Elena Paredes

Elena Paredes was born in 1911 and was primarily influenced by the 1930s. The period of the 1930s is epitomised by the conflict between many political ideologies, including Marxist Socialism, Capitalist Democracy, and the Totalitarianism of both Communism and Fascism. Artistic output in the United States was heavily impacted at the time by the Great Depression, and a number of artists took to focusing on ideas of humility and the ordinary man. For the first time in US history, artists began to delve into political subjects and endeavoured to use their art to impact society. Topics including poverty, lack of affordable housing, anti-lynching, anti-fascism, and workers' strikes were predominant in many artists’ work. In the Soviet Union, Stalin’s government required urgent funds to implement the rapid industrialisation demanded by the first Five Year Plan. It initiated a secret proposal to sell off treasures from the State Hermitage Museum in Leningrad (St. Petersburg), including a primary list of two hundred and fifty rare paintings by the Old Masters, a number of which ended up in the collection of Andrew Mellon via the New York based art dealing company, Knoedler. Surrealism continued to dominate in Europe, and had influence worldwide. Artists such as Frida Kahlo and Diego Riviera in Mexico, worked to incorporate the ideas posed by Surrealism into their revolutionary political ideologies, developing a new kind of magic realism. The decade took a sinister turn with the dawn of National Socialism in Germany, followed by Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. By the end of the 1930s, the Second World War had begun; which preoccupied both artists and the global population.