrival by plane. Riefenstahl said on hearing Hitler’s Congress address, “It seemed as if the earth's surface were spreading out in front of me, like a hemisphere that suddenly splits apart in the middle, spewing out an enormous jet of water, so powerful that it touched the sky and shook the earth. I felt quite paralysed”. After the war, Riefenstahl was denounced as a Nazi propagandist. She denied the claim, calling Triumph of the Will a “pure historical film [a piece of] film-vérité” (film truth). Some who defended her position pointed to the absence of any antisemitism in the film. But, as film critic Roger Ebert argued, “the very absence of antisemitism in Triumph of the Will looks like a calculation, excluding the central motif of almost all of Hitler's public speeches must have been a deliberate decision to make the film more efficient as propaganda”.
An example of a wide-reaching poster campaign, meanwhile, can be seen in China’s “Four Evils” campaign which ran between 1958 and 1962. Following Chairman Mao’s slogan “man must conquer nature”, the Four Evils campaign sought to eradicate rats, flies, mosquitos, and sparrows in the hope that the party’s quotas on agricultural production could be met. Posters were displayed throughout the country and included images of school children engaged in hunting sparrows. Historian, Abigail Holst writes, “To attain the aim of the elimination of the four pests, everybody was mobilized. Contests were held among enterprises, government agencies and schools in cleanliness. Non-material rewards were given to those who handed in the largest number of tails of rats, or dead flies and mosquitoes, or dead sparrows. As the movement became something of a sport, children turned out to be a group that jumped at the excitement of these activities and were eminently receptive to the calls for mobilization. Eyewitnesses recall from their youth how they would bang pots and pans so that sparrows would not have the chance to rest on tree branches and would fall dead from the sky from exhaustion”. The campaign had a devastating environmental impact, however, as the locust population exploded due to the reduction of sparrows. The result was a widespread famine where an estimated 20 million people died. As the surviving population began to turn on Mao, the Cultural Revolution, another nationwide campaign to rehabilitate his image, was launched in 1966.
The Cult of the Leader
It is a condition of totalitarian states that they have a charismatic leader; a “chosen one” who garners devotion and total loyalty from his subjects. Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin (Il Duce, die Führer, and Vozhd respectively) were known simply as “The leader”, while in China, Mao was referred to widely as the “shining sun”, and, in North Korea Kim Il-sung was referred to as “The Sun of the Nation”. To ascend to the position of supreme leader, the individuals in question actively promote the “cult of personality” and the construction of their own mythology. As historian Kanan Makiya writes, “It would not do, for example, for a Soviet artist to depict Stalin as the short, pockmarked, bandy-legged man that he really was. His physical attributes [had] to undergo the same transformation as Stalin's version of history, to be turned into what the writer Milan Kundera so eloquently referred to as ‘the beautifying lie’”. Makiya is able to illustrate this point through the following quote from a Soviet citizen living under Stalin’s reign: “We loved Stalin very much, because he was an extraordinary person. After the war, he pulled the country from misery, every New Year - lower prices. How not to love him for that? ... At the same time, everyone, of course, knew about the arrests. My father's brother was imprisoned for a joke. There was no family where someone did not suffer from repression, but still, in almost every house there was a portrait of Stalin. We believed that he was not to blame for what was happening”.
In North Korea, Kim Il-sung’s cult of personality extends its influence to this day (over 30 years after his death). Reporting for the Reuters News Agency in 2018, Danish Siddique observed that, “one of the first things any traveller to North Korea notices is a huge portrait of Kim Il Sung. […] Portraits are mandatory not just in public places like train stations, hospitals, schools and factories, but even in private spaces such as the living rooms of apartments. Portraits must be hung high, so that no one can stand above the leaders, according to government minders who accompany visiting media and tourists”. Further evidence of the strength of the cult of the Kim dynasty (while in power Il-sung introduced a law of hereditary dynasty which passed down leadership to his son, Kim Jong-il in 1994, and his grandson, Kim Jong-un, 2011) can be found in the lapel pin badge, featuring a portrait of Il-sung, which is worn in public by all citizens. Siddique writes, “The badge is presented to every North Korean when he or she turns 12, and from then on they are required to wear it whenever they leave their home. The badges are considered sacred and are not for sale”. A music teacher explained to Siddique (albeit in the presence of a state minder), "We, all North Koreans, always wear the portrait badge like this. The most important part of a human body is the heart. […] Being together with our dear leaders through a badge hung on the closest place from our heart means that our belief that we won't be alive if the great leaders had not existed is kept in all our hearts".
