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Through the lens of Aleksandr Rodchenko's photography, a new and provocative understanding emerges of the troubled relationship between technology, modernism, and state power in Stalin's Soviet Union Tracing the shifting meanings of photography in the early Soviet Union, Aglaya K. Glebova revises the relationship between art and politics during what is usually considered the end of the critical avant-garde. Aleksandr Rodchenko (1891-1956) was a highly versatile Russian artist and one of Constructivism's founders. His photographic work between 1928, when Stalin rose to power, and the late 1930s reveals a wide-ranging search for a different pictorial language in the context of the extreme tran...
This book brings together thirteen scholars to introduce the newest and most cutting-edge research in the field of Russian and East European art history. Reconsidering canonical figures, re-examining prevalent debates, and revisiting aesthetic developments, the book challenges accepted histories and entrenched dichotomies in art and architecture from the nineteenth century to the present. In doing so, it resituates the artistic production of this region within broader socio-cultural currents and analyzes its interconnections with international discourse, competing political and aesthetic ideologies, and continuous discussions over identity.
"Soviet Spectatorship provides an depth exploration of Soviet physical culture and its on screen representations from the end of the Civil War to the eve of the Second World War. Samuel Goff analyses understudied films such as Happy Finish (1934), The Laurels of Miss Ellen Gray (1935) and A Strict Young Man (1936), identifying the three fundamental 'structures of looking' - surveillance, aesthetics, and spectatorship - that shaped representations of the embodied Soviet subject"--
Edited by Magdalena Dabrowski, Leah Dickerman and Peter Galassi. Essays by Magdalena Dabrowski, Leah Dickerman, Peter Galassi, Aleksandr Lavrent'ev and Varvara Rodchenko. Foreword by Glenn D. Lowry.
"Before the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent archival revolution, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's famous "literary investigation" The Gulag Archipelago was the most authoritative overview of the Stalinist system of camps. This volume develops a much more thorough and nuanced understanding of the Gulag. It brings a greater awareness of the wide variety of camps, the forced labor system, and the Gulag as viewed in a global historical context, among many other topics. It also offers fascinating new interpretations of the interrelationship and importance of the Gulag to the larger Soviet political and economic system, and how they were in fact, parts of the same entity"--
Exploring the art and life of this important American artist whose work bridged the gaps between abstraction, feminism, and Blackness Howardena Pindell: Reclaiming Abstraction is a fascinating examination of the multifaceted career of artist, activist, curator, and writer Howardena Pindell (b. 1943). It offers a fresh perspective on her abstract practice from the late 1960s through the early 1980s--a period in which debates about Black Power, feminism, and modernist abstraction intersected in uniquely contentious yet generative ways. Sarah Louise Cowan not only asserts Pindell's rightful place within the canon but also recenters dominant historical narratives to reveal the profound and ov...
In this book, Maria Chehonadskih unsettles established narratives about the formation of a revolutionary canon after the October Revolution. Displacing the centre of gravity from dialectical materialism to the rapid dissemination, canonisation and decline of a striking convergence of empiricism and Marxism, she explores how this tendency, overshadowed by official historiography, establishes a new attitude to modernity and progress, nature and environment, agency and subjectivity, party and class, knowledge and power. The book traces the adventure of the synthesis of empiricism and Marxism across philosophy, science, politics, art and literature from the 1890s to the 1930s, offering a radical rethinking of the true scope and scale that the main proponent of Empirio-Marxism, Alexander Bogdanov, had on the post-revolutionary socialist legacies. Chehonadskih draws on both key and forgotten figures and movements, such as Proletkult, Productivism and Constructivism, filling a gap in the literature that will be particularly significant for Marxism, continental philosophy, art theory and Slavic studies specialists.
One fall evening in 1880, Russian painter Ilya Repin welcomed an unexpected visitor to his home: Lev Tolstoy. The renowned realists talked for hours, and Tolstoy turned his critical eye to the sketches in Repin's studio. Tolstoy's criticisms would later prompt Repin to reflect on the question of creative expression and conclude that the path to artistic truth is relative, dependent on the mode and medium of representation. In this original study, Molly Brunson traces many such paths that converged to form the tradition of nineteenth-century Russian realism, a tradition that spanned almost half a century—from the youthful projects of the Natural School and the critical realism of the age of...
From the walls of the Salon to the pages of weekly newspapers, war imagery was immensely popular in postrevolutionary France. This fascinating book studies representations of contemporary conflict in the first half of the 19th century and explores how these pictures provided citizens with an imaginative stake in wars being waged in their name. As she traces the evolution of images of war from a visual form that had previously been intended for mostly elite audiences to one that was enjoyed by a much broader public over the course of the 19th century, Katie Hornstein carefully considers the influence of emergent technologies and popular media, such as lithography, photography, and panoramas, on both artistic style and public taste. With close readings and handsome reproductions in various media, from monumental battle paintings to popular prints, Picturing War in France,1792–1856 draws on contemporary art criticism, war reporting, and the burgeoning illustrated press to reveal the crucial role such images played in shaping modern understandings of conflict.
A leading representative of the Russian avant-garde, 'Alexander Rodchenko' (1891?1956) revolutionized the world of graphic art, design and photography. The over 250 illustrations featured in this volume allow the reader to grasp the full force of this innovator and to appreciate the charisma he exerted on fellow artists as much as on the men of letters, directors and intellectuals who shared his path. To this day, the style of Rodchenko the photographer, marked by unusual perspectives, sharp angles and diagonals, stands as the purest witness not just to the talent of an artist but to his eagerness to modernise art and the world at large. Complementing the volume are contributions by Olga Sviblova, the director of the House of Photography / Multimedia Art Museum of Moscow, by the grandson of the artist and leading scholar of his work Alexander Lavrentiev, in addition to writings and testimonies by Rodchenko himself and his daughter Varvara. 00Exhibition: LAC Lugano Arte e Cultura, Lugano, Switzerland (27.02.-08.05.2016).