When Soviet art is mentioned, familiar associations arise: socialist realism, strict censorship, the absence of creative freedom. But alongside official art there existed an underground art, one kept from the general public for ideological reasons. The term referred to works that did not meet the criteria of the prevailing social realism — an art form tasked with depicting the happy reality of the Soviet Union.
In this article you will learn:
- how the avant-garde and socialist realism competed for the title of the official art of the new Russia
- "Even my grandson draws better" — why Khrushchev first permitted and then banned unofficial art
- Conceptualists, Kineticists, Sots Art: the first unofficial creative groups
- bulldozers and paintings: how unofficial art was suppressed in the USSR
- what became of the underground after the collapse of the Soviet Union
In the beginning was the avant-garde
To understand how underground art emerged in the second half of the twentieth century, it is worth examining the phenomena of the Russian avant-garde and socialist realism. It was the avant-garde — which at the start of the twentieth century became the art of the new state, and was then driven out of the Union — that laid the groundwork for the flourishing of the nonconformist movement in the 1950s. You can read more about the five most significant works of the Russian avant-garde on Losko.
The avant-garde is an art stripped of everything superfluous and taken to its absolute. In Russia it was represented by a multitude of artists, each striving to articulate their own philosophy. Yet all were united by a shared idea: art is an instrument for transforming the world, the individual, and their perception of reality. The avant-gardists believed that art could not be static. In the context of the industrial revolution, art had to keep pace with such rapid change — and, more than that, to anticipate it.
Shaped by the influence of Western painterly movements — Impressionism, Symbolism and Cubism — the styles of the great masters of the Russian avant-garde took form in the 1900s. Mikhail Larionov, Kazimir Malevich, Alexander Rodchenko, Vladimir Tatlin, Wassily Kandinsky and many others each aspired to invent their own '-ism' and stake a claim as a pioneer. Artists of the period reconceived the very nature of pictorial means — colour, line and form — and made these the central subjects of a work. They believed that, stripped of superfluous detail, a work lost none of its power to shape human experience. From this conviction emerged Malevich's Suprematism, Larionov's Rayonism, Rodchenko's Lineism and Tatlin's Constructivism.
'When the habit of the mind to see in paintings a depiction of corners of nature, Madonnas and shameless Venuses has disappeared, only then shall we see a purely painterly work. I have transformed myself in the zero of form and fished myself out of the rubble of Academic art's rubbish.' — K. Malevich
Avant-garde visual art reaches beyond the canvas and extends into philosophical treatises, manifestos and programmes that explain how the modern painting came to be what it is. The documented idea, the artist's own philosophical construct, is itself part of the work.
Malevich, for instance, described his Black Square as the zero point of art, its absolute 'nothingness': painting, he argued, had exhausted itself.
After the Revolution of 1917, the avant-garde found its most fitting purpose. The new state demanded a new art capable of immortalising sweeping change and glorifying it. The avant-garde's central idea was thus realised: it became an instrument for transforming the world.
But the triumph was short-lived. In the 1920s the avant-garde began to be displaced by other movements. Painting and literature were set a new task: to serve the people, to document the state's unfolding progress towards the inevitable victory of socialism. Against changes of such planetary scale, the individual artist's identity ceased to matter; what counted was capturing the magnitude of events. State institutions determined what was relevant, demanding an art accessible to the people — one that would clearly render the new and wondrous world. The avant-garde, not always accessible and preoccupied with means rather than content, was unequal to this task and retreated underground.
It was never destined to become the official art of the Soviet Union.
The most decisive shifts began when the USSR established the Union of Artists — a creative association of people engaged in the arts. At the time of its formation, there was no intention to suppress 'dissenting' voices. On the contrary, the aim was to bring together the full breadth of talent among the proletariat and the intelligentsia, and to support the most outstanding among them. Yet no clear criteria were ever formulated by which an artist's abilities would be judged.
The Union of Artists offered every practitioner of the arts the prospect of security at last. Where before it had been a struggle in which the creator was forced to prove the right of their own 'self' to exist, membership now guaranteed state support — provided the artist was willing to work in its service. To document history, to become part of the collective, to dissolve into the current of events: this was what was required. That line of thinking became the foundation for a new genre — Socialist Realism, defined as 'the truthful, historically specific depiction of reality in its revolutionary development'.
