Artistic Proletariat
It's hard to tell what Karl Marx thought of Art. The safest that can be said about Marx and art is that he did not think it had anything to do with the class struggle. He was not wrong. Relevant comment by Marx may be found in the opening chapter of Capital, in which he writes that as soon as people start to work for each other in any way, their labor assumes a social form. It is socialist.
The Russian modernist art movement of Constructivism was the first conscious manifestation of the socialist theory of Art. Russian Constructivist artists met regularly to argue about the future of Soviet art. A contradiction developed over the role of the artist as individual, opposed to utilitarian purposes of art, what today would be described as industrial design.
The role of the individualistic artist was becoming an object of scorn to the Russian Constructivists. Their Institute of Artistic Culture debates of the 1920s peaked in the theory of Productivism, which demanded direct participation in industry by artists, and the obsolescence of easel painting. Vladimir Tatlin was one of the first to commit to industrial means of production, with his designs for furniture, and related items of practical use.
Tatlin's best-known creation was a tower, spiral in form, and which was intended as a pulpit, of sorts, for political haranguing such as Lenin was accustomed to give. Artist Naum Gabo pointedly criticized Tatlin's tower design saying, "Either create functional houses and bridges, or create pure art -not both." The individualists were put on the defensive, finding themselves on the wrong side of History.
To be a progressive artist in Soviet Russia was an existential dilemma, but not so dire as the situation in Nazi Germany. In Russia, the non-participation in production by individualistic artists marginalized them, but unless engaged in counter-revolutionary activities, they were not considered a threat. The Nazis, on the other hand, actively hunted individualists, persecuting them for individualism. Conformity to a perverse cultural standard was alone approved.
Such was not the case in Russia. In many ways Joseph Stalin was as vindictive as Adolf Hitler. The difference is Stalin considered art too insignificant to bother with, unlike Hitler, who was obsessed with it. A very good quote from a survey of the art of the Stalinist era puts it this way:
"...art exhibitions of 1935–1960 disprove the claims that artistic life of the period was suppressed by the ideology and artists submitted entirely to what was then called "social order." A great number of landscapes, portraits, genre paintings and studies exhibited at the time pursued purely technical purposes and were thus free from any ideology. That approach was also pursued ever more consistently in the genre paintings as well, although young artists at time still lacked the experience and professional mastery to produce works of high art level devoted to Soviet actuality."
What this says, in essence, is that artists were either useful to the Soviet regime, or they were ignored, as they were not considered a threat.
One-of-a-kind works of art can be viewed at: https://www.saatchiart.com/account/artworks/1840403