Constructive Strands in Russian Art, 1914-1937

Constructive Strands in Russian Art, 1914-1937
Author: Christina Lodder
Publisher: Pindar Press
Total Pages: 616
Release: 2005
Genre: Art
ISBN:

Professor Lodder is a leading specialist in art of the Russian avant-garde which flourished during the 1910s and 1920s. She is the author of a major study of Russian Constructivism, acclaimed as the standard work on the subject, and with her husband has written an important monograph on the Russian-born sculptor Naum Gabo and edited a collection of the artist's writings. The present volume brings together her articles of the past twenty years, many of which focus on particular aspects of avant-garde responses to the social and political upheavals of the period, especially the Russian Revolution of 1917. Her essays cover subjects such as Vladimir Tatlin's seminal structure, The Model for a Monument to the Third International of 1920, the evolution of public monuments, the cultural debates during the revolutionary period, the development of new teaching programmes, and the implementation of Constructivist ideas in photography and design for textiles, clothing and the theatre. Her interests extend to International Constructivism and to the impact that Russian ideas made on the theory and practice of avant-garde figures working in Central and Eastern Europe during the 1920s. More recently she has concentrated on developments in the 1910s, including the innovative work of Kazimir Malevich and the relationship between art and science. The author has supplied additional notes to the original articles, which draw attention to subsequent research. Since the collapse of Communism in the erstwhile Soviet Union, public collections and archives have become more accessible and the new information has substantially altered existing preconceptions of the period. Occasionally, the need to correct errors exposed by recent developments in the field has involved making some extensive changes to the main body of the text.

The Organic School of the Russian Avant-Garde

The Organic School of the Russian Avant-Garde
Author: Professor Isabel Wünsche
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2015-10-28
Genre: Art
ISBN: 147243269X

The artists of the Organic School of the Russian avant-garde found inspiration as well as a model for artistic growth in the creative principles of nature. Isabel Wünsche analyzes the artistic influences, intellectual foundations, and scientific publications that shaped the formation of these artists. Particular emphasis is given to the holistic worldviews and organic approaches prevalent among artists of the pre-revolutionary avant-garde and the emergence of the concept of Organic Culture.

The Organic School of the Russian Avant-Garde

The Organic School of the Russian Avant-Garde
Author: Isabel W?nsche
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2017-07-05
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1351541781

The artists of the Organic School of the Russian avant-garde found inspiration as well as a model for artistic growth in the creative principles of nature. Isabel W?nsche analyzes the artistic influences, intellectual foundations, and scientific publications that shaped the formation of these artists, the majority of whom were based in St. Petersburg. Particular emphasis is given to the holistic worldviews and organic approaches prevalent among artists of the pre-revolutionary avant-garde, specifically Jan Ciaglinski, Nikolai Kulbin, and Elena Guro, as well as the emergence of the concept of Organic Culture as developed by Mikhail Matiushin, practiced at the State Institute of Artistic Culture, and taught at the reformed Art Academy in the 1920s. Discussions of faktura and creative intuition explore the biocentric approaches that dominated the work of Pavel Filonov, Kazimir Malevich, Voldemar Matvejs, Olga Rozanova, and Vladimir Tatlin. The artistic approaches of the Organic School of the Russian avant-garde were further promoted and developed by Vladimir Sterligov and his followers between 1960 and 1990. The study examines the cultural potential as well as the utopian dimension of the artists? approaches to creativity and their ambitious visions for the role of art in promoting human psychophysiological development and shaping post-revolutionary culture.

Reclaiming and Redefining American Exhibitions of Russian Art

Reclaiming and Redefining American Exhibitions of Russian Art
Author: Roann Barris
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 171
Release: 2023-08-23
Genre: Art
ISBN: 100092761X

This book examines the history of American exhibitions of Russian art in the twentieth century in the context of the Cold War. Because this history reflects changes in museological theory and the role of governments in facilitating or preventing intercultural cooperation, it uncovers a story that is far more complex than a chronological listing of exhibition names and art works. Roann Barris considers questions of stylistic appropriations and influences and the role of museum exhibitions in promoting international and artistic exchanges. Barris reveals that Soviet and American exchanges in the world of art were extensive and persistent despite political disagreements before, during, and after the Cold War. It also reveals that these early exhibitions communicated contradictory and historically invalid pictures of the Russian or Soviet avant-garde. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, museum studies, and Russian studies.