'We all share the same goal: the building of socialism. Naturally, this does not remove or destroy the entire diversity of forms and nuances of creative work. On the contrary. Only under socialism, only here, can and must the most varied forms of art grow and expand; the fullest and most multifaceted range of forms; the entire diversity of shades of every kind of creative endeavour.' — I. V. Stalin
It later became clear that this very vagueness in the definition of Socialist Realism was what led to the one-sided judgements of critics — critics on whose decisions it depended whether a work would reach the public at all. Although the avant-garde was left on the margins of history, it is important to understand that Socialist Realism did not arise on anyone's orders: this was simply how art evolved in the USSR.
In spite of, not thanks to: the subsequent fate of unofficial art
The 1930s saw an aggressive campaign against formalism — a term applied to any artistic expression that deviated from the general direction of Socialist Realism. When an artist concentrates on technique and style rather than on the subject of a work, he is being dishonest with the viewer: so the opponents of formalism believed. Unofficial art now developed quietly, behind the walls of private apartments, well beyond the reach of the authorities. Yet even that precarious existence proved untenable during the years of repression, and many artists were sent to the labour camps.
Sweeping change came with Stalin's death in 1953. An entire era died with him: cities were renamed, Stalin's monuments were removed, and at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party Khrushchev's celebrated speech on the cult of personality called the legitimacy of the repressions into question. The Thaw touched not only political and social life, but creative life as well.
In the late 1950s a movement emerged in the USSR that art historians today call the 'second avant-garde' and the 'Soviet Renaissance.' Art genuinely revived: artists who had been imprisoned returned from the camps, and new groups formed, determined to find fresh means of expression. Exhibitions remained difficult — small, local, muted affairs. But this was only the beginning of the underground art movement in the Soviet Union.
The Thaw for the nonconformists, and the swift suppression of unofficial art
The European avant-garde exerted an enormous influence on the new generation of unofficial artists in the late 1950s. The authorities once again permitted Western magazines to circulate, through which readers could learn about what was current in the art world and beyond: Amerika, Für Dich. In 1956 the Hermitage held the first Picasso exhibition in the USSR. It was permitted on the grounds that the Spanish-French artist was a communist. The show was a success: thousands of curious Soviet citizens came to see what had earned Picasso his worldwide renown. To list every artist his paintings influenced would be impossible, though purely stylistic impact can be traced in relatively few works. The most important lesson Picasso offered, however, was the lesson of creative freedom.
'20 December. Yesterday I went to the Picasso exhibition and envied his freedom. Inner freedom. He does what he wants. That purity Kharms dreamed of. Picasso is not even dependent on his own school, on his own discoveries, if he has no need of them today. I became convinced that content has not disappeared. What has disappeared is plot. But the content that cannot be defined in words has remained. The exhibition caused an extraordinary stir in the city. People are practically coming to blows in front of the paintings.' — the writer Yevgeny Shvarts
Three years later, an American exhibition was organised in Sokolniki Park, bringing the foreign abstractionists Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko to Moscow. Works of the Russian avant-garde were still inaccessible, kept in museum archives. But the examples filtering through from the West were sufficient to inspire Soviet artists in their search for new expressive tools.
When representatives of the Russian avant-garde of the 1910s and 1920s gradually began to be shown in exhibitions, some artists started paying greater attention to that forgotten legacy. In this way, the creators of underground art pursued new means of expression along two parallel paths: in the Russian avant-garde, recovering lost traditions, and in Western art, analysing contemporary creative approaches.
More and more new avant-garde work began appearing at exhibitions. The most notable was the December 1962 show at the Moscow Manege — '30 Years of MOSKh' — which Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev attended in person. The General Secretary attacked the modernist artists outright, marking yet another retreat of unofficial art into the underground.
'What kind of faces are these? Can't you draw? My grandson could do better! … What is this supposed to be? Are you men or damned perverts — how can you paint like this? Have you no conscience?' — N. S. Khrushchev
Khrushchev declared that such art was 'not needed by the people', and that 'this disgrace must be stopped and banned immediately'. He argued that if artists 'study on public money and eat the people's bread', then the art they produce must be 'comprehensible to the people'. He directed that informal culture be made to disappear from the public sphere. In the aftermath of the exhibition, a scathing article appeared the following day in the newspaper Pravda, marking the opening of yet another campaign against formalism.
