Video: Socialist realism is our everything: How Nikita Khrushchev dispersed the exhibition of avant-garde artists
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
On December 1, 1962, on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the Moscow branch of the Union of Artists of the USSR, an exhibition was held, which was attended by Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev himself. The exhibition featured works by avant-garde artists. The first chairman of the Central Committee of the CPSU walked the hall three times, and then subjected the paintings to harsh criticism. After this exhibition, the Soviet Union forgot for a long time what abstract art is.
The exhibition was organized at the Moscow Manege. The artists of the New Reality studio also exhibited their works there. Avant-garde art was then recognized throughout the world as an art, but Khrushchev, brought up on socialist realism, not only did not understand the paintings, but burst into swear words:
Nikita Khrushchev was not shy in expressions, stopping at each picture:
But most of all went to the organizer of the avant-garde exhibition, the artist and art theorist Eliy Mikhailovich Belyutin:
After such a resonant visit by Khrushchev to the exhibition, an article appeared in the newspaper Pravda that practically put an end to avant-garde art. The artists began to be persecuted, it came to the point that the KGB and the Ministry of Internal Affairs detained them for interrogation with partiality.
The position of the avant-gardists in the USSR improved only after 12 years. And even then, it was not without a struggle. On September 15, 1974, the artists, despite the official ban of the authorities, organized an exhibition of their works in a vacant lot. Among the spectators were their friends, relatives and representatives of the domestic and foreign press.
As soon as the paintings were installed, workers immediately appeared with seedlings, which had to be planted on Sunday. The exhibition lasted no more than half an hour, when bulldozers, sprinklers and police officers arrived at the vacant lot. Water jets were directed at people, paintings were broken, artists were beaten and taken to the police stations.
The events, dubbed the "Bulldozer Exhibition", caused a public outcry. Foreign journalists wrote that people in the Soviet Union were imprisoned simply for the desire to express their ideas on canvas. And for harmless avant-garde paintings with artists they do whatever they want.
After these articles, the Soviet government was forced to make concessions, and two weeks later the avant-garde artists organized an official exhibition of their paintings in Izmailovo.
The name of the French avant-garde artist Pierre Brasso, who exhibited his work in 1964, was associated with a curiosity. His paintings were a great success, but, as it turned out later, the canvases were painted not by a man, but by a monkey.
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