“Social Realism in Art: Of the Left and the Right”

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While reviewing a book on Käthe Kollwitz’s art – which features prominently images of labourers, the poor and the socially deprived, with a view to eliciting sympathy with the plight of the urban poor in the era of industrialism – I was struck once again by the multivalent political character of Social Realism. Social Realism needs to be distinguished from Socialist Realism. Social Realism is the use of naturalism to depict the life of the poor, working class and social outcasts, specifically with the intention of effecting social, legal and cultural change in favour of the depicted subjects. Socialist Realism is the political conformity of artists to the cause of advancing and consolidating the policy and ideals of Socialism and Communism, usually within the structures of states pursing such political goals. So Kollwitz, Jules Bastien-Lepage and Marie Bashkirtseff are Social Realists; Vera Mukhina and Isaak Brodsky are Socialist Realists. 

To complicate matters, Kollwitz may not have been a Socialist Realist but she was definitely a Socialist. Her close family members were members of the SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands), expressed support for it and she made posters for SPD causes. She accepted commissions from the SPD and the pro-Communist Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung newspaper. She was twice a signatory to a petition for left-wing parties to unite against the Nazi Party in 1932 and 1933. One essential feature of Socialist Realism is idealisation; Kollwitz did not idealise her subjects, though she did simplify and turn living subjects into types. Her art (even the political posters) criticises inequity rather than celebrates the success of Socialist action and organisation.   

A curious fact about Kollwitz’s Socialist iconography and messages is that they are equally amenable to the politically left and right…”

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Käthe Kollwitz

Käthe Kollwitz née Schmidt (1867-1945) was born in Königsberg and went to study painting in Munich. She aspired to follow the informality and liveliness of Max Liebermann’s Impressionism, combining this with the social-realist trend, current in the 1870s and 1880s. The movement came largely from the elevation of the peasant by Jean-François Millet and Gustave Courbet. This became inflected by the dramatic symbolism of Max Klinger, whose example dominated the German art world in the last decade of the Nineteenth Century. The young artist married physician Dr Karl Kollwitz in 1891 and moved to the Prenzlauer Berg district of Berlin. This brought her into frequent contact with the working-class poor, labourers, the elderly, children and pregnant women.

These types formed the basis of her art works, sometimes illustrating scenes from Charles Dickens, Émile Zola and Gerhart Hauptmann. Narrative is generally eschewed in favour of the impact of the isolation figure or pair of figures. The subjects are often women who are suffering or supplicating. Children (sometimes the artist’s sons) are usually young and poor, sometimes accompanied by mothers. Mother’s grieving over the death of infants is a recurrent subject. This was a staple of not only social realists but of book illustrators and Victorian academic painters. Without a belief in religious redemption and certainty of an afterlife – Kollwitz seems (as a socialist) to have been an areligious materialist – her scenes have a powerful bleakness.

[Image: Käthe Kollwitz, Lise, um 1890, © Käthe Kollwitz Museum Köln]

Kollwitz soon expanded her media to graphics, which became her primary means of working, something that allowed her to exhibit widely, sending her art by post. It also corresponded with her increasingly socialist outlook, which advanced the idea that art should be cheap enough for even labourers to purchase. Her work in woodcut is not as effective, as it loses most of it corporeality. This book includes posters, drawing attention to poverty and opposing war. They were noticed at the time and considered provocative. The artist commented on her dissatisfaction with the lettering done by typographers on the final printing of the posters. Editor Hannelore Fischer selects quotes from the artist’s journals, memoirs and letters that give us Kollwitz’s personal testimony. Comments by contemporaries tell of how her art was received during her lifetime.

She also studied sculpture at the Académie Julian, Paris and visited Rodin. She built respect and won awards for her art over the next decade. In 1914, one of her two sons, Peter was killed in Great War. The despair and anguish of her grief drove Kollwitz to commemorate his death in the statue group Mourning Parents (1932), erected in the Belgian cemetery where her son is buried. The experience turned her into a pacifist. War themes and maternities dominated the late work she made. Kollwitz opposed the Nazi government, using her pacifist work to implicitly criticise the militarism of the regime. She died a few weeks before the end of World War II.