The illusion of free art in the USSR was shattered once again. Artists were once more forced to retreat into apartments, where private exhibitions were held. Some went further, staging unauthorised street shows that lasted only until the first call to the police.
The 1960s: key ideas and names
As is well known, any prohibition only strengthens the protest against it. So it proved with unofficial art in the 1960s. The Soviet authorities sought to eradicate every trace of the underground and to intimidate young artists, but these efforts only intensified resistance. The number of non-conformist creative groups continued to grow.
The first conceptualists
In the early 1960s, Russian conceptualism began to take shape, with artists Ilya Kabakov, Ülo Sooster and Yury Sobolev among its founders. In this movement, the idea the artist wishes to convey takes precedence over the means and methods of expression.
The movement's first group was the Club of Surrealists. Kabakov, Sooster and Sobolev — mentioned above — were all members of this collective. They refused to depict a well-fed, self-congratulatory reality and sought instead to rethink the function of art. For them, creative work was not a mouthpiece for propagating ready-made ideas about the inevitable triumph of communism. On the contrary, in works full of romantic elevation, they drew the viewer into a dialogue, posed unexpected and complex questions, and invited a shared reassessment of the familiar phenomena of everyday life.
The Lianozovo Circle
Many groups formed along local lines. One such was the Lianozovo Circle, which emerged in 1966 — a group of post-avant-garde artists who coalesced near the Lianozovo railway station in Moscow. The school included the brothers Evgeny and Lev Kropivnitsky, Lidiya Masterkova, Oscar Rabin, and the poets Genrikh Sapgir, Igor Kholin and others. The 1960s were a period of mass construction and the demolition of barrack-style housing. It was in a flat in one such building — Barrack No. 2 — that poets, artists and devotees of the underground scene would gather.
'There are rabbits that live in a cage — they are fed, but used for other people's ends — and then there is the wild hare. Of course, a fox might tear him apart and eat him, or he might die of hunger, but he lives a wild life. I am exactly that kind of wild hare.' — Oscar Rabin
The key distinction between the Lianozovo school and the avant-garde artists of the early twentieth century was the absence of any desire to immortalise the self. Social issues concerned them little: they recorded the reality around them, revelled in its absolute aesthetic and made no effort to embellish it. And that reality was far from bright or cloudless — barracks life, dirt, outcasts on every side. It was precisely this dispassionate poetic sensibility, set against the festive optimism of Socialist Realism, that produced an effect of irony and grotesque. They were not trying to criticise the authorities, yet the contrast between the official and the unofficial discourse created exactly that impression. The authorities took notice: newspaper headlines bristled with caustic nicknames — among them 'Priests of Rubbish Tip No. 8', a jab at Oscar Rabin's painting Rubbish Tip No. 8.
Severe Style
There were also artists who did not stray from the central subject matter yet positioned themselves against official art. This tendency became known as the Severe Style. Its protagonists are the same as in Socialist Realism — collective farm workers and factory hands, heroes of war and intellectual labour, strong men and women. But they are not depicted as cheerful builders of a radiant future; they are shown as they actually are. Fatigue, pain and tension are written into their faces and postures, and every figure in the picture carries a story of their own. Building a new state through blood and sweat is no celebration — it is titanic, grinding labour. The most prominent representatives of this tendency were Viktor Popkov and the brothers Alexander and Pyotr Smolin. They were not searching for new instruments with which to depict reality, but for new kinds of heroes.
Kinetics and Cybernetics
Art began to take on new forms not only on the canvas but beyond it. The Kineticists, carrying forward the idea of productive art — whose primary instrument was physical material — founded the group Dvizhenie (Movement) in 1962. The group's founder, Lev Nussberg, frequently worked with plastic, wood, mirrors and metal. The Kineticists' works are among the earliest examples of installation art: they engaged with light and sound, with materials and structures. It was a period of triumphant science — researchers were making breakthroughs in physics, mathematics and engineering, the conquest of space was in full swing, and artists drew inspiration from all of it.
Cybernetics offers another example of how science shaped art. In this tendency, however, scientific methods were applied with the aim of studying the effect of painting on the human being. Yuri Zlotnikov — the most prominent figure of the movement — created a series of works entitled Signal System in the manner of abstract minimalism. Simple geometric forms in various colours, dots and lines: through these means he sought to model human experience. Behind the visible surfaces lay extensive research involving mathematical calculations and the application of cybernetic methods. He believed he had created a new language in art, one capable of regulating human emotion.
