Volume 40, Number 8 · April 22, 1993
Art and the Great Utopia
By Jamey Gambrell
Ilya Repin and the World of Russian Art
by Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier
Columbia University Press, 248 pp., $37.00
Aleksandr M. Rodchenko/ Varvara F. Stepanova: The Future Is Our Only Goal
catalog of an exhibition at the Austrian Museum for Decorative Arts, edited by Peter Noever, essays by Aleksandr N. Lavrent'yev, by Angela Völker
Prestel, 260 pp., $65.00
Popova
by Dmitri V. Sarabianov, by Natalia L. Adaskina, translated by Marian Schwartz
Abrams, 396 pp., $39.95 (paper)
The Great Utopia: The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde, 1915–1932
catalog of an exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, New York.
Guggenheim Museum, 732 pp., $50.00 (paper)
Street Art of the Revolution: Festivals and Celebrations in Russia 1918–33
edited by Vladimir Tolstoy, edited by Irina Bibikova, edited by Catherine Cooke
The Vendome Press, 240 pp., $50.00
An atmosphere of mystery and romance, with a tragic overcast, has always attended discussions of that constellation of artists and movements we call the Russian avant garde. Despite the flood of information over the last five years—dozens of survey and monographic exhibitions, and many times that number of books and articles—the air is still heavy with myth. The fascination with the period leading up to and following the Russian Revolution lies not only and perhaps not primarily in the objects the artists produced, but in the aura of great events—war, revolution, famine, terror—that surrounds them. To a degree unprecedented in modern history, artists after the Revolution became agents of the state and sought to merge ideology and artistic discourse. The same artists and their art were soon disowned and repressed as ideological enemies by the revolutionary government they so passionately served. Some, like El Lissitzky and Klutsis, went on to create icons for the Stalinist state; others, like Tatlin and Malevich, appeared to draw back, returning to a private, figurative art that also seemed to spell defeat. Some, like Rodchenko and Stepanova, did both.
Review, 6013 words
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