The Avant Garde In Russia 1910 1930

Covering painting, sculpture, prints, drawings, books, photographs, costumes, and examples of industrial architectural, and theatrical design, it is "a significant addition to the small number of books on the Russian avant-garde. It contains 19 authoritative and enlightening essays; short sections (good for reference) on each artist ... with biographies, bibliographies; a detailed chronology of the period; and a general bibliography. The whole text is extremely useful. The works themselves ... are astonishingly relevant to the 1980s." - Library Journal.

A Choice "Outstanding Academic Book."

Life in the modernist era not only moved, it sped. As automobiles, airplanes, and high-speed industrial machinery proliferated at the turn of the twentieth century, a fascination with speed influenced artists—from Moscow to Manhattan—working in a variety of media. Russian avant-garde literary, visual, and cinematic artists were among those striving to elevate the ordinary physical concept of speed into a source of inspiration and generate new possibilities for everyday existence. Although modernism arrived somewhat late in Russia, the increased tempo of life at the start of the twentieth century provided Russia’s avant-garde artists with an infusion of creative dynamism and crucial momentum for revolutionary experimentation. In Fast Forward Tim Harte presents a detailed examination of the images and concepts of speed that permeated Russian modernist poetry, visual arts, and cinema. His study illustrates how a wide variety of experimental artistic tendencies of the day—such as “rayism” in poetry and painting, the effort to create a “transrational” language (zaum’) in verse, and movements seemingly as divergent as neo-primitivism and constructivism—all relied on notions of speed or dynamism to create at least part of their effects. Fast Forward reveals how the Russian avant-garde’s race to establish a new artistic and social reality over a twenty-year span reflected an ambitious metaphysical vision that corresponded closely to the nation’s rapidly changing social parameters. The embrace of speed after the 1917 Revolution, however, paradoxically hastened the movement’s demise. By the late 1920s, under a variety of historical pressures, avant-garde artistic forms morphed into those more compatible with the political agenda of the Russian state. Experimentation became politically suspect and abstractionism gave way to orthodox realism, ultimately ushering in the socialist realism and aesthetic conformism of the Stalin years.

In the midst of the turbulent social and political conditions of the early twentieth century, progressive artists in Russia explored aesthetic and formal directions that challenged traditional art and supported the new social order begun in 1917. Avant-garde artists worked in Russia within a singular political context, and they also shared important contacts and affinities with contemporaneous artists in the West. Artists plumbed technology as source and subject matter for art, explored new techniques and formal vocabularies, and investigated utilitarian and agit-prop applications of modern design. Contributors to this volume examine these developments in art, architecture, and design in relation to literature, philosophy, and politics. They explore in depth some of the complex associations between the avant-garde in Russia and in the West for an international perspective on the study of modern art during this period.

From pre-war years in Paris to the end of the 1920s in Kyiv, Ukrainians or artists from Ukraine produced some of the world's greatest avant-garde art and made major contributions to painting, sculpture, theatre, and film-making. This book tells their story and explores the roots of their inspiration.