◆ SpookStack

every ¢ .nd all day long there was a line of people in f or the museum awaiting their turn to see the collection. Some nembers of our group were particularly interested in the plastic arts and made an efforé to determine what new trends er innovations had appeared since 1939, when the flower of Soviet realism was exhibited at the New York World's Fair. We spent some time in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, whieh specializes in Russian art and is arranged by years, thus facilitat- ing our effort to study the trends. We got the impression that there was probably some greater freedom in the choice of subject matter today than in 1939. Along with the prevailing type of painting with an obvious social message there were some land- scapes and some still lifes. As for techniques, there was nothing new or experimental. A very few canvasses had touches of im- pressionistic brush work but nothing reflecting the influence cf Twentieth Century painting in the West. While considerable technical skill of a conventional kind was reflected in numerous paintings, the general result might be described as calendar art. Going back to the Nineteenth Century and before, we felt that even Soviet realism was perhaps an improvement on early Rus- sian painting. For many decades Russian painters seemed to be eoncerned largely with portraiture in a static style. The canons of Russian taste are perhaps more acceptable in sculpture than in painting. There were some effective char- acter studies in this medium, and in some public buildings we saw monumental examples of high relief, with hundreds of sculptured figures marching cut of a painted background. The absence of what we call modern architecture is one of the most striking things about the Soviet building program. New con- struction is almost entirely in ornate Victorian style, an indica- tion perhaps of the cultural stage through which the Soviet people are now passing. The only “modern” building we saw was the box-like theatre in Rostov, built experimentally in the 1930's and now considered outdated by the Soviet citizenry. 3 Theatrical Realism The Soviet cultivation of realism in art probably finds its best application in the theater. For perfection in creating the theatrical illusion of reality it would probably be hard to find an equal anywhere in the world to the Bolshoi Theater in Mos- cow, On the tremendous stage of the Bolshoi, almost as deep as the auditorium itself, a river is not just a painted strip on a backdrop, but it has waves and ripples and keeps flowing throughout the scene. The total eclipse in Borodin’s opera Prince 63