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ART AND REVOLUTION:
Ernst Neizvestny and the
role of the artist in the
U.S.S.R. By John Berger.
New York, Pantheon. Paper-
back, $1.95.

By SIDNEY FINKELSTEIN

John Berger is a brilliant Eng-
lish art critic whose view of
capitalism is that of a Marxist.
But in his theories of art he
has gone far out, as I see it, on
a weak and shaky limb. This is
his conviction that the 20th cen-
tury revolt in pictorial art
against any recognizeable re-
semblance to outer reality is
the counterpart in art of the
socialist revolution in society. ~

In Berger’s book of four years
ago. “Success and Failures of
Picasso,” he argued that cub-
ism was dialectical materialism

«in painting. In his current book
he introduces the reader, through
95 illustrations with explana-
tions, to the work of a sculptor,
Ernst Neizvestny, in the Soviet
Union, who violently distorts or
breaks up the human body like
the expressionists or puts elem-
ents of reality into dream or
nightmare connections like the
surrealists. Berger argues that
Neizvestny is one of the few
true “anti-imperialist” artists

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in the Soviet Union, and de-
nounces the currents of “Social-
ist Realism” as a betrayal of
socialism.

Neizvestny, who has _ been
working for about 15 years in
a Moscow studio, has been
harshly criticized by some offi-
cials and authorities in the
Soviet art world. He has been
granted but one big public com-
mission. He makes a living
chiefly through private sales to
admirers of small sculptures
and drawings. About a year ago
there was a showing of his
drawings-and etchings in a small

New York gallery. It got little _

attention. To progressives who
saw it, there seemed to be no
hint of socialism or the Soviet
Union. To bourgeois art critics,
it appeared to do nothing that
had not been done better, years
before, by artists like Jacques
Lipchitz and Salvadore Dali.

It is clear that Neizvestny is
a skillful artist and would not
work in the way he does unless
he felt it deeply. But is the
style in which he works, that
born out of the expressionism,
cubism, constructivism and sur-
realism which rose between
1905 and the 1920's, a revolu-
tion in art like socialism in po-
litics and economics?

At the Shaw Festival

GRATITUDE AND C€

The Shaw Festival at Nigara-

on-the-Lake merits our grati-

tude for showing us Part I of
the rarely-seen five-part Back
to Methusaleh, the stage work
at the Court House Theatre
which has some of Shaw’s most
eloquent writing and profound-
est thought.

But we must question the
director’s judgment in placing
the first half on an unpeopled

stage. Marigold Charlesworth _

gives us a playing area bare
except for a large sphere (the
apple? the Earth?), some psy-
chedelic color and sound, and
the disembodied, tape-recorded
voices of the actors speaking
their lines. Not a creature ap-
pears on stage. We see no face,

no eyes, no gesture, no body, -

no action.

It is like listening to a radio
play, and even when the elec-
tronic equipment functions per-
fectly we feel frustrated. Sure-
ly, watching that far-away,
awe-inspiring time when hu-
man life began, we would like

to see the first humans, the
Serpent, the Fawn. And surely
it would be more rewarding to
see and hear a vital actress like
Barbara Chilcott (the Serpent)
than only to hear her voice in
a vacuum.

The second half comes as an
overdue relief, for at last we
see tangible people. Frances
Hyland as Eve is the very em-
bodiment of love, humaneness
and courage. She is the mo-
ther, the militant, the common-
sense farm wife who -over-
comes fear and inspires hope.
Hers is a magnetic, moving
portrayal. :

Both Jonathan White as
Adam and Roland Hewgill as
‘Cain play their roles in rather
too vigorous a voice and the
Shaw dialogue accordingly
loses in balance and depth.

I cannot understand why this
second half (a few centuries
later) disregards Shaw’s speci-
fic stage directions, colors
everything white, turns Eve

) Art and revolutio

This style, when it first ap-
peared, certainly shocked the
bourgeois world out of its pants.
But what it did say, as I see it,
is that in the world viewed by
the artist, it was impossible to
love nature and people, or to
live in a human way. It ex-
pressed its antipathy to the
bourgeois world by rejecting the
humanist tradition in art that
had risen with the rise of the
bourgeoisie.

The irony was that it did this
at a time when the bourgeois
world was itself turning savage-
ly against what was most hu-
manist and creative in its past.
The art expressed the furious
hope for demolition of existing
institutions of society, a disil-
lusion with reason because of
the hypocrisy perpetrated in its
name, an awareness of and even
submission to the alienation of
human relations being fostered
by imperialism. It signalled a
crisis of capitalism, but not, as
I see it, the path to socialism.

The first world war and the :

imperialist peace settlement in-
tensified the feeling that capital-
ism had reverted to barbarism.
And when fascism began to
rise, some artists in these radi-
cal trends began to use their

RITICISM

from a farm woman at her spin-
ning to a 20th Century house-
wife at her washing machine,
and transforms Adam from a
farmer digging and sweating into
a white-collar office worker. If
the producers wanted to up-
date : the play, surely they
should not have assumed that
the average modern man is the
neatly-suburban father of Dick
and Jane.

Visually the production is
exciting. Designed by Les Lawr-
ence, with fluid lighting and
colorful special effects projec-
tions by Catharsis' and Donald
Acaster, the Garden of Eden
envelopes the stage and the
walls above and around, with
the audience right in the heart
of the lush Paradise.

The play is rich in debate on

life and mortality, on man’s po-

- tential, on the conflicts in so-

ciety. The cynical Cain hails

war as a way of life and out-

lines his plan to brainwash, en-
slave and exploit the world.

