Mixed Media: ‘Albanian Art’ (2013)

Vojo Kushi by Shijaku

The Mixed Media Column from the January 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Socialist Realism’ was the official art of the People’s Republic of Albania between 1944 and 1990. Socialist Realism originated in the state capitalist USSR and was adopted throughout Eastern Europe. When Soviet leader Khrushchev denounced Stalin in 1956, state-capitalist Albania alone opposed this ‘revisionism’ and continued to revere ‘Uncle Joe’ right up to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The Partisan War against the Germans and the Liberation of Albania in 1943-44 is a source for Socialist Realist paintings in the National Gallery in Tirane. The Victor by Haxhiu depicts a heroic partisan amidst ruins with German POWs trudging into captivity in the background, while Vojo Kushi by Shijaku heroically romanticises a partisan in a red shirt atop a Wehrmacht tank throwing a hand grenade inside.

Workers in Albanian industry are portrayed, notably in the steel works depicted in 30 July 1978 by Ceka which recalls Iron Rolling Mill (Modern Cyclopes) by Menzel. The Assembler by Kokushta is an inspiring painting of a worker on a girder with red flag flying above an industrial landscape of the building of Albania’s hydro-electric scheme in the 1970s.

Female Nude (1961) by Shijaku is beautiful and definitely not ‘socialist realism’ but it is ‘realism’ in the style of Courbet.

The enhanced status of women in Albanian society is captured by Socialist Realism in a painting of male and female engineers by Hysa in 1969, Milk Woman by Sulovari, Factory Worker by Blido, Bricklayer by Dule, and as athletes in The Relay Race by Nalbani. In the 1970s art in a Formalist style of Modernism (mainly Expressionism and Fauvism) developed operating within the official parameters of Socialist Realism.

Socialist Realism was formulated by Stalin in his 1932 On the Reconstruction of Literary and Art Organisations which decreed that art had to be unambiguous and elevate labour to heroic status. In 1934 the Soviet state instructed that art had to be ‘proletarian’, of everyday life, realistic in the representational sense, and support the aims of the Party. This effectively discouraged the avant-garde and any form of experimentation.

Socialist Realist rigidity was not encouraged by Lenin. He did not believe in a ‘year zero’ for Art: ‘proletarian culture must be the logical development of the store of knowledge mankind has accumulated’. In the years after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution experimental ‘revolutionary’ art was encouraged in the shape of Constructivism, and in the cinematic art of Vertov and Eisenstein.

Marx in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts identified the role of labour in man’s ability to reproduce ‘in accordance with the laws of beauty’. Engels wrote in The Part played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man that ‘labour has given the human hand the high degree of perfection required to conjure into being the pictures of a Raphael’, and in Dialectics of Nature he wrote ‘Italy rose to an undreamt-of flowering of art, which seemed like a reflection of classical antiquity’.

Marx and Engels would be uncomfortable with the rigidity of ‘Socialist Realism’.

Steve Clayton