Erste russische Kunstausstellung, Berlin (1922) [German]

The First Russian Art Exhibition [Erste russische Kunstausstellung] opened at the Van Diemen Gallery on Unter den Linden 21, near the Russian embassy in Berlin, on 15 October 1922. More than 700 works by 167 artists where shown, including paintings, graphic works, sculptures, as well as designs for theater, architectural models, and porcelain. The exhibition’s official host was the Russian Ministry for Information, and it was put together by the artists Naum Gabo, David Shterenberg, and Nathan Altman. El Lissitzky designed the catalogue’s cover. Gabo was in charge of the three rooms where Russian avant-garde art was presented, including several of his own sculptures. Due to the positive response in the press and the large number of visitors (ca. 15,000), the exhibition was prolonged until the end of the year. On the initiative of the International Workers’ Assistance, the show was conceived as a commercial exhibition; the proceeds were to go to “Russia’s starving”. In the Spring of 1923, a version of the exhibition traveled to Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

Publisher Internationale Arbeiterhilfe, Berlin, 1922
31+[46] pages
via Bibliotheque Kandinsky

Commentary: Branko Ve Poljanski (Zenit 1923, trans. 2002), Eckhard Neumann (Art Journal 1967).

PDF (27 MB)

More about the exhibition

Moscow Art Magazine: Digest 1993-2005 & 2005-2007 (2005, 2007)

Two volumes of texts from critical Russian journal for contemporary art and theory.

With texts by Keti Chukhrov, Ekaterina Degot, Eugeny Fiks, Boris Groys, Olga Kopenkina, Bojana Kunst, Viktor Misiano, Anatoly Osmolovsky, Dmitry Vilensky, a.o.

Edited by Viktor Misiano and David Riff
Publisher Moscow Art Magazine/Khudozhestvennyy zhurnal, Moscow, 2005 & 2007
155 & 141 pages

WorldCat (I)
WorldCat (II)

HTML (1993-2005)
HTML (2005-2007)
Issues in Russian

Kirill Medvedev: Beyond the Poetics of Privatization (2012–) [RU, EN, ES]

“Combining poetry with protest actions and music, Kirill Medvedev is one of the leading exemplars of the new ‘civic poetry’ that emerged in Russia during the 2000s, and whose longer lineage, from the creative ferment of the 1920s to the hyper-individualism of the 1990s, he discusses in this essay.” (from the introduction to English translation)

First published in Translit 10-11, St Petersburg, 2012.
English and Spanish translations appeared in New Left Review 82, 2013.

Peresmotret rezultaty privatizatsii poezii: novaya paradigma angazhirovannosti (Russian, 2012), HTML repost.
Beyond the Poetics of Privatization (English, 2013)
Más allá de la poética de la privatización (Spanish, 2013)

More on Medvedev and Arsenev.