Dear colleagues,
I want to remind you about today's seminar (details below) with Ilia
Dorontchenkov, who is a visiting professor of Russian art history and
culture at Brown University this spring. Dorontchenkov received his PhD
in 1990 at the Repin Institute of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture
of the Russian Academy of Fine Arts, where he has been an associate
professor of art history since 1993. He has also taught at the European
University in St. Petersburg and at Brown in 2002-03. Dorontchenkov
comes highly recommended as both a scholar and a lecturer (by Pat
Herlihy, for one, who first met him at Brown in 2002). His seminar
today, on modern Western art and cultural politics in the early Stalin
era, will include a comparative slide presentation. If you are able to
attend, I urge you to do so. This promises to be extremely
interesting and he is looking forward to a lively discussion.
Lis Tarlow
Wednesday,
April 19, 2006
Occasional Seminar
"‘Against the
French Cult’: Modern Western Art and Cultural Politics in the Early
Stalin Era”
Ilia Dorontchenkov, Visiting Associate Professor, Department
of Slavic Languages, Brown University
1730 Cambridge Street,
1st Floor, Room #S153
12:15 - 2:00 pm
“Against
the French Cult”: Modern Western Art and
Cultural Politics in Early Stalin’s Era
In 1928
two major exhibitions
were featured in Moscow:
the first French show in post-revolutionary Russia
(with Modigliani, Chagall,
Utrillo, Max Ernst, etc.), and an exhibition dedicated to the 10th
anniversary of the Red Army, which presented to the public
Socialist
Realism long before this ideological concept was shaped. The following
year
brought
Joseph Stalin to full power and changed the life of the whole country.
Along
with other campaigns, a tough one was launched by young Marxist
radicals
against
modern French art and its influence on Soviet art. The lecture
explains
the importance of the anti-French crusade in terms of both the
post-revolutionary
development of Russian culture and the political goals of the early
Stalin
era. It also puts in one context several phenomena, including Osip
Mandelstam’s essays,
the selling of the masterpieces of Van Gogh and Degas to an American
collector,
and
Malevich’s late figurative paintings.
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Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies
Harvard University
1730 Cambridge Street, 3rd Floor, Suite 301B
Cambridge, MA 02138
Phone: 617.495.4037
Fax: 617.495.8319
http://www.daviscenter.fas.harvard.edu