The Russian Avant-Garde Rising in ‘A Revolutionary Impulse’

Roberta Smith | The New York Times | 8th December 2016

Russia had a great artistic flowering in the last decades of Tsarist rule. The Bolsheviks’ initially were tolerant.  Artists such as Tatlin and Rodchenko responded with Constructivism – art aimed at utopian social change. This movement had a sustained influence in the West but Bolshevik tolerance soon waned. By 1935 Stalin decreed Constructivism gone and social realism became the only game in town. More images are here.