Creative Resilience and Adaptation: Artistic Endeavors from the Empire's Fall to the Stalinist Era

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

The panel investigates the artistic and curatorial practices within the constrained cultural landscape of the former Russian Empire and the Soviet Union from the late 1910s to the early 1940s. It focuses on the tension between the creative community’s quest for autonomy and the numerous barriers to such autonomy, from the Stalinist regime’s oppression and censorship and the limitations imposed by ostensibly non-political historical events to the stereotypes of the era and recurring cognitive and artistic frameworks of artists and curators.

The panel offers new insights into the inventive strategies adopted by Soviet artists and curators to operate within and beyond boundaries, thereby contributing to an intricate dynamic of resistance, compliance, and adaptation.

The participants examine the Soviet policies related to art from a variety of perspectives: the reevaluation of art histories from the Bolshevik Revolution, the impact of Soviet governance on museum exhibition strategies in Ukraine, the role of public exhibitions by avant-garde artists–Kazimir Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin–in shaping reception and historicization of their art amidst increasing authoritarianism, and the challenges faced by pre-revolutionary avant-garde artists in adapting to the Soviet regime's expectations and the ideological constraints of the Socialist realism.

Sub Unit

• Arts I: Visual Culture, Material Culture, Applied and Fine Arts

Chair

• Molly Brunson, Yale U

Papers

• Colonial and Political Imprints on the Odesa Fine Arts Museum’s Permanent Exhibition (Late 1920s-Early 1940s) - Pavel Golubev, U of Pennsylvania

• Public Display as Historiography: Kazimir Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin’s Exhibitions in the Soviet Union, 1929-1933 - Masha Chlenova, The New School

• Pre-Revolutionary Avant-Garde Artists in Stalinist Russia: Navigating the Crisis of Artistic Innovation and Challenges of the Era - Maria Timina, Amherst College

Discussant

• Angelina L