Russian Art and the West (NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies)
This book addresses the lively artistic dialogue that took place between Russia and the West—in particular with the United States, Britain, and France—from the 1860s to the Khrushchev Thaw. Offering stimulating new readings of cross-cultural exchange, it illuminates Russia's compelling, and sometimes combative, relation with western art in this period of profound cultural transformation. Russian Art and the West breaks new ground in the range of its material and its chronological span. Attending...
Explodity - Sound, Image, and Word in Russian Futurist Book Art
by Nancy Perloff
Painters and poets-including Natalia Goncharova, Velimir Khlebnikov, Mikhail Larionov, Kazimir Malevich, and Vladimir Mayakovsky-collaborated to fabricate hand-lithographed books, for which they invented a new language called zaum (a neologism meaning "beyond the mind"), which was distinctive in its emphasis on "sound as such" and its rejection of definite logical meaning. At the heart of this volume are close analyses of two of the most significant and experimental futurist books: Mirskontsa (...
With the launch of Moscow Art Magazine in 1993, curator and critic Viktor Misiano gave readers access to a rich variety of theory, criticism, and artists' texts by Russian and international writers. It is the only independent art journal in Russia which has weathered they country's economic crises and continued to publish innovative, and at times challenging, writing on visual art up to the present day.Critical Mass: Moscow Art Magazine 1993-2017 is published to mark the 100th issue of the magaz...
Russian painter Olga Suvorova is internationally known for her brilliant reinterpretations of English Pre-Rafaelite art, described by critic Viktoriya Syslova as "amazingly modern in their exquisite theatricality." Both exuberant and philosophical in mood, her richly detailed worlds depict people who are somehow familiar to us, even in their extravagant costumes. In this first-person account, accompanied by over 150 images of her colorful paintings, Suvorova describes her backgro...
This book examines the legacy of international interwar modernism as a case of cultural transfer through the travels of a central motif: the square. The square was the most emblematic and widely known form/motif of the international avant-garde in the interwar years. It originated from the Russian artist Kazimir Malevich who painted The Black Square on White Ground in 1915 and was then picked up by another Russian artist El Lissitzky and the Dutch artist Theo van Doesburg. It came to be understo...
How Constructivist artists in Russia between 1923 and 1925 developed a counterproposal to capitalism's commodity fetish by producing objects meant to be "comrades" in the creation of an egalitarian socialist culture.In Imagine No Possessions, Christina Kiaer investigates the Russian Constructivist conception of objects as being more than commodities. "Our things in our hands must be equals, comrades," wrote Aleksandr Rodchenko in 1925. Kiaer analyzes this Constructivist counterproposal to capita...
My Life was written in Moscow in 1921-1922, when Chagall was thirty-five years old. Although long out-of-print, it remains one of the most extraordinarily inventive and beautifully told of all autobiographies. The text is accompanied by twenty plates which Chagall prepared especially to illustrate his life story. Together, the words and pictures paint an incomparable portrait of one of the greatest painters of this century, and of the now vanished milieu which inspired him.
The subject of Russian Futurism is familiar only to experts, and based on highly limited material. No other movement appears to have evoked quite the same public response, having, as it does, social roots. Referred to as "the art of the future" by the Russian press in 1908 - a year before the official appearance of the word - this book focuses on the works of some forty-two artistic 'revolutionaries' featuring vibrant examples of their work, which serve to inspire the imagination. The work of Da...
Great Private Collections of Imperial Russia
by Oleg Yakovlevich Neverov
Prior to the Revolution of 1917, Russia had one of the greatest traditions of private art collecting in the world. The first great collections were created by the aristocracy, and then by the newly rich industrialists and businessmen in the 19th century. Finally came the 'Merchant Princes', who were among the first and most important collectors of Impressionist and Modern Art. After 1917, all these collections were confiscated by the State, put into reserves in Moscow and Leningrad, and eventual...
This is the first book to focus on the complex and fascinating relationship between Russian and Italian Futurism. A long overdue examination of the subject, it explores the energetic, creative and occasionally violent encounters of East and West in the arena of avant-garde art. After founding Futurism in Italy in 1909, F.T. Marinetti's ambition was to establish an international Futurist movement that would develop his own group's activities and interests. Futurist ideas were familiar to Russian...
This exhibition catalogue features nearly 120 paintings, drawings and objects, among them several rediscovered masterworks. In addition, the book includes previously unpublished letters, essays and diaries, along with contributions by international scholars who shed new light on this popular figure and his devotion to the spiritual in art.
