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 10^th 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