Evaluating Violence: Why the First Official Portrait of Felix Dzerzhinskii Matters to History

In his 1962 memoir “How I Painted Felix Dzerzhinskii,” the realist painter Evgenii Katsman recounted the experience of the production of the first official portrait of the head of the Bolshevik secret police for the Soviet public. Like the painting itself, Katsman’s text is infused with both raw fear, bordering on terror, and respectful admiration. This paper describes the impact of this attitude toward the Bolshevik leadership, which I argue was a direct consequence of political violence, on Soviet visual culture. Through a comparative approach, which relies on a visual analysis of Katsman’s picture, primary source texts, and philosophical works on violence and aesthetics, I begin to describe how the experience of war and revolution altered the very meaning of the visual within the Soviet context. I also describe why a more thorough understanding of these changes and their consequences is critical to the understanding of the meaning and function of aesthetics in modern art and visual culture.

Angelina Lucento received her PhD at the Department of Art History, Northwestern University in 2014. She wrote her dissertation on “Painting for the Collective: Art, Politics, and Communication in Russia, 1918-1932”. She was a Visiting Graduate Scholar in Residence at the Department of History, Russian Art History Section, Moscow State University in 2010-2011 and 2012–2013. She is currently Humanities Initiative Fellow at CEU IAS.

Publications: "The Conflicted Origins of Soviet Visual Media: Painting, Photography, and Communication in Russia, 1925-1932,” Cahiers du Monde russe, forthcoming, spring 2015; “Surface Tension: Sam Gilliam, Modernist Painting, and the Critical Examination of  Race in Post-War American Art,” Critical Riot, in press; The Politics and Aesthetics of Figuration in Soviet Art, 1918-1941, book manuscript, in preparation.