Art and Power: The Russian Avant-garde under Soviet Rule, 1917-1928

Description

In Art and Power the authors Andrei Sarabyanov and Natalia Strizhkova explore the historical period between 1917 to the early 1930s, when avant-garde artists and Bolshevik leaders worked hand-in-hand on forging new cultural policies and creating new visual language that would channel Soviet ideological values. Based on the formerly unknown and hitherto unpublished archival documents from the State Archive of the Russian Federation, the authors explore alliances and tensions that existed within the artistic community, as well as the roles played by such torch-bearers as Kazimir Malevich, Vassily Kandinsky, Alexander Rodchenko, Olga Rozanova, Vladimir Tatlin and the challenges they faced in their collaboration with the Soviet State. Within just a few years, they founded new art schools, established numerous educational, research and experimental laboratories and institutions throughout Russia, reaching even into the most remote backwaters of the former Russian Empire.

Natalya Strizhkova was born and educated in Russia. Based in Moscow, she graduated from the Faculty of History at the Humanitarian University before completing her studies as a postgraduate at The Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences. With a degree in Cultural History, her area of expertise is history and theory of culture, Soviet culture, culture under totalitarian rule and archival documents. She has worked in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI), where she researched primary archival sources for her publications and scientific projects. She has written or curated more than 20 books in Russian. In 2015 she won the Grand Prix at the annual Book of the Year for her Olga Bergholz. Blockade Diary. 1940-1945. Andrei Sarabyanov is a leading art historian and expert on Russian avant-garde of the 20th century. He is the head of the Avant-Garde Centre at the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Centre in Moscow, professor at the HSE Art and Design School in Moscow, a member of the State Tretyakov Gallery Art Council and of the Supervisory Board of the State Research Museum of Architecture. He is author of the seminal monograph The Unknown Russian Avant-Garde in Museums and Private Collections (1992), and of the studies on Ivan Kliun, Vladimir Baranov- Rossine and Lev Bruni. Importantly, in 2013-2014, together with Vassily Rakitin, he co-authored his fundamental three-volume Encyclopedia of Russian Avant-garde (to be published in English in 2022).