The great founder of formalism: how Soviet citizens were told about Cézanne in the 1930sThe great founder of formalism: how Soviet citizens were told about Cézanne in the 1930s

The history of the State Museum of New Western Art (GMNZI) is usually told as part of a totalitarian paradigm, according to which Western Modernism was doomed to disappear from public displays in Soviet museums after the establishment of Socialist Realism in 1932. However, critical attitudes towards Cezanne, and other artists repre-senting "bourgeois" styles, was complex rather than consistently negative during the 1930s. It was influenced by studies of the aesthetic views of Marx and Lenin, and rep-resented a pragmatic search through the history of art for practices and techniques that might be useful for Soviet artists. This article, largely based on unpublished docu-ments from the archive of GMNZI, argues that the policy towards the legacy of Western Modernism, epitomized by the figure of Cezanne, was not predetermined, but was largely dependent on various changes in cultural policy as well as, most importantly, the aggressive anti-bourgeois and anti-Western rhetoric prevalent during such major shifts in Soviet politics, as the Cultural Revolution and the Great Terror. In the frequent absence of direct instructions from above, museum workers often had to look for sig-nals in an ambiguous political climate, and there was always some uncertainty when they exhibited Cezanne, as to whether they were arguing that his art could or could not provide a valuable lesson for Soviet artists.