Socialist Realisms. Soviet Painting 1920-1970 is perhaps the best exhibition on this movement that takes place outside Russia. Will take place between October 11th and January 8th, 2012 at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome.
The exhibition is a chronology of the development of Soviet painting. Since its start, still during the Russian Civil War to the Brezhnev era, Socialist Realisms is a journey into one of the cultural movements that caused more impact in the twentieth century.
Boris Kustodiev 'The Bolshevik' (1920), The Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
Socialist realism was an instrument of Soviet power, but their artistic quality is indisputable. It was both an alternative to contemporary art and a break with the past to create a new art while looking in the mirror of classic arts.
The exhibition occupies seven galleries that trace the history of a style with greater depth and variety of what was wanted to see at times. A key movement to understand art and the twentieth century.
A cura di Matthew Bown, Evgenija Petrova, Zelfira Tregulova
11 ottobre 2011 - 8 gennaio 2012
http://www.palazzoesposizioni.it/MediaCenter/FE/CategoriaMedia.aspx?idc=550&explicit=SI
Next year's annual conference of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies, held in Cambridge from Saturday 31st March-Monday 2nd April 2012, will offer postgraduate students in the humanities and the social sciences related to the former Soviet Union and the countries of Eastern Europe the opportunity to present posters on their research project to an international audience of more than 300 scholars in the field.
The poster will be displayed throughout the conference and can also be uploaded to the BASEES website afterwards. Don't miss this chance to chat with scholars about your research in a friendly and informal atmosphere, get early feedback on your work, make helpful contacts and get tips on archival sources.
If you are interested in presenting a poster, please contact the BASEES postgraduate
representative, Dr Matthias Neumann on m.neumann@uea.ac.uk or the postgraduate
students' representative, Andy Willimott on a.willimott@uea.ac.uk.
Call for Postgraduate Posters BASEES Annual Conference, Fitzwilliam College,
Cambridge, 2012:
http://www.basees.org.uk/conference.shtml
Professor Sarah Wilson at the Courtauld Institute of Art has contributed an essay to the new Soviet painting catalogue for the Palazzo della Esposizioni in Rome which opens this week.
The history of the painting of Socialist Realism tells the story of an extraordinary movement in 20th century art. The Soviet state supported realist painting in a manner unequalled anywhere in the world, promoting its development by "recruiting" thousands of talented artists from all over its immense multi-ethnic empire. Socialist Realism extolled the social role of art and the superiority of content over form; it encouraged the rediscovery of the practice of traditional crafts and it dipped into both classical and modern European art, using it as a kind of reservoir of stylistic and iconographic motifs from which artists might draw inspiration. In 20th century history it represented the only complete alternative to the urgent drive to sweep away the past that was such a feature of the modernist movement.
Socialist Realisms: Soviet Painting 1920-1970 is the most complete retrospective of this movement ever organized outside Russia. The exhibition tracks the development of Socialist Realism painting from the dying throes of the Civil War to the start of the Brezhnev era, halting as the seventies begin because after that date the trends in official Soviet art started to branch off into different and inconsistent directions, which were to lead in the end to the definitive demise of the cultural domination exercised by Socialist Realism.
The exhibition, arranged in chronological order, occupies all seven galleries in the Palazzo delle Esposizioni. Each gallery explores a multitude of issues, themes and formal approaches to art in each period. In highlighting the broad variety of solutions with which artists responded to the challenge of Socialist Realism, not only over time but also simultaneously within each individual time period, the exhibition sets out to overturn and thus to disprove the received wisdom that sees Socialist Realism as a monolithic art form built around a single artistic vocabulary.
Curated by Matthew Bown, Evgenija Petrova and Zalfira Tregulova
11 October 2011 - 8 January 2012
