The Avant-Gardists: Artists in Revolt in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union 1917-1935 [Hardcover]

October 1917. The Russian Revolution wipes the old tsarist empire off the map. Marc Chagall, Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Lyubov Popova, Alexander Rodchenko, Olga Rozanova, Vladimir Tatlin, and other avant-garde artists participate in the revolutionary struggle, transforming inner cities with their progressive murals, posters, installations, and performances. The new political leaders soon want nothing to do with these radical artists. While their reputation is growing in Europe, they experience increasing pressure in the Soviet Union.A fascinating narrative biography of the Russian avant-garde art movement that transformed the modern world, tracing the lives and activities of the key protagonists as they set about a revolution in art. A deep dive into the initially symbiotic but ultimately violently repressive relationship between early 20th-century Russia's groundbreaking avant-garde artists and the dogmatic revolutionaries behind the 1917 Soviet revolution& Deeply sourced and well-illustrated. An overwhelming reading experience. Scheijen is an inspired writer . . . In cutting through the retrospective romance that has clouded so many accounts of those years, Scheijen makes it more clear than ever before that the avant-garde's relationship with Bolshevism was at best shaky long before Stalin's program of annihilation was fully underway. The story Scheijen tells is full of frustrations, dashed hopes, and disasters. From philosophical and political subversion to violent repression, incarcerations, and torture in the 1930s under Stalin, events are narrated through artists' personal memories. Excerpts from diaries and correspondence reveal the extent of the avant-garde's energy and determination to survive a totalitarian regime, civil war, hunger, and terror. Written in lively prose and richly illustrated, Scheijen's study serves as a compelling portrait of this dynamic era and an intellectual-artistic biography of the creators who defined it . . .?