Soviet propaganda against the demon drink: the latest in Fuel's Russian pop culture series
From the acclaimed authors of the Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedias and Soviet Space Dogs comes Alcohol, a glorious and exhaustive collection of previously unpublished Soviet anti-alcohol posters. The book includes examples from the 1960s through to the 1980s, but focuses on posters produced during Mikhail Gorbachev's campaign initiated in 1985. These posters attempted to sober up Soviet citizens by forcing them to confront the issues associated with excessive alcohol consumption. This government-led urgency allowed the poster designers to present the anti-alcohol message in the most graphic terms: they depicted drunks literally trapped inside the bottle or being strangled by "the green snake." Their protagonists are paralytic freeloaders and shirkers who always neglect their families, drive under the influence, produce substandard work, are smashed when pregnant and present a constant danger to fellow citizens. A two-part essay by renowned cultural historian Alexei Plutser-Sarno attempts to explain, from a Russian perspective, the reasons behind this phenomenon.
A collective of artists, a gallery and a movement, APTART was a series of self-organized "anti-shows" that took place in a private apartment and outdoor spaces in Moscow between 1982 and 1984. These covert and anarchic actions, which soon came into conflict with the Soviet authorities, represented a collective attempt to rethink the politics of exhibition-making and the making of a public in the absence of a public sphere.
The first comprehensive publication on APTART, this book presents extensive photographic documentation of all their activities alongside archival texts from contributing artists and documents from the time. Main essays by Margarita Tupitsyn and Victor Tupitsyn offer a detailed elucidation of the movement's history and guiding concepts; and further analysis is provided by contributions from Alexandra Danilova and Elena Kuprina-Lyakhovich, Maja and Reuben Fowkes, Richard Goldstein, Sven Gundlakh, Ilya Kabakov, David Morris and Valerie Smith.
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.
From 1978 to 1993, the renowned Soviet paper architects Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin created an incredible collection of elaborate etchings depicting outlandish, often impossible, buildings and cityscapes. Funny, cerebral, and deeply human, their obsessively detailed work layers elements borrowed from Egyptian tombs, Ledoux's visionary architecture, Le Corbusier's urban master plans, and other historical precedents in etchings of breathtaking complexity and beauty.
Back by popular demand following the sold-out original 1991 edition and 2003 reprint, Brodsky & Utkin presents the sum of the architects' collaborative prints and adds new material, including an updated preface by the artists' gallery representative, Ron Feldman, a new introductory essay by architect Aleksandr Mergold, visual documentation of the duo's installation work, and rare personal photographs.
Inspired by American pop art of the 1960s, sots art emerged in the Soviet Union during the 1970s. Both movements used irony, parody, and mockery to expose the core elements of their societies -- in the United States, consumerism, and in the USSR, communist ideology. It's the Real Thing is the catalog of a landmark exhibition in which the work of pre- and post-perestroika sots artists was exhibited together for the first time in the United States at the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis.
Sots art was originally produced in Moscow by nonofficial Soviet artists who grew up in the 1960s. Strongly influenced by propaganda art, they still remembered the aura of sanctity that had surrounded Stalin. Pop art provided them with tools to confront the objects of their consumerism -- political slogans and official images. Instead of enjoying the adulation and mainstream success many pop artists experienced, sots artists were harassed and misunderstood, and their art remained underground and marginal. Not until some of these artists emigrated to New York City in the mid-1970s was sots art hailed in the United States as the first avant-garde movement to come out of the Soviet Union since the 1910s.
It's the Real Thing features work by all the major figures of sots art, including Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, who founded the movement. By liberating culture from generations of accumulated fear and by embracing political changes and alternatives, sots artists created a movement that continues to influence contemporary art in Russia just as pop artists changed the American art world forever. It's the Real Thing illuminates art and artists of this important and fascinating movement.
Monumental in scale and rich in exotic detail, Konstantin Makovsky's stunning paintings epitomize the charm of Old Russia. His early career blossomed in St. Petersburg in the 1870s, where he became the darling of the Tsar's court. His popularity soon spread far beyond Russia's borders. He lived and worked in Paris and then America, becoming the premier ambassador of traditional Russian culture in the United States.
