L'image de Lénine dans l'iconographie révolutionnaire et postrévolutionnaire

The Image of Lenin in Revolutionary Iconography. In destroying effigies of the tzar and symbols of autocracy, the February 1917 revolution created a void which would have to be filled sooner or later. October 1917: intending to make art serve the revolution the new Soviet leaders hastened to launch a huge "monument propaganda"program to commemorate revolutionary celebrities of the past, and later of the present as well. The President of the new Soviet government, indifferent for a long time to any form of personal publicity, couldn 't indefinitely escape the attention of artists; thus right from the first months of the October revolution, photographers, drawers, poster artists and sculptors adopted the image of the number one Bolshevik, portraying him in a wide variety of ways. This article sets out to analyze the different competing representations from which emerged, in the end, the figure of the prophet guiding humanity in its march towards a radiant socialist future. A few years later, "camarade Il'ic's death, along with the tenth anniversary of the October revolution, gave definitive form to this emblematic image which synthesized in its own way the many roles filled by the founding hero of the new Soviet State. The time was right for a massive distribution of realist effigies of Lenin, whose cult was less than ever fortuitous.Coquin François-Xavier. L'image de Lénine dans l'iconographie révolutionnaire et postrévolutionnaire. In: Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations. 44ᵉ année, N. 2, 1989. pp. 223-249