Soviet nonconformist art
[1] From the time of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 until 1932, the historical Russian avant-garde flourished and strove to appeal to the proletariat.
Beginning in 1936, avant-garde artists who were unable or unwilling to adapt to the new policy were forced out of their positions, and often sent to the gulag, as part of Stalin's Great Purges.
[4] Art students such as Ülo Sooster, an Estonian who later became important to the Moscow nonconformist movement, were sent to Siberian prison camps.
[6] Oleg Tselkov was expelled from art school for 'formalism' in 1955, which from the viewpoint of the Party might have constituted an act of treason.
[7] The death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, and Nikita Khrushchev's subsequent denunciation of his rule during his Secret Speech at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956 created the "Khruschev Thaw"; a liberal atmosphere wherein artists had more freedom to create nonsanctioned work without fearing repercussions.
Furthermore, Stalin's cult of personality was recognized as detrimental, and within weeks many paintings and busts bearing his likeness were removed from public places.
Artists such as Aleksandr Gerasimov, who had made their careers painting idealized portraits of Stalin,[8] were forced out of their official positions, as they had become embarrassing to the new leadership.
Khrushchev got into a public and now-famous argument with Ernst Neizvestny, sculptor (1925-2016), regarding the function of art in society.
Artists could no longer hold delusions that the state would recognize their art, yet the climate had become friendly and open enough that a coherent organization had formed.
The goal of nonconformism in art was to challenge the status of official artistic reality, to question it, to treat it with irony.
[15] The members of this group were: Evgenii Kropivnitsky [ru], the artist and poet, Olga Potapova, Oscar Rabin, Lidia Masterkova, Vladimir Nemukhin, Nikolai Vechtomov and the poets Vsevolod Nekrasov [ru], Genrikh Sapgir, and Igor Kholin.
"[16] critic and theorist Victor Tupitsyn considered that, "the aestheticization of misery is precisely what distinguishes the representatives of the de-classed communal intelligentsia of the thaw era from their predecessors (the Socialist Realists), who created a paradisiac image of history.
Khrushchev worked to improve housing conditions, and a consequence of this was that artists began to get studios of their own, or shared spaces with like-minded colleagues.
The members of this group were: Ilya Kabakov,[20] Ülo Sooster, Eduard Steinberg, Erik Bulatov, Sergey Shablavin,[21] Oleg Vassiliev, Viktor Pivovarov, Vladimir Yankilevsky, and sculptor Ernst Neizvestny.
As Joseph Bakstein explained, "The creation of this nonconformist tradition was impelled by the fact that an outsider in the Soviet empire stood alone against a tremendous state machine, a great Leviathan that threatened to engulf him.
"[23] This group includes Ilya Kabakov, Gregory Perkel, Erik Bulatov, Oleg Vassiliev, Sergey Shablavin, Komar and Melamid, Ivan Chuikov [ru],[24] Viktor Pivovarov, poets Vsevolod Nekrasov (ru), Dmitry Prigov, Lev Rubinstein, young artist and novelist Vladimir Sorokin, and also broadly encompasses the Sots artists and the Collective Actions group, which were both influential in the construction of Russian conceptualist art.
[citation needed] In 1967 the Petersburg Group Manifesto was written and signed by Chemiakin, O. Liagatchev, E. Yesaulenko and V. Ivanov.
V. Ivanov and M. Chemiakin had previously developed the idea of Metaphysical Synthesism, which proposed creating a new form of icon painting through the study of religious art across the ages.
[citation needed] Some examples of the unofficial Apartment Exhibitions include: In November 1975, the first Jewish exhibition "Aleph", also known as "Twelve from the Soviet Underground", took place in Eugene Abeshaus's apartment, where 12 Jewish artists participated: Eugene Abeshaus, Anatoly Basin (ru), Leonid Bolmat, Aleksandr Gurevich, Yuri Kalendarev, Tatyana Kornfeld, Aleksander Manusov, Aleksander Okun, Sima Ostrovsky, Alek Rapoport, Osip Sidlin, and Olga Schmuilovich.
[citation needed] Among Sidlin's students were Anatoly Basin,[32] Galina Basina, Vladimir Egorov, Nina Fedotova, Anatoly Golovastov, Evgeny Goryunov,[33] Igor V. Ivanov,[34][35] Galina (Sizova) Ivanova, Boris Kupin, Alexander Mikhailovsky, Yury Nashivochnikov,[36] Sergey Sivertsev, Natalia Toreeva,[37] Margarita Trushina, Vasily Zhavoronkov, Vasily Yuzko [38] and the poet Yuli Goldstein.
Was aroused spontaneously in all Ukrainian large cities as Kyiv, Odesa, Kharkiv, Uzhhorod, Lviv.
The Ukrainian part of Soviet nonconformism involved such artists as Vagrich Bakhchanyan, Vilen Barskyi, Olena Golub, Valentin Khrushch, Yuri Kosin, Alexander Kostetsky, Vladimir Strelnikov, Stanislav Sychov, Feodosiy Tetianych, Irina Vysheslavska, Vasyl Yermylov, Nicholas Zalevsky, and many others.
On December 15, 1975, the nonconformist artists and poets, staged a poetry-reading on the Senate Square to commemorate the sesquicentennial of the Decembrists' uprising.
