Totalitarian Art achieves nothing less than a thorough and serious comparative study of the official art of Stalin's Russia, Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy. In the Soviet Union, and later in Maoist China, theories of mass artistic appeal were used to promote the Revolution both at home and abroad. In Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy they asserted the putative grandeur of the epoch. All too often, art that served the Revolution or the new millennial society became total realism, and always it became a slave to the state and the cult of personality, and ultimately one more weapon in the arsenal of oppression. Igor Golomstock gives a detailed appraisal of the forms that define totalitarian art and illustrates his text with more than two hundred examples of its paintings, posters, sculpture and architecture, and includes a powerful comparative visual essay which demonstrates the eerie similarity of the official art of these very different regimes.
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Product Description:
The Russian art historian Igor Golomstock presents an illustrated, comparative study of the official art of Stalins USSR, the Third Reich, Mussolinis Italy and the Peoples Republic of China under Mao, with a postscript on Saddam Husseins Iraq. Translated by Robert Chandler.
Review:
"Important and encyclopedic tome...Totalitarian Art is an indispensable work of reference."--"Foreign Affairs"
"Golomstock convincingly demonstrates how the overlapping aesthetic values of these superficially disparate regimes underlined how much they had in common Fascinating." "Wall Street Journal" "Important and encyclopedic tome Totalitarian Art is an indispensable work of reference. "Foreign Affairs""
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