In the late 1960s, some artists, unable to endure the pressure from the authorities, emigrated abroad. Yet there was a positive side to this: it cleared the way for a new generation of unofficial artists.
The 1970s: Key Ideas and Names
The 1970s were the high point of the Russian underground. The principal tendencies took shape — abstract expressionism, kinetic art, conceptualism — but development did not stop there, and new directions continued to emerge.
The Bulldozer Exhibition
A landmark event that significantly affected the degree of freedom granted to art was the 'Bulldozer Exhibition' of 1974, organised by Oscar Rabin, a representative of the Lianozovo group. It was the largest self-organised show of unofficial art, and it lasted only a few hours before becoming the subject of enormous controversy due to the aggressive intervention of the police. Paintings were destroyed by water trucks and bulldozers, and many of the participants were arrested. The Soviet authorities were unable to suppress the story: news spread rapidly through the Western media, prompting sharp criticism of such despotic methods of suppressing new movements in art.
After the 'Bulldozer Exhibition', the authorities, seeking to minimise public outcry, became more willing to make concessions. Two weeks later they approved an open-air exhibition in Izmailovsky Park: more than 40 artists, thousands of curious visitors, and 'four hours of freedom' — as it came to be known.
A year later — in 1975 — artists who were not members of the Union of Artists were permitted to open their own studio at 28 Malaya Gruzinskaya Street. The authorities decided it was simpler to offer a regulated form of freedom, and so the Moscow City Committee of Graphic Artists was established. Exhibitions were held there twice a year, invariably accompanied by critical press coverage. Yet this did nothing to dampen the interest of ordinary Muscovites — queues always formed outside the shows. It was another triumph for the unofficial artists.
Moscow Conceptualists
Conceptualism as an art form was first discussed in the 'Surrealists' Club'. During the 1970s the movement acquired more clearly defined characteristics, with Moscow at its centre. For the Conceptualists, art is a construction kit to be taken apart and examined to understand how it works. Artists in this movement had a wide range of tools at their disposal: performance, painting, text, photography, and ready-mades — found objects presented as works of art.
Conceptualism asserts that 'art is the power of the idea, not of the material'. Where previously the search for the new had proceeded through the exploration of painterly forms and means — with every artist striving to invent a personal style — for the Conceptualists this ceased to matter. They are drawn to making abstract things visible: another principle that sets them apart from other movements.
Moscow Conceptualists frequently presented texts as complete, self-contained works. This is the central irony of the movement: the value of art in its traditional sense disappears. Mastery is no longer measured by fidelity to observed reality or by the inventiveness with which artistic devices are employed, as was the norm under Socialist Realism. At the heart of the work instead lies a deep analysis of events and everyday routine. They regarded reality as inescapable, and all that remained was to dismantle it into its component parts.
The art critic Boris Groys observed that 'Moscow Conceptualism became the embodiment of the artistic expression of everyday life in the Soviet Union'
Key Figures and Works
The Moscow Conceptualist group was formed initially from a circle of friends: the studios of Ilya Kabakov, Viktor Pivovarov, Erik Bulatov and Ivan Chuikov were located close to one another on Sretensky Boulevard. And although other artists and poets later joined them, it is their works that are considered foundational to the Moscow Conceptualist movement.
Ilya Kabakov is the founding figure of this movement. His work centres on themes of alienation and despondency within Soviet reality. Through his art he probes the tension between the 'personal' and the 'collective', examines the phenomenon of communal-apartment life — seemingly unremarkable at first glance — and employs text as an autonomous element of the work, since our entire existence is saturated with 'instructional texts': manuals, directives, slogans. Alongside paintings, Kabakov's body of work includes his celebrated albums, which draw the viewer into deep immersion through a constant shift of 'frame' and the invitation to turn the pages oneself. Total installations of various interior spaces are another of his instruments, one that investigates 'the repressive, oppressive character of spaces: apartments, schools, hospitals.'
The work by Kabakov — Answers of the Experimental Group — is among the earliest examples of Russian Conceptualism. The painting bears none of the conventional hallmarks of visual art: on a rectangular canvas, a series of quotations are inscribed, stripped of their context. Together they accumulate into a stream of phrases that follow no discernible logic. It is a pure instance of Conceptualism reduced to text alone.
