Kazimir Severinovich Malevich was a Russian avant-garde artist and art theorist, whose pioneering work and writing influenced the development of abstract art in the 20th century. He was born in Kiev, modern-day Ukraine, to an ethnic Polish family. His concept of Suprematism sought to develop a form of expression that moved as far as possible from the world of natural forms (objectivity) and subject matter in order to access "the supremacy of pure feeling" and spirituality. Active primarily in Russia, Malevich was a founder of the artists collective UNOVIS and his work has been variously associated with the Russian avant-garde and the Ukrainian avant-garde, and he was a central figure in the history of modern art in Central and Eastern Europe more broadly.
Socialist realism was the official cultural doctrine of the Soviet Union that mandated an idealized representation of life under socialism in literature and the visual arts. The doctrine was first proclaimed by the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934 as approved method for Soviet cultural production in all media. In the aftermath of World War II, socialist realism was adopted by the communist states that were politically aligned with the Soviet Union. The primary official objective of socialist realism was "to depict reality in its revolutionary development" although no formal guidelines concerning style or subject matter were provided.
An art movement is a tendency or style in art with a specific art philosophy or goal, followed by a group of artists during a specific period of time, or, at least, with the heyday of the movement defined within a number of years. Art movements were especially important in modern art, when each consecutive movement was considered a new avant-garde movement. Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an attempt to reproduce an illusion of visible reality. By the end of the 19th century many artists felt a need to create a new style which would encompass the fundamental changes taking place in technology, science and philosophy.
Suprematism is an early twentieth-century art movement focused on the fundamentals of geometry, painted in a limited range of colors. The term suprematism refers to an abstract art based upon "the supremacy of pure artistic feeling" rather than on visual depiction of objects.
OBERIU was a short-lived avant-garde collective of Russian Futurist writers, musicians, and artists in the 1920s and 1930s. The group coalesced in the context of the "intense centralization of Soviet Culture" and the decline of the avant garde culture of Leningrad, as "leftist" groups were becoming increasingly marginalized.
The Russian avant-garde was a large, influential wave of avant-garde modern art that flourished in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, approximately from 1890 to 1930—although some have placed its beginning as early as 1850 and its end as late as 1960. The term covers many separate, but inextricably related, art movements that flourished at the time; including Suprematism, Constructivism, Russian Futurism, Cubo-Futurism, Zaum, Imaginism, and Neo-primitivism. In Ukraine, many of the artists who were born, grew up or were active in what is now Belarus and Ukraine, are also classified in the Ukrainian avant-garde.
Soviet nonconformist art was Soviet art produced in the former Soviet Union outside the control of the Soviet state started in the Stalinist era, in particular, outside of the rubric of Socialist Realism. Other terms used to refer to this phenomenon are Soviet counterculture, "underground art" or "unofficial art".
Henryk Stażewski was a Polish painter, visual artist and writer. Stażewski has been described as the "father of the Polish avant-garde" and is considered a pivotal figure in the history of constructivism and geometric abstraction in Central and Eastern Europe. His career spanned seven decades and he was one of the few prominent Polish artists of the interwar period who remained active and gained further international recognition in the second half of the 20th century.
Nikolai Suetin was a Russian Suprematist artist. He worked as a graphic artist, a designer, and a ceramics painter.
George Costakis was a Greek-Russian art collector who amassed one of the largest private collections of Russian avant-garde art in the world.
Red Peristyle was an urban intervention in Diocletian's Palace in the city of Split, Croatia, performed on 11 January 1968, when its peristyle was painted red. This was also the name of the group responsible for the intervention, which was formed in 1966. The group had a destructive approach similar to Marcel Duchamp's post-urban art of the 1960s. A number of other actions were recognized as the work of the same artistic group.
Miško Šuvaković is a contemporary aestheticist, art theorist and conceptual artist in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. He taught theory of art and theory of culture in Interdisciplinary Postgraduates Studies at the University of Arts in Belgrade. He teaches theory of art and theory of culture in transdisciplinary master and doctoral studies at the Faculty of media and communication.
Boris Efimovich Groys is an art critic, media theorist, and philosopher. He is currently a global distinguished professor of Russian and Slavic studies at New York University and senior research fellow at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design in Karlsruhe, Germany. He has been a professor of aesthetics, art history, and media theory at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design/Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe and an internationally acclaimed professor at a number of universities in the United States and Europe, including the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California and the Courtauld Institute of Art London.
Soros Realism describes a type of post-socialist art. It was coined by Miško Šuvaković in "Ideologija izložbe: o ideologijama Manifeste" (2002). The name comes from George Soros, who financed Soros centers for contemporary art in Eastern Europe.
Subversive affirmation is an artistic performance that overemphasizes prevailing ideologies and thereby calls them into question. Simultaneously with affirmation, the affirmed concepts are revealed, and artists distance themselves from those concepts. Strategies of subversive affirmation include "over-identification", "over-affirmation" and "yes revolution".
Joseph Moisevich Chaikov was a Russian Imperial and Soviet Russian sculptor, graphic designer and teacher of Ukrainian Jewish descent.
Soviet art is the visual art style produced after the Russian Revolution of 1917 and during the existence of the Soviet Union, until its collapse in 1991. The Russian Revolution led to an artistic and cultural shift within Russia and the Soviet Union as a whole, including a new focus on socialist realism in officially approved art.
Black Square is a 1915 oil on linen canvas painting by the artist Kazimir Malevich. The first of four painted versions, the original was completed in 1915 and described by the artist as his breakthrough work and the inception for the launch of his Suprematist art movement (1915–1919).
Momir Korunović, was a Serbian architect best-known for his projects built in Serbo-Byzantine Revival. He was sometimes called the Serbian Gaudi. Although he designed some of the most beautiful buildings in Belgrade and was the leading architect of sacred buildings in Yugoslavia between the two world wars, today he is insufficiently known to the general public. Many of his works were destroyed or substantially altered during World War II and the period of communist dictatorship.
Miloš Babić (1904–1968) was a Yugoslav painter, illustrator, designer, graphic artist who studied the avant-garde movement with his circle of Zenit artists whose early work anonymity was not recognizable to the public at the time when it first began in Zagreb and Belgrade. Babić considered himself simply a painter engaged in graphic design in order to make a living and not starve while waiting for his work to sell. With the passage of time, his graphic design work became part of collections now held at the National Museum in Belgrade, Museum of Applied Arts in Belgrade and the Municipal Museum of Subotica.
