Vera Against the Wind. Part 3, Totalitarian

In our previous post, we set foot within the ‘Heroics’ gallery, where Vera Mukhina chose to immortalise the men of science, engineers, physicians, and pioneering spirits of her turbulent epoch. To suppose, however, that the exhibition at the State Historical Museum is constructed around a solitary, monolithic masterpiece would be to do the curator a grave injustice; on the contrary, it takes pains to present Mukhina in all her manifold brilliance. Yet Worker and Kolkhoz Woman remains the conceptual zenith and culminating climax—the very summit toward which the reader’s and viewer’s entire pilgrimage through the master’s oeuvre spirals.

To fully appreciate the breathtaking audacity of this soaring leap, one must cast one’s mind back to the peculiar atmosphere that prevailed at the 1937 Paris World’s Fair.

The World on the Brink of Catastrophe and the Shadow of 1937

The World’s Fair of 1937 in Paris has descended to posterity as a somewhat jittery stock-taking of human ingenuity on the very eve of the Second World War. By the banks of the Seine, under the benevolent gaze of the Eiffel Tower, there unfolded not merely a cheerful display of cultural camaraderie, but a thoroughly ferocious architectural and ideological duel between two totalitarian colossi.

Directly confronting one another rose the pavilions of the USSR and the Third Reich. The German pavilion, conceived by Hitler’s chief architect Albert Speer, was a stern, soaring fifty-four-metre monolith of grim masonry, crowned by a bronze eagle clutching a swastika with a somewhat excessive display of talon. At its base glowered Josef Thorak’s massive sculptures Freundschaft (“Comradeship”) and Familie (“Family”)—the benchmark embodiment of ‘racially pure’ monumental nudity.

Hard by stood the Soviet pavilion, designed by the brilliant architect Boris Iofan—a dynamic, cascading structure faced with Samarkand marble, crowned in turn by Vera Mukhina’s twenty-four-metre rushing steel sculpture. It was Iofan who struck upon the singular notion of treating the building itself as nothing more than a modest pedestal for this hurtling surge of metal. When all was said and done, the exhibition jury neatly split the Grand Prix and gold medals between the architectural designs of Iofan and Speer.

The art critic Abram Efros later remarked upon this extraordinary ‘plastic trap’ which the architect so blithely laid for the sculptor:

Such a relationship between architecture and sculpture is utterly unusual, not to say paradoxical—where the builder seems to rush ahead of the sculptor, demanding of the sculptor not only extraordinary talent, but a combination of great courage with immense tact. Mukhina possessed the first, the second, and the third…

Yet behind this dazzling exterior and spectacular foreign-policy triumph lurked a rather more menacing domestic reality. In the Soviet Union, 1937 marked the blood-soaked apex of the Great Purge. The date rings out with an ominous resonance even through the pages of contemporaneous trade journals: the very issue of Architecture of the USSR (No. 5, 1937) that details the ingenious structural framework of the statue also opens with rather devastating political diatribes railing against ‘Trotskyite-Zinovievite and Bukharinite wreckers’. Nor did fate extend much in the way of clemency to those who orchestrated the Paris triumph: Commissar Ivan Mezhlauk, commissioner of the Soviet section, was arrested and summarily dispatched before the year was out, in December 1937.

Another tragedy was quietly unfolding at that very same exposition: within the pavilion of the Second Spanish Republic, already devoured by the flames of Civil War, Pablo Picasso unveiled his monumental Guernica to an astonished world—a colossal canvas shrieking out the agony of a bombed Basque township. I count myself fortunate to have gazed upon Guernica many years ago at the Reina Sofía in Madrid; I recall sitting upon the gallery floor before it for nearly an hour, quite incapable of tearing myself away from this definitive artistic monument to human catastrophe.

A Miracle of Soviet Engineering: How the Steel Giant Was Built

Beneath the light, elastic sweep of the two figures brandishing their hammer and sickle lay a feat of scientific and engineering wizardry quite without precedent. To forge a twenty-five-metre sculpture from chromium-nickel stainless steel—a material hitherto deemed entirely unsuited to the fine arts—seemed little short of lunacy. The sculptors’ natural skepticism was only quieted after Professor Pavel Lvov’s team experimentally hammered out the head of Michelangelo’s David in steel.

The periodicals and exhibition guidebooks of the day preserve some rather splendid particulars of this frantic enterprise:

1. 200,000 coordinate points and 3,000 sheets of plywood: Mukhina’s initial plaster model was a modest fifteen times smaller than the finished article. To scale it up, engineer N. Zhuravlev enlisted draftsmen who meticulously recorded upwards of 200,000 coordinate points using specialized templets fitted with steel needles.
2. Manual hand-beaming and authorial modelling: Guided by these measurements, wooden troughs were beaten out, each of which Mukhina and her two assistants (proud graduates of Vkhutemas) polished and refined by hand, correcting the inevitable quirks of mechanical enlargement. The resulting giant heads and hands were likewise finished with the utmost personal care.
3. Spot welding and a mighty framework: Steel sheets ranging from half a millimetre to a millimetre in thickness were laid into the moulds, beaten with copper mallets, and welded using a novel apparatus invented by P. Lvov. Encased within this gleaming 8½-ton shell lay a robust, riveted supporting skeleton weighing a cool 50 tons, fabricated in a record-shattering three weeks and engineered to withstand monumental gales.
4. A flying 30-metre scarf: Among the thorniest structural posers was the scarf fluttering in the breeze—stretching some 30 metres, weighing upwards of 5 tons, and suspended in mid-air for 10 metres without a single prop. Its inner skeleton was a remarkably complex cantilevered curved-line beam.
5. An experiment under the planetarium dome: To accurately gauge optical distortions and how the monument would appear to a viewer craning their neck from below, a silver-painted model was carted off to the Moscow Planetarium, where the precise angle of sunlight could be simulated under the dome.

The entire undertaking occupied an almost implausible three and a half months! Professor Lvov was later heard to recall:

The sculptors toiled twelve to fifteen hours a day without leaving the workshops, personally directing all the finishing touches upon the wooden forms… One may fairly say that had they not rolled up their sleeves alongside us, we could never have brought the matter off; and had we somehow managed it on schedule, the statue would have lacked that final, vital stroke of artistic polish.

The completed sculpture was unceremoniously sliced into sixty-five portions, bundled onto a goods train, and dispatched to Paris, where it was triumphantly pieced together once more by means of a thirty-five-metre derrick mast crane.

Abram Efros has left us his own indelible impressions of the finished monument:

The sculptural engine, nearly twenty-five metres in height, towered aloft, reducing the onlookers to the stature of Lilliputians scurrying about its ankles. I felt very much a Lilliput myself… Mukhina achieved success in the most demanding discipline of all: she accomplished not a mechanical, but an organic expansion of scale. Her worker and kolkhoz woman stand forth as genuine titans, hoisting the implements of Soviet socialist fraternity and labour high above the globe.

Two further galleries now lie before us: ‘Lyrism’ and ‘Allegory’. Pray, do not desert us!