This beautifully illustrated book, the first full survey in English of Makovsky's career, positions his work at the crossroads between late Imperial St. Petersburg, Belle-Epoque Paris, and America during the Gilded Age. Three great canvases celebrating Russia's traditional wedding customs unify this survey: A Boyar Wedding Feast (1883), which launched Makovsky on a long career as a celebrity painter of historical genre scenes, Choosing the Bride (1887), and The Russian Bride's Attire (1889). All are explored through outstanding photography, including close-up details, published here for the first time.
Four fascinating essays trace the career path of this Russian artist eager for international fame. Wendy Salmond begins by establishing the Russian milieu. Russell E. Martin highlights the historical sources, artifacts and costumes on which Makovsky relied for his scenes of seventeenth-century private life. Wilfried Zeisler reveals the artist's little-known Paris period, exploring also his Orientalist paintings inspired by the Middle East and North Africa. Wendy Salmond investigates the American audience's enthusiastic reception of Makovsky's paintings. That Makovsky's canvases acquired real celebrity status among a broad American public invites intriguing questions about the nature of the international art world and the place there of Russian artists in the late nineteenth century. A valuable bibliography brings together resources on the artist.
Lavishly illustrated, Moscow & St. Petersburg 1900-1920 is the quintessential guide to Russia's vibrant and influential Silver Age.
In this elegantly written narrative survey, John E. Bowlt sheds new light on Russia's Silver Age, the period of artistic renaissance that flourished as Imperial Russia's power waned. Much of the creative energy could be attributed to the Symbolist movement, whose proponents sought to transcend the barriers of bourgeois civility and whose unconventional lifestyles led some critics to label them Decadents and Degenerates. But, as Sergei Diaghilev declared, theirs was not a moral or artistic decline, but a voyage of inner discovery and a reinvention of a national culture. Bowlt's richly textured volume focuses not only on Russia's best known artists from this period--Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, Igor Stravinsky, Anna Pavlova and poet Anna Akhmatova--but also on lesser known movements of the period--experimental theater, Nikolai Kalmakov's innovative painting, and the free dance practiced by followers of Duncan and Dalcroze. Praise for Moscow & St. Petersburg: This book will serve as a reference resource . . . . This ambitious English-language publication aims to cover not only every art group of the time but every aspect of the Russian culture. The pictorial layout of John Bowlt's book renders the sheer proliferation of new ideas immediately apparent. The highly charged text charts the medley of productions, groups, and individuals, all loosely associated with the symbolist movement, that make up the vast canvas. As the leading specialist in the Russian 20th-century avant-garde, Professor Bowlt is well qualified to place the silver age in context. The Art NewspaperThis lushly illustrated volume captures the artistic explosion that was Russia's Silver Age. Russian Life
(An) authoritative feast of a book. The Irish Times
Splendidly illustrated, beautifully designed . . . . Shepherd Express
A truly seminal work . . . . Midwest Book Review
Lavishly illustrated and elegantly written narrative survey. Panache Priv e
A dazzling array of color illustrations and period photos displaying the glories of Russia's art, architecture and scientific achievements. California Literary Review
Born in 1962 in Moscow, where she still lives, Olga Chernysheva is one of the most perceptive and sensitive observers of her native country's cultural and geographic landscape. Eschewing simplistic rendering of the post-Soviet political and social atmosphere, Chernysheva instead depicts a side of Russia that is rarely seen. Drawing is integral to this drive in Chernysheva's work: her charcoal renderings, with their blurred edges and delicate textures, provide the viewer with an arrestingly intimate view of her anonymous subjects as they linger, doze, and aimlessly wander. This volume documents the series of works that The Drawing Center commissioned Chernysheva to produce over the course of a month in New York City in 2015. Though she has been depicting the urban landscape for decades, she has rarely strayed from portraits of her home country.
