What do we think about when we think about Soviet-era art? The official art style of the USSR was socialist realism. Like social realism, it showed working people, focusing on their virtues and struggles, only through a lens designed to promote Communist values. But even though the Soviet Union seemed like a monolith, it was made up of many different peoples, including those of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Belarus, Turkmenistan and Ukraine. Ukrainian artists managed to create socialist realist paintings that complied with the rules on the surface but also communicated subtly subversive statements about the state of things.
A new exhibition at the Georgia Museum of Art, “The Awe of Ordinary Labors: Twentieth Century Paintings from Ukraine,” shows off 44 works by Ukrainian artists working between the 1930's and the 1980's. Ukraine became part of the USSR in 1922 and gained its independence in 1991 before Russia invaded it in 2022. The works in the exhibition all come from the museum’s collection, gifts from the Maniichuk Brady Collection and the Parker Collection.
The artists in this show, which runs January eighteenth to June first, managed to navigate the margins of artistic freedom in their work. They manifested national pride by celebrating the labors of their comrades as well as the history and the landscape of their country. Although paintings in this style are no longer fashionable, the show presents them as worthy of our consideration.