Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Chaliapin House Mu-
seum (Petrograd &
Vyborg Sides)
Soviet Art
Futurists turned to the needs of the revolution - education,
posters, banners - with enthusiasm. They had a chance to
act on their theories of how art shapes society. But at the
end of the 1920s abstract art fell out of favour. The Com-
munist Party wanted socialist realism. Images abounded of
striving workers, heroic soldiers and healthy toiling peas-
ants, some of which are on display at the Russian Museum.
Two million sculptures of Lenin and Stalin dotted the coun-
try; Malevich ended up painting portraits and doing designs
for Red Square parades.
Anna Akhmatova Mu-
seum in the Fountain
House (Smolny &
Vosstaniya)
Brodsky House Mu-
seum (Historic Heart)
After Stalin, an avant-garde 'Conceptualist' underground group was allowed to
form. Ilya Kabakov painted, or sometimes just arranged, the debris of everyday life to
show the gap between the promises and realities of Soviet existence. Erik Bulatov's
'Sotsart' pointed to the devaluation of language by ironically reproducing Soviet slo-
gans or depicting words disappearing over the horizon. In 1962 artists set up a show
of 'unofficial' art in Moscow: Khrushchev called it 'dog shit' and sent it back under-
ground. Soviet underground art is particularly well represented in the collection of the
Neo-Academism & Non-Conformist Art
As the centre of the avant-garde movement in Russia at the turn of the last century, St
Petersburg never gave up its ties to barrier-breaking, gut-wrenching, head-scratching
art. After the end of communism the city rediscovered its seething artistic underbelly.
Much of St Petersburg's post-Soviet contemporary art revolved around the artistic
to congregate and create. This place was 'founded' in the late 1980s, when a bunch of
artists and musicians moved into an abandoned building near Pl Vosstaniya. The
centre has since developed into an artistic and cultural institution that is unique in
Russia, if not the world.
In the early 1990s Timur Novikov founded the Neo-Academic movement as an an-
tidote to 'the barbarism of modernism'. This return to classicism (albeit with a street-
level, junk-shop feel) culminated in his foundation of the Museum of the New
