Political Censorship of the Visual Arts in Nineteenth-Century Europe

Arresting Images

Robert Justin Goldstein, Andrew M. Nedd, Robert Justin Goldstein, Andrew M. Nedd

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137316493
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia sociale

In this comprehensive account of censorship of the visual arts in nineteenth-century Europe, when imagery was accessible to the illiterate in ways that print was not, specialists in the history of the major European countries trace the use of censorship by the authorities to implement their fears of the visual arts, from caricature to cinema.

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Irony, Derision, and Magical Wit: Censors as a Spur to Russian Abstract Art

Margaret Bridget Betz and Andrew M. Nedd

Introduction

Censorship of the image in Imperial Russia contributed to the development of a specialized Russian art—one bursting with hidden meaning.¹ More than merely reporting on what drew the censor’s disapproval, we look deeply and draw out as much of the image’s meaning as we can. Beginning with the popular lubok folk print, censorship caused the development of many cloaking devices to allude to issues in Russia itself.² This conditioned the public to search for critiques of the existing regime, much more so than in Western Europe. The consequences of this catapulted Russian art from Symbolism into the abstract realm where images hid from view, with training needed to understand a difficult art.

In the defining event of the nineteenth century, artists created cheap popular prints about Napoleon’s invasion of Russia to bolster their nation’s defensive efforts. Domestic icons shared space with popular prints, war lubki, and these were “often the first printed materials to enter the homes of common people.”³ Lubki depicting scenes of war were particularly popular in imperial Russia, and these were hung in people’s homes alongside spiritual images in the area traditionally called “the red corner.” Vladimir Denisov, an early twentieth-century critic, commented on this fact: “War lubki took this place in the red corner by no accident. In popular thought war was endured, like universal and cosmic events, like manifestation of the omnipotence of God, who sends war, like floods, famine, and earthquakes … in fulfillment of His divine will.”⁴ As a reflection of Russian Orthodox millennialism, this truly helps the believer cope with life’s tragedies, for these are all part of “the end times” preceding the Savior’s return. Between the years 1812 and 1814 some two hundred caricature sheets of Napoleon and his entourage were produced in Russia. Largely ignored by the censors at this time, three artists, Ivan Terebenev (1780–1815), Ivan Ivanov (1779–1848), and Aleksei Venetsianov (1780–1847), are often credited with fueling this visual manifestation of a burgeoning Russian national awareness.

In the wake of Napoleon’s invasion of 1812 the audience for lubki expanded and came to include rural peasants, urban dwellers, and the limited middle class that existed at the time. As literacy and commercial publishing increased in Russia the imperial administration grappled with how to regulate the circulation of “lubok literature,” as it was called. Alexander I (r. 1801–25) issued a new censorship law that decreed that no book or image could be sold until censors had reviewed it, and no foreign image could be sold in Russia that did not bear the censor’s seal of approval.⁵ While the new censorship law was relaxed during the war with Napoleon, an increasingly conservative censorship regime emerged in the last years of Alexander’s rule. The censors, for example, had ignored Terebenev’s patriotic lubki in 1812, but by 1815 his images were banned as part of a broader crackdown on representations of actual warfare. On 1 September 1816 Count Sergei Uvarov wrote to the St. Petersburg Censorship Committee of his concern that a large number of popular images were circulating in Russia during and after the 1812 invasion without the censor’s stamp of approval. Uvarov called on the committee to require image-makers to submit to preliminary censorship, as required by law. Uvarov’s call for more vigilant surveillance of lubki initiated the decades-long process of government subversion of popular pictures.

Nicholas I (r. 1825–55) and Count Uvarov viewed censorship as a way to advance the program of Official Nationality; in fact, Uvarov was later Nicholas I’s minister of education and author of the Doctrine of Official Nationality.⁶ The censorship charter of 1826 decreed that all forms of popular imagery like lubki had to be submitted to the censors for approval and were required to have a “moral use or at least a harmless purpose.” Beginning with Nicholas I’s 1826 censorship charter, representations of the tsar and his family were brought under strict control, and the tsar maintained the right to reject or approve any portrait of himself or his family. As Richard Wortman argues, Russian tsars retained control of the use of imperial imagery as part of their individual “scenarios of power.” Poetry, art, architecture, pageantry, and ceremony raised the tsar into a “higher realm” in order “to represent an otherworldly universe dominated by the monarch’s persona” while masking the “fragile legitimacy of monarchical authority in Russia.”⁷ One of the tsar’s familiar names was the tender tsar batushka, or Little Father Tsar, and expressed the filial devotion proper between ruler and subject; this, too, would put his image into the realm of the sacred and thus, unavailable for parody or caricature.

During the reign of Nicholas I, lubki representing the tsar reflected the formulations of the Doctrine of Official Nationality, and the emperor was depicted in an appropriately lofty and elevated manner. Under Nicholas’s son, Alexander II (r. 1855–81), lubok artists were confronted with a dilemma: how to represent the “Tsar Liberator” following the release of the Emancipation Manifesto of 1861, which ended serfdom in the Russian Empire. While the results of emancipation fell far short of its promise, the emancipation lubki were required to represent grateful serfs in the same image as the tsar. Contemporary newspapers printed numerous accounts of peasant gatherings and ceremonies organized to express gratitude to their liberator. One lubok, Voice of the Russian People, demonstrates how artists dealt with placing the tsar and his subjects in the same representational space. The tsar is in a “picture within a picture,” standing on a canopied dais wearing military dress and surrounded by imperial regalia to impress the adoring serfs with his “imperial and secular transcendence.”⁸ Highlighting differences in dress and height was another device in lubki of that period. It prevented an indecorous intimacy between the tsar and his subjects because in most cases the tsar was the tallest figure in the composition, a tradition revived in paintings of Stalin.

