Revisioning Stalinist discourse of art: Mikhail Liebman’s academic networks and his social art history

Abstract

The article addresses the art historian and leading Renaissance scholar Mikhail Liebman’s 1960s and 1970s texts, which present his understandings of the discourse and methodology of art history. It was a time when the Soviet art history avant-garde, called ‘revisionists’, encouraged by Khrushchev’s de-Stalinisation policy, began critically reappraising art and art history’s Marxist-Leninist/Stalinist approach. The article seeks to determine why and how Liebman’s art history discourse changed in this new political situation. What was ‘Marxist’ in it and how did he arrive at the ‘social history of art’? I argue that it was the official socialist system of internationalisation which allowed Liebman to attend international forums in his discipline, and hence to be in dialogue with the contemporary Western art historical discourse(s). I also ask how, given the paucity of sources and the ideologically ambivalent conditions in which art historical texts in Soviet Union were created, one can find the right code for reading socialist art histories?