Bicycles and Art

Deineka’s work, although figurative, is strikingly modernist in style with its large flattened areas of bright colors. Trained not as a painter but as a graphic artist, he also produced popular posters with collectivist themes, glorifying work and the future of the Soviet Union. Deineka’s paintings introduced convincing depictions of the Soviet “New Person” dreamed of by Russian revolutionaries. To meet state-imposed guidelines, the heroes and heroines of Socialist Realist painting were required to be recognizable and appealing to the public and the embodiment of a social thesis. The New Person in the painting of the 1930s was inevitably healthy, typically smiling, and often engaged in vigorous activity.


Collective Farm Worker on a Bicycle is considered one of the key works of early Socialist Realism. Socialist Realism of the 1930s was a highly symbolic visual language filled with both romance and lyrical distortion of reality. Deineka and his colleagues strove to transmit the idea that a new and improved society would be achieved through the application of collectivism and technology. Nowhere was the basic premise of Socialist Realism—the promised bright future—more apparent than in paintings showing life on the collective farms. Here the sun shone, modern farm machinery was available (although in fact the proportions of collective farms provided with tractors in the 1930s was not high), and the anguish of collectivization was nowhere to be seen. Deineka’s painting put an idyllic gloss on country life, showing the land and its people transformed by technology and modern farming techniques. A truck visible in the background and the shiny bicycle, still rare commodities in the Soviet countryside, would have been easily read by contemporaries as desired symbols of modernity.