Radical Russia: Art, Culture and Revolution

This book accompanies the Russian season exhibition at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts and concentrates on avant-garde Russian culture and art, placing the movement in its artistic and historical context. Showing how radical movements developed across the whole range of Russian culture in the first decade of the twentieth century, the book discusses how the political revolutions of 1917 gave a new impetus to the avant-garde. The lives and artistic work of key figures in the radical form a thread running through the book: Kazimir Malevich, Natalia Goncharova, Liubov Popova, Vladimir Maiakovskii and Vladimir Tatlin each feature as central characters, showing how they interacted with the Russian revolutionary world. The rise of Stalinism at the end of the 1920s signalled an end to Russia's adventure with the avant-garde: by the mid-1930s the dull conservatism of Socialist Realism had driven radical art out of the Soviet experience