From the 18th century to the 20th, this book gives a panorama of Russian painting not equalled anywhere else. Russian culture developed in contact with the wider European influence, but retained strong native intonations. It is a culture between East and West, and both influences in together. The book begins with Icons, and it is precisely Icon-painting which gave Russian artist their peculiar preoccupation with ethical questions and a certain kind of palette. It goes on the expound the duality of their art, and point out the originality of their contribution to world art. The illustrations cover all genres and styles of painting in astonishing variety. Such figures as Borovokovsky, Rokotov, Levitsky, Brullov, Fedatov, Repin, Shishkin and Levitan and many more are in these pages.

From the first Modernist exhibitions in the late 1890s to the Soviet rupture with the West in the mid-1930s, Russian artists and writers came into wide contact with modern European art and ideas. Introducing a wealth of little-known material set in an illuminating interpretive context, this sourcebook presents Russian and Soviet views of Western art during this critical period of cultural transformation. The writings document complex responses to these works and ideas before the Russians lost contact with them almost entirely. Many of these writings have been unavailable to foreign readers and, until recently, were not widely known even to Russian scholars. Both an important reference and a valuable resource for classrooms, the book includes an introductory essay and shorter introductions to the individual sections.

As Dmitri Sarabianov tells us in this lively book, Russia first turned its face to Europe at the beginning of the eighteenth century. By the start of the nineteenth century, European ideas had been assimilated into the rich substratum of Russian culture and a unique amalgam began to emerge. Indigenous subjects became the focus of Russian art. In 1870, the Society for Traveling Art Exhibitions, whose members were known as the Wanderers, was founded. Its dual purpose was to educate the people through traveling exhibitions and to work for social reform. At the turn of the century, the dominant mode was Symbolism. But Modernist tendencies and other currents were gaining strength. These diverse aesthetics had to be rethought in 1917, when the Revolution brought the Bolsheviks to power. Functional, applied design came to the forefront. It is here, with the close of the most brilliant and innovative period in Russia's artistic life so far, that Professor Sarabianov ends his account of the pivotal years that led to the dazzling abstract, geometrical breakthroughs of Russian art. -- From publisher's description.

A completely revised and updated edition of Soviet Impressionism.

The rich tradition of French painting was an important influence on Russian art from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1920s, a period that saw the rise of many of the most important movements in modern art. A magnificent visual record of an unprecedented event, this book, the catalogue of an ambitious exhibition of master paintings from the four greatest museums of Russia, examines the interaction of these two great cultures. Drawing on the collections of the State Russian Museum and the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and the Tretyakov Gallery and the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, the book presents outstanding examples of Salon painting, Impressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism in France, and related movements in Russia, among them The Wanderers, Constructivism, and Suprematism. Paintings by Renoir, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Matisse are reproduced, along with works by Kandinsky, Tatlin, and Malevich. Key episodes in the story of this fascinating exchange include the vital role played by the great Russian collectors Ivan Morosov and Sergei Shchukin, whose preeminent collections of French art were an inspiration to the Russian avant-garde; the ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev's promotion of Russian art in France in 1906; and Henri Matisse's visit to Russia in 1911.

Between the late 1920s and the early 1950s, one of the most persuasive personality cults of all times saturated Soviet public space with images of Stalin. A torrent of portraits, posters, statues, films, plays, songs, and poems galvanized the Soviet population and inspired leftist activists around the world. In the first book to examine the cultural products and production methods of the Stalin cult, Jan Plamper reconstructs a hidden history linking artists, party patrons, state functionaries, and ultimately Stalin himself in the alchemical project that transformed a pock-marked Georgian into the embodiment of global communism. Departing from interpretations of the Stalin cult as an outgrowth of Russian mysticism or Stalin's psychopathology, Plamper establishes the cult's context within a broader international history of modern personality cults constructed around Napoleon III, Mussolini, Hitler, and Mao. Drawing upon evidence from previously inaccessible Russian archives, Plamper's lavishly illustrated and accessibly written study will appeal to anyone interested in twentieth-century history, visual studies, the politics of representation, dictator biography, socialist realism, and real socialism.

This work considers aspects of the art and architecture of the Soviet Union during the turbulent period of 1917 to 1922, covering a broad range of art, some modernist, some anti-modernist, but all to some degree guided by (and sometimes coerced by) the apparatus of the over-arching state.

The development of Soviet realist painting over fifty years through a selection of works from Russia's leading museums. Socialist Realism was and remains an exceptional phenomenon in twentieth century art. It bore the challenge of promoting realist figuration on a scale without parallel in the rest of the world, employing the talents of thousands of artists over decades and spreading over an immense and varied empire. By glorifying the social role of art, affirming the primary value of content as opposed to form and restoring the central role of traditional practices, socialist Realism was the declared opponent of the modern movement, and in fact represented the only completely alternative artistic system. Created by the great Russian artists (Deineka, Malevic, Adlivankin, Laktionov, Plastov, Brodskij, Korzhev) the works present a multiplicity of questions, themes and formal approaches to art spanning from the last phases of the civil war to the beginnings of the Brezhnev era, stopping at the early 1970s when trends in official Soviet art took on varied and inconsistent directions such that the cultural supremacy of the socialist-realist current faded definitively. A non-monolithic view emerges, in which the movement does not originate exclusively as the product of totalitarian control and political pressures but as an evolving organism that reflected internal issues and echoed the great historic events of the twentieth century.