Komar And Melamid: American Pop Art Analysis

3. Komar and Melamid
Expelled from the Union of Artists because they did not conform with the criteria of Socialist realism, Komar and Melamid immigrated to Israel in 1977 and then to the United States in 1978. In the Soviet Union, they developed an aesthetic style called Sots Art, which was a critique of the “overproduction of ideology and propaganda”. Combining elements of Dadaism and Socialist Realism, this was perhaps the closest parallel to American Pop Art, itself a response to the abundance of advertising and consumerism.
Arriving in America, their earliest works continued the dialectics of the American Pop Art tradition. In the Poster series (1980-1), Komar and Melamid adapted their strategy of appropriation of Sots Art that had mocked
Nonetheless, this nostalgic evocation of their past is tempered with intentional ironic and fictitious twists, such as the multiple historical trends conflated within these two images: in addition to the Classical conceit in the former – to which Komar and Melamid annotated “the muse of painting presents Clio, the muse of history to Stalin” – the lighting and composition pays homage to European masters. Moreover, the “muse of painting” is an invented persona, contributing to an another layer of fiction. Furthermore, for those faithful to Socialist Realism, Komar and Melamid’s works were “blasphemous” for having “made visible the academic tradition of representation of glory and triumph that was concealed under the mask of official Soviet Socialist Realism”. By directly engaging their formative experiences in the Soviet Union, and by imbuing the artwork with multiple layers of meanings – Komar and Melamid not only lampoons the Soviet Union, but also complicates and challenges the simple and stereotypical perceptions of non-Soviets towards the Soviet