Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Russian Art
Tretyakov Gallery
New Tretyakov Gallery
Rerikh Museum
Vasnetsov House-Museum
Soviet-Era Art
Futurists turned to the needs of the revolution - education, posters and banners - with en-
thusiasm. They had a chance to enact their theories of how art shapes society. But, at the end
of the 1920s, abstract art fell out of favour and was branded 'formalist'. The Communist
Party wanted 'socialist realism', or realist art that advanced the goals of the glorious social-
ist revolution. Images of striving workers, heroic soldiers and inspiring leaders took over
from abstraction. Plenty of examples of this realism are on display at the New Tretyakov
Gallery. Two million sculptures of Lenin and Stalin dotted the country. Malevich ended up
painting penetrating portraits and doing designs for Red Square parades; Mayakovsky com-
mitted suicide.
After Stalin, an avant-garde 'conceptualist' underground was allowed to form. Ilya
Kabakov (b 1933) painted, or sometimes just arranged the debris of everyday life, to show
the gap between the promises and realities of Soviet existence. The 'Sots art' style of Erik
Bulatov (b 1933) pointed to the devaluation of language by ironically reproducing Soviet
slogans and depicting words disappearing over the horizon.
In 1962 the Moscow artist union celebrated the post-Stalin thaw with an exhibit of previ-
ously banned 'unofficial' art. Cautious reformer Khrushchev was aghast by what he saw, de-
claring the artwork to be 'dog shit'. The artists returned to the underground.
