Socialist Realism, wave of the future?

The period of Soviet socialist realist art isn't the cultural wasteland it's often made out to be. It produced some excellent artists, some of whom pushed the boundaries of the doctrine (see, A. Deineka, for instance), but let's remember that not only was it officially approved, it was officially demanded. So, yes, some of the war images BoingBoing links to are powerful, but many are also kitsch—not well executed and not particularly imaginative. They're meant to be propaganda—political content laid bare—intended to produce a very specific reaction among the citizenry of a country at war. So I find it ridiculous that Alllie laments (in the same post) the sad fact that Western art didn't follow suit in the decades following Goya's Third of May and Van Gogh's Potato Eaters.

Really? Blatant politicizing is the heir to the impressionists and postimpressionists? No, Picasso's Guernica is the heir. Barbara Kruger, Leon Golub, and Nancy Spero are the heirs. Even Robert Smithson's Partially Buried Woodshed is the heir.

Anyway, what really interested me in the slew of Soviet war images here was the Pimenov painting On the Front Road.

I thought I'd seen something just like it. Turns out I had.

Seems ol' Pimenov liked to recycle ideas. This one, called New Moscow, is from 1938, so it preceded the one above.