Jérôme Bazin, Pascal Dubourg Glatigny, Piotr Piotrowski (eds.): Art beyond Borders: Artistic Exchange in Communist Europe, 1945-1989 (2016)

“This book presents and analyzes artistic interactions both within the Soviet bloc and with the West between 1945 and 1989. During the Cold War the exchange of artistic ideas and products united Europe’s avant-garde in a most remarkable way. Despite the Iron Curtain and national and political borders there existed a constant flow of artists, artworks, artistic ideas and practices. The geographic borders of these exchanges have yet to be clearly defined. How were networks, centers, peripheries (local, national and international), scales, and distances constructed? How did (neo)avant-garde tendencies relate with officially sanctioned socialist realism?

The literature on the art of Eastern Europe provides a great deal of factual knowledge about a vast cultural space, but mostly through the prism of stereotypes and national preoccupations. By discussing artworks, studying the writings on art, observing artistic evolution and artists’ strategies, as well as the influence of political authorities, art dealers and art critics, the essays in Art beyond Borders compose a transnational history of arts in the Soviet satellite countries in the post war period.”

Publisher CEU Press, Budapest/New York, 2016
Leipzig Studies on the History and Culture of East-Central Europe series, 3
Open access
ISBN 9789633860830, 9633860830
xii+494+24 pages
via x

Publisher
OAPEN
WorldCat

PDF (126 MB, updated on 2020-11-25)

Konstantin Akinsha: The Second Life of Soviet Photomontage, 1935-1980s (2012)

“This dissertation explores the development of Soviet photomontage from the second half of the 1930s to the end of the 1970s. Until now, the transformation of the modernist medium and its incorporation into the everyday practice of Soviet visual propaganda during and after the Second World War has not attracted much scholarly attention. The firm association of photomontage with the Russian avant-garde in general, and with Constructivism in particular, has led art historians to disregard the fact that the medium was practised in the USSR until the final days of the Soviet system. The conservative government organisations in control of propaganda preserved satirical photomontage in its post-Dadaist phase and Heartfield-like form, finding it useful in the production of negative propaganda.”

Doctor of Philosophy Dissertation
University of Edinburgh, 2012
328 pages + 368 pages of illustrations

Publisher
Author

PDF (29 MB)

Claire Bishop, Marta Dziewańska (eds.): 1968-1989: Political Upheaval and Artistic Change (2010)

“This volume comprises a selection of texts and presentations from a seminar organized in Warsaw in 2008 by the Museum of Modern Art with art historian Claire Bishop that presented a comparative reflection of Western and Eastern European evaluations of the artistic significance of 1968 and the transformations of 1989, which saw the end of the Soviet empire. The essays presented here explore the extent to which political change affects the form, medium, and distribution of visual art; explains the differences among artistic practices that appear similar but arose in diverse political and ideological contexts; and considers the possibility and desirability of writing a European art history that brings together East and West.”

With contributions by Claire Bishop, Tania Brugera, Branislav Jakoljević, Ana Janevski, Vit Havránek, Tomáš Pospiszyl, Luiza Nader, Gabriela Świtek, Piotr Piotrowski, Attila Tordai-S., Borut Vogelnik, Charles Esche, Kathrin Rhomberg, Joanna Mytkowska, Grzegorz Kowalski and Artur Źmikewski, Milan Knížák, and Ján Budaj.

Publisher Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, 2010
ISBN 9788392404408
232 (of 504) pages
via Academia.edu

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (English section only, 43 MB)