Communism In The 19th Century

In the late 19th century Russia was in a industrial standstill and its zeitgeist completely skewed compared to the evolution of the rest of the western world. This was mainly due to Russia being so big as well as having a much larger population than the rest of europe and having no government to match the sheer size of the masses. During the end of the 19th century into the 20th, the population of Russia was the fastest growing western nation, other than the U.S., with their population more than double what it was in the early 19th century. As well as having a huge population “the vast majority of the people lived in rural communities and engaged in relatively primitive agriculture.” which led to a very slow moving economic status. The only
This piece was created out of Wales, though from Wales, it still depicts the turnout of Modern Communism and how it became a skewed, uneven sociology instead of the communal, equal community that it was thought to create in The Communist Manifesto. Wales was actually home to one of many big and powerful communist parties, infact “Lenin considered the South Wales Miners' Federation to be the vanguard of a British revolution”. (BBC) Evan Walters began his official career by painting camouflage for the United States in WWI, after which, he returned back to Wales where his career in portraits and paintings of life became popular. Though, he began to experiment and started to paint in a form he called “double-vision” in which the visuals were somewhat blurred and inexact, which much of the art community did not like and his fame declined from there. This painting, “The Communist, A political meeting” was painted during his later period, in 1932, and showcases his “double-vision” paining and his migration to industrial
The entirety of the painting is painted in very dull and bleak colors except for the man in the center of the crowd, which is given a bright red shirt and creates a focal point that you are immediately drawn to when you first look at the painting. Also, in the background it is showing a industrial community of smokestacks in which are painted with the same colors as the mass of people in which you are able to infer that these people are all of the working class. The man who is seemingly head of all this seemingly looks like he could have stepped out of the crowd and taken leadership of this meeting, as he is painted with the colors of everyone else other than the red that is so drastically different from the bland browns and greys. Another detail he used to create the feeling of unity that communism should have created is that the people have no real faces, they are all the same in the sense that their faces all blur together to create one mass of unknowns with no personal identity which fit into what communism initially strived to achieve, to do away with one's personal, private