Georgi Satel was born in Moscow and entered the city’s architectural institute in 1935, which he left only two years later in order to become an artist. He began to study under Dorokhov and Boim before entering the Moscow Art Institute. There he was taught by Aristakh Lentulov (1882-1943), one of the most famous names of Soviet Avant-Garde painting. After the latter’s death, he continued his studies under Pokarzhevsky and was accepted in the Moscow Union of Artists in 1945. He began exhibiting as early as 1944 and finished his studies in 1948. He went on to exhibit in many exhibitions, both at home and abroad culminating in a personal exhibition at the Moscow Union of Artists in 1985. He met with a broader western audience when his work was championed by the flamboyant London art dealer Roy Miles in the late 1980s.

The portrait presented here is one of the studies for Satel’s most famous work, “The New Theme”, for which he was awarded the State Stalin prize. The painting was finished in 1951 and was an important example of Socialist realism, hanging for many years in the Lvov State Museum in the Ukraine. The studies undertaken by Satel are spirited and rapidly composed employing thick brush stokes and quick observation. They contrast distinctly with the completed work, which held true to the nature of Socialist realism, not only in narrative, but in style and finish. It is because of this that the oil sketches remained in the artist’s studio for over forty years until being included in the exhibition of Russian Art staged by Roy Miles in 1990, where the current study was one of eight such works displayed.

Socialist Realism was the official style of Soviet art from the late 1930s until the dissolution of the Soviet Union. It emerged as the result of the state’s efforts to intensify and codify its control over the arts and was charged with transforming the nation’s inhabitants into Soviet citizens—in the words of one of its leading spokesmen, Andrei Zhdanov, effecting the “ideological remolding and education of working people in the spirit of socialism.” Toward this end, Socialist Realist artworks are characterized by the glorified depiction of communist values, such as the emancipation of the proletariat and are always painted in an easily readable ‘realistic’ manner.

Particularly in the West, Socialist Realism has often been dismissed as Communist kitsch, mere political propaganda monolithic in form and lacking in artistic merit. While this criticism is undoubtedly warranted a number of works to emerge on the art market in the West during the 1990s indicates that this is clearly not true universally and that the painters responsible were talented individuals whose abilities was stifled by political necessity. Socialist Realism encompassed an impressive range of themes, genres, techniques, and practices. It also changed over time in response to historical events and circumstances like World War II, the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, and the Khrushchev Thaw of the late 1950s and early 1960s, which witnessed a relative relaxation of censorship of the arts.