ARTH 266
Twentieth-Century Russian Art and the Birth of Abstraction
Last Offered Spring 2007
Division I
Cross-listed
This course is not offered in the current catalog

Such revolutionary artistic movements as Cubo-Futurism, Suprematism, and Constructivism profoundly influenced the development of twentieth-century art throughout the Western world–just as the 1917 Russian Revolution upset the world’s political balance. This course will investigate Russian art within a cultural framework and explore the relationship between artistic production and politics. We will begin with a brief overview of important developments in Russian art that prefigured the twentieth-century artistic revolution: the introduction of icons from Byzantium, the founding of St. Petersburg and the rise of Western-style portraiture, and the fin-de-siècle movements that united painting with music and ballet. However, the focus of the course will be 1910-1930, when radical innovation was the order of the day and revolutionary ideas sparked entirely new conceptions of art. We will then look at the Socialist Realist style of the Stalin era, Soviet dissident art and Moscow conceptualism, ending the semester with an exploration of current trends in post-Soviet Russian art.