Vision and Communism: Viktor Koretsky and Dissident Public Visual Culture

Softcover |13.97 x 1.27 x 20.96 cm | 176 pp

The New Press | 2011 | 9781595586254 

Viktor Koretsky (1909–1998) was a leading Soviet artist and the acknowledged master of the Soviet photographic poster. With a long and prolific career that spanned the early Stalin era through to the onset of Glasnost, Koretsky produced some of the most memorable images of World War II and the Cold War from the point of view of the USSR.

In the last thirty years of the Soviet Communist project, Viktor Koretsky’s art struggled to solve an enduring riddle: how to ensure or restore Communism’s moral health through the production of a distinctively Communist vision. In this sense Koretsky’s art demonstrates what an “avant-garde late Communist art” would have looked like if we had ever seen it mature. Most striking of all, Koretsky was pioneering the visual languages of Benetton and MTV at a time when the iconography of interracial togetherness was still only a vague rumour on Madison Avenue.

Vision and Communism presents a series of interconnected essays devoted to Viktor Koretsky’s art and the social worlds that it hoped to transform. Produced collectively by its five editors, this writing also considers the visual art, film, and music included in the exhibition Vision and Communism at the Smart Museum of Art, 2011.