Later Developments - After Totalitarian Art
Anti-Totalitarian Art
In the introduction to their book Totalitarian Art and Modernity, Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen and Jacob Wamberg write, “a survey of general contemporary literature on 20th century art history reveals that art made under totalitarian regimes […] is still conspicuously absent, just as it is in the collections of Western art museums, including those of the former Eastern Bloc countries. In this negative presence, and also in the literature which does treat Totalitarian Art, it seems to be assumed that somehow totalitarian visual culture does not fulfil the normative requirements of the category of ‘art’, not even political art, and is therefore more fruitfully expelled to the duller area of ‘historical documents’ of politically suspect regimes”. With that sentiment in mind, perhaps the most famous modern take on Totalitarian Art came from Andy Warhol. By the time of his Mao Series the dictator had, through his mass-produced portraits, become a cultural icon in China and overseas. Warhol, who borrowed the image of Mao from the Little Red Book - Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong (1964), was responding to US President Nixon’s historic 1972 visit to China and the deluge of Mao portraits appearing in the American media. Pop Art (with its celebration of consumer culture) was the antithesis of communism. But, as Christies auction house writes, “[Warhol] was able to subtly and playfully express his dissent: he opted for a vibrant colour palette, the communist leader was transformed into a Western glamourized and kitsch popstar, with eyeshadow, lipstick or blush”.
Such were the depths to his wickedness; the ghost of Adolph Hitler still disturbs the public’s consciousness some 80 years after his death. Maurizio Cattelan tapped into this ominous phenomenon with his sculpture, Him (2001). Made of wax, polyester resin, and human hair, the life-like figure sold (to an anonymous buyer) for $17.2 (£11.9) million at auction in 2016. When Him was first exhibited in Stokholm in 2001, the unwitting public entered the otherwise empty gallery space to encounter what appeared to be a child, his back turned to the entrance, kneeling in prayer. Once they moved to face the child they were confronted by the dwarf figure of Adolph Hitler. Christie's auction house said of Him, “the viewer is forced to ask the question, whether forgiveness for the atrocities Hitler committed under his fascist regime could ever be forgiven. That we are asked to encounter the work first from behind, that we are positioned high above the fallen foe, Cattelan has created a combination of imagery and experience that provides his viewer the opportunity for reflection—on the atrocities of World War II and the Holocaust, on an individual’s power to create evil and on our own personal and societal responses to past, present and future horrors”. Curator Nancy Spector added that Cattelan placed his viewer “in an exceedingly uncomfortable position of authority, a position to mete out judgement, including the impossible notion of absolution".
Contemporary North Korean Art: Chosonhwa
Totalitarian Art has continued to thrive in the 21st century in North Korea (the one country where there is general consensus that totalitarianism still thrives). Art historian B.G. Muhn takes the view that “the free world considers the socialist art [of North Korea] as kitsch based on an arbitrary judgment, which is a very narrow point of view”. While he acknowledges the fact that Socialist Realism had continued to dominate the visual arts, Muhn has focused on Chosonhwa art. The term has a somewhat flexible meaning: it can mean “warm art” or “cold art” depending on what is being represented. Muhn writes that during the Il-sung years, the Social Realist style became “more human-friendly” and projected a “tranquil and amiable” warm feeling. During the 1970s cold art took over. Here the painting centered on historical events and battles through which “Confucian values and virtues such as endurance, perseverance, [and] transcendence” came to the fore.
Contemporary Chosonhwa works such as The Miracle of Chongchon River (painted by six North Korean artists) (c. 2010-12) promote nationalist and socialist values (the heroic construction worker in this example). But the painting’s rich colors and detailed brushwork invoke the ancient East Asian tradition of ink and brush painting on rice paper. Muhn, who was granted supervised access to the country on several occasion during the 2010s, wrote, “I had an opportunity to visit Mansudae Art Studio in Pyongyang, the largest art community in the world, with four thousand artists and staff members working in the vast facility of the Studio. I also viewed many art exhibitions including a National Art Exhibition and I met several Chosunhwa artists and discussed their work with them”. For him, Chosonhwa was the most “popular and revered art form in North Korea and many of the paintings in North Korea, including large-scale propaganda figure paintings, are created in this medium” Muhn concludes that “such expression of nuance is Chosonhwa’s uniqueness and strength”.