New Soviet Publications on Art

Abstract

During the last 15 years or so, Western historians, dealers and collectors have become increasingly interested in Russian art of all periods, especially in Russian painting of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This has prompted the publication of many books and articles, it has led to the implementation of specialist auctions, and it has given rise to important exhibitions in Europe and the U.S. such as Stage Designs and the Russian Avant-Garde (Lincoln Center, New York and elsewhere, 1976, catalog issued), Russian and Soviet Painting (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1977, catalog issued), The Art of Russia 1800-1850 (University of Minnesota, 1978 and elsewhere, catalog issued), and Russian Art of the Avant-Garde 1910-1930 (planned by Los Angeles County Museum for 1980). Our academic and commercial discovery of Russian art is, of course, parallelled by the continued research and appraisal undertaken by our Soviet colleagues, in the form both of exhibitions and of publications. In fact, even a fleeting examination of such cultural manifestations indicates that, apparently, at least, a distinct adjustment of criteria in the Soviet understanding and appreciation of artists and artistic ideas is now underway; i.e., of artists and ideas that, until recently, were often relegated to the dubious status of formalist and bourgeois. This shift in Soviet criteria is especially evident today, for it is occurring after a long and tedious period of stagnation in Soviet art history, a period which, as a matter of fact, is now the target of outspoken criticism by art and architecture historians in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev and elsewhere. The new wave of Soviet art criticism represented by individuals such as Khan-Magomedov, Kostin, Kovtun, Rakitin, Sarab'ianov, Zhadova et ial., attempts to renounce the strictures of the Stalinist esthetic and to refurbish the fine traditions of art criticism that evolved just before and after 1917, represented by Efros, Gollerbakh, Punin, Tarabukin, Ternovets, et al. Indeed, the very fact that anthologies of critical essays by Punin and Ternovets have just appeared is symptomatic of the new awareness of earlier critical systems.' Not surprisingly, there-