100 Years on

by Isabel Wünsche
100 Years on
Author: Isabel Wünsche
Publisher: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2022
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9783412525644
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The First Russian Art Exhibition (Erste Russische Kunstausstellung), which opened at the Galerie van Diemen in Berlin on October 15, 1922, and later travelled to Amsterdam, introduced a broad Western audience to the most recent artistic developments in Russia. The extensive show - more than a thousand works, including paintings, graphic works, sculptures, stage designs, architectural models, and works of porcelain - was remarkably inclusive in its scope, which ranged from traditional figurative painting to the latest constructions of the Russian avant-garde. Coming on the heels of the Treaty of Rapallo, the exhibition was a first cultural step towards bilateral relations between two young and yet internationally isolated new states - the Weimar Republic and the Russian Soviet Republic. Moving away from the narrow focus on the avant-garde, the volume presents new research that examines the exhibition's broader historical scope and cultural implications. The reception of the exhibition within artistic circles in Germany, Europe, the United States, and Japan in the 1920s is addressed, as well as the disposition of many of the works exhibited. The combination of longer, thematic essays and short features, along with reproductions of newly identified works and a selection of unpublished archival materials make this book valuable to both a scholarly and a general readership.

100 Years On: Revisiting the First Russian Art Exhibition of 1922

by Isabel Wünsche
100 Years On: Revisiting the First Russian Art Exhibition of 1922
Author: Isabel Wünsche
Publisher: Böhlau Köln
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2022-12-12
Genre: Art
ISBN: 3412525650
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The First Russian Art Exhibition (Erste Russische Kunstausstellung), which opened at the Galerie van Diemen in Berlin on October 15, 1922, and later travelled to Amsterdam, introduced a broad Western audience to the most recent artistic developments in Russia. The extensive show – more than a thousand works, including paintings, graphic works, sculptures, stage designs, architectural models, and works of porcelain – was remarkably inclusive in its scope, which ranged from traditional figurative painting to the latest constructions of the Russian avant-garde. Coming on the heels of the Treaty of Rapallo, the exhibition was a first cultural step towards bilateral relations between two young and yet internationally isolated new states – the Weimar Republic and the Russian Soviet Republic. Moving away from the narrow focus on the avant-garde, the volume presents new research that examines the exhibition's broader historical scope and cultural implications. The reception of the exhibition within artistic circles in Germany, Europe, the United States, and Japan in the 1920s is addressed, as well as the disposition of many of the works exhibited. The combination of longer, thematic essays and short features, along with reproductions of newly identified works and a selection of unpublished archival materials make this book valuable to both a scholarly and a general readership.

What Is to Be Done?

by Ludmila Piters-Hofmann
What Is to Be Done?
Author: Ludmila Piters-Hofmann
Publisher: Logos Verlag Berlin GmbH
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2024-09-28
Genre: Art
ISBN: 3832582231
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Addressing a century of change from late nineteenth-century realism to late 1970s Sots Art, this volume presents new research on how art making, criticism, and promotion responded dynamically to the fast-moving social, cultural, and political contexts of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union. Case studies of artists reveal how figures such as Viktor Vasnetsov and Kazimir Malevich [Kazymyr Malevych] incorporated contemporary debates into their artworks and expanded their visual expressiveness. Analyses of writings by Wassily Kandinsky and Nikolai Punin illustrate the central role played by critics, theorists, and artists' societies in catalyzing new approaches. Lastly, essays focusing on the Society of Art Exhibitions (1874-83), the diverse displays at exhibitions in the Soviet era, and national themes in Ballets Russes productions rethink binaries between collaboration and enmity, between nationalism and internationalism, and between east and west in art presentation and promotion. This analytical triad is complemented by an epilogue by Russian émigré artist Pavel Otdelnov, who shares how his personal history and identity shape his art, especially since Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine.

Between Point Zero and the Iron Curtain

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Between Point Zero and the Iron Curtain
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 418
Release: 2024-10-31
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9004711287
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This volume, edited by Éva Forgács, with contributions from art historians from across Europe and the Americas, analyzes the artistic initiatives of the short time span between the end of World War II and the onset of the Cold War. In this moment, a new internationalism was anticipated by retrieving pre-war modernism, as well as creating the new era's new artistic lingua franca. The chapters include in-depth case studies that analyze the complex, often interconnected, projects throughout the world—South America and Eastern and Western Europe—that were soon ended by the Cold War.

Wolkenbügel

by Richard Anderson
Wolkenbügel
Author: Richard Anderson
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 381
Release: 2024-04-09
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0262048787
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How a visionary, never-realized architectural project, devised by one of the twentieth century’s greatest artists, shaped architectural culture in Europe between the world wars. After achieving international acclaim as a painter and designer, El Lissitzky set out in 1924 to convince the world—and himself—that he was also an architect. He did this with a project for a “horizontal skyscraper,” which he gave an obscure and untranslatable name: Wolkenbügel. Eight of these buildings, perched atop slender pillars, were intended to stand at major intersections along Moscow’s Boulevard Ring, integrating the flow of tramlines, subways, and elevators. In Wolkenbügel, Richard Anderson explores Lissitzky’s translation of visual and textual media into spatial ideas and offers an in-depth study of the surviving drawings and archival artifacts related to Lissitzky's most complex architectural proposal. This book offers a new and definitive account of how Lissitzky expanded the conceptual and representational tools available to the modern architect by drawing on many sources—including photography, typography, exhibition design, and even the elementary forms of the alphabet—to create the Wolkenbügel. Anderson shows how the production and reception of a paper project served to link key ideas and relationships that animated the worlds of art and architecture, offering a new view on received histories of the interwar avant-gardes. By attending to Lissitzky’s singular architectural project, Anderson reveals the dynamics of internationality in the constitution of modern architectural culture in Europe.

