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Indepth Arts News:
"Forbidden Art: The Postwar Russian Avant-Garde"
2000-10-15 until 2000-12-10
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College
Chesnut Hill, MA,
USA United States of America
Forbidden Art: The Postwar Russian Avant-Garde presents 77 works by Soviet
underground artists who dared to challenge the Communist government's monopoly on
artistic expression. After the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, many Russian artists
believed that the new Communist state would give them unprecedented artistic
freedom. Instead of filling commissions for the wealthy elite, they would now create
authentic art for the people. Avant-garde artists such as Vasilii Kandinsky, Kazimir
Malevich, Luibov Popova, El Lissitzky, and Vladimir Tatlin believed that Modernist forms
would be the true artistic language of the liberated, egalitarian Soviet society. These
idealistic artists were bitterly disappointed when, in the early 1930s, the Communist
government set strict guidelines for Soviet art.
The official style, known as Socialist Realism, emphasized narrative, didactic subjects
and classical composition. The Ministry of Culture of the USSR proclaimed that the truth
and historical concreteness of the artistic depiction of reality must be combined with the
task of the ideological transformation and education of the workers in the spirit of
Socialism. Furthermore, artists were to create works with a high level of
craftsmanship and a high level of ideological and artistic content. The entertainment of
irrelevant or subjective styles, such as abstract art or Surrealism, was strongly
discouraged.
The death of Joseph Stalin in 1953 brought hopes of artistic freedom. With Nikita
Khrushchev1s revelatory Secret Speech in 1956 and the first official statements on the
horrors of the preceding era, the truth of the dictator1s crimes began to emerge. New
civil and cultural liberties seemed imminent. Bold artists joined literary and scientific
figures like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrey Sakharov on a dangerous path of
alternative expression, issuing provocative statements and formulating new aesthetic
theories. The inevitable result was a series of confrontations with the government,
epitomized by the so-called Bulldozer Exhibition in 1974, when police drove bulldozers
through the exhibition, scattering the painters, and then doused the paintings with fire
hoses.
The state suppression of alternative ideals continued after Khrushchev, through the
Leonid Brezhnev years and the brief tenures of Yuri Andropov and Konstantin
Chernenko. Nevertheless, the Soviet underground continued to expand, pressing for
creative freedom and public recognition. In many ways, the 1970s marked the zenith of
the nonconformist movement's originality and polemical power. Finally, in the late
1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev's policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (rebuilding)
marked a new era of free and energetic cultural expression. The auction of Russian
Avant-Garde and Soviet Contemporary Art held at Sotheby1s in Moscow in July 1988
formally introduced nonconformist art into the international market. The emigration of
Russian nonconformists to Europe and the United States also gave Western audiences
new access to Russian alternative art.
Forbidden Art: The Postwar Russian Avant-Garde begins with a Socialist Realist work,
Nikolai Kritski and Group's Power to the People. The six sections of the exhibition trace
the different ways that Soviet artists reacted against Socialist Realism, beginning with
the first waves of nonconformist artists, the Reform School and the Radical School. The
next two sections present Sots Art and Moscow Conceptualism, two forms of artistic
innovation that emerged in the 1970s. The final section gathers together works by
artists from St. Petersburg.
IMAGE:
Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid,
Pravda, from Anarcharchic Synthesism series, 1985-86
Mixed Media, 60 x 72 in.
Courtesy of Curatorial Assistance, Inc./Yuri Traisman collection.
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