“Song of Russia” is a series of oil paintings based on imagery borrowed from three Hollywood films about Russia that were produced between 1943 and 1944. These films, North Star and Song of Russia, both produced at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios, and Mission to Moscow, produced by Warner Brothers, were created at the behest of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and were intended to garner support for the Soviet Union during World War Two by influencing the American public's perception of the USSR. The films were essentially pro-Soviet propaganda, presenting Stalin's Russia in a very favorable light. They adroitly appropriated the aesthetics and rhetoric of Stalin's Socialist Realism of the 1930s and 1940s, and were essentially American embodiments of Socialist Realist motion pictures in terms of both form and content, but produced in Hollywood and sanctioned by F.D.R. himself.
The unlikely creation of these films was possible due to timing:...
