In the decades of the Cold War before glasnost and perestroika, dissident Soviet artists produced a dramatic, vital body of art - work that was forbidden and secret, but that survived and flourished despite persecution. Artists risked personal safety, imprisonment, and exile in their quest for individual expression.
In opposition to the government-prescribed patriotic style of Socialist Realism, these "unofficial" artists worked in prohibited styles - abstraction, Surrealism, Expressionism, Photorealism, and Conceptualism - and depicted forbidden subject matter concerned with politics, religion, and eroticism. Until glasnost and the end of the Soviet Union, few people were familiar with the richness of this art; now the full story can be told.
During the thirty-year Cold War period, Norton Dodge, Professor Emeritus of Economics at St. Mary's College of Maryland, amassed a collection of approximately 10,000 works of art by more than 900 Soviet artists. Published in collaboration with the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, which now houses the collection, this book reproduces a selection of these remarkable works in a wide range of media including paintings, sculpture, photography, works on paper, banners, and performance art.
Among the artists represented are Grisha Bruskin, Eric Bulatov, Mikhail Chemiakin, Ilya Kabakov, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, Leonid Lamm, Lydia Masterkova, Ernst Neizvestny, Vladimir Ovchinnikov, Oscar Rabin, Evgenii Rukhin, and Oleg Tselkov.
The seventeen accompanying essays provide a broad perspective on the subject, addressing a variety of issues and themes: methods of artistic control and oppression; the relationship of the work of these dissident artists to that of their Western counterparts; the dilemmas facing "official" artists who created subversive works; and the risky activities of collectors, most notably Norton Dodge.
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