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The aim of this article is to connect the history of Red Sport International (RSI) with the history of Constructivist Art in Russia and Czechoslovakia in the years of 1921–1928. It investigates the various ways in which avant-garde artists were engaged in promoting worker sports. It shows then how it differed from traditional sport-themed artworks as Constructivists intended to reject museums and galleries in favour of creating art for proletarian masses. Architectural sketches, photomontages, postcards, photography, film, sport, and artistic magazines were the means by which artistic propaganda of RSI in Russia and Czechoslovakia up to the 1st Spartakiad in Moscow and the 2nd Spartakiad in Prague (1928) evolved. Showing a range of artistic projects made by Constructivists from Vkhutemas school in Russia and Devětsil members in Czechoslovakia this article shows that the ideas of fighting for socialism promoted by RSI took place not only in the field of sports, but also in the artistic field – in the field of physical and visual culture alike. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the end of the 1990s, post-socialist nostalgia has been a powerful trend in Czech film and television. This article focuses on the examples of Filip Renč’s 2001 musical comedyRebelové(The Rebels) and the Czech television seriesVyprávěj(Tell Me a Story, 2009–2013), which both portray the period around the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. Through an analysis of the visual style of the film and television series, as well as a discussion of the way the texts recontextualize the popular culture of the period they portray, the article proposes that Czech post-socialist nostalgia is more fruitfully viewed as “retro”, which is here differentiated from non-nostalgic depictions of socialism through a comparison with the mini-seriesHořící keř(Burning Bush, directed by Agnieszka Holland, 2013). Although retro’s concern with surface and style can be interpreted as apolitical, the author argues that the political agenda of Czech retro texts needs to be understood by the ways they combine a fetishization of the aesthetic trappings of the period with a condemnation of the political system of the time. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

On 19 September 2011 the Museum of Socialist Art opened its doors in Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria. Previously, the only attempt at exhibiting the communist period in a Bulgarian museum was a short-lived exhibition at the National Art Gallery in 2009, which had provoked enormous interest. In considering the reasons why it took the country 22 years to introduce this controversial period in a museum, this paper concentrates on context, outlining the more recent changes that have occurred in Bulgarian culture and facilitated a renewed attitude and approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The transition from state socialism to capitalism brought changes to the Russian cultural sector. Previously entirely sponsored and controlled by the patron state, the cultural organizations had to cope with dramatically reduced budgets. While the state remained the principal sponsor and patron of cultural organizations, the new actors—foreign foundations—provided additional possibilities of funding and introduced a new discourse on arts administration. The foreign concept of “cultural management” became an alternative to a Soviet-type “cultural bureaucracy” and found its partisans among the active part of arts administrators who effectively profited from foreign grants and scholarships and tried their best to integrate into the international community. They are now promoting cultural economy and innovation and are striving for further liberalization of the cultural sphere. But the organization of culture inherited from Soviet times persists. This article provides analyses of interviews with Russian cultural managers devoted to their professional trajectories in the 1990s and 2000s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores what happens when artists attempt to control art in order to 'solve' conflicting definitions of art in the post-Socialist condition with the use of two case studies. In the case of Little Warsaw, a Hungarian artist duo, representatives of the ex-unofficial and underground artists were eager to take over the disappearing state control and claim authoritarian power to define the boundaries of art and police fellow artists. In the second case radical Russian artists, such as Oleg Kulik and Alexander Brener, Western artists and curators declared themselves the guardians of standards and norms in their desire to keep the status quo of Cold War art discourse alive and maintain their dominant position within it. The author refers back to the heritage of censorship employed by artists towards fellow artists and to the hidden history of gate-keeping in modern art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the last Congress of the GDR's Artists' Association in 1988, the term 'Socialist Realism' was officially replaced by the phrase 'Art in Socialism'. The Congress's participants thus tried not only to do justice to the variety of art, but also to bid farewell to Socialist Realism as an aesthetic concept. But how were these two goals to be accomplished, without changes in the GDR's institutions and power structures? A solution was possible, because the generation of leftist artists, recruited after 1945 to hold office in the new system and build a new socialist art, had been educated or otherwise active in the 1920s. They wanted to re-appropriate the left's modernist traditions, assuming thereby a position opposed to official cultural policy, which required strict accommodation to the Soviet model. This conflict concerning the proper attitude to modern art became the central discourse for the development of art in the GDR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author examines the political and social context of Chinese painting in the early 1950s. The author analyzes several representative works of old gouhua painters who engaged themselves in the so-called caimo or colored ink figure pictures, a highly regarded genre of socialist realism since 1949 Liberation. He also discusses the three interpretations of socialist realism which convey certain historical truths about it.

From Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen onwards, Thomas Mann made frequent mentions of socialism in his works. Depending on their own political positions, both his detractors and supporters considered him to have undergone a political conversion after the First World War, from conservative monarchist to socialist republican. His public statements became increasingly sympathetic to the Social Democrat cause throughout the period 1918–1933, culminating in two 'Bekenntnisse zum Sozialismus' in Vienna and Berlin in 1932 and 1933 respectively. On closer examination however, his politics during the Weimar Republic throw up many contradictions, not least of which is the continuity they often display with his earlier positions. This article explores Thomas Mann's paradoxical attitude to socialism in the period with particular emphases on his experience of the Munich revolutions in 1918–1919, his reading of Gustav Landauer, his rewriting of Der Zauberberg and his visits to 'Red Vienna'. Der Zauberberg accords socialism a place in Europe's cultural heritage and presents us with the only fully rounded socialist characters in Mann's oeuvre, reflecting his political preoccupations at the time. Ultimately, however, it seems that Mann developed his own idiosyncratic understanding of socialism primarily as a pragmatic, rhetorical tool to be used against the National Socialists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an examination into the work of artist William Morris and explores how his values influenced and contributed to the modernist movement. The author notes that Morris' work is defined by his embrace of medieval artistic methods, the decorative arts and an organic functionalism. The author also explores how Morris used art as a tool of political revolution and activism in his efforts to outline the connection between art & society.

Analyzes the articles concerning East German theater published in the periodical "Contemporary Theatre Review". Authors' analysis of the impact of the fall of the German wall on the country's performing arts; Political issues influencing the theater industry focused on in the articles.

The article describes the education on pictorial arts provided by the government of USSR to its citizens in 1960. This education starts in the elementary where children with special talent for drawing are equipped with elementary drawing skill. Next stage is where they complete their secondary education and acquire professional skills in a five-year art school or enter a seven-year art school which can qualify them for admission to an institute of art. The third stage is offered at the higher schools where their individual qualities and cultural levels are developed.

In this article we contend that vision, imagination and a passion for justice are in short supply in our schools and society, and we advocate the importance of creating space for the voices of artists to emerge. The preponderance of materials and programmes that emphasize the technical rationality of our work as educators continues to stifle and silence the voices of imagination. If schooling is simply technical, it has reached the end of its usefulness and is incapable of contributing to the social, spiritual and ecological problems of our communities. We are not resigned to the end of education. Rather, we believe that empowering the voices of imagination through the arts will contribute to a renewal of the metaphysical dimension of our work. We advocate such a posture. As we encourage the young to make the arts a natural means of expression we also encourage the development of the prophetic voice. And it is this voice that most certainly can attend to the pressing problems of our postmodern world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]