Lot 403: Song of Russia #14, 2005

Song of Russia #14, 2005
Oil on canvas.   91.4 x 121.9 cm. (36 x 48 in).   Signed and dated 'Y Fiks 05' on the reverse. 

 Moscow, ARTStrelka Project, "The Song of Russia," 2005; Tallinn, Art Museum Kumu, "The Return of Memory: New Art from Russia," 2007

  Sots Realism Made in USA…, gif.ru, 22 December, 2005; Irina Saminskaya, Picasso in the Office, ezavisimaya, 11 January, 2006; Diana Baldon, Critics’ Picks, ARTFORUM on-line, January, 2006; Georgiy Litichevskiy, Utopicheskoe Pervorodstvo, Moscow Art Magazine, #61/62, May 2006; Anastasiya Mitushina, Songs of Russia, ARTmargins, May, 2006; Olga Kopenkina Introducing Yevgeniy Fiks, Modern Painters, May, 2008, p.50

 Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner

The Song of Russia is a series of paintings based on imagery thatYevgeniy Fiks borrowed from Hollywood films about Russia made in 1943-1944 at the behest of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in order to garner more supportfor the Soviet Union during WWII, and to change the opinion of the 403 American public toward the USSR. Song of Russia (by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) was essentially pro-Soviet propaganda produced in Hollywood that presented Stalin’s Russia in a very favorable light.The film completely matched both the aesthetics and rhetoric of Stalin’s Socialist Realism of the 1930s and ‘40s. Interestingly enough, the movie was produced in the USA during the SecondWorldWar, the time between the anti-Soviet hysteria that followed the October Revolution and the “ColdWar” era. The film was made possible only during 1943-1944 when the goals of the American and Soviet propaganda machines coincided.What makes the film even more interesting is that after WWII, during McCarthyism and the“witch hunt”, it’s precisely this film and several others from the same series, that became the focus of the hearings of the Committee on anti-American activity and communist infiltration in Hollywood in the US Congress. As a consequence, many of the creators of these films were blacklisted for they couldn’t prove direct orders of the Roosevelt administration to produce these films.Yevgeniy Fiks’s project Song of Russia reflects this forgotten chapter of the history of American cinema and narrates about the artificiality of the process of enemy construction.Alexandre Gertsman