Description

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Historical analysis of avante-garde art community in Russia in the years following the Russian Revolution. 

In Art and Power, 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 to forge new cultural policies and create a new visual language that would channel Soviet ideological values. 

Based on formerly unknown and hitherto unpublished archival documents from the State Archive of the Russian Federation, the authors explore alliances and tensions that existed within the artistic community and analyze the roles played by such torchbearers as Kazimir Malevich, Wassily Kandinsky, Alexander Rodchenko, Olga Rozanova, and Vladimir Tatlin, and the challenges they faced in their collaboration with the Soviet state. Within just a few years, they founded new art schools and established numerous educational, research, and experimental laboratories and institutions throughout Russia, reaching even the most remote backwaters of the former Russian empire.

About the Author

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Natalya Strizhkova is a historian with a focus on the theory of culture, Soviet culture, culture under totalitarian rule, and archival documents. She has written or curated more than twenty books in Russian.

Andrei Sarabyanov is a leading art historian and expert on Russian avant-garde of the twentieth century. He is the head of the Avant-Garde Center at the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow and professor at the HSE Art and Design School in Moscow.