Alexandra Salienko
Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia
In October 1917 the Russian art was in a phase of crisis. It was obvious both for the art critics and the artists. “In the end of the war it was necessary to mention art crisis”, Efros wrote. The First World War did not become an impulse for the renewal of the Russian art with its Renaissance at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries and in the period of avant-garde. N. Punin wrote: “We do not know when the revolution has begun: the war had not an end”. The Revolution “finished” in the period of the Civil War in 1921. 1917 was a turning point in the evolution of the Russian art undergoing the reform of artistic education, emigration of the Russian artists, formation of the Soviet culture and birth of new mass audience.
After the Revolution an artist was under the hardest conditions among other representatives of the creative professions.
In 1924 A. Lunacharsky wrote: “Russian sculpture is in the greatest decline. The painting still exists, but on its last legs. The best artists strive overseas. Only orders from abroad can feed them. The state does not buy anything. The State art purchase fund is destroyed. May be the graphic designers have a better situation due to the illustrated editions, but our wonderful graphic is going through difficulties and conceptual disorder”. Artists and art historians proposed to “put a question point-blank: is an easel painting necessary in the USSR?”.
In the 1920s the art market was in a difficult situation, collecting was complicated and collector’s destiny vague. How did the Soviet art change in the next few decades? Could the Soviet art come to live again during the 20th century? What is “renaissance” in this context? The report based on archival materials and periodicals makes the new stresses in the artistic life of the 1920s and 1930s and about the Soviet art in general.