The Easel

Archives: Mario Naves

8th October 2024

“The Avant-Gardists; Artists in Revolt in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union 1917-1935”

When the Romanovs fell, Russia’s avant garde artists were filled with “a giddy sense of possibility”. They had all spent time in Paris. Yet Russia, barely started on its industralisation, was not so responsive to Parisian theories of combining life and art. In any case, the Bolsheviks had other plans for Russian society. Combining the petty rivalries amongst its “brilliant, talented crackpots” with their “almost unutterable naivete “, the artistic revolt was short lived and officially extinguished in 1932.