While the history of Russian graphic arts has its origin in lubok literature, an alternate social and political caricature tradition emerged and was fueled by artists from western Europe, starting under Peter the Great and resulting in an “imposed Western tradition of the graphic arts,” with foreign master artists teaching at the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg.⁹ Founded in 1757 by Empress Elizabeth (r. 1741–61), the Imperial Academy saw a complete reorganization under Catherine the Great. Her new program for the Academy was relatively liberal and benign, but during the reign of Nicholas I (r. 1825–55), the Academy’s charter was revised once more in 1840 as part of the general tightening of control over the visual arts. Its supervision was transferred from the Ministry of Education to the Ministry of Imperial Domains, bringing the direction of the Academy under the supervision of members of the royal family. The medals and titles that the Academy awarded brought with them an equivalent rank in the civil service, with the result that artists were treated, as Elizabeth Valkenier notes, “not as free creative individuals but as servitors with assigned tasks who could be commandeered either to decorate a church or an imperial residence or to copy some Western masterpiece.”¹⁰ Though there were several private art schools located in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, only the Academy could grant professional titles to artists. Through much of the nineteenth century, Russia’s artistic life relied almost entirely on the support of the state and imperial family.

Following the Decembrists Uprising of 1825 a number of new regional censorship committees were set up under the Ministry of Internal affairs. The 1825 censorship law established the new Security Police (the Third Section), given broad powers of arrest and censorship. Writers and artists were banned from representing any political views or mentioning any government figure by name. Government officials were generally impossible to include in any obvious way in these years and, as John Grand-Carteret wrote later, political caricature was limited to gentle “charged” portraits of middle functionaries, figures of the “human comedy, actors, men of letters, artists.”¹¹ The years 1848–56 are called “the darkest hour in the night of Russian obscurantism in the 19th century. … [because of] the stupidities and iniquities of the new double censorship … this literary ‘White Terror’.”¹² The widespread revolts of 1848 throughout Europe caused this crackdown in Russia, and that year, the tsar formed the Buturlin Committee in order to further expand censorship. The committee recommended that all pictures should bear the censor’s seal. The tsar wanted to seal Russia in a “moral quarantine,” to use Isaiah Berlin’s term.¹³ Then in 1851 a law was introduced that required that all existing lubok plates be destroyed and all new ones registered with government censors, particularly the Moscow Censorship Committee, as that city was the center of the lubok trade. The 1851 law, which remained in effect until 1917, brought an end to this folk art as all images had to be inspected by censorship committees. Production was centralized in Moscow and modernized by the introduction of mass-produced lithographs and engravings. This led to a “culture of self-censorship” in which publishers and censors worked “in a mutually reinforcing relationship.”¹⁴ Nevertheless, traditional pictures continued to appear in the markets, and, as Brooks argues, “the folkloric, religious, and literary subjects that had characterized the uncensored lubki remained the hallmark of the prints into the second half of the nineteenth century.”¹⁵ The mood after 1848 “among idealistic democrats and socialists [was of] a bitter sense of disillusion and despair. In some cases … [it was a matter of] cynical detachment, or else a tendency to seek comfort either in apathetic resignation, or in religion, or in the ranks of political reaction.”¹⁶ For Russians, religion was often the refuge from such bitter oppression.

A second generation of satirists emerged under this strict regime, and in response to the crisis that followed the disastrous Crimean War of 1853–56. Caricatures of Napoleon’s invading army had set a pattern earlier, and later in the century Russia’s humiliating defeat in the Crimean War and public discussion preceding the abolition of serfdom in 1861 effected a brief liberation of the press. Four caricature journals appeared between 1857 and 1863, addressing political issues.¹⁷

Negotiating these censorship variations, Nikolai Stepanov (1807–77), the principal contributor to Hotchpotch (Eralash), became one of Russia’s most prolific and influential graphic artists. This series first appeared during the relative calm 20 years after the Decembrists, in 1846, and shows a new spirit of satire. Published in album form with caricatures accompanied by short texts, Hotchpotch was heavily censored and in 1869 was shut down after 16 issues. Nikolai Stepanov later edited Spark (Iskra), a weekly caricature journal founded in 1859 under the editorship of its publishers Stepanov and the satiric poet Vasili Kurochkin (1831–75). It was one of the most sought-after journals of the 1860s, with a circulation reaching as high as 10,000 copies. Spark and its successor, Alarm Clock (Budil’nik, published with interruptions from 1866 to 1917), were the two most prominent illustrated weeklies of the post-reform era and censors repeatedly harassed both. The satire in these journals largely dealt with social foibles, the administrat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Irony, Derision, and Magical Wit: Censors as a Spur to Russian Abstract Art
• 2 France
• 3 Austria-Hungary 1867–1914
• 4 Political Images and Censorship in Germany before 1914
• 5 Censorship of the Visual Arts in Italy 1815–1915
• Illustrations
• Bibliography
• Index