[Image: Käthe Kollwitz, Frauenschicksal (Martyrium der Frau), um 1889, © Käthe Kollwitz Museum Köln]

This book is published under the guidance of Käthe Kollwitz Museum, Cologne, which holds a large collection of the artist’s drawings, prints and sculptures, as well as personal documents, which come primarily come from the artist’s family. The book acts as a generous introduction to the artist’s world and the range of her oeuvre. There are thematic chapters covering the artist’s output, with bibliography, exhibition list, chronology and index. This catalogue publishes 15 newly authenticated drawings by Kollwitz, not included in the 1980 catalogue raisonné. The reproductions are pin sharp and tonally rich. Most of her art is monochrome.  

Kollwitz’s drawings are very close to the prints. Kollwitz started with etching but soon moved to lithographs, often made with transfer sheets. That where, rather than drawing directly on a stone, the artist draws in crayon on a special paper, which is then mechanically transferred to the stone. It requires less involvement from the artist and is more convenient. The drawings are mainly in charcoal, of faces and half-length figures, usually set in a dark, non-descript surrounding. The detachment from specifics of place and time are deliberate; they stress the universality of the situations and amplify the emotions of both the depicted and the viewer. There is no relief, no incidental detail, no anecdotal aside, no attractive colour. There is nothing except the subject of the art and the subject-as-viewer. Kollwitz’s drawing may have been influenced by the realism of Adolph von Menzel’s studies from life and Seurat’s conté drawing on textured paper, which created monochrome analogues to his Pointillist paintings. Her exhibitions with different societies of avant-garde art would have brought her into contact with a great variety of art. Two artists she knew from Paris was Eugène Carrière and Théophile Steinlen. Following his example, she made smoky drawings of women workers. Some of the newly found drawings are of Paris workers, sleeping or in drunken stupors in cellar bars. Social critiques of poverty, alcoholism and working conditions are frequent topics. Kollwitz’s tableaux of mothers with sick or dead children is one that we can find throughout Symbolist and Secession art of the 1890-1918 period.

[Image: Käthe Kollwitz, Stehender Mann und sitzendes Paar, 1909, © Käthe Kollwitz Museum Köln]

The graphics are in no way supplementary to unique works. Kollwitz was ideally suited for prints, especially the lithographs that are drawing facsimiles, and we do not miss oil paintings. It is the absence of such paintings that mean that Kollwitz’s art is not discussed in overall surveys of realist art of the period. In 1910s and later, we find a degree of expressionism; not the Expressionism of Die Brucke or Edvard Munch but that of Daumier or Van Gogh – exaggeration rather pure Expressionism of primitivism and schematic treatment. The fold-out pages allow readers to view the sequence of two print suites: A Weavers Revolt (1893-7), The Peasants’ War (1902/3-8) and Seven Woodcuts on War (1921-2). The account of the 1524-5 Peasant’s Revolt was written Wilhelm Zimmermann, who was a source for Babel and Engels as a template for a workers’ Socialist revolution. Kollwitz included scenes of a raped-and-murdered woman, workers arming themselves and the march of the mob, selecting the most rousing scenes.  

While Kollwitz’s maternities and lamentations are well known; less reproduced are her drawings of lovers embracing. She kept them secret during her lifetime. They are as tender and urgent as scenes of sad emotion. More detached are her drawings of herself. She drew workers and children from life but did not make many portraits made for fee-paying subjects. She had a gift for portraiture, as seen in some character heads. She sometimes wishes that she had described more specific physiognomies and record something of their life experiences. One of the greatest blind spots of socialists is indifference to the individual, in preference to the abstract masses. Kollwitz is relatively free of this failing but too often we encounter the general in her art when the specific would have been more piquant and engaging. She was invited to draw the body of Communist Karl Liebknecht after the failed revolt of 1919. 

It seems that the English edition is currently sold out. Let us hope that a reprint makes this attractive volume available again to Anglophone readers.

