Author Description

From Stalin's demise to Gorbachev s glasnost, this is the definitive survey of underground Soviet art in the post-war era. The Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection at Rutgers University's Zimmerli Art Museum is the largest collection of Soviet nonconformist art in existence. Comprising more than 25,000 works by over 900 artists, it documents the activities of underground artists from Moscow and Leningrad, as well as from the former Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan between the years 1956-1987. This volume features the most outstanding of these works in stunning color and black-and-white reproductions. Essays by leading scholars and statements and interviews with artists such as Ilya Kabakov, the Gerlovins, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, who played a major role in this important movement, offer a general critical appraisal and history of the movement and highlight certain distinctive aspects such as performance and experimental art. The book also looks at this movement through a Western lens, comparing and contrasting the works with those of the Conceptualists in the US and the rest of the Free World.