Totalitarian Art: In the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, Fascist Italy, and the People's Republic of China

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, as well as a thoughtful examination of Saddam Hussein's Iraq. All too often, art that served a revolution or a new millennial society was canonized as "total realism," and always it became a slave to the state and the cult of personality. Arguably, it became one more weapon in the arsenal of oppression. This major work of scholarship makes an overwhelming case for considering totalitarian art to be, after modernism, the second international style of the last century's culture, and one which needs its own careful study.