Skip to main content
Donate to the Fighting Fund
The golden boy of Soviet art
Alexander Deyneka's dynamic response to the Bolshevik revolution shines through his work, says CHRISTINE LINDEY
(L to R) Ace [fighter pilot] shot down, 1943; In the Donbass, 1925; Football, drawing for Red Niva magazine, 1927

IN 1917 Alexander Alexandrovich Deyneka (1899-1969) was just 18 and studying in his native Kursk when the upheavals and excitement of the Bolshevik revolution began.

He soon travelled to Moscow to study at the now celebrated Vkhutemas (arts and crafts workshops) and in this cauldron of aesthetic and political debates he honed his Marxist aspiration to create a new Soviet art.

Deyneka joined Vladimir Favorsky’s graphics and printmaking department, where he learned to respect art theory and to construct his compositions in terms of plane and space.

Defence of Petrograd, 1928
The 95th Anniversary Appeal
Support the Morning Star
You have reached the free limit.
Subscribe to continue reading.
Similar stories
Tower of Babel, 1982
Culture / 10 April 2025
10 April 2025
This is poetry in paint, spectacular but never spectacle for its own sake, writes JAN WOOLF
Second Cumming - Bella Caledonia 2020, by Lorna Miller
Exhibition review / 21 March 2025
21 March 2025
In an exhibition of the graphic art of Lorna Miller, MATT KERR takes a lungful of the oxygen of dissent
PREMONITION OF DISASTER: Anonymous photographer, Fallen Stat
Book Review / 18 March 2025
18 March 2025
NICK WRIGHT delicately unpicks the eloquent writings on art of an intellectual pessimist who wears his Marxism lightly
MASTERMIND; (L) Jon Pertwee as Dr Who in Invasion of the Din
Books / 13 March 2025
13 March 2025
JOHN GREEN surveys the remarkable career of screenwriter Malcolm Hulke and the essential part played by his membership of the Communist Party