The Socialist Feminism of Textile Work in Early Soviet Painting

Aleksandr Deineka’s large-scale painting Textile Workers (1927) caused a modernist splash in the 2017 exhibition “Revolution” at London’s Royal Academy, where a critic described its protagonists as “sci-fi robots.” The deep anachronism of this reading reveals our contemporary unfamiliarity with images of labor: the woman workers were understood by critics at the time to be performing recognizable labor actions, while the painting’s rhythmic organization was also perceived to exemplify the “flowing, singing movements” (as Deineka put it) particular to collective labor under socialism. The paper examines the painting’s documentary origins in the detailed lithographic illustrations of women’s textile labor that Deineka made for the journal Atheist at the Workbench in 1925-26; his assigned study trips to textile factories; and contemporary photographs of textile production documenting Gastev’s Scientific Organization of Labor. It also argues that Deineka turned these sketches of actually-existing workers into coherent images of “the proletariat”—which, following Bolshevik feminism, he shows to be feminine as well as masculine. The women organize the pictorial space through their intense absorption in their comradely labor, excluding the viewer in ways that led to charges by some male reviewers that they were in a “trance” or even “girls of a frivolous type.” Deineka unexpectedly becomes the historical conductor—in the sense of an electrical conductor—of a profound socialist feminism. The paper concludes by following such depictions of women absorbed in their textile work into photomontage posters of the early 1930s by woman artists like Elizaveta Ignatovich and Natalia Pinus.