The Icon and the Square

by Maria Taroutina
The Icon and the Square
Author: Maria Taroutina
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 761
Release: 2018-11-26
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0271082550
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In The Icon and the Square, Maria Taroutina examines how the traditional interests of institutions such as the crown, the church, and the Imperial Academy of Arts temporarily aligned with the radical, leftist, and revolutionary avant-garde at the turn of the twentieth century through a shared interest in the Byzantine past, offering a counternarrative to prevailing notions of Russian modernism. Focusing on the works of four different artists—Mikhail Vrubel, Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Vladimir Tatlin—Taroutina shows how engagement with medieval pictorial traditions drove each artist to transform his own practice, pushing beyond the established boundaries of his respective artistic and intellectual milieu. She also contextualizes and complements her study of the work of these artists with an examination of the activities of a number of important cultural associations and institutions over the course of several decades. As a result, The Icon and the Square gives a more complete picture of Russian modernism: one that attends to the dialogue between generations of artists, curators, collectors, critics, and theorists. The Icon and the Square retrieves a neglected but vital history that was deliberately suppressed by the atheist Soviet regime and subsequently ignored in favor of the secular formalism of mainstream modernist criticism. Taroutina’s timely study, which coincides with the centennial reassessments of Russian and Soviet modernism, is sure to invigorate conversation among scholars of art history, modernism, and Russian culture.

Byzantium/Modernism

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Byzantium/Modernism
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 395
Release: 2015-06-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004300015
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Byzantium/Modernism features contributions by fourteen international scholars and brings together a diverse range of interdisciplinary essays on art, architecture, theatre, film, literature, and philosophy, which examine how and why Byzantine art and image theory can contribute to our understanding of modern and contemporary visual culture. Particular attention is given to intercultural dialogues between the former dominions of the Byzantine Empire, with a special focus on Greece, Turkey, and Russia, and the artistic production of Western Europe and America. Together, these essays invite the reader to think critically and theoretically about the dialogic interchange between Byzantium and modernism and to consider this cross-temporal encounter as an ongoing and historically deep narrative, rather than an ephemeral or localized trend. Contributors are Tulay Atak, Charles Barber, Elena Boeck, Anthony Cutler, Rico Franses, Dimitra Kotoula, Marie-José Mondzain, Myroslava M. Mudrak, Robert S. Nelson, Robert Ousterhout, Stratis Papaioannou, Glenn Peers, Jane A. Sharp and Devin Singh.

Beyond Vision

by Pavel Florensky
Beyond Vision
Author: Pavel Florensky
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Total Pages: 396
Release: 2006-08-15
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1861896395
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Beyond Vision is the first English-language collection of essays on art by Pavel Florensky (1882–1937), Russian philosopher, priest, linguist, scientist, mathematician – and art historian. In addition to seven essays by Florensky, the book includes a biographical introduction and an examination of Florensky’s contribution as an art historian by Nicoletta Misler. Beyond Vision reveals Florensky’s fundamental attitudes to the vital questions of construction, composition, chronology, function and destination in the fields of painting, sculpture and design. His reputation as a theologian and philosopher is already established in the English-speaking world, but this first collection in English of his art essays (translated by Wendy Salmond) will be a revelation to those in the field. Pavel Florensky was a true polymath: trained in mathematics and philosophy at Moscow University, he rejected a scholarship in advanced mathematics in order to study theology at the Moscow Theological Academy. He was also an expert linguist, scientist and art historian. A victim of the Soviet government’s animosity towards religion, he was condemned to a Siberian labor camp in 1933 where he continued his work under increasingly difficult circumstances. He was executed in 1937.

El Lissitzky

by A. S. Kant︠s︡edikas
El Lissitzky
Author: A. S. Kant︠s︡edikas
Publisher: Unicorn Publishing Group
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2017
Genre: Art, Modern
ISBN: 9781910787960
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El Lissitzky (1880 - 1941) is unquestionably one of Russian Modernism's most well known artists. The subject of numerous monographs and exhibitions, his mature abstract paintings, drawings, photographs, and graphic work can be found in abundance in Western and Eastern public collections. In his early career, however, his work was more or less exclusively devoted to Jewish subjects, reflecting his religious education and family's heritage. While a handful of these works are well known and widely published, this fascinating book, El Lissitzky's Jewish Period: 1905 - 1923 by Alexander Kantsedikas, one of the world's leading scholars on the artist, is the first endeavor to look at this phase of his work. Amounting to a veritable catalogue raisonne of 500 plus works, the author has resurrected some of the more obscure but no less fascinating works by Lissitzky in Hebrew and Yiddish. Lavishly illustrated in color and black and white, the book tracks his evolution from an Expressionist style to one that is increasingly more abstract and non-objective. It also includes rare photographic material of the artist's family, as well as little-known correspondence from his father and his relationship with his first wife, who has heretofore been entirely obscured in the artist's biography.