Designing Russian Cinema

Designing Russian Cinema
Author: Eleanor Rees
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2022-12-15
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1350246379

This book highlights the significant role that production artists played when Russian cinema was still in its infancy. It uncovers Russian cinema's connections with other art forms, examining how production artists drew on both aesthetic traditions and modernist experiments in architecture, painting and theatre as they explored the new medium of cinema and its potential to engender new models of perception and forms of audience engagement. Drawing on set design sketches, archival documents and film-makers' memoirs, Eleanor Rees reveals how less-canonical films such as Behind the Screen (Kulisy ekrana, 1919) and Palace and Fortress (Dvorets i krepost ́, 1923), were remarkable from a design perspective, and also provides new readings of well-known films, such as Children of the Age (Deti veka, 1915) and Strike (Stachka, 1925). Rees brings to light information on significant but understudied figures such as Vladimir Egorov and Sergei Kozlovskii, and highlights the involvement of well-known figures such as Lev Kuleshov and Aleksandr Rodchenko. Unlike the majority of late Imperial directors and camera operators, many early-Russian production artists continued to work in cinema in the Soviet era and to draw on practices forged before the 1917 Revolution. In spanning the entire silent era, this book highlights the often overlooked continuities between the late-Imperial and early-Soviet periods of cinema, thus questioning traditional historical periodisations.

Gan's Constructivism

Gan's Constructivism
Author: Kristin Romberg
Publisher: University of California Press
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2019-01-08
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0520298535

This compelling new account of Russian constructivism repositions the agitator Aleksei Gan as the movement’s chief protagonist and theorist. Primarily a political organizer during the revolution and early Soviet period, Gan brought to the constructivist project an intimate acquaintance with the nuts and bolts of “making revolution.” Writing slogans, organizing amateur performances, and producing mass-media objects define an alternative conception of “the work of art”—no longer an autonomous object but a labor process through which solidarities are built. In an expansive analysis touching on aesthetic and architectural theory, the history of science and design, sociology, and feminist and political theory, Kristin Romberg invites us to consider a version of modernism organized around the radical flattening of hierarchies, a broad distribution of authorship, and the negotiation of constraints and dependencies. Moving beyond Cold War abstractions, Gan’s Constructivism offers a fine-grained understanding of what it means for an aesthetics to be political.

The Poetics of the Avant-garde in Literature, Arts, and Philosophy

The Poetics of the Avant-garde in Literature, Arts, and Philosophy
Author: Slav N. Gratchev
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2020-10-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1793615756

The Poetics of the Avant-garde in Literature, Arts, and Philosophy presents a range of chapters written by a highly international group of scholars from disciplines such as literary studies, arts, theatre, and philosophy to analyze the ambitions of avant-garde artists. Together, these essays highlight the interdisciplinary scope of the historic avant-garde and the interconnectedness of its artists. Contributors analyze topics such as abstraction and estrangement across the arts, the imaginary dialogue between Lev Yakubinsky and Mikhail Bakhtin, the problem of the “masculine ethos” in the Russian avant-garde, the transformation of barefoot dancing, Kazimir Malevich’s avant-garde poetic experimentations, the ecological imagination of the Polish avant-garde, science-fiction in the Russian avant-garde cinema, and the almost forgotten history of the avant-garde children’s literature in Germany. The chapters in this collection open a new critical discourse about the avant-garde movement in Europe and reshape contemporary understandings of it.

Art for the Workers

Art for the Workers
Author: Natalia Murray
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2018-04-10
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9004355685

Art for the workers explores the mythology and reality of post-revolutionary proletarian art in Russia as well as its expression in the festive decorations of Petrograd between 1917 and 1920. It covers this brief period chronologically, and so permits a close inspection of the development of artistic policies in Russia under the Provisional Government followed by the Bolsheviks. Specifically, this book focuses on the pre-and post-revolutionary debate about the nature of proletarian art and its role in the new Socialist society, particularly focusing on festive decorations, parades and mass performances as expressions of proletarian art and forms of propaganda.

Situating El Lissitzky

Situating El Lissitzky
Author: Nancy Perloff
Publisher: Getty Publications
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2003
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780892366774

Reassessing the complex career of one of the most influential yet controversial experimental artists of the early 20th century, this volume of essays looks at the prolific painter, designer, architect and photographer, El Lissitzky (1890-1941).

Text and Image in Modern European Culture

Text and Image in Modern European Culture
Author: Natasha Grigorian
Publisher: Purdue University Press
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2012-09-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1612492428

Text and Image in Modern European Culture is a collection of essays that are transnational and interdisciplinary in scope. Employing a range of innovative comparative approaches to reassess and undermine traditional boundaries between art forms and national cultures, the contributors shed new light on the relations between literature and the visual arts in Europe after 1850. Following tenets of comparative cultural studies, work presented in this volume explores international creative dialogues between writers and visual artists, ekphrasis in literature, literature and design (fashion, architecture), hybrid texts (visual poetry, surrealist pocket museums, poetic photo-texts), and text and image relations under the impact of modern technologies (avant-garde experiments, digital poetry). The discussion encompasses pivotal fin de siècle, modernist, and postmodernist works and movements in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Russia, and Spain. A selected bibliography of work published in the field is also included. The volume will appeal to scholars of comparative literature, art history, and visual studies, and it includes contributions appropriate for supplementary reading in senior undergraduate and graduate seminars.