Severe style (Soviet art)

Severe style (Russian: суровый стиль, romanized: surovy stil), also called austere style or harsh style, was a movement in Soviet painting. It emerged in the late 1950s and reached its peak in the early 1960s. It developed during the Khrushchev Thaw in reaction to the grand, festive manner of late socialist realism. Its paintings use monumental, simplified forms, close-up figures, strong contrasts and clear compositional rhythms, and they often look like a single film frame taken from ordinary life. The movement emerged among Moscow painters and later spread to other parts of the Soviet Union and to other countries of the Eastern Bloc. The Getty Art & Architecture Thesaurus lists it as a separate Soviet style of the late 1950s to the 1970s and notes that it is often described as "the official art of the Khrushchev thaw". Among its best-known works are Nikolai Andronov's The Raftsmen (1960–1961), Pavel Nikonov's Geologists (1962), Viktor Popkov's The Builders of Bratsk (1960–1961) and the Smolin brothers' Polar Explorers (1961).¶

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Severe style (Soviet art) is movement in Soviet painting of the late 1950s and 1960s, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition.¹¶

The source record links this tradition to 2 external registers, which can be verified through the citation.¹¶