ART & POWER: The Russian Avant-Garde Under Soviet Rule

Based on formerly unknown and hitherto unpublished archival documents, the volume offers new insights into the definitive role of Russian Avant-Garde artists who would disseminate their artistic values through numerous educational, research and experimental laboratories and institutions throughout Russia, reaching even the most remote backwaters of the Russian Empire. Avant-Garde art was something alien and impenetrable to the Bolshevik rulers in the early post-revolutionary years. Party leaders did not understand it, and certainly attached no great value to it, but tolerated and even found ways of using it. But the alliance was short lived, a unique period in which modern art was put into service of the state and the new government. The enthusiasm amongst the artists themselves was understandable - they went from being an underground movement to a force endowed with administrative powers to change artistic culture and achieve their agenda. The so-called leftists believed that it was their ideas and methods that would lie at the heart of a new artistic culture. This historical study looks at the various divisions and sections of the Visual Arts Department of IZO, a new type of museums of painterly culture unique in the world at the time, and a countrywide network of new museums and art schools. The architects and leaders of the programme included such figures as Vassily Kandinsky, Alexander Rodchenko, Kazimir Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin, Marc Chagall and Olga Rozanova, and the challenges they faced in their collaboration with the Soviet State. Fine full page colour examples throughout such as Natalya Goncharova's Spring: Petrovsky Park 1909-10 and Lev Yudin's Cubism. 148pp, 18.4 x 25.4cm.
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