19th and 20th Century Art, Culture, and Russian History
Culture and Art in the 19th and 20th Centuries
Literary Movements
Culture highlighted two literary movements:
- Realism: Focused on contemporary reality, described in detail and accurately.
- Modernism: Sought to escape reality, evading into the past or to distant lands.
Art and Architecture
- Iron Architecture: Characterized by the use of new, high-strength, and low-cost materials. Notable examples include the Eiffel Tower and the reading room of the National Library.
- Modernism: Notable figures include Victor Horta (Tassel House) and Hector Guimard (Paris Metro entrances and Castel Béranger).
Sculpture
- Realistic Sculpture: Represented members of the proletariat. Key figure: Constantin Meunier (The Puddler and The Stevedore).
- Impressionist Sculpture: Rodin, who leveraged the incidence of light to create plays of light and shadow, blurring the outlines of the figures.
Painting
- Realism: Sought to represent contemporary reality objectively and raw, abandoning the romantic idealization of anonymous people to show and denounce the cruelty of life for workers and social differences.
- Impressionism: Named after a painting by Monet entitled Impression, soleil levant. The art was strictly experimental; the artist was interested in the impression produced by scenes and fleeting time.
- Post-Impressionism: Pointillism stands out, characterized by the use of dots of pure color juxtaposed.
- Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Cézanne: Considered a history of various styles such as Fauvism, Expressionism, and Cubism.
- Avant-garde:
- Fauvism: Main representative was Matisse, who used color on the margins of reality.
- Expressionism: Showed emotion, pessimism, and human tension in its works.
- Cubism: Decomposed subjects into flat geometric shapes that were rendered simultaneously.
- Futurism: Taught action, violence, speed, and movement.
Civil War and the Consolidation of the USSR
In March 1918, Russia signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, withdrawing from the First World War. A civil war (1918-1920) ensued between the Whites (supporters of the Tsarist regime) and the revolutionary Red Army. The Whites were defeated. In 1922, a new political organization, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), was formed, and a constitution was approved in 1924, based on the following principles and agencies:
- A federal state consisting of various republics, with Russia as the dominant republic.
- The concentration of all power in the hands of the Communist Party.
- A Supreme Soviet or Central Committee, equivalent to a Parliament, as a representative body of popular sovereignty.
- A Congress of Soviets, a representative body of the different territories of the USSR, which chose the government.
Efforts were made to replace capitalism with Marxist socialism (abolition of private property and establishing a centrally planned economy by the state). However, the situation resulting from the civil war (hunger, destruction, millions of deaths) led to the implementation of the New Economic Policy (NEP) between 1921 and 1928. The NEP partially and temporarily restored capitalist economic ways to encourage private initiative and encourage productivity. Farmers could sell part of their production in the open market, and small artisan businesses and cooperatives were promoted. This achieved some economic stability.