Art, like religion, is a beautiful thing when kept far away from worldly concerns. Being utterly free of the constraints of reality, it is also an easily abused medium of political expression. The artist who chooses to make a political statement in his or her work is peculiarly empowered to uplift an unhinged perception of the world; art’s emotional weight has zero intrinsic correlation with its intellectual fidelity.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the innovative artwork and architecture of the Constructivist movement, which was popular in the Soviet Union until about 1934.

Early Constructivist posters demonstrate striking abstract creativity with the use of simplified shapes and high-contrast color schemes to catch the viewer’s attention. These are followed up with plain, brief slogans to convey the message. Many of these works depict hopes for an imagined classless society.

Alongside workers and peasants, charismatic communists, such as Stalin and Lenin, are captured standing in profile or staring gallantly upward beneath a dramatically painted sky. Later depictions of Communist saints such as Mao Tse-Tung, Kim Il-Sung and Che Guevara echo this style.

The most intriguing symbols of Constructivism, however, take the form of thousands of unique and visually fascinating buildings scattered across the former U.S.S.R. Many of these were workers’ clubs and other community buildings were meant to espouse egalitarianism. Others, such as apartment blocks for KGB agents and faux-Art Deco office complexes for party apparatchiki, served to whitewash the repressed, deprived realities of life in a socialist one-party state.

In the mid-1930s, Constructivism was suppressed in favor of socialist realism in art and Stalinism in architecture. The collegial ideals it represented were replaced by the real face of communism: a blunt demand for obedience.

Between 1992 and 2002, English photographer Richard Pare made eight trips to Russia to document the surviving Constructivist buildings; the highlights were later shown at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Pare himself is sympathetic to his subjects, yet his work is brutally honest: Many of these structures, though still architecturally beautiful, are faded shells of their former selves. Rust, flaking paint and chipped concrete are the primary motifs. The utopianism of the contemporary Constructivist posters is nowhere to be seen, because it never existed.

Unlike its worthier architectural form, this strain of Constructivism is alive and well: Though not a communist, Barack Obama has been lionized in quasi-Constructivist styles to an astounding degree by artists like Shepard Fairey.

In America, glorification of individuals is customarily reserved for hindsight of the deceased. Our success is built not on collectivist unity behind charismatic megalomaniacs at the helm of an omnipotent state. It rises atop the tension of competing ideas within the overarching, pluralistic framework of democratic capitalism — which rightly values both commercial and fine art over political scribbles.

The fixed upward gazes, the reckless splashes of color, the banal slogans and, perhaps worst of all, the portraits cut in profile characterizing depictions of Obama are alien to our culture and really rather creepy in their hagiographic quality.

In spite of all this, America today hardly resembles the Soviet Union of 1934. Still, we may reasonably expect that in 70 years our descendants will view Obama iconography the same way we look at crumbling Constructivist architecture and its yellowed posters — a curious artistic foray marred by its premature idolatry of hollow men and illusory hope.

Reach columnist Russ Wung at opinion@dailyuw.com.