Contenu du sommaire : Image, éducation et communisme, 1920-1930

The article examines a radical reform of Soviet art museums during the late 1920s and early 1930s both on their own distinct ideological terms, as institutions that would illustrate Marxist dialectical view of historical development, and in the context of a broader international drive to modernize art museums and turn them into primarily educational institutions accessible and attractive to the broader population. A case study of a radically innovative exhibition entitled Art on Soviet and Revolutionary Themes, organized by the young Marxist art historian and curator Aleksei Fedorov-Davydov at the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow in June 1930, reveals the degree to which the Soviet art historian's innovative and polemical curatorial approach finds parallels with the educational strategies of one of the most iconic examples of modern displays in western museums, Cubism and Abstract Art, organized by Alfred Barr, Jr. at The Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1936.

The reconstitution of social and intellectual being that comprised the goal of the new Soviet authorities following their seizure of political power in late 1917 signalled a fundamental campaign for literacy. The process of learning to read was commenced in a traditional way, i.e. through school lessons and by illustrated primer (azbuka/bukvar) in which letter, word and image were text. In the attempt to instill a socialist consciousness in every adult and child ‘HOW' and ‘WHAT' to read took on new significance. Just as the Cyrillic alphabet was reformed so too were the primers, with content and meanings being radically altered. It is the actuality and process of this transformation over the first fifteen years of Sovietised Russia and as revealed through four illustrated primers, that is the subject of this paper.

This article studies the discourses of the Bolsheviks, Soviet psychologists, pedagogues, doctors and artists regarding the definition of children's images at the time of the First Five Year Plan (1928-1932). It lays out the functions attributed to children's images and the different way in which these functions were defined and prioritized by the professions and, within, by individuals. The use of a shared vocabulary in fact reflected varied understandings and a diverse array of formal propositions. The article also takes into account the versatility of artists as a factor in studying inter-professional debates and the strategies of adaptation employed by the actors of the Soviet cultural system.

In this article, we will examine the Progressives' theoretical and plastic productions that sought to address educational issues. The texts and works of this little-known anarcho-communist group provide an opportunity to study an original artistic-pedagogical approach that was often far-removed from the policies established by their own camp to counter the scourge of a school system subjected to the powerful.

This article does not examine the preferred objects of communist propaganda (posters and photographs) but rather the secondary propaganda media of drawings and paintings. By examining three case studies from the final years of the Weimar Republic, one may reflect on what we really know about the educational initiatives of the time and what historians can learn from attending to images in writing about this period.

Educating the worker's eye by the practice of photography: this was the objective of the workers' photography associations that Willi Münzenberg federated in Germany between 1926 and 1933. But how did this educational discourse distinguish itself from its liberal predecessor, the artistic teaching that centered on the Bildung ideal? By moving beyond the artistic triumph of the individual promoted in the Wilhelmine period and towards communist Erziehung, which aimed less at personal realization than at the internalization of a working class visual habitus.

The illustrations of the Soviet education abroad can take many forms, but they always intended to brag the progress of communist culture. This article aims to highlight the similarities and contradictions between numerous exhibitions on artistic or general education held in Europe between 1920 and 1930. It refers to arts education, general education, proletarian art, children's art and ends with the overabundant project of art as a main educator of the masses in the Soviet pavilion at the International Exhibition in Paris in 1937.

The submitted study focuses on the issue of the discourse and practice of the children's and young people's movement, which was organizationally connected to the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (CPC). Through descriptions of the organizational base of this movement and an analysis of its discursive and social practices it strives to search for answers to the research questions on the share of the children's organizations in the creation of the radically left-wing activist milieu around the CPC and the importance of indoctrination in order for it to work. Based on an analysis of the discourse of the children's party press, flyers, etc., just like the breakdown of the everyday experience of the youngest activists, it uncovers the significance of institutions, such as the family, school, and not least the party in the real world of politically active children and their parents. The article is divided into three parts. The first part describes an organization that was able to capture only a fraction of the young population compared to its liberal nationalist (Sokol) or Christian (Orel) competitors, despite its considerable efforts. The second part presents an analysis of the discourse. It is organized around three themes: firstly, images of an antagonistic class society; secondly, categories that form class consciousness; thirdly, the depiction of competing images of reality as forms of false consciousness. The third part focuses on the practice of the children's movement, in which discursive symbolic images of discourse were realized with varying degrees of success.

Images are so overwhelming in our globalized quotidian life that W. J. T. Mitchell has labeled the end of the 20th century a « pictorial turn ». If no one contests the necessity of spreading the methods of image analysis and making it approachable by everybody, including the young children, there is vigorous disagreement on how we should approach visuals and what images should we study. Those which have crossed the centuries and are considered as masterpieces? Those published in the media, largely diffused and impacting our daily life? Can we, should we put on the same level a commercial and a video artwork? According to what criteria should we study the gaze as well as the social, political, family environment which shapes it? Our paper will try to clarify the recent debates on this question, and namely the criticism addressed at art history, the discipline which has traditionally had the monopoly of image analysis. Emanating from « visual culture » and « visual studies », this critique has allowed rethinking the visual research methodology. We are going to ponder the specificity of the epistemological field related to the visual, the objective of its research without forgetting the potential of fascination held by the images.

Initiated in 1994 by American film director Steven Spielberg, the Visual History Archive is now the largest collection of testimonies from survivors of genocides and mass crimes. If the bulk of the archive gives voice to Holocaust survivors, its administrator based in Los Angeles, University of Southern California's Shoah Foundation, is regularly adding interviews from witnesses of other crimes. The Archive started as a civic and pedagogical project but is being increasingly used by scholars from many disciplines, who can benefit from its full digitization and its precise indexation system. By presenting the origins, methodology, content, reception and scientific potential of the Visual History Archive, this article intends to make scholars aware of the collection, which, since 2016, is fully accessible at the American University of Paris.