[Marxism] From a trickle to a torrent?

[Brian Shannon <Brian_Shannon@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

David King was a young man when he began collecting graphic images of 
the Russian Revolution. "With Francis Wyndham he compiled the first 
pictorial biography of Leon Trotsky (1972). King began supplying his 
own pictures to the Sunday Times, and an assignment with Muhammad Ali 
in 1974 resulted in the book I am King."

In the early 1970s, he visited New York City several times and worked 
with the three Georges (Weissman, Breitman, and Novack) of the U.S. 
Socialist Workers Party in tracking down and exchanging photographs of 
Leon Trotsky. One of the results was an important supplement to the 
British Sunday Times featuring Lenin and Trotsky.

Important shows and books followed. "The Commissar Vanishes" is about 
the physical elimination of the images of Stalin's victims, including 
not only Trotsky and others of the generation that made the Russian 
Revolution, but of Stalin's own allies, whose graphical elimination 
paralleled their physical elimination.

Brian Shannon
___________________

In Russia in the 1970s you couldn’t even talk about Trotsky. Today, I 
go back to Russia three or four times a year to collect new materials 
for different projects.

It is amazing the amount of stuff about Trotsky that people kept during 
those years and that has come to light recently. People kept his 
writings and pictures of him under their floorboards and in their 
lofts. They kept them on pain of going to the gulag.

Among the pictures from my collection displayed at the Tate Modern, 
there is a large drawing made in 1923 by an artist called Pichugin. 
It’s an amazing portrait of Trotsky. A couple of years after Pichugin 
completed it, Trotsky was deeply out of favour. Pichugin covered the 
drawing up with a piece of white board and hid it in his studio, where 
it remained for 70 years.

After Pichugin’s death, his family found the drawing in perfect 
condition — I bought it and now it’s in the Tate Modern in London. You 
can see the portrait there as part of collection of Russian posters 
from the revolution through to the end of the Stalin period.

It’s like a fast-forward through Russian history. So many people go to 
see the posters and they stay there for such a long time, reading all 
the captions. As they go round, they discuss and compare the early 
revolutionary stuff with the Stalinist stuff — that makes me optimistic 
about the future.

http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/article.php4?article_id=5823_______________________________________________
Marxism mailing list
Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism