Heroic realism is a term which has sometimes been used to describe art used as propaganda. Examples include the Socialist realism style associated with Communist regimes, and the very similar art style associated with Fascism. Its characteristics are realism and the depiction of figures as ideal types or symbols, often with explicit rejection of modernism in art (as "bourgeois" or "degenerate").

Both socialist and Nazi art were explicitly ordered to be heroic and romantic, and was in consequence ideal rather than realistic.

Heroic realism designs were used to propagate the revolution in the Soviet Union during Lenin's time. Lenin doubted that the illiterate population would understand what abstract visual images were intended to communicate. He also thought that artists, such as constructivists and productivists, may have had a hidden agenda against the government. Indeed, such movements as Cubism were denounced as bourgeois and criticized for failure to draw on the heritage of art, whereas proletarian culture had to draw on what was learned in the prior times, and for rejecting the beautiful on the grounds that it was "old". The artists countered such thinking, however, by saying that the advanced art represented the advanced political ideas.