UNIT 6
Interrogation of the Communists
Boris Vladimirovich Ioganson was a Russian painter. He was trained in the 19th-century Realist tradition of the wanderers and became one of the most important artists in establishing socialist realism as the official art of the USSR. Promoting Realism and attacking the abstract experiments of the avant-garde Ioganson argued that ‘the Russian painter is an innovator...not an innovator of form divorced from content, but a true innovator, reflecting the new tendencies of reality’.
Ioganson's work was inspired by that of Repin that is exhibiting certain features of Impressionism, and was often narrative in nature. A sense of theatricity is present in his paintings, probably due to his studies of theater design under Korovin.
Possibly his best known work was "Interrogation of the Communists" (1933) a piece thoroughly representative of Socialist Realism but with piercing elements of Romanticism, in addition to an exploitation of some elements of Futurism.
This work stands out for a particularly forceful implementation of the theme of class struggle. Contrast is the principal means of revealing the content of the picture. It is based on sharp contrasts in composition, color, and light, producing a tensely dramatic image.The episode, however, tragic renders an optimistic feeling, because the ideas for which the Communists die will triumph. Ioganson’s mastery is felt in the splendid arrangement of the composition in which the figures are arranged with all the skill of an experienced stage director.
In Ioganson’s canvases, every artistic means – the composition, the colour and total relations, the light and shade – all serve to underline the main idea embodied in expressive imagery. This historical-revolutionary picture summed up the goals of the Association of Artists for a social the composition, the colour and total relations, the light and readily developed certain elements of characterization which they discovered in Ioganson’s handling of the Civil War theme.