In Purchase, N.Y., an Exhibition of Artwork by Artists Who Worked in the Soviet Union (original) (raw)
New York|Artistic Expression in a Repressive State
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Arts | Westchester
Artistic Expression in a Repressive State
“Still Life With Apples” (1973) by Vladimir Yakovlev.Credit...Courtesy of Kolodzei Art Foundation
- Nov. 28, 2014
“Still Life With Apples” is a small gouache of six rosy apples resting on a blue table, painted with gestural brush strokes by the artist Vladimir Yakovlev in 1973. It is a lovely picture; nothing about it appears contentious. Yet its very creation at that time in the Soviet Union was an act of political defiance.
The piece is one of 88 works in “This Leads to Fire: Russian Art From Nonconformism to Global Capitalism, Selections From the Kolodzei Art Foundation Collection,” at the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase. The exhibition presents paintings, sculptures, photographs, prints, mixed-media assemblages, videos and an installation by 56 artists who worked in the Soviet Union.
Most were active when Socialist Realism was the only government-sanctioned aesthetic, but many of their pieces on display were made after the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. Many emigrated to Europe, Israel and the United States; those who stayed are confronting renewed restrictions under Vladimir Putin. Despite the show’s diversity of context, medium and content, the specter of censorship is clear throughout the gallery. And so is the doggedness — even the urgency — of personal artistic expression in the face of a repressive state.
“In the Soviet Union, only artwork that adhered to Socialist Realist guidelines and propagated official ideology was acceptable,” said Sarah Warren, the show’s curator and an associate professor of art history at Purchase College. “Anything else — any manifestation of an individualistic or intimate vision — was considered dangerous.”
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“Marilyn and Stalin” (1989-90) by Leonid Sokov.Credit...Courtesy of Kolodzei Art Foundation
“This Leads to Fire” is filled with individualistic and intimate visions. The exhibition traces the development of unofficial (also called nonconformist) artistic production from the Khrushchev Thaw (the brief period of cultural liberalization following Stalin’s death), through the relative openness of glasnost (under Mikhail Gorbachev), to the present. All of the items were borrowed from the New Jersey-based Kolodzei Art Foundation’s collection of approximately 7,000 works owned by Tatiana Kolodzei and her daughter, Natalia Kolodzei.
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