Kazimir Malevich's sudden realization of a non-objective way of painting, which he termed Suprematism, stands as a seminal moment in the history of 20th-century art. This is a study of his work in the context of his time and in relation to revolutions in physics, linguistics and poetry. It pays particular attention to his late figurative works. The authors trace Malevich's development from his beginnings in the Ukraine and early years in Moscow, where he was closely involved in the Futurist circ...
Moscow's State Tretyakov Gallery and A.A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum house the world-famous collections of Russian art and theatre design. This publication brings together for the first time a representative selection of works by Jewish artists from these two treasure troves. Some of the artists have great reputations, but most of them have until now remained obscure. "Modern Masterpieces from Moscow" covers the period from the birth of the Russian avant-garde around 1910 until the...
Since the 1960s, artists in Hungary have displayed a penchant for abstraction when it comes to complex social conditions and efforts to enact political change.The abstracted visual language of Hungarian artists is the focus in the Künstlerhaus exhibition “Ábstract Hungary” curated by Ákos Ezer, a painter who in this catalog hastranslated the present-day reality in his home country through the framework of "abstraction." This theme is, in fact, a revival, as the Künstlerhaus has previously presen...
Explorations of the radical film praxis and extensive oeuvre of filmmaker Želimir Žilnik. Shadow Citizens offers insights into the radical film praxis and extensive oeuvre of filmmaker Želimir Žilnik (b. 1942). Since his beginnings in the lively amateur film scene of Yugoslavia in the 1960s, Žilnik has made more than fifty films, often in the genre of docudrama. Many of Žilnik's films have anticipated real-world events--the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the economic transition from socialism to a...
Dialogues
Artists in the Soviet Union faced a difficult choice: either join the official academies and make art that conformed to the state’s aesthetic and ideological dictates, or attempt to develop alternative artistic practices and spheres for exhibiting their work. In the early 1970s, conceptual artists Ilya Kabakov and Viktor Pivovarov chose the latter option, turning their limited resources into an asset by pioneering an entirely new artistic genre: the album. Somewhere between drawings and novels,...
Treasures of Catherine the Great
by Geraldine Norman and Mikhail B. Piotrovski
Catherine the Great was one of the greatest and most astute art collectors of all time. During her reign she amassed an astonishing collection, now kept in the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, Russia's foremost museum and one of the world's great encyclopaedic collections of art. This catalogue is tied to the year-long exhibition running at the first 'foreign branch' of the State Hermitage, opening this year at Somerset House in London. Reproduced here are some of the finest holdings in Cather...
Russian Art in the New Millennium
by Sergei Reviakin and Edward Lucie-Smith
There is surprisingly little, and certainly nothing comprehensive, written about the contemporary Russian scene now. What appear in the West are mostly reports about so-called ‘dissidents’, not about what is happening in this vast culture, taken as a whole. Too often, these reports seem to be primarily inspired by a desire to demonstrate Western cultural and political superiority. The aim of Russian Art in the New Millennium is not to support any one cause, but to look at the situation as it now...
Picturing the Cosmos elucidates the complex relationship between visual propaganda and censorship in the Soviet Union in the Cold War period, focusing on the 1950s and 1960s. Drawing from a comprehensive corpus of rarely seen photographs and other visual phenomena narrating the Soviet Union’s 1957 victory in the ‘Race for Space’, the author illustrates the media’s role in cementing the way for Communism whilst retaining top-secret information. Each photo is examined as a deliberate, functioning...
Performance art in Western Europe and North America developed in part as a response to the commercialisation of the art object, as artists endeavoured to create works of art that could not be bought or sold. But what are the roots of performance art in Eastern Europe and Russia, where there was no real art market to speak of? While many artworks created in the 'East' may resemble Western performance art practices, their origins, as well as their meaning and significance, is decidedly different....
Focusing on Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935), one of the great pioneers of 20th-century abstract art, this is one of a series of illustrated monographs which offer introductions to modern art and artists. Each book presents a profile of the artist and analysis of his distinctive style. Malevich was a major figure in the Russian avant-garde, and a founder of Suprematism, which became the basis for most later trends in abstract painting. His life and work are traced from his early years to his triumph...
One of the most exciting movements in 20th century art, Russian constructivism radically reassessed the role of the artist and his work. Here, Lodder provides a detailed account of this complex movement and the reverberations it had on Western culture.
The all-encompassing mass culture of today is not an invention of the late 20th century. Contrary to what might be assumed, given the capitalist under- and over-tones of contemporary mass media, our visual culture has its roots in the totalitarian regimes of the 20s and 30s. Back then, the main venue for visual communication was the reproduction and circulation of pictures via posters and films. Fascism and communism made radical use of these new opportunities for the consistent transformation o...