Top stars at Moscow Festival

By MONICA WHYTE

This summer seventy-one
countries participated in the
Sixth International Film Festival
in Moscow. In the feature film
section Cuba, Italy and the
USSR took the three gold
‘medals with their respective en-
tries—Lucia, Serafino and Let’s
Live Till Monday.

Unfortunately it cannot be
said that this year’s crop of en-
tries was of a generally high or-
.der. Competition films from such
countries as France, Czechslo-
vakia, Italy, the USA, Japan

. which in the past have presented

truly interesting offerings, were
in the main disappointing.
The most popular movie with
-poth audiences and critics was
undoubtedly Carol Reed’s Oliver.
The director received a special
prize and Ron Moody won the

_- PACIFIC TRIBUNE—-AUGUST 8, 1969-—-PAGE 6

best actor award for his incom-
parable Fagin. Mark Lester, the
film’s young hero, won the best
child actor prize in the children’s
films category for his work in
Britain’s Run Free, Run Wild.
The most interesting film to
deal with contemporary prob-
lems—in this case the school—
was the Soviet Union’s Let’s
Live Till Monday, directed by
Stanislav Rostotsky. It is a sen-
sitive study of teachers and pu-
pils, their problems and rela-
tions and in the past year that
it has been showing on the
screens of Moscow has been
warmly acclaimed. The gold
medal was well deserved. During

- the two weeks of competition

glamorous visitors appeared in
the streets of Moscow.

Among them, Melina Mercou-
ri, Monica Vitti, Sophia Loren,
Marcello Maestroianni drew

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hordes of autograph hunters. Lil-
lian Gish, the great American
star of the silent screen, was a
favorite with Muscovites. For-
eign directors and critics were
impressed by the retrospective
showing of features and docu-
mentary films on Lenin. The
Sixth of July and Lenin in Po-
land were singled out as out-
standing by most observers.

The French film director Yves
Ciampi expressed the ideas of
many participants when he said:
“I am an advocate of an active
film art, an art inspired by the
ideas of humanism, progress and
friendship of the peoples. The
Moscow Festival is called upon
to promote such art. That is the
reason why it has aroused such
interest and why every true ar-
tist considers it an honor to take
part in this representative inter-
national film review.

distortions to show concretely
the inhuman character of the.
forces of destruction, naming
them, while others learned that
in the unselfish, cooperative
struggles of the working class,
it was possible for the artist to
rediscover a human way of life.
Most, however, cashed in on the
fact that the bourgeois world
got over its shock, and accept-
ed alienation as the “truth” of
our time.

It is true that from the mid-
dle 1930’s in the Soviet Union,
when the threats of invasion
were mounting, there was too
narrow, restrictive and acade-
mic an approach to “Socialist
Realism.” And along with this
there was no real coming to
critical grips with the contra-
dictions, sensitivities and real

problems in the radical art of -

the West. Instead it was all in-
discriminately lumped together.
as “decadence,” or a wilful per-
version. :

But developing now in the
Soviet Union is a different cri-
tical evaluation of art in the
20th century, and a broadening
of the styles and concepts of
“Socialist Realism.” And consi-
dering the devastation of the
last war, with the human prob-
lems that followed it, it is un-
derstandable that artists like
Neizvestny can appear, who are
deeply involved with their in-
ternal pain, and with the strug-
gle that was involved simply by
the desire to live. Such art, as
I see it, does no harm to social-
ism, and even, by putting a
finger on an existing emotional
problem that has social conno-
tations, does a service. But I do

American folksinge’ Joa
is almost as famous
policies as she is for i?
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Miss Baez will give 4 oe
the CBC Ottawa Musi¢ hu
Camp Fortune, near ont
Highlights of her Peat S
will be broadcast on © of
case, Part Il, August 10

at 4:30 p.m. EDT. {

not see this as the and
ment of the brave neW "|
that Berger sees in it |
I think that when ¢
will write comprehen! ‘alt
ries of the art of the ™
bourgeois eras, they gift
stand this art quite va
from the bourgeois © a
they will not advocatt
most of it into the rig
to make way for the

But Eve’s closing speech re-
pudiates her son’s evil: “Man
need not live by bread alone.
There is something else. We do
not yet know what it is; but
some day we shall find out; and
then we will live on that alone;
and there shall be no more dig-
ging nor spinning, nor fighting
nor killing.”

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In contrast, on the same pro- |

gram, is Five Variations for
Corno di Bassetto (Shaw’s pen-
name during an earlier career
as a music critic). Arranged by
Louis Applebaum and Ronald
Hambleton and staged by Pat-
rick Boxill, this musical enter-
tainment employs the composi-
tions

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of Mozart, Schubert, -

Bach, Brahms, pagat it,
others as a foil 1% y
opinions on concerts i
viewed. Sometimes ft f
played straight, °
in-cheek, but * ccasiontl
are misled and 1a
wrong places. <
The concert numbe
the whole very pleasing
ing in solo or group’
tinguished Reginald
Mary Simmons, GeF?" joj
jian, Albin Berky |
Morton. < oii
John Horton makes iy
critic come aliv 4 af
patient, shrewd am’ 1)
demolisher of what = |

ders musical hum }

- Sofia Loren, Marcello Mast

roiani and Carlo Pont! inf
Prospect, Moscow. Miss Loren is in the Soviet Union
film. The film portrays the story of a common tragedy ?
ll—that of the family separation and following years oO
dering and searching for loved ones.

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