Like the playing cards in Alice in Wonderland, which hurried to paint the living white roses red before the queen’s arrival for fear of having their heads cut off, Russia’s official artists cling to Stalin’s social-realist dogma though it has lost any real ideological function. As expressions of the awkward state of self-denial that pervaded Russia before and after the collapse of communism, Natalya Nesterova, a former official artist, documents in her paintings as grotesque a social farce as one could imagine.

In her retrospective show in 1992 at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, earlier works