Can great art be produced in a police state? Josef Stalin ran one of the most oppressive regimes in world history. Nevertheless, Stalinist Russia produced an outpouring of artistic works of immense power. More than a dozen great artists were visible enough for Stalin to take an interest in them - which meant he chose whether they were to live in luxury and be publicly honoured or to be sent to the Lubyanka for torture and execution. Journalist and novelist Andy McSmith brings together the storie...
Assembled during the last twenty years, the José Maria Castañé collection of paintings, drawings, and prints constitutes a panorama of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Russian art, one of the most exciting moments of modern cultural history. Unlike other representations in the West, however, the Castañé collection does not focus exclusively on the avant-garde, Socialist Realism or the dissident movement, but, instead, offers a broader and sometimes alternative enquiry into the history...
An illustrated study of one of Ilya Kabakov's most fantastic installations.The fictitious hero of this 1984 installation is a lonely dreamer who develops an impossible project: to fly alone in cosmic space. But this dream is also an individual appropriation of a collective Soviet project and the official Soviet propaganda connected to it. Having built a makeshift slingshot, the hero apparently flies through the ceiling of his shabby room and vanishes into space. The miserable room and the primit...
Punk Orientalism: The Art of Rebellion explores the spaces and places associated with the former Soviet Union, focusing on the artists and ideas hailing from Central Asia and the Caucasus, which were long perceived as an extension or “client” states of the USSR. The theme of non-conformity and the punk rejection of state authority is a continuous thread throughout the book, which highlights changing and divided societies and their evolving norms in the post-Soviet period. Inspired by the titula...
This highly readable introduction to the abstract artist Wassily Kandinsky reveals why he remains one of the most influential and imitated artists. This book explores all facets of Kandinsky s life and career, from his radical work as the founder of the Blue Rider group and his escape from Weimar Germany to Paris, to his stormy love affair with the painter Gabriele MAnter and his many friendships with leading artists of his generation. Color reproductions of Kandinsky's works are presented along...
This richly illustrated catalogue documents the exhibition organized by the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, in partnership with the State Russian Museum, St Petersburg. Featuring celebrated paintings by such pioneering artists as Wasilii Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin and Natalia Goncharova, it also includes the work of more than 20 other innovative artists of the Russian avant-garde, some of whose art has rarely been reproduced in colour. These intriguing paintings are juxtaposed w...
Published to accompany an exhibition at The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, this catalogue beautifully presents a history of Russian collage, with an emphasis on the middle and later years of the 20th century. Works by Popova, Rodchenko, and Malevich allow the reader to see the roots of later constructions, in chapters organised by application, including texture, assemblage, decoupage, and photomontage.
"It is clear from the creations of this outstanding artist that his soul absorbs all the profound beauty of nature through his intoxicated eye, and new beauty is born from his overflowing soul..." These are the words of an enthusiastic visitor to Alexej von Jawlensky's first ever one-man show, published in the communications of the Barmer Kunstverein in 1911. Sadly, von Jawlensky (1864-1941) remains unacknowledged in Russia to this day, even though the rest of the world has long since discovered...
Since the beginning of his career in the 1960s, Russian artist Erik Bulatov has investigated the potential of painting as social commentary. A founder of the school of Moscow Conceptualism-alongside Ilya Kabakov, Collective Actions, and Komar & Melamid among others-Bulatov developed what has been described as conceptual painting, using text and image to explore spatial preoccupations that mirror his understanding of social relations. This book follows the making of the artist's largest work to d...
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...
This reader is intended to accompany undergraduate courses in the history of Russian cinema or Russian culture through film. It consists of excerpts from English language criticism and translations of excerpts of Russian-language criticism, as well as commissioned essays on thirty subtitled films widely taught in American and British courses on Russian film and culture. The arrangement will be chronological, from Sten'ka Razin through How I Ended This Summer, with a general introduction to each...
Russian Realisms (NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies)
by Molly Brunson
One fall evening in 1880, Russian painter Ilya Repin welcomed an unexpected visitor to his home: Lev Tolstoy. The renowned realists talked for hours, and Tolstoy turned his critical eye to the sketches in Repin's studio. Tolstoy's criticisms would later prompt Repin to reflect on the question of creative expression and conclude that the path to artistic truth is relative, dependent on the mode and medium of representation. In this original study, Molly Brunson traces many such paths that converg...
*Winner of the Pushkin House Prize for the Best Book in Translation 2018*From a renowned graphic artist and activist, an incredible portrait of life in Russia today'A surprisingly uplifting, moving and often very funny chronicle of grassroots protest movements, political trials, provincial sex workers and bomb-scare-ridden LGBT festivals' - The Times'Victoria Lomasko's gritty, street-level view of the great Russian people masterfully intertwines quiet desperation with open defiance. Her drawings...
Культура русской диаспоры судьбы и тексты (Russian Culture in Europe, #13)
by Fedor B Poljakov, Aleksandr Danilevskij, and Sergej Dotsenko
, , XX XXI ., . This volume includes articles and materials on the history of 20th and 21st century literature, arts, spiritual and religious life of the Russian Diaspora. It is largely based on archival research, thus making it possible to address some l...