Art the Way Joe Stalin Liked It : Gallery Seeks Market for Soviet Socialist Realism

William A. Karges Fine Art has installed a new but distinctly familiar-looking show of paintings in its La Cienega Boulevard gallery.

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You know--those well-crafted landscapes with light flickering across fields and streams, sweet genre scenes whose human subjects blend into an ambience of peace and plenty. In short, it’s exactly what you expect to see at a gallery specializing in 19th- and early 20th-Century California painting.

Except for three discrepancies: The paintings on view were made in the former Soviet Union by government-sponsored artists; they were created about 50 years later than Karges’ usual fare, and they sell for $1,800 to $55,000, about 25% to 35% of the price of their California counterparts.

“Style of a Nation: Soviet Socialist Realist Paintings of the Mid-20th Century,” which opened Saturday, is more than a curiosity, however. Gallery director Whitney Ganz is attempting to establish a market for the debased style of Soviet Socialist Realism. But instead of promoting the aggressively political pictures that are finding an audience among kitsch lovers and Soviet history buffs, he is banking on a lesser-known aspect of the style--the Soviets’ perfumed propaganda--because of its similarity to early California painting.

“The aesthetic is not that different,” Ganz says. Unlike California landscapes, the Soviet pictures usually include human figures. Such subject matter as a woman bundled up in a sheepskin coat, a pair of young men in military uniforms, snow scenes and horse-drawn sleds also offer clues to the paintings’ origins. Still, the show is so sunny and bright that he’s hoping collectors of California plein air paintings will expand their horizons--and open their wallets.

“These paintings offer great value. I figure the market is where California painting was about 10 or 15 years ago,” he says.

Ganz--a Stanford University graduate who is the son of American art collectors and L.A. County Museum of Art patrons Julian and Jo Ann Ganz--had his own Socialist Realist epiphany in Springville, Utah. Vern Swanson, an old friend who directs the Springville Museum of Art and works with an importer of Soviet artworks, offered to show some examples to Ganz.

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Impressed with the paintings’ quality and fascinated with their market potential, Ganz telephoned Karges, whose gallery operation is based in Carmel. “I think we have hit a gold mine,” he recalls telling Karges. “This looks like the mother of all estates.”

Although the soft side of Soviet Socialist Realism has scarcely been seen in the West, Ganz says his supplier has tracked down the work of dozens of artists in Russia. “This was the official style that was meant to unify the masses,” he says. “The artists were generally required to produce three or four major paintings a year for the government. The rest of the time they were free to paint on their own as long as they worked within the confines of the style.”

The 45 works Ganz selected for exhibition represent the first step in a plan to incorporate Socialist Realism in the gallery’s program. Bringing the paintings to Los Angeles and producing a catalogue was too expensive for a one-shot deal, he says, and the risk seems to be paying off. He sold about half of the 28 works pictured in the catalogue before the show opened, and the gallery received more than twice its usual number of responses to the opening reception.

“We’re thrilled,” Ganz said. “It’s nice to be validated, or at least to know that I haven’t gone completely wacko.”

* “Style of a Nation: Soviet Socialist Realist Paintings of the Mid-20th Century,” William A. Karges Fine Art, 767 N. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 657-2301. Mon.-Sat., 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Through June 30.