Features paintings as well as arts and crafts, toys, prints, textiles and toys.

During the 1920s and 1930s, American minority artists and writers collaborated extensively with the Soviet avant-garde, seeking to build a revolutionary society that would end racial discrimination and advance progressive art. Making what Claude McKay called "the magic pilgrimage" to the Soviet Union, these intellectuals placed themselves at the forefront of modernism, using radical cultural and political experiments to reimagine identity and decenter the West. Shining rare light on these efforts, The Ethnic Avant-Garde makes a unique contribution to interwar literary, political, and art history, drawing extensively on Russian archives, travel narratives, and artistic exchanges to establish the parameters of an undervalued "ethnic avant-garde." These writers and artists cohered around distinct forms that mirrored Soviet techniques of montage, fragment, and interruption. They orbited interwar Moscow, where the international avant-garde converged with the Communist International. The book explores Vladimir Mayakovsky's 1925 visit to New York City via Cuba and Mexico, during which he wrote Russian-language poetry in an "Afro-Cuban" voice; Langston Hughes's translations of these poems while in Moscow, which he visited to assist on a Soviet film about African American life; a futurist play condemning Western imperialism in China, which became Broadway's first major production to feature a predominantly Asian American cast; and efforts to imagine the Bolshevik Revolution as Jewish messianic arrest, followed by the slow political disenchantment of the New York Intellectuals. Through an absorbing collage of cross-ethnic encounters that also include Herbert Biberman, Sergei Eisenstein, Paul Robeson, and Vladimir Tatlin, this work remaps global modernism along minority and Soviet-centered lines, further advancing the avant-garde project of seeing the world anew.

Painter, architect, engineer, set designer, father to the Russian Constructivist movement, inventor of the "counter-relief" and author of one of modernism's greatest icons, the "Monument to the Third International," Vladimir Tatlin blazed an incredible trail of innovation through the glory years of the Soviet avant-garde. Nevertheless, "Not the old, not the new, but the necessary" was his motto; having spent his early years as an icon painter, Tatlin eschewed the modernist disavowal of heritage in favor of a research-based attitude to materials and genres. His "counter-relief" sculptures, made of wood, cardboard, metal and wire, were foundational works for Rodchenko and the Constructivists, and their influence can be seen today in the works of creators as various as Zaha Hadid and Richard Tuttle. But it is his "Monument to the Third International," often called simply "Tatlin's Tower," that has grasped the imaginations of artists, architects and writers down the generations. Though it was never built, "Tatlin's Tower" endures as a promethean image of utopian heroism and Soviet optimism, as does the artist himself, who applied his energies so broadly, without loss of integrity or focus. With 120 color illustrations and a wealth of archival photos, this volume offers the first English-language overview of Tatlin's diverse achievements in more than 25 years. Published for a landmark exhibition at the Museum Tinguely in Basel, it examines every facet of his output, from his early Cubist-influenced paintings to the counter-reliefs, the "Tower," prints, set and costume designs and aeronautic researches, and constitutes an essential portrait of the ambitions of Soviet modernism. Vladimir Tatlin(1885-1953) was born in the Ukraine, and studied icon painting in Moscow. In 1913 he traveled to Paris, where he encountered Picasso's three-dimensional sculptures, which directly inspired his own "counter-reliefs." Following the October Revolution, Tatlin directed his skills towards the Soviet cause, devising in 1920 his "Monument to the Third International."

These artists, heeding the call of Constructivist manifestos to abandon the nonobjective painting and sculpture of the early Russian avant-garde and enter into Soviet industrial production, aimed to work as "artist-engineers" to produce useful objects for everyday life in the new socialist collective." "Kiaer shows how these artists elaborated on the theory of the socialist object-as-comrade in the practice of their art. They broke with the traditional model of the autonomous avant-garde, Kiaer argues, in order to participate more fully in the political project of the Soviet state. She analyzes Constructivism's attempt to develop modernist forms to forge a new comradely relationship between human subjects and the mass-produced objects of modernity."--BOOK JACKET.

The plans for the gigantic Monument to the Third International were completed in 1920 by Vladimir Tatlin, the Russian painter and visionary designer who was a key figure of Russian constructivism. Planned as the headquarters and monument of the Comintern in Petrograd, it was to be made from industrial materials—iron, glass, and steel—as a towering symbol of modernity. Because of the political turmoil and housing shortages in Russia after the 1917 Revolution, the building was never constructed, but it remains a celebrated icon of revolutionary art. In this insightful book, Norbert Lynton investigates the sources and symbolism of Tatlin’s Tower and considers not only its significance but also the broader role of allegory in abstraction and as an expression of man’s highest aspirations. Then, in light of his new symbolic reading of the Tower, Lynton examines Tatlin’s flying machine, Letatlin, and earlier works in his career and discusses their impact on other Russian painters, sculptors, designers, and architects of his era.

"In this volume, which accompanies the largest exhibition ever mounted at the Guggenheim Museum, twenty-one essays by eminent scholars from Germany, Great Britain, Russia, and the United States explore the activity of the Russian and Soviet avant-garde in all its diversity and complexity. These essays trace the work of Malevich's Unovis (Affirmers of the New Art) collective in Vitebsk, which introduced Suprematism's all-encompassing geometries into the design of textiles, ceramics, and indeed whole environments; the postrevolutionary reform of art education and the creation of Moscow's Vkhutemas (Higher Artistic-Technical Workshops), where the formal and analytical princples of the avant-garde were the basis of instruction; the debates over a "proletarian art" and the transition to Constructivism, "production art," and the "artist-constructor"; the organization of new artist-administered "museums of artistic culture"; the "third path" in non-objective art taken by Mikhail Larionov; the return to figuration in the mid-1920s by the young artists - and former students of the avant-garde - in Ost (the Society of Easel Painters); the debates among photographers, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, on the superiority of the fragmented or continuous image as a representation of the new socialist reality; book, porcelain, fabric, and stage design; and the evolution of a new architecture, from the experimental projects of Zhivskul'ptarkh (the Synthesis of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture Commission) to the multistage competition, in 1931-32, for the Palace of Soviets, which "proved" the inapplicability of a Modernist architecture to the Bolshevik Party's aspirations."

From the ruins of communism, Boris Groys emerges to provoke our interest in the aesthetic goals pursued with such catastrophic consequences by its founders. Interpreting totalitarian art and literature in the context of cultural history, this brilliant essay likens totalitarian aims to the modernists’ goal of producing world-transformative art. In this new edition, Groys revisits the debate that the book has stimulated since its first publication.

The artists’ books made in Russia between 1910 and 1915 are like no others. Unique in their fusion of the verbal, visual, and sonic, these books are meant to be read, looked at, and listened to. Painters and poets—including Natalia Goncharova, Velimir Khlebnikov, Mikhail Larionov, Kazimir Malevich, and Vladimir Mayakovsky— collaborated to fabricate hand-lithographed books, for which they invented a new language called zaum (a neologism meaning “beyond the mind”), which was distinctive in its emphasis on “sound as such” and its rejection of definite logical meaning. At the heart of this volume are close analyses of two of the most significant and experimental futurist books: Mirskontsa (Worldbackwards) and Vzorval’ (Explodity). In addition, Nancy Perloff examines the profound differences between the Russian avant-garde and Western art movements, including futurism, and she uncovers a wide-ranging legacy in the midcentury global movement of sound and concrete poetry (the Brazilian Noigandres group, Ian Hamilton Finlay, and Henri Chopin), contemporary Western conceptual art, and the artist’s book. Sound recordings of zaum poems featured in the book are available at www.getty.edu.