Antiquities of the ideological news: three positions on the relationship between art and revolution

Abstract

The relationship between art and politics constitutes one of the fundamental reasons for aesthetic reflection from its very origins, and even more so in historical moments characterized by strong movements of social revolution. From this brief framework, our work is oriented to reconstruct three positions on the relationship between art and the revolution produced in the interwar period of the 20th century. At first, we characterize the doctrine of Socialist Realism proposed in the Soviet Union through the First Congress of Writers (1934). Then, we stop at a document that tried to dismantle the foundations of the aforementioned position: The Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art signed by Leon Trotsky and André Breton (1938). Finally, we explore an alternative form of relationship to the two previous positions based on the considerations of the german philosopher Walter Benjamin about Surrealism and the concept of image (1929).