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These artists, heeding the call of Constructivist manifestos to abandon the nonobjective painting and sculpture of the early Russian avant-garde and enter into Soviet industrial production, aimed to work as "artist-engineers" to produce useful objects for everyday life in the new socialist collective." "Kiaer shows how these artists elaborated on the theory of the socialist object-as-comrade in the practice of their art. They broke with the traditional model of the autonomous avant-garde, Kiaer argues, in order to participate more fully in the political project of the Soviet state. She analyzes Constructivism's attempt to develop modernist forms to forge a new comradely relationship between human subjects and the mass-produced objects of modernity."--BOOK JACKET.
How Soviet citizens in the 1920s and 1930s internalized Soviet ways of looking at the world and living their everyday lives.
This reader offers an essential selection of the best work on the Consumer Society. It brings together in an engaging, surprising, and thought provoking way, a diverse range of topics and theoretical perspectives.
Groundbreaking new insight into a rich spectrum of early Soviet art and its spaces of display Published on the centenary of the Russian Revolution, this landmark book gathers information from the forefront of current research in early Soviet art, providing a new understanding of where art was presented, who saw it, and how the images incorporated and conveyed Soviet values. More than 350 works are grouped into areas of critical importance for the production, reception, and circulation of early Soviet art: battlegrounds, schools, the press, theaters, homes and storefronts, factories, festivals, and exhibitions. Paintings by El Lissitzky and Liubov Popova are joined by sculptures, costumes and...
"Aleksandr Rodchenko and Liubov Popovaq were leading figures in the Russian avant-garde during its most exciting period, from the 1917 Revolution to Popova's tragically early death in 1924 at the age of thirty-five. Together they believed that new forms of art could play a key role in transforming society and reorganizing everyday life. As leading lights in the Constructivist movement they were responsible for an array of iconic works, from painting to magazine covers and fabric designs. Featuring new scholarship, as well as archival photos and illustrating many previously unpublished works, this book demonstrates the extent of their influence on their circle of friends and collaborators and their wide impact on the course of twentieth-century art." --Book Jacket.
"Dislodging the avant-garde from its central position in the narrative of Soviet art, Collective Body presents painter Aleksandr Deineka's haptic and corporeal version of Socialist Realist figuration not as the enemy of revolutionary art, but as an alternate experimental aesthetic that, at its best, activates and organizes affective forces for collective ends. Tracing Deineka's path from his avant-garde origins as the inventor of the proletarian body in illustrations for mass magazines after the Revolution through his success as a state-sponsored painter of monumental, lyrical canvases during the Great Terror and beyond, Collective Body demonstrates that Socialist Realism is best understood ...
An upsurge in artworks negotiating the conditions of their own production, distribution, and reception has called attention to the infrastructural relations that shape the art world but have long been understudied. In response, this book introduces the concept of infrastructure aesthetics into the study of culture. The concept is drawn from infrastructure studies, media theory, and aesthetic theory. This volume develops it further, addressing: the analytical challenge of working with works that blur the boundaries between art and infrastructure, both historically and in the present, the aesthetic problem of assessing artistic forms that operate on an infrastructural level, and the politics o...
Wayland Rudd (1900-1952) was an African American actor who moved to the Soviet Union in 1932 and lived there until 1952. He appeared in numerous Soviet films and theatrical performances, and served as a model for paintings, drawings, and propaganda posters. Using Rudd?s personal story as a springboard, 'The Wayland Rudd Collection' presents Soviet images of Africans and African Americans produced between 1920 and 1980 alongside responses from contemporary artists, writers, and scholars. The book maps the complicated and often contradictory intersection of race and Communism in the Soviet context, exposing the interweaving of internationalism, solidarity, humanism, and Communist ideals with practices of othering, exoticization, and racist stereotyping.00The book is edited by Russian-Amerian artist Yevgeniy Fiks, whose works explore the dialectic between Communism and ?the West? and build on historical research into Cold War narratives
Today few would think of astronomy and astrology as fields related to theology. Fewer still would know that physically absorbing planetary rays was once considered to have medical and psychological effects. But this was the understanding of light radiation held by certain natural philosophers of early modern Europe, and that, argues Mary Quinlan-McGrath, was why educated people of the Renaissance commissioned artworks centered on astrological themes and practices. Influences is the first book to reveal how important Renaissance artworks were designed to be not only beautiful but also—perhaps even primarily—functional. From the fresco cycles at Caprarola, to the Vatican’s Sala dei Ponte...
The first biography of Nikolay Punin, this book offers a comprehensive analysis of his life in the context of Russian political, social and cultural history in the first half of the 20th century.