‘Workingman’s Dead’ offers a look at art and paranoia in Stalin’s Russia
Spectators take in Workingman's Dead during the opening days of the exhibition. The collection of Soviet-era photographs and related paintings will be on display at the McMaster Museum of Art until Oct. 25. A reception will take place on Sept. 11.
A new exhibition at the McMaster Museum of Art fuses Russian history with modern critical theory.
Workingman’s Dead: Lives of the Artists was curated by Ben Portis and Montreal artist Leopold Plotek, and juxtaposes rare and striking Soviet-era photos with contemporary oil paintings.
For Plotek — born in Moscow in 1948 — the concessions, indignities and humilities of Soviet artists has been a recurring subject in his work. He has lived and worked in Montreal since 1960, and currently teaches at Concordia University.
In Stalinist Russia, artists who did not toe the party line often paid with their lives. Others lived in fear, compromising their work in order to survive.
Bolshevik writer Isaac Babel was interrogated and perished. Anna Akhmatova, Leningrad’s greatest poet, was harassed by the KGB.
Composer and pianist Dmitri Shostakovich endured scathing reviews, often written by Stalin himself. During the terrible siege of Leningrad, Shostakovich was among a troop of artist-firefighters made to pose on a rooftop for a patriotic poster.
Workingman’s Dead: Lives of the Artists was co-organized by the MacLaren Art Centre in Barrie, Ont. The photographs are drawn from the SOVFOTOArchive in the Permanent Collection of the MacLaren Art Centre.
The exhibition is on now, and continues at the McMaster Museum of Art until Oct. 25.
An opening reception will take place on Thursday, Sept. 11 from 6-8 p.m.
Below: ‘Stalin Prize winner Alexander Laktyonov working on a canvas depicting Pushkin.’ Photographer unknown. Courtesy of the MacLaren Art Centre.
