Soviet Art & Avant-Garde Artists

After 1917, the political revolution welcomed the support of these avant-garde groups for the simple reason that the new government found them to be, "the only section of the artistic and cultural world willing to cooperate with it." Lenin was never enthusiastic about the art of the avant-garde, preferring nineteenth-century realism himself. But the artists were fervent supporters of the Revolution and possessed a deep-seated belief that their art could help change the face of the world. The position of the avant-garde regarding changes in society was established as early as 1905 when the group Proletcult (Organization for a Proletarian Culture) was organized by a number of artists. The group's theorist, A. Malinovsky (who called himself Bogdanov), explained the artists' views about how art rel

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ory was aided by the artist brothers Naum Gabo and Anton Pevsner. After extensive disputes with Rodchenko and Tatlin, the brothers had left the USSR in the early 1920s. It was not, however, until Gabo's 1946 arrival in the United States that he began the campaign to eradicate the memory of the true founders of Constructivism and put himself in their place. Gabo himself had made the true state of affairs in the USSR fairly clear. In an article he wrote for an obscure English journal in 1942, Gabo said that replacing Constructivism with Socialist Realism, while unfortunate, might "be an inevitable and, to a certain extent, understandable phase of transition" as the "abstract movement is still in the process of growth and has not yet found its full application in the life of the masses." For a man who later claimed that the Soviets had destroyed the avant-garde, he had remained remarkably sympathetic to the revolution even after twenty years' absence. The truth of the brothers' conflict with the other Soviet artists was that Gabo's and Pevsner's belief in a "pure art": any art created by autonomous artists was at odds with the Constructivist critique of pure art's "purposelessness and autonomy." There was, as most of the
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Proletarian Culture, USSR Constructivists, Aleksander Brik, Gabo's Pevsner's, Vladimir Tatlin, Revolutionary Bodine, Gan Constructivists', Socialist Realism, Soviet Union, Communist Party, revolution 1917, pure art art, avant-garde artists, political revolution, -- art, spirit proletariat, pure art, realist painters, politically revolutionary, art art, life proletariat,
Approximate Word count = 1637
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)