THE GREAT EXPERIMENT: RUSSIAN ART 1863-1922

Camilla Gray

10 x 11 hardcover book with 327 pages, 257 plates, including 24 tipped-in color plates. The landmark study of Russian avant-garde art up to 1922, including painting, collage, Constructivist sculpture, photography, photocollage and architecture, as well as ceramic, fabric, dress and theater design. The standard reference on the subject, often reprinted but never recreated with the sumptious production values of the first edition: text letterpressed on uncoated sheets, black and white artwork on semi-glossy signatures and 24 tipped-in color plates.

Exploration of the one place and time in the 20th century (except, briefly, for the linkage of Italian Fascism and Futurism) when radical art actually did become the house style of a revolution.

Includes work by and artist biographies of David Burliuk, Natalia Goncharova, Wassily Kandinsky, Mikhail Larionov, El Lissitzky, Kasimir Malevich, Liubov Popova, Alexandr Rodchenko, Olga Rosanova, Varvara Stepanova, Vladimir Tatlin and Alexandr Vesnin.

Artists also include Konstantin Melnikov, Ilya Golossov, Nathan Altman, Lev Bruni, Naum Gabo, Anton Pevsner, Marc Chagall, Alexandr Exter, Ivan Puni, Ivan Kliun, Pavel Filonov, Vladimir Burliuk, Ilya Mashkov and Pyotr Konchalovsky.

Contents

• Introduction
• CHAPTER ONE 1860's-90's. The 'Wanderers' and the birth of a school of nationalist art. Mamontov's circle. Repin, Surikov and Levitan. The 'social', 'historical' and 'landscape' schools. Vrubel, the bridge between the old and the new traditions.
• CHAPTER TWO 1890-1905. 'World of Art': the 'Art Nouveau' movement in Russia. The society. The exhibiting organization. The magazine. Creative period. Benois, Bakst and Diaghilev. Borissov-Mussatov and the Symbolist movement.
• CHAPTER THREE 1905-10. The Burgeoning. Consequences of the 'World of Art' movement. The Petersburg and Moscow . The'Blue Rose'. Groups and exhibitions. 'Union of Russian artists'. The 'Golden Fleece'--magazine, group and exhibitions. The Shchukin and Morosov collections. Goncharova and Larionov emerge as leaders of the Primitivist-Futurist movement.
• CHAPTER FOUR 1909-11. Larionov and Goncharova and the Burliuk brothers. The Moscow Primitivist movement. Futurism in Russia. Major exhibitions and new personalities. The Foundation of the 'Union of Youth' and 'Knave of Diamonds' societies.
• CHAPTER FIVE 1912-14. Rayonnism. Cubo-Futurism Suprematism. Constructivism in its initial stages.
• CHAPTER SIX 1914-17. War breaks out. The Cubo-Futurist movement at its height. The War-time in Russia during the initial period of isolation up to the Revolution. New personalities. New movements.
• CHAPTER SEVEN 1917-21. Revolution. The dictatorship of the 'Leftists'. Social activities. Artistic activities. Constructivism.
• CHAPTER EIGHT 1921-22. The Proletcult. Laboratory art and 'the Object' ideology. Constructivism. NEP and the 'Leftists'. Suprematism as a basis of design. Constructivism in design and the theatre. The Russian exhibition, Berlin, 1922. Suprematism and Constructivism in the Bauhaus. The international style.
• Artists' Statements
• Biographies of the Artists
• Selected Bibliography
• Text References
• List of Works Reproduced
• Index

"Since the publication in 1962 of Camilla Gray's pioneering study of the Russian avant-garde, The Great Experiment: Russian Art 1863-1922, over 130 books and catalogues on the subject have appeared in English, French, German, Italian and Japanese. And since the comprehensive exhibition "Paris-Moscow, 1900-1930" organized by the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1979, and then hosted by the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow two years later as "Moscow-Paris, 1900-1930," there have been over 100 exhibitions devoted to the Russian avantgarde in public and private venues throughout the U.S., Europe, the Soviet Union and Japan.

"These statistics alone indicate that the Russian avant-garde -- the mosaic of personalities and events that transformed the face of Russian art, literature and music in the 1910s and '20s -- has already received wide coverage. True, a decade or so ago, the subject was still fraught with the difficulties of territorial access and political bias, but the early and mid '80s witnessed the general recognition in the Soviet Union of the avant-garde as a valuable component of the Russian cultural heritage, and the result was a series of major exhibitions in Europe and Japan that drew substantially on Soviet holdings." [From John E. Bowlt¹s review of the Guggenheim's The Great Utopia: The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde, 1915-1932: Art in America, May, 1993 ]

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