Bowdoin College Museum of Art | - Under the Banner of Lenin for the Second Five-Year Plan

Preview image of work. lithograph on paper, Under the Banner of Lenin for the Second Five-Year Plan 33052

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Under the Banner of Lenin for the Second Five-Year Plan

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Artist

Sergey Yakovlevich Senkin (1894 - 1963)

Title

Under the Banner of Lenin for the Second Five-Year Plan

Creation Date

1931

Century

mid-20th century

Dimensions

59 x 43 in. (149.86 x 109.22 cm)

Object Type

Creation Place

Asia, Russia

Medium and Support

lithograph on paper

Credit Line

Generously lent by Svetlana and Eric Silverman ’85, P’19

Copyright

This artwork may be under copyright. For further information, please consult the Museum’s Copyright Terms and Conditions.

By 1928 Stalin consolidated power, purged the government of his opponents, and replaced Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP) with the Five-Year Plan system. The forced industrialization and collectivization of agriculture brought the economy under the centralized control of the Party. Art was to follow. Vying for official status and for state support, factions struggled for dominance in all cultural sectors. Lenin distrusted avant-garde art, which he dismissed as “leftist” and “infantile.” By the 1930s, experimental art was replaced by realist work based on the well-established representational language of academic painting. Various art movements were consolidated under one state-directed program. In 1934, Andrey Zhdanov defined the style that was to represent the Soviet aesthetic. Socialist Realism promoted “truth and historical correctness of the artistic depiction […] combined with the tasks of the ideological transformation and education of the working people in the spirit of Socialism.”