Екатеринодарские Высшие государственные свободные художественные мастерские в 1920–1922 гг.

Abstract

Referring to archival documents, the author attempts to make the first ever reconstruction of the history of the first higher school of art in Kuban — Yekaterinodar (Kuban) Free Higher State Art Workshops, as part of a national project to create a network of art schools of a new type. Based on the discovered and carefully analyzed sources, the author reveals the essence of this experiment, traces the stages of its development, and uncovers its origins, arguing that it did not arise as a wave of “revolutionary romanticism”, but rather resulted from the objective requirements of the new era, that had been emerging and forming in the late 19 th — early 20 th centuries. Along with the consistent presentation of the history of the reform of the workshops, the article shows a number of its striking regional features, such as a successful combination of continuity of pre-revolutionary schools traditions with active adoption of innovative principles of the Free State Art Workshops, as well as the complete absence of political motives, ideas and conflicts in the school reform, quite untypical of the period of the Civil War in Russia. One of the main purposes of the author is to try and prove that the period of the Free State Art Workshops gave rise to the modern state system of art education, whose successor today is the Krasnodar Art College. The author specifically emphasizes the contribution of Peter Stepanovich Krasnov to the transformation of the Kuban art school into free workshops, as he was head of the school as of its establishment in 1911 and did a lot not only for its conservation, but also for its consistent and continuous state of the art development, regardless of the political and ideological changes in the country.