The Pussy Riot protest, and the subsequent heavy handed treatment of the protestors, grabbed the headlines, but this was not an isolated instance of art being noticeably critical of the regime. As this book, based on extensive original research, shows, there has been gradually emerging over recent decades a significant counter-culture in the art world which satirises and ridicules the regime and the values it represents, at the same time putting forward, through art, alternative values. The book traces the development of art and protest in recent decades, discusses how art of this kind engages in political and social protest, and provides many illustrations as examples of art as protest. The book concludes by discussing how important art has been in facilitating new social values and in prompting political protests.

The Pussy Riot protest, and the subsequent heavy handed treatment of the protestors, grabbed the headlines, but this was not an isolated instance of art being noticeably critical of the regime. As this book, based on extensive original research, shows, there has been gradually emerging over recent decades a significant counter-culture in the art world which satirises and ridicules the regime and the values it represents, at the same time putting forward, through art, alternative values. The book traces the development of art and protest in recent decades, discusses how art of this kind engages in political and social protest, and provides many illustrations as examples of art as protest. The book concludes by discussing how important art has been in facilitating new social values and in prompting political protests.

The largest surviving portion of the first major collection of Classical antiquities in Britain - the sculptures and inscriptions collected in the early 17th century by Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel for his London house and garden - is in the Antiquities Department of the Ashmolean Museum. This handbook tracks their eventful history.

Ruthless and passionate, Catherine the Great is singularly responsible for amassing one of the most awe-inspiring collections of art in the world and turning St. Petersburg in to a world wonder. The Empress of Art brings to life the creation of this captivating woman's greatest legacy

This book gives a fascinating overview of Russian decorative art, revealing a highly accomplished crafts tradition that persisted over nine centuries. It includes works by Peter Carl Fabergé and his workshop, jeweled Byzantine icons, silver drinking vessels, and intricate enamels. Featured are two extraordinary Fabergé eggs that were once in the Russian Imperial collection, including one that opens up to reveal a miniature gold replica of the Gatchina Palace, near St. Petersburg.The decorative arts had flourished in Russia under the patronage of the tsars and their court, whose apparently limitless resources supported the production of some of the most technically sophisticated works of art ever made. With the onset of the Russian Revolution, a few individuals helped bring many of these objects to Europe and then into major private and public collections in the United States, including that of the Walters Art Museum. On the 100th anniversary of the revolution, this book tells the stories of their initial dispersal and of the collectors and dealers through whose hands they passed. Full catalog entries for each object are included.

In Framing Russian Art, Oleg Tarasov investigates the role of the frame both literally and conceptually, both in the organization of the artistic space of a work of art and in the very perception of a visual image - an icon, a building, a painting, an etching or photograph. Part One is dedicated to exploring the frame of the Russian icon and related arks, folding images and prints, from the Middle Ages to the late nineteenth century, including analyses of Grigoriy Shumayev's vast and extraordinary Baroque masterpiece, which he called 'the iconostasis of the life-giving Cross', and the sumptuous blending of medievalism and the late Romanticism in the Church Not Made by Hands at Savva Momontov's estate of Abramtsevo outside Moscow. Part Two examines the successive roles of the frame in Baroque imperial portraiture, the dynastic grandiloquence of the nineteenth century, the impact of Western ideas and new technology (photography in particular) on the celebrated battle painter Vasiliy Vereshchagin, and finally the impact of the vanishing frame in abstract art and Modernism.

This edited collection reassesses East-Central European art by offering transnational perspectives on its regional or national histories, while also inserting the region into contemporary discussions of global issues. Both in popular imagination and, to some degree, scholarly literature, East-Central Europe is persistently imagined as a hermetically isolated cultural landscape. This book restores the diverse ways in which East-Central European art has always been entangled with actors and institutions in the wider world. The contributors engage with empirically anchored and theoretically argued case studies from historical periods representing notable junctures of globalization: the early modern period, the age of Empires, the time of socialist rule and the global Cold War, and the most recent decades of post-socialism understood as a global condition.