Fictional characters appeared frequently in Kabakov's work — composite figures of the Soviet person living in a communal apartment. Among the best known is Primakov, the subject of the series Primakov Who Lives in the Wardrobe, which traces the life of an eccentric who has taken up residence inside a wardrobe. One of the paintings in the series may call to mind the famous Black Square. What sets it apart is the inscription 'In the wardrobe' in the far right corner, which answers the implied question: 'What is depicted here?'
Kabakov's series featuring various everyday objects from the 1960s–80s is an example of Conceptualism applied to domestic things. A mug, a ladle, a grater — these objects are captured not only on canvas but within text. 'Whose fly is this?' a voice asks in the left-hand corner of the painting. From the answer in the opposite corner, one learns that it belongs to a certain Olga Leshko. The question 'Whose is this?' was entirely familiar to any Soviet citizen living in a communal apartment — and therein lies the irony.
'All the objects that surround us are, in my view, "bad" in precisely a "sculptural" sense. They only partly resemble and function as cups, television sets, chairs, trams, houses and so on; for the most part they belong to that eyeless, wordless and formless "nothingness" — that chaos which permeates and saturates everything around us. This "nothingness" is many times denser, more cohesive, more active and more significant than whatever tries to emerge from it or stand in opposition to it. It, this "nothingness," laughs at every object, rightly perceiving in each one its own pettiness, as well as the contingency and transience of these "objects" — however solid as iron or vast as cities they may be.' — Ilya Kabakov
Viktor Pivovarov explored the theme of solitude in his work. His celebrated series Projects for a Lonely Person invites us to analyse the nature of loneliness and break it down into its simplest components. He describes this profoundly complex condition in an impartial language and renders it through the typeface found on fire-safety boards — as a set of clear rules and operating instructions.
Another representative of the Moscow Conceptualists is Erik Bulatov. Through his works he examined the conditioned nature of Soviet reality — a world saturated with slogans and operating instructions at every turn. It is a visualisation of the idea that you are never alone with your thoughts; Big Brother is always somewhere nearby. In his work Glory to the CPSU, for instance, we see the sky yet cannot reach it — the slogan stands in the way. Bulatov himself insists that he was not trying to create politicised irony. By working across different planes — textual and landscape — he wanted to depict the conflict between word and pictorial space, and to produce a painting that reflected its time.
The text used in his paintings was often associated with a specific historical period — 'Welcome', 'Do not lean', 'Danger' — phrases that could be encountered every day on notices, posters and warning signs in the 1970s. But with the collapse of the USSR, the interplay between text and image took on a different kind of polemic. In his 2001 work Freedom Is Freedom II, he shows how flimsy the false promises of politicians can be, set against the raw sensation of the word 'Freedom' itself, which draws the eye upward into an infinite sky.
Ilya Chuikov was one of the few nonconformists who held membership in the Union of Artists. But it did not last long: at a certain point he could no longer withstand the pressure of the system. Chuikov recalled:
The process was a painful one. At some point everything I was making suddenly became deeply repellent to me. I simply destroyed many of the works. Some survived, but I don't show them. I actually feel more kindly towards my student pieces now — they are more honest. But in those other works there was something affected that irritated me enormously. I broke from it sharply and completely, and that break became my way out into freedom.
Chuikov was convinced that paint should come straight from the tin and colour should be elementary. Like many Conceptualists, he was drawn to text, and his 1976 series Far and Near contains nothing but text. These are diary-like notes in which paintings were described in inks of different colours: red for 'the near' and blue for 'the far'. Everyday situations, still lifes or simply unknown figures might appear among them.
Other art forms were also developing rapidly: happenings, performances, actions and environments. A happening is an event or occurrence initiated by the artist but not controlled by them; bystanders may be drawn into the activity. A performance, by contrast with a happening, unfolds according to a set scenario and likewise involves action on the part of the artist or a group of people. An environment is not always easy to define, because its central idea lies in the merging of the individual with the surroundings.
It is worth recalling Andrei Monastyrsky — one of the central figures of Moscow Conceptualism and the founder of the group Collective Actions. Their chosen mode of expression was performances and the documentation of events, which itself formed part of the work. Records of these events survive in several volumes of Trips Out of Town. Amusingly, the actions themselves could pass with nothing happening at all. They were announced, invitations were sent out, and the process of anticipation was what filled the event with meaning. One example is the action Appearance. On one side of Izmailovsky Field stood the audience. Two figures approached from the opposite side and handed them a stamped document confirming that they had been present at the event.
