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Two Russian Artists: The Aristocrat and the Revolutionary
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13628 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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8 / 1988 |
2,793 Words |
| Author
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Michail Makarenko
Michail Makarenko spent eight years in the gulag for having
unofficially exhibited the work of Russian avant-garde artists
in the USSR. He now lives in Washington, D.C. |
One of the great art movements of the twentieth century came out of Russia. It preceded the Revolution of 1917 by some thirty years and was virtually consigned to the dustbin of history within five years after the revolution. For a brief, exciting period, the Russian avant-garde led the whole world in innovations in painting, sculpture, theater, ballet, film, photography, literature, design, and architecture.
The work of these artists combined aspects of early European Modernism with a distinctive Russian aesthetic, anticipating by as much as fifty years developments that were to take place in the West. The Russian avant-garde thrived, however, only until Lenin's death in 1924. With Stalin's coming to power, the Central Committee was soon calling for art "comprehensible to the millions." Socialist Realism became standard. Many of the artists died in the 1920s; many more fled to western Europe (see Gallery); others accommodated themselves to the regime, changing their style; still others were sent to the gulag.
This avant-garde movement was rooted in ideas of the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia, which in its desire to form a viable basis for a new Russian culture had given rise to several important but varied approaches to art. As early as the 1860s, a group known as the Wanderers broke with the academic style of the all-powerful St. Petersburg Academy. Condemning art for art's sake as "empty diversion," the Wanderers sought to make art "useful" to society. Foreshadowing in their own way the Socialist Realism that was to come later, they presented the Russian peasant as the national hero.
In the 1870s and '80s, an
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