Hannelore Fischer (ed.), Käthe Kollwitz: A Survey of her Works, 1888-1942, Hirmer, 2022, hardback, 304pp with 6 fold-out pages, 259 illus., €45, German version available, English version ISBN 978-3-7774-3079-9

(c) 2022 Alexander Adams

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Art for All: British Socially Committed Art

During the early and middle decades of the Twentieth Century, the tradition of social realism in the West extended the realism, naturalism and social realism schools of the preceding century but with a more explicitly advocatory role. Inspired by the Russian Revolution, the foundation of the USSR and development of Socialist art in Mexico, these artists had specific ideals to work towards, with the hope that such changes could be enacted in the West. Christine Lindey’s Art for All documents the work of British socially committed artists working from 1930s to 1962 – the height of the period when social realism was disapproved of by the British establishment and when realism was under attack from Modernists.

It should be said that Art for All is a necessary book, exploring as it does the overlooked history of politically committed left-wing art during the mid-century era. In the ideological war of the period, realism decisively lost to Modernism. Consequently, the true span of art of this period has been obscured because of a concentration on explaining the development of Modernism over this period. The efforts of social realists during the period are irrelevant for tracing the development of abstraction and Modernist schools, thus they have been dropped in most accounts. Art history is more École de Paris than École de Manchester.

There is the question of quality. In many historical accounts the only glimpse of inter-war realism in Britain one gets is Stanley Spencer’s figure paintings. Yet this obscures the fact that Spencer himself was an eccentric for the period. Spencer is one of the more engaging artists of the period and his Modernist credentials make him acceptable for Modernist-inclined studies. But Spencer was neither typical nor representative of realism in Britain. In some ways the realism of the artists in Art for All is more representative of the blend of Modernism and realism that characterised non-academic figurative painting in the period.

Lindey describes the socially-committed artist as a stylistic realist with some of the following attributes: documenting working people and ordinary life; highlighting specific social inequities; campaigning in favour of pacifism; agitating for improvement in working/living conditions of the poor; advocating adoption of socialism or socialistic policies; opposing the British Empire; opposing Fascism; supporting Socialist nations. While Lindey rightly stresses the gender-equal aspirations for Marxism, she leaves unmentioned the movement’s hostility towards the traditional family. One of the principle foundations of socialist states (deriving primarily from Engels) is the destruction of the family as a root of iniquitous inheritance, private loyalty and traditional morality.

Lindey’s list of artists is assembled transparently (excluding left-wing Modernists and the intermittently committed) and the spread of artists seems representative. Artists selected include Peter de Francia, Priscilla Thornycroft, Paul Hogarth, Clive Branson, Cliff Rowe, James Boswell, Josef Herman, Eva Frankfurther, George Fullard and Ruskin Spear. There is no doubting the seriousness of these artists. Many endured poverty for their principles or imprisonment for their conscientious objection. Felicia Browne died fighting in the Spanish Civil War. Lindey does well to cover the problems artists faced to survive and make work. World War II was the first time when Social Realists felt their anti-Fascist position matched their country’s policies, though many were ambivalent until the invasion of the USSR made it a clear the war was an anti-Fascist enterprise. Some artists enlisted, others became war artists or designed posters. Exhibitions selling low-cost prints proved both artistically and financially satisfying, spreading the word and allowing ordinary people the chance to own art. The book mentions the endless cycle of May Day demonstrations, Spanish Republican fundraising exhibitions, banner painting for protest marches and the role of organisations such as Artists International Association and publications such as Left Review and The Daily Worker. In addition to the official art of the USSR, British realists took as their models Grosz, Dix, Kollwitz and the Neue Sachlichkeit, Mexican Muralists and graphics, Frans Masereel and art of previous generations, such as Daumier, Meunier and others.

