Monumental Fatigue: Vera Mukhina, Soviet Sculpture, and the Politics of Reproduction

Professor Aglaya Glebova (University of California, Berkeley)

This talk examines the making of Vera Mukhina’s monumental steel sculpture The Worker and Collective Farm Woman (1937), an icon of socialist realism and textbook “bad object” of interwar modernism. In the collective and often speculative labor of its construction, and the challenges posed by its scale and materiality, this surprisingly delicate statue strained the limits of its medium and the human body, laying bare the pressures of reproduction both sculptural and political.

Event organised by the Department of History of Art and the Slavonic Studies Section.