Red. Art and Utopia in the Land of the Soviets

In 1917, the October Revolution caused a disruption of the social order, with decisive repercussions on artistic creation. Many artists adhere to the communist project and want to participate through their works in the construction of the new society. Led for the most part by authentic convictions, these artists oppose each other in defining what the art of socialism should be. But by the end of the 1920s, the debates were closed by the establishment of the Stalinist regime. This led to the gradual establishment of socialist realism, an aesthetic doctrine that gradually governed all sectors of creation. In capitalist countries, these debates are closely followed: multiple artistic exchanges are taking place with the young Soviet Russia, which attracts intellectuals and artists curious to discover the "homeland of socialism". It is this history, its tensions, its impulses and its reversals that the exhibition recounts through a series of major works on loan from the major Russian museums and the Centre Pompidou; a history in which plastic innovations and ideological constraints, inextricably linked, raise the question of a possible politicization of the arts.
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