In the late 1970s the group staged another action — Slogan. Somewhere in the forest, a banner in the style of May Day posters was stretched between the trees, bearing the inscription:I have no complaints and I like everything, despite the fact that I have never been here before and know nothing about this place. The action concluded a year later, when another banner appeared in the same spot, but with a different inscription: 'Strange, why did I lie to myself that I had never been here and knew nothing of these places — for in truth it is the same here as everywhere else, only you feel it more keenly and understand it even less.' As with other performances, the work consisted not only of the action itself but also of a report with photographs and text. This again fits the definition of conceptualism as a means of dismantling art into its component parts.
Sots Art
Some artists could not remain indifferent to the political agenda of the Soviet Union. This gave rise to Sots Art — an invention of artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid. Sots Art is the twin brother of Pop Art, transposed into Soviet reality. Where Pop Art was a reaction to the overproduction of goods, services and culture, Sots Art was a reaction to relentless propaganda and slogans: 'The victory of communism is inevitable!', 'Glory to the CPSU', 'We exceed the plan!' and so on. Unlike conceptualism, the new movement's art engaged in direct irony at the expense of Soviet power.
The story of Sots Art's origins has the quality of a cheerful anecdote. Komar and Melamid were fulfilling a commission — painting the interiors of a Pioneer camp. The work took place in winter, when the buildings were unheated and the artists had to warm themselves with alcohol. They discussed how ashamed they were to have stooped to such hypocrisy for money. But at a certain moment, both began to wonder: what if one imagined a person who would produce this kind of work entirely sincerely? And so the Socialist Realist artist 'Komar and Melamid' was born.
They began signing Soviet slogans — 'Glory to Labour!' and 'Forward to the Victory of Communism!' — with this name. They created mosaics in the Soviet style featuring their own self-portraits. Pioneers, too, were depicted with their own faces, while the images of heroes of labour were modelled on their relatives and close friends. The ultimate revelation was the painting The Origin of Socialist Realism, which depicts Stalin alongside a semi-naked muse. They also staged actions and performances — among them Unleavened Patties from the newspaper Pravda, in which scraps of wastepaper were fashioned into cutlets, fried, and offered to viewers to 'partake of spiritual nourishment'.
The 1980s: Key Ideas and Names
In the early 1980s, many artists emigrated from the country. Those who remained attempted to build a constructive dialogue with the authorities, and artists from Leningrad established the Fellowship of Experimental Exhibitions for this purpose. Over the following decade, the association organised numerous shows in which more than 500 representatives of unofficial art took part.
A new generation of artists emerged, their collective image crystallised in the figure of the boy Bananan from the film Assa: freedom-loving, carefree, unconcerned with tomorrow. The film became a symbol of the nonconformist mood among Soviet youth in the late 1980s. The young musicians of a Yalta hotel are portrayed as creative rebels unwilling to live in accordance with the system. This fresh, energetic image of the artist-slacker stands in sharp contrast to the film's characters of the old Soviet mould, who exist by prescribed rules and official instruction.
The film was made in part by nonconformist artists: the lead role is played by Sergey Bugayev-Afrika of the Leningrad group New Artists. Other members of the group also appeared in it: Georgy Guryanov and Viktor Tsoi, whose song — Peremen (Changes) — provides the film's symbolically resonant closing note.
For artists of this kind, creative work is an endless celebration and source of joy, not a serious re-examination of existence. In their work they have no wish to dwell on the bleakness of reality. They approach art as a means of escape from it.
It was in the 1980s that unofficial art became synonymous with youth culture — thanks in no small part to Timur Novikov, the leader of the New Artists group. Through music and art, the collective attracted a new generation with its audacity and fearlessness in the face of authority, because, in their view, there was no longer anything to fear. Novikov is best known for his so-called "rags" — coloured flags adorned with appliqué and drawings. Among these, the Horizons series is the most recognisable: minimalist textile collages reduced to a division of the work into two planes, converging on a single point — a simple sign at the centre.
"It's enough to do everything at 4%: do more and you'll burn out; do less and nothing will happen at all." — Timur Novikov.
