SPRINGVILLE — Utah has become one of the most important states for collections of Russian art, as witnessed by the Springville Museum of Art's symposium and exhibition on official Russian artists between 1934 and 1985.

The symposium, "Soviet Art in Conflict: The Artist as an Agent of Social Change," held earlier this month, brought in a host of experts — Mark C. Konecny, curator at the Institute of Modern Russian Culture at the Institute of the University of Southern California; Mark Purves, assistant professor of Russian and Russian literature at Brigham Young University; Bradford Shinkle IV, director of scholarship at The Museum of Russian Art in Minneapolis; James Dabakis, collector and dealer of Russian art in Park City; Ross Butler, associate vice president of international relations at Utah Valley State College and honorary consul general from the Federation of Russia to Utah; Russian artist Alexey L. Steele; and Springville Museum director Vern Swanson.

Artists of the period were required to join official artist unions to get work, then bow to the Communist Party line in their creations or disappear via the Secret Service, Swanson said during his keynote address. That meant they had to create works that followed the ideology of communism, ignore styles of art that were developing internationally and avoid "personal artistic diversions."

Amid those demands, the art was to be uplifting. "There was no clear way out for the artist," Swanson said. Yet, they "brilliantly succeeded."

"When you train workers to become artists, this is what you get," Konecny said of the art that often depicted people at work in factories, on the street and in other settings that promoted the party ideology.

During a panel discussion that followed Swanson's remarks, Steele said that many Soviet artists followed the communist ideology because they believed in it. Most never joined the Communist Party.

The result of the Communist Central Committee's involvement in the arts was a genre called Socialist Realism, now popular among American collectors. The panel discussed the three styles that came out of the genre: ceremonial, working-class impressionism and severe. "The Russians really started appreciating their art when goofy Americans started paying for it," Swanson said.

However, some artists, such as Arkadi Plastov, hated then-dictator Joseph Stalin and bristled when he was required to put Stalin's image in a painting of children going off the summer camp on the back of a flatbed truck, aptly named, "Off to the Summer Pioneer Camp."

To satisfy the demands of the state, Swanson said, Plastov put Stalin's face in a muted picture mounted on the roof of the truck.