Soviet 2

A few weeks ago, I spent a rainy day at the Latvian National Museum of Art. It's a wonderful museum in a Beaux Arts building, and I mean no disrespect to Latvia when I say it's not very big. There's plenty of Latvian art, but you don't feel overwhelmed by it the way the V&A in London or the Metropolitan Museum of Art In New York just give you too much art. You can manage Latvia's national art museum, thank you very much.

When in the museum, you realize that Latvia has always been in touch with the rest of Europe in terms of art. (It's located there, after all, so this can't come as a total surprise.) Latvian Impressionism was closely in touch with Russian Impressionism, for example, and if you didn't know that there was a school of Russian Impressionism, you have some research to do. But though I feel that I'm not supposed to say this, honestly, my favorite gallery was the one that contained all the Soviet art.

Not that it was all great art, but that a gallery full of it existed at all. Soviet art was of course meant to be ideological: "national in form, socialist in content" is the key phrase. It meant that artists (not just visual artists, but writers, composers, sculptors, you name it) had severe constraints placed on them to express the glories of the socialist paradise being built right now before all of humankind! (Never mind those gulags and death camps and dissidents being tortured in psychiatric wards.) As you might imagine, at it worst this produced clunky, ideological schlock. At its best, though, it could produce art that really did inspire people.

That's the statement that I feel I am not supposed to make because, well, you know -- it's the Soviet Union again. And one painting in particular, with the clunky title "Masters of the Land," is a sort of cubist rendering of sturdy harvesters on a collective farm, taming the vast fields to bring humankind all the closer to a socialist Mecca. It's sort of dopey, frankly. But another painting of Latvian fishermen -- I forget the title -- is great. It's realistic, which socialist realism tended to be, which is one strike against it. We all know that great twentieth-century art is supposed to be inaccessible and abstract. This is just a great painting of a fishing competition that captures a moment like a snapshot would. I know that theoretically I'm not supposed to like it, but I do.

In its discussion of the entire gallery, the museum's appraisal of this hard-to-talk-about school, if we can even call it that, is unusually intelligent. While acknowledging that this era of art is highly problematic for all sorts of ideological reasons, it also assesses how artists worked, or didn't, within the highly politicized structure that they were forced to, how that created art, and what kind it created. I didn't like everything I saw, but I did like some of it, and I'm still sorting out how I feel about that. I think that a good test might be to take a work from this gallery and hang it somewhere else -- maybe in a show of early twentieth-century neo-realism like the work of, say, Thomas Hart Benton, and into which some of this Soviet art would fit nicely.. In a different context, devoid of its ideological underpinnings, would we appreciate it differently? I bet that we would. I very much appreciate the Latvian National Museum of Art's decision to collect this art and engage its visitors with it.

That said, there are two more works of Soviet art in Rīga worth mentioning. One is the truly clunky Academy of Sciences building, a Stalinist "wedding cake" of the type that Stalin was so fond of bestowing on cities in the Eastern bloc, whether they wanted them or not. (I would guess that they generally didn't, but when a dictator presents you with a building, it's in your best interest to accept it graciously.) It's a building that looks like, well, a wedding cake, with "layers" of stories that get increasingly smaller the higher it goes. But it doesn't go high enough; that is, it's so short and squat that it has no vertical thrust the way the Empire State Building does, so it looks as if someone took what was supposed to be a skyscraper and sat on it. The neo-Gothic decoration does not help matters any, either. If you think it's bad, try an even bigger and worse version of the "wedding cake" building, the Palace of Culture in Warsaw. Varsovians are fond of saying that the best view of Warsaw is from the top of the Palace of Culture because it's the one place in Warsaw where you don't have to look at the Palace of Culture.

The other is the World War II monument in a park on the west side of the Daugava River. I know that this huge set of statues is supposed to engage one with the immense sacrifice the Soviet Union made in WWII. And it was colossal -- an estimated 27 million dead, though nobody has an exact figure. So is the monument colossal. It is so colossal, in fact, that it crosses the line into kitsch, as far as I'm concerned. The statue of the Mother, I am guessing (as in Motherland, Rodina in Russian) reaches 150 feet into the sky, straining to grasp something. It is not clear why. When I first saw her, I thought she was trying to get something from the top shelf. Her cape (cape?) billowing out behind her. But because it's in bronze, it too heavy to have any energy. It just looks heavy and rather silly. On the other side of the monument, there are a group of soldiers who stylistically seem unrelated to Mother, as if they wandered in from another monument. They are engaged in what looks like a rugby scrum. In the middle of the monument is a narrow, vertical plinth of five very tall columns, each with a star at the top for the five years of the war. In short, the whole thing is a very large muddle, a memorial as executed by committee.

I know that this monument in all its glorious colossal-ness is meant to inspire awe. But it's so over the top that it just doesn't, can't work for me. Art shouldn't have to pummel you over the head to be inspiring. This is why Maya Lin's Vietnam Veteran's Memorial in Washington, D.C. is everything a war memorial should be, and Rīga's is everything it shouldn't. Her simple gash in the ground inscribed with the names of all those who died in that war allows the participant to engage with the memorial in any way she or he sees fit. The Soviet monument sees fit to interpret the war for you; it's as if it refuses to trust your feelings about the Great Patriotic War and insists on imposing on you the feelings that it thinks you're supposed to have. That said, it is worth seeing, as art is, good or bad. It's only in evaluating a wide range that we can see how it all fits together, and even bad art has a place in helping us define what possibilities there are for good art.