The general freshness and lightness of the new wave in art is equally apparent in the work of other art groups. The Leningrad collective Mitki, for instance, analysed everyday Soviet life much as the Conceptualists did, yet their works are more reminiscent of children's drawings — just as sincere and naïve. The Moscow group Mukhomory (Toadstools) poked fun not only at life in the USSR but at the surrounding reality in general — a reality that included commuters on minibuses, elderly people, schoolchildren, and other art groups that had themselves become part of the mundane.
Conceptualism never lost its relevance, and young artists continued to find their footing within it. The 1980s saw the emergence of "total" installations — large-scale works that fill an entire space in accordance with the artist's concept. The term was coined by Ilya Kabakov together with his wife Emilia; from 1989 onwards they worked in co-authorship. They applied the word "total" to the installations of artist Irina Nakhova — her Rooms series, which she staged in her own apartment. In these works, Nakhova employed painterly techniques within a three-dimensional perspective.
Around the same time, Kabakov produced his own installations — conceptual in the truest sense. The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment, for example, describes precisely what the viewer encounters: an untidy room cluttered with knick-knacks and junk, a homemade catapult at its centre, and directly above it a hole in the ceiling — evidence that the man did indeed fly into space.
By the late 1980s the Iron Curtain had ceased to be a barrier, and Europe began to take a growing interest in Soviet art. Ilya Kabakov, Ivan Chuikov, Erik Bulatov, and many other Moscow Conceptualists emigrated, having recognised the demand for their work abroad. The era came to a close with a Sotheby's auction at which works by underground artists sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The 1990s: a legacy
In the new state, art was finally free. A new generation came to replace the artists who had emigrated — one that found itself with the opportunity to shape the present. The forms remained the same: painting, performance, actions. Only they grew ever more dangerous and radical.
For instance, the art collective ETI had no qualms about spelling out a three-letter obscenity with their bodies on Red Square. The artist Anatoly Osmolovsky staged the action 'Mayakovsky–Osmolovsky' and climbed onto the shoulder of a six-metre statue of the poet. One of the most radical artists, Oleg Kulik, slaughtered a pig inside a gallery and then handed out fresh meat to visitors — an action he sarcastically titled 'Piglet Gives Out Gifts.' He is better known, however, as the 'man-dog,' owing to a series of performances in which he acted as a four-legged animal: he guarded the entrance to an exhibition and lunged at anyone trying to enter, blocked traffic, sat in a cage and attacked passers-by. The artist Avdei Ter-Oganyan went even further, setting his sights on religion: he staged an action in which he destroyed mass-produced Russian Orthodox Church icons with an axe — an act for which he was ultimately deported from the country.
The goal of art in this period was to attract attention, to enter history. Artists had no fear of the press or criticism — these were simply another means of making oneself heard in a new world, free from prejudice and full of promise.
Art became intertwined with politics, which turned into yet another tool for expressing ideas. The artist Oleg Kulik seriously set about founding a Party of Animals and attempted to register it for elections — a deliberately absurd act that was itself a work of art. The group Non-Governmental Supervisory Commission hung a banner reading 'Against All!' directly on Lenin's Mausoleum. There would be many more such actions at the intersection of politics and art in the years that followed.
Interesting facts:
- The film Assa featured real objects made by the Moscow art group Gnezdo — Communication tube and Iron curtain
- A number of other outstanding artists also worked within Sots Art, each with a distinctive style of their own. Alexander Kosolapov, for example, poked fun at Socialist Realism by blending Soviet and American culture: a single canvas might set Lenin alongside the logos of Coca-Cola, McDonald's or Marlboro, while the sculpture Worker and Kolkhoz Woman took on the likenesses of Mickey and Minnie Mouse.
- Alongside Moscow and Leningrad, an unofficial art scene was also flourishing in Odessa. It was there that one of the first unsanctioned exhibitions took place — later nicknamed the 'Fence Show': artists Valentin Khrushch and Stanislav Sychev hung their paintings on the fence of the Odessa Opera Theatre.
- Many informal artists may be familiar to us from the illustrations of magazines and books. Viktor Pivovarov, for instance, designed covers for the children's magazine Vesyolye Kartinki, while Ilya Kabakov was well known for his illustrations in Murzilka.
- The exhibition '30 Years of MOSKh,' which Nikita Khrushchev famously denounced, proved an excellent PR campaign for unofficial artists. Their work attracted the interest of foreign diplomats, which meant they could sell their paintings on the black market — something that was simply not available to members of the Union of Artists.
Also read the biographies of El Lissitzky and Wassily Kandinsky.
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