“While Dust is Settling”: The Perception of Exhibitions of Soviet Émigré Painters in the American Press between the 1970s and 1980s

Abstract

This article considers the perception of the main group and personal exhibitions of Soviet third-wave emigre artists by the American press between the 1970s and 1980s. It analyses reviews in periodicals, which recorded the amplitude of growth and decline of interest in exhibitions of USSR artists, and correlates the results with the events of the cultural life of the Cold War period. The author refers to articles in American specialised magazines ( Art in America, ARTnews, Artforum, October , etc.) and daily newspapers ( The New York Times, Newsweek , etc.) as well as in Russian emigre publications in circulation in New York ( Novoe Russkoe Slovo , Tretia Volna, A–Ya , etc.). The majority of the sources come from the archive of L. P. Talochkin (1936–2002), a collector of Soviet unofficial art of the 1960s–1990s (now the archive is kept in the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art). The author notes that in the 1970s, the American press was mostly interested in the political hype around unofficial artists, as well as their status as “artists in exile”, whereas in the 1980s, the emphasis shifted towards the analysis of the artistic value of the works. Special attention is paid to the gradual introduction of the idea of the genetic connection of Soviet unofficial art with the Russian historical avant-garde, which legitimises the fact that American critics were becoming aware of it. The term “second avant-garde” in relation to non-conformism first began to be used by the artist and researcher M. Grobman (Jerusalem) in the 1970s, M. Tupitsyn and D. Bowlt (New York) emphasised in their publications the connection of some third-wave emigre artists with the Russian historical avant-garde in the 1980s. Similar analogies were often used by the American daily press, but the terms themselves (“second avant-garde”, “neo-avant-garde”) in relation to post-war unofficial art were not widely used in professional art history literature, remaining in the cultural situation of the period under consideration.