Loading…
10 + 10
Add a Comment
Add Tags
Add More
Add to my Collection
Mark for Later
Save to a ListItem Details
Includes bibliographical references
English and Russian
Publishers Weekly
Introduction by Gordon Dee Smith, E. A. Carmean Jr., Marla Price and Graham W. J. Beal, essays by John E. Bowlt and Victor Misiano. Abrams, $39.95 * ISBN 0-8109-1668-1 ~ Ten Soviet painters and 10 American painters are shown side by side in a path-breaking joint exhibition soon to tour both countries. This catalogue with fine color reproductions is full of surprises from both sides. Highlights of the Soviet works include Vladimir Mironenko's challenging Rorschach-like image ( Ours-Yours ) intended to bridge the Cold War mindset, Leonid Purygin's primitivist fantasies riddled with religious and folk elements, Yurii Petrak's sardonic meditations on Laika, the Russian dog shot into space. Notable American pictures range from April Gornick's majestically simple landscapes to Annette Lemieux's outrageous splicings of words and images, and Rebecca Purdum's luminous vortices of color suggestive of energy fields or natural processes of birth and decay. Both Soviets and Americans display subversive humor and a fierce willingness to investigate reality through any means available--figurative, mythic, topical, conceptual. (Sept.)
Choice
This is a catalog of public art: one can be expressive, but not lyric or intimate, on a ten-foot canvas, and all the paintings from both countries are in billboard scale. Ironically, while most of the artists proclaim some form of individual expression, the overriding content is social or cultural commentary. For examples, Halley's "geometry of the real" (the geometry of a repressive technological society as opposed to the ideal spiritual form of Mondrian) or Vladimir Mironneneko's search for a geometric system of symbols for the "new Soviet civilization" present art that can be discussed in ways that one cannot readily discuss Matisse or Edward Hopper. This is art about the meaning of art or of life. It presents the self-conscious expression of two cultures on the same raft taking them, despite their wills, to the brink of the waterfall that is to crash them into the 21st century. It is accessible art, in the way that rock music is accessible and seems to cross cultures easily. There are differences, of course, among the artists, and these are often articulated clearly in their statements on the work. The book is well illustrated and is significant enough to be of use to undergraduates and graduates alike. -D. Lent, Bates College
Comments
There are no comments for this title.