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Based on her reading of the survey of Pop Art, edited by Lucy Lippard (1966) and the Time-Life book American Painting 1900 − 1970 (1971), the Soviet art historian Tatyana Yureva analyzes US Pop art...

The vibrant textile designs produced in the Soviet Union in the 1920s were inspired by the need to create new styles of fabrics that would reflect the new society, inaugurated by the October Revolu...

In February 1921, Ivan Puni organized an exhibition at the Galerie Der Sturm in Berlin. Orchestrating small-scale individual works with letters and numbers (cut from paper as if they were separate visual components in a painting), he used the wall as an enormous canvas in order to create a large pictorial composition, transforming the entire space into an avant-garde Gesamtkunstwerk. This paper examines this installation in terms of pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary artistic theory and practice, including zaum, alogism, suprematism, Kazimir Malevich’s display at the Last Futurist Exhibition of Painting 0.10 (Zero-Ten), suprematist decorations for the revolutionary festivals, and Puni’s work in running the agit-prop department at the Vitebsk Art School in 1919. Above all, this essay will argue that the synthesis of the arts that Puni created in Berlin in 1921 was particularly indebted to his experience of the way in which the revolutionary decorations had created totally new, potentially socialist environments. Yet while assimilating and to some extent replicating this experience, Puni’s 1921 display could also be seen as a protest against communism—acting as a powerful declaration of individualism against the collective, as well as an emphatic statement concerning the importance of art, the enduring value of aesthetic values, and the crucial necessity of maintaining the freedom of art, and its independence from all external pressures.

The typological theories articulated by Moisei Ginzburg and the architects of his circle guided the development of Soviet architecture and remain influential in Russia today. Re-visiting these ideas highlights their relationships to the concepts and theoretical principles that were elaborated by the academic schools, which were grounded in the traditions of the past. Recent historical studies have revealed this intimate connection between the academic tradition and the modernism that was born to negate it, emphasizing continuity in the historical path of architecture. Applied to the history of Soviet architecture, this insight does not raise questions about the nuances in stylistic or theoretical similarities or differences between Soviet constructivism and modernism, but rather between those ideological links that form two branches of one integral current in the evolution of twentieth-century architecture.

This article considers the work of Ilia Golosov (and the Fourth Workshop of Moscow City Council or Soviet) on the design of facades in the context of Art Deco. The article compares Soviet practice with the international scene during the 1920s and 1930s, noting an atmosphere of architectural competition among countries, and the similarity in the stylistic solutions created in both East and West. An analysis of Soviet architecture in the context of the pre-Revolutionary era allows one to locate the origins of facade-design methods of the 1930s and their transformation within the new environment.

Gabo was one of the first artists to create constructed sculptures, which he built up from flat (planar) elements in space. His initial works, developed in Norway (1915–1917), were figurative (see, for instance, Head No. 1 and 2), but in Russia (1917–1922) he adopted a more abstract idiom (for example, Column, 1920–1921) based on two intersecting vertical planes. The Realistic Manifesto (1920), written by Gabo, explained that his art was inspired by the ideas and forms of science and engineering and reflected the progressive political and social forces shaping the modern world. In 1920–1921 he produced the first kinetic sculpture—KineticConstruction (Standing Wave)—which consisted of a metal rod that oscillated by means of a motor to produce a virtual volume in space. In the 1920s Gabo started using plastics. In Britain, he moved away from a rectilinear geometry to develop a style based on more organic forms (Spiral Theme, 1941). Reflecting his desire to express the continuity and curvilinear quality of space, he developed Spheric Theme (1937) and employed stringing (Linear Construction in Space No.1 and 2, 1941 and 1949–1953), initially using nylon monofilament, but later employing more durable metal springs woven around metal armatures (Linear Construction in Space No. 4).

Abstract This article explores the “Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings ‘0.10’” (1915) as a key moment when Russian painters began to work seriously in three dimensions, exploring the nature of materials, questioning the relationship between art and reality, and ultimately laying the foundation for the subsequent emergence of the Constructivist movement. The exhibition revealed an important strand in Russian creative thinking and practice concerning sculpture and the nature of artistic materials.

Nikolai Chuzhak's article, first published in 1923 in the Russian avant-garde journal Lef, is a plea for a production art based on Marxist dialectics and a rejection of bourgeois aesthetics. The te...

Kazimir Malevich (1878–1935) is often presented as a quasi-mystical artist, steeped in the tradition of the icon, who was profoundly influenced by notions of the fourth dimension and spirituality a...

In March 1921, the Russian Constructivists declared that they intended to abandon easel painting and the creation of works of art in order to devote themselves to producing designs for useful objects as their way of contributing to the creation of a new socialist environment.1 Unfortunately, in the circumstances, designing for mass production proved to be well nigh impossible. Seven years of almost continual conflict on Russian soil (the First World War followed almost immediately by the Civil War) had left the country's industrial plant decimated and had brought commerce to a virtual standstill. So drastic was the situation that in early 1921 Lenin had been compelled to implement the New Economic Policy, or NEP, in order to jump-start the economy by allowing small-scale, free enterprise to coexist alongside large state-owned concerns.

This is the introductory chapter provides an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book Utopian Reality: Reconstructing Culture in Revolutionary Russia and Beyond , which deals particularly with Russian notions of utopia and dystopia, along with their social, artistic, literary and ideological ramifications. The book explores visual and cultural aspects of utopia, and covers the whole period from 1900 right up to the fall of Communism and even into the present century. It explains how and why the utopian aspirations within Russian society turned into the dystopian nightmare of Stalinism. The book reviews the militarisation of labour, the Tambov and Kronstadt rebellions, the suppression of anarchism, the removal of avant-garde artists, socialist realism, cybernetic communism as a new Western art, Slavophiles' retrospective utopianism, and October Revolution of 1917. Keywords: anarchism; Communism; dystopia; October Revolution; revolutionary Russia; Slavophiles; socialist realism; Stalinism; utopia

This chapter shows the continuities of a specifically modernist vision of utopia (as expressed in modernist architectural theory and practice) within the framework of Soviet architectural activity of the 1930s. It could be argued that modernist architects chose to work on such projects as a survival strategy, which would ensure long-term employment and wages, while giving them an important role within the Soviet Union's industrialisation programme and therefore a secure ideological status within the architectural community. As Nikolai Miliutin had stressed, a modernist idiom was also initially regarded as the appropriate language for other buildings such as the workers' clubs and palaces of culture. Such continuities in method and personnel are striking, and serve to highlight the fact that, under Stalin, the design method could remain avant-garde, while the external styling might display a more historicist and ornate treatment. Keywords: avant-garde; modernist architects; Nikolai Miliutin; Soviet Union's industrialisation programme; Stalin; utopia

El Lissitzky is an enigmatic and fascinating creative figure with a multi-faceted identity and a complex set of allegiances. Lissitzky's artistic trajectory seems to move from the production of explicitly Jewish works like his illustrations for A Mischievous Boy of 1919 to painting abstract canvases that he called Prouns. Lissitzky was successively the Jewish artist, the Suprematist, and the Stalinist propagandist. Lissitzky's concern to combine his Jewish heritage with avant-garde approaches in Berlin was part of an earlier process and his activities in Germany did not represent a new departure in his work, but rather the continuation of an existing strand in his creative thinking. This chapter explores these notions further and revisits the idea that Lissitzky did not abandon his Jewish allegiances in 1919, although they might have taken second place for a while. Keywords:Berlin; El Lissitzky; Germany; Jewish artistic renaissance; Prouns

(1990). Lyubov’ Popova: A revolutionary woman artist. Revolutionary Russia: Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 151-182.