Western art history has largely ignored Socialist Realism, deeming it unworthy of the models of analysis developed by the discipline. My research project aims to produce a new, post-Cold War model of art history that will be adequate to comprehending Socialist Realism as part of the history of modernist art, rather than as its repressed East-bloc other. I take the successful Soviet painter Aleksandr Deineka (1899-1969) as my case study because despite his secure status as a Socialist Realist, his formally innovative and highly corporeal works are intensely compelling to modernist eyes.
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Christina Kiaer, of Columbia University, was a 2001-02 Individual Advanced Research Opportunities (IARO) [8] fellow.
