Totalitarian Art

Totalitarian Art achieves nothing less than a thorough and serious comparative study of the official art of Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, and Mao’s China.
In the Soviet Union, and later in Maoist China, theories of mass artistic appeal were used to promote the Revolution both at home and abroad. In Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy they asserted the putative grandeur of the epoch. All too often, art that served the Revolution became "total realism," and always it became a…