Māksla un sabiedrība. Vizuālās mākslas recepcija padomju varas gados Latvijā

• Authors: Kļaviņš Eduards

Title variants

EN

Art and Society. Reception of Visual Art during the Soviet Years in Latvia

• Languages of publication: LV

Abstracts

EN

The attitude of Latvian society to visual art during Soviet rule could be reasonably judged from sociological studies, but sociology in the Latvian SSR developed only from the 1960s and the reception of visual art was not an object of its study. In order to answer the research questions, it was necessary to analyse through case studies of statistical documents on exhibition attendances at the Latvian and Russian Art Museum of the LSSR (from 1963 the State Art Museum), exhibition visitors’ comments in the Latvian State Archives and the Latvian National Museum of Art Scientific Documents Centre, beginning with the reoccupation period from 1945. Documented visitor figures had to be accepted as a sufficiently representative factual basis despite gaps in the data. Analysis of the comments sheets (more than 2000) made it possible to identify typological groups and trends in opinions, despite the frequent lack of self-identification of the authors and the ever growing number of migrant and tourist comments in Russian, which had to be separated focusing on the local community. The active “art for the people” policy of the ruling powers had its results. The number of visitors to exhibitions at the museum gradually increased, far surpassing the statistics of independent Latvia in the 1920s and 1930s. The dynamics of the total number of visitors varied from year to year reaching a peak in 1979 (more than 300,000) but experienced a sharp decline at the end of the period, when cultural life intertwined with the struggle for political independence, which was a pressing issue for Latvian society. Looking at the general picture of the reception of visual art in the whole of the Soviet period, one had to conclude that the development of prevailing attitudes shows both an orientation towards a mimetically traditional, but distinctly apolitical and iconographically local, “native” art, and a dramatically contrasting expansion of cognitions, as well as art-induced hidden and, by the end of the period, already overt desires for national and political independence.

Keywords

EN

Latvian art; Soviet art; museum exhibitions; visitor numbers; visitor opinions; comments sheets; reception of art

• Publisher: Institute of Art History of the Latvian Academy of Art and Art History Research Support Foundation
• Journal: Makslas Vesture un Teorija
• Year: 2024
• Volume: 28
• Pages: 98-111

Contributors

author

Kļaviņš Eduards

• Art Academy of Latvia Institute of Art History, Kronvalda Blvd. 4-325, Riga LV-1010, Latvia