Ex-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych’s Mezhyhirya estate, along with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Black Sea palace revealed by Alexey Navalny, are impressive monuments to political corruption, kleptomania and greed.
But their taste — derivative, retrograde and mawkishly nostalgic — is an outgrowth of their ideological position, even if neither leader has the art historical knowledge to understand that. And both residences, with their over-the-top gaudy decor and style, could have passed for one of ex-U.S. President Donald Trump’s residences.
Visual arts are the earliest forms of human self-expression. The Cauvet Cave paintings date from around 30,000 years ago, and since then painting, sculpture and architecture have provided the most complete and accurate record of human societies. This remains true today as visual arts reflect our deepening political divisions.
The 1848 revolution in Europe marked the beginning of the modern era, providing an impetus for the radical transformation of society in the second half of the 19th century and laying the foundations for the 20th. It prompted Marx and Engels to write their Communist Manifesto, initiating the socialist and social-democratic movements that shaped modern Europe and North America. It began the emancipation of the Jews, the first group of “others” to be given full citizenship rights, which eventually altered the nature of the nation-state. It is significant that serfs were freed in the Russian Empire and slavery was ended in the United States within two decades of 1848.
The revolution triggered the unification of Italy and Germany, the creation of the Dual Monarchy in Austria and the longest anti-Russian uprising in Poland and Lithuania. Even though self-determination for Poland and Lithuania, as well as for other central, southern and eastern European nations, didn’t come until the end of World War I, and for some parts of the Russian Empire even later, the ideas of national liberation were first proclaimed in 1848.
The breakdown of the centuries-old social order set in motion by that revolution was expressed in the visual arts with the appearance of new radical, non-academic artistic movements, notably the Impressionists. Their first shows elicited an intense emotional response from the French public — not because they broke the boundaries of the accepted in painting, but because they reflected the breakup of existing boundaries in society.
The expansion of the scope of artistic expression accelerated in the early 20th century with the appearance of Post-Impressionists and a wide variety of even wilder and more subversive movements, such as Dadaists, Surrealists, etc. Painting was uncoupled from the subject matter with the development of abstraction, and even from visual expression in subsequent artistic movements.
Artists themselves became subversives, with their lifestyle reflecting the rejection of commonly held notions of propriety. Manet’s Olympia dared to portray a well-known courtesan and a generation later Gaugin became a kind of symbol of the unconventional, leaving his family and respectable job in banking and moving to Tahiti in “primitive” French Polynesia. By now, contemporary artists’ lifestyles are often not just complementary to their oeuvre but replace works of art entirely.
Subversion of the established social order by definition came from the left, whereas traditional values were asserted and defended by the right. The Russian revolution was spearheaded by this type of new artists and the artistic movements of the Silver Age. Many of those artists — including, notably, an enormous number who were working in Ukraine — welcomed the collapse of the monarchy and the Bolshevik takeover. They not only wanted to provide propaganda for the new regime, but believed that a new, liberated society had to be based on new artistic principles — naturally, their own.
However, as societies changed in the second half of the 19th century and, especially, after the egalitarian impetus of World War I, those changes triggered a reaction from the right — a violent assertion of traditional value. Those were no longer the old conservatives, based on the monarchic principle, the nobility of birth and Christianity. Those were right-wing revolutionaries espousing the “one nation, one country, one leader” ideology. Note that all of them — Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler and Franco — were not especially concerned with any of the three conservative principles.
During the 1930s Age of Dictators pluralism and freedoms were quashed and in visual art — and in the arts and literature in general — a reactionary style became triumphant, while other forms of artistic expression were violently suppressed.
Italian fascism, the first such movement, was, like the Russian revolution, spearheaded by futurism. However, once it became established and crystalized, Mussolini’s regime turned to traditional artistic forms and ended up condemning futurism in the 1930s. And of course, it made perfect sense for Hitler, a failed artist himself, to come up with the term “Degenerate Art.”
Russia had a similar trajectory. Though coming from the left, Stalin recreated a kind of neo-Czarist empire in his Soviet Union and promptly put an end to all leftist artistic experimentations. He embraced a retrograde pseudo-heroic style known as socialist realism, which was barely distinguishable from the art of Nazi Germany. Artists from the early 20th century were pushed abroad or forced to change their style — and many ended up in the Gulag.
Germany and Italy fascism was defeated in 1945, Spain became a democracy after Franco’s death, but in the Soviet Union both politics and esthetics remained by and large Stalinist. During the Soviet period, great Silver Age artists were rarely exhibited while museums were filled with retrograde socialist realist works. In performing arts, the Soviets cultivated the 19th-century classical ballet while modern composers such as Shostakovich and Schnittke were forever running afoul of the authorities.
In the second half of the 20th century, America replaced France as the artistic capital of the world. Under American influence, mainstream visual art — works shown in major museums and commanding highest prices — became extremely non-traditional in form and subversive in content.This kind of art has been under attack from what is still called conservatism, but which is in effect the radical right. Forty years ago, when Maya Lin’s below-ground black wall design won the competition for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, protests led to a commission to Frederick Hart to design a rival monument, The Three Soldiers, whose style and imagery would have made any socialist realist proud.
There is a direct link between radical right-wing presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, who once compared abstract sculptures in the National Gallery to giant dog excrement, and fantastically kitschy art which portrays Trump as General Washington crossing the Delaware, or relaxing in the company of America’s greatest presidents, or standing guard over picket-fence America. There is a close stylistic link between Trumpist art and the “military porn” decor of the recently constructed Russian Armed Forces Cathedral in Moscow.
While the realist style of this art harks back to 19th-century academic painting, the ideology that underpins it does not represent a return to conservative values. In fact, Trump’s followers are just as passionately anti-establishment as the radical anti-globalist left. They reject the US government, distrust America’s armed forces, police and intelligence agencies and denounce mainstream media as “fake news” and “enemies of the people. Even in religion, they want their own brand: American Catholics seem to know God’s will better than Pope Francis, the Vicar of Jesus Christ on earth.
Unlike the authoritarians and right-wingers of the past, who at least saw the value of art as propaganda, their modern heirs couldn’t care less about it. Trump used money from his now-defunct charitable foundation to buy an atrocious portrait of himself, and similarly, horrible portraits of Putin are plentiful in Russia. But their esthetics are revealed in architecture and home decor. Not surprisingly, their tastes are similar, tending toward “the old times” and using plenty of gold fixtures in toilets.
In Russia, both corruption fighters and mafia state rivals regularly publicize the palaces of Russian kleptocrats. Most recently, Navalny’s associates created a video about Duma chairman Vyacheslav Volodin and the police arrested the chief traffic cop in Stavropol region. Both demonstrate the same taste as Yanukovych, Putin and Trump, with the degree of excess dependent on the amount of money they have stolen.
