“We Were Born to Make Fairytales Come True”: Reinterpreting Political Texts in Unofficial Soviet Art

Abstract

Written texts became an especially significant element of unofficial pictorial art during the late Soviet period. Beginning in the early 1970s and continuing through the end of the Soviet Union, such painted words played a transformative role on the canvases of unofficial Russian artists. The resulting contrast between textual and visual art helped make conceptualism—the most important Russian art movement of the end of the twentieth century—an unexpectedly influential branch of unofficial Soviet art. In the case of Russian conceptualism, such artistic texts were often borrowed from the world of politics in a subtle re-evaluation of both the pictorial art that they supplanted and the political system in which they arose. This article investigates the various ways in which painted, printed, and handwritten political texts appear on the canvases of unofficial artists in the late Soviet period, 1972–1992. Art played a significant role as an ideological weapon in both the Soviet Union and the West. A better sense of the manner in which this war of words was waged in unofficial art expands our understanding of the end of the Soviet system.