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Library | Material Type | Shelf Number | Child Count | Shelf Location | Status | Item Holds |
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Searching... Science | Book | N 6988 S6753 1995 | 1 | Stacks | Searching... Unknown | Searching... Unavailable |
Searching... South | Book | 709.2 SOVIET | 1 | Non-fiction Collection | Searching... Unknown | Searching... Unavailable |
Searching... South | Book | 709.2247 SOVIET | 1 | Non-fiction Collection | Searching... Unknown | Searching... Unavailable |
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Summary
Summary
If life was hard for all under the Soviet regime, how much more difficult was it to be a dissident artist? For those who did not belong to the dominant school of Socialist Realism, it could be a life of great risk. Often forced to scavenge for materials to use in paintings and sculptures, these artists led both a sometimes dangerous, illicit underground life, as well as an acceptable public life. In Soviet Dissident Artists , Renee Baigell and Matthew Baigell interview nearly fifty former dissident artists to better understand their struggles under Soviet rule and their desires to maintain their sense of inner freedom.
In these probing interviews, the artists chronicle their hardships and their friendships under the old Communist regime from the 1950s to the 1980s. They relate their confrontations with the KGB and other government organizations--sometimes with tragic consequences--and how they managed to survive and create subversive work in their spare time. Recording experiences largely unknown to Western artists, these interviews describe one of the great heroic stories of the last half of the twentieth century.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The 47 artists interviewed here, who broke with the official style of Soviet socialist realism, outspokenly discuss their harassment by artists' unions and the KGB, their sense of isolation and their exposure to Western avant-garde art. Their freewheeling work, ranging from neo-expressionist to conceptualist, constitutes an oasis of authenticity within the conformity of the Soviet system. All the paintings and sculptures reproduced in the 27 color and 18 b&w plates are in the collection of nonconformist Soviet art at Rutgers University's Zimmerli Art Museum. This collection was recently donated by Norton Dodge (also interviewed here), an American economist and Sovietologist who, beginning in the early 1960s, smuggled 10,000 works by dissident artists out of the U.S.S.R. Renee Baigell is a student of comparative literature; Matthew Baigell is a Rutgers art history professor. (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Choice Review
In The Ransom of Russian Art (1994), John McPhee describes Norton Dodge as an absentminded professor with an uncertain command of Russian. Nevertheless, from the 1960s through the 1980s, Dodge managed to smuggle out of the Soviet Union thousands of paintings created by dissident artists. Dodge has now given a substantial portion of his collection to the Zimmerli Museum at Rutgers University. (Selected works have been published in a catalog, Nonconformist Art: The Soviet Experience, 1995.) Now there is a complementary anthology of interviews with the artists. In addition to awful stories of persecution, they offer valuable information about the cultural history of dissident art. With remarkable consistency, they insist that the major figures of modernism did not influence them. If they are telling the truth, then it appears that they reinvented modernism in some ways. Perhaps they caught glimpses of a few Picassos and Maleviches, and intuited the rest. A valuable contribution to our overall understanding of Soviet cultural history. General; lower-division undergraduate through professional. J. M. Curtis; University of Missouri--Columbia
Library Journal Review
While neither of these surveys of nonconformist Russian artists is complete unto itself, they perfectly complement each other. Matthew and Renee Baigell, a professor of art history and a student of Russian literature, respectively, offer interviews they conducted with 47 Russian artists who worked outside the government-ordained school of Socialist Realism. Their interviews were conducted recently, spurred by the donation to Rutgers University of Norton Dodge's significant collection of unoffical art assembled over more than three decades. (For more on Dodge, see John McPhee's The Ransom of Russian Art, LJ 11/1/94.) Reprinted verbatim, the interviews are straightforward and as often biographical as analytical in subject matter. Collectively, they offer a singularly clear picture of the trials, and vastly dissimilar experiences, of artists operating at once under and outside a totalitarian regime. While it provides invaluable context, the book lacks both illustrations and an overarching art historical analysis, leaving the reader's appetite whetted but unsatisfied. A catalog of more than 40 paintings from the late 1980s and early 1990s, New Russian Art by contrast offers a vital contemporary sampling, albeit somewhat short on context. The reproductions are large and clear, and the two introductory essays anecdotally describe the building of the collection while offering a quick gloss on the history of the 20th-century Russian avant-garde. Seven of the artists appear in both books. Small art collections might purchase New Russian Art as a sufficient look at recent Russian art, but all larger collections should have both records of this underdocumented milieu.-Eric Bryant, "Library Journal" (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.