Aleksandr Deineka (Russian, 1899–1969)

Between 1915 and 1917, Deineka studied at the School of Fine Arts in Kharkiv (now Ukraine). Returning to his hometown of Kursk in 1918, he worked as a teacher at the Gubernskii otdel narodnogo obrazovaniia (Gubnarobraz; Political Department of Public Education), overseeing the Fine Arts department. He also worked as a forensic photographer at the Ugrozysk (Police Department of Criminal Investigation) and as a stage designer.

In 1919, Deineka was mobilized into the Red Army, where he coordinated agitation and propaganda, including the poster production of the Russian Telegraph Agency (ROSTA) in Kursk. After his demobilization in 1921, he enrolled at VKhUTEMAS (Higher State Artistic and Technical Workshops) in Moscow, where he studied in the Graphics and Printing Department. In 1923, he began working as an illustrator for the anti-religious journal Bezbozhnik u stanka (Atheist at the Workbench; 1923–1931). The following year, he participated in the Pervaia diskussionnaia vystavka ob”edinenii aktivnogo revoliutsionnogo iskusstva (First Discussional Exhibition of Active Revolutionary Art Associations) in Moscow. It was in the context of this landmark exhibition that his work was mentioned in the press for the first time.

In 1925, Deineka became a founding member of OST (Society of Easel Painters). In 1928, he left OST to join the Oktiabr’ (October) group, a union of artists, photographers, filmmakers, and architects active between 1928 and 1932, under whose auspices he could continue to work in a figurative manner while creating graphic art for mass publication. In 1929, Deineka began working for the Vsekokhudozhnik (All-Russian Union of Cooperative Partnerships of Visual Art Workers). In 1930 he taught at the Poligraficheskii institut (Institute of Graphics and Printing Trades) in Moscow, where he was appointed Chair of the Poster Department in 1934. That same year Deineka was appointed a member of the exhibition committee for the show The Art of Soviet Russia scheduled to take place at the Philadelphia Museum of Art from June 9 to September 17, 1934, and he traveled to the United States as an official Soviet representative of the exhibition. On February 12, 1936 a monographic exhibition of Deineka’s work opened at the Academy of Fine Arts in Leningrad.

Although Deineka was closely associated with avant-garde circles, he did not adopt the language of abstraction or often employ photomontage. Rather, he developed a distinctive figurative style that situated him between what have come to be considered the poles of avant-garde art and Socialist Realism. His oeuvre reveals these stylistic approaches to be less discrete opposing poles, than factions of a single, lively, and contested debate regarding the most effective visual means of reaching the populace.

For a detailed chronology of the artist, see Aleksandr Deineka (1899–1969): Avant-Garde for the Proletariat (Madrid: Fundación Juan March, 2011), pp. 19–35. This exhibition catalogue is a key English-language source on the artist, as is Christina Kiaer’s recently published Collective Body: Aleksandr Deineka at the Limit of Socialist Realism (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2024).

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