The twin blows of 1956 (the revelation of Stalin’s terror and the Invasion of Hungary) led to the haemorrhaging of support for Socialism. The UK and US support for the plurality of Modernism undermined realism stylistically, while the increasing influence of US popular culture undermined Socialist values and post-war material prosperity undercut the Marxist economic case. The 1950s and 1960s marked the long decline of social realism in the UK. While France and Italy had strong Communist parties, the already weak British branch rapidly diminished into insignificance, leaving British socially committed artists isolated morally and financially. Leftist artists had ambivalent attitudes to socialist realism. Some maintained it was an ideal only to be undertaken in Socialist states; others claimed it infringed on artists’ independent courses towards raising class consciousness. The charge that social (and Socialist) realism was a political imposition which contrasted to the true freedom artistic Modernism offered became a difficult claim to refute. The point that most people preferred realist art was also being quickly eroded by changes in taste (or fashion).

The point that the School of London painters “convey the malaise of the helpless, alienated individual” is the common Marxist accusation. What the Marxist means by this is that the ordinary man has to deal with life whereas the middle-class bohemian can indulge his emotional frailties. Surely the point about existential art is that it applies to every person living in the world, regardless of class and background. Why cannot the working man address the acute internal fear and doubt he experiences? Why should a baron but not a bricklayer relate to this type of art? Opening the door to matters of private revelation, inner searching, individual reflection and philosophical contemplation contravenes the Marxist’s social-economic model, leaving the subject dangerous latitude in matters of private self-interested morality and personal conduct. Refusal to suborn discussion to the Marxist level leads to general attacks, of which this is a common one: Comrade, the working man is a cheerful capable fellow who requires more labour councils and does not deserve to have his head bothered with this personal angst nonsense. This displays the Marxist’s terrible fear of individuals dwelling upon the meaning of life and concluding that Marxism does not provide what they require. It is extra evidence of the paternalistic attitude of Marxists towards the subjects of its charity.

By and large, if one accepts the premise of the approach, then politics are not too intrusive in the narrative. Even so, at times the relentless class warfare can grate. Making jibes at a society portrait compared to portraits of working women is not any kind of considered criticism – it is inverted snobbery and lessens one’s respect for the author’s judgment in matters of discrimination. It would have been possible to engage a debate on aesthetic merits of portraits but serious debate is never entertained.

Illustrations are plentiful and enlightening. On matters of fact, Art for All is informative, using a broad range of sources to provide documentation of the activities of artists. Interpretatively, the book is less reliable. Lindey does not given an unbiased presentation of the parallels between art of National Socialism and Socialist Realism, claiming that the latter allowed more variety in subject and style and was therefore entirely dissimilar. Actually, it is only a toleration of more stylistic variation that distinguishes Socialist Realism. In Fascist and Socialist states we find the bureaucratic management of public art, persecution of dissident Modernist art (“degenerate formalism”), imposition of punitive sanctions on artists, complete control of artist associations, publications and education, all directed towards the production of politically directed realist/heroic art. The two authoritarian ideologies converge in their utilitarian functionalist attitudes towards art.

So, is the art any good? Some is appealing and thoughtful. Herman is striking; de Francia is a skilled painter (though too close to Guttaso); Fullard’s realistic sculpture is effective; Rowe’s compositions are strong and well handled, as seen in his murals; Spear is a top-drawer portraitist. Much is indifferent; some is awful. It would be a difficult proposition to suggest that this art deserves a place in a general art history, other than as isolated examples of the currents of political and realist art. The truth is that there is nothing really compelling or exciting about this art. One cannot help thinking that all the artists who were genuinely ambitious and committed to art over politics had already joined the Modernist movement, leaving the social realists rather shorthanded when it came to the ability to make first-rate art. In an open market of art, people buy more posters of Picasso, Mondrian, Van Gogh, Monet, Rothko and Chagall than realist art. The human appetite craves pungent tastes, originality, eccentricity and élan – all the accoutrements of bourgeois formalism and individualistic self-absorption, if one were to get Marxist about it. For all the social realists’ grousing about capitalistic individualism, one El Greco or Rembrandt on their side would have won over legions of supporters. While the social realists have been unfairly written out of history, the evidence seems to be that they lost to the Modernists – in part – because they failed to recruit and retain the best artists.

Christine Lindey, Art for All: British Socially Committed Art from the 1930s to the Cold War, Artery Publications, 2018, paperback, 224pp, col. illus., £20

© 2019 Alexander Adams

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Edited on 26 Feb. 2019: grammatical errors