Nonconformist Art: The Soviet Experience 1956-1986

From 1962 onward, Norton Dodge, a Maryland economics professor and expert on Russia, smuggled out of the Soviet Union some 10,000 artworks by more than 900 dissident artists. A selection from this extraordinary collection, newly installed at Rutgers University's Zimmerli Art Museum, is the focus of this catalogue. It reveals an important and astonishing body of work--an outpouring of creativity, protest and nonconformity by artists in Russia and other former Soviet republics. Risking loss of employment or even imprisonment, these artists rejected the official socialist realism, drawing instead on their historical, religious, philosophical and national roots, as revisioned through the filter of unvarnished realism, surrealism, abstract expressionism, folk art, Pop, photorealism or conceptualism. Dodge and coeditor Rosenfeld, the museum's curator of Russian and Soviet art, have assembled 17 scholarly essays by art historians, curators and critics who chronicle the flourishing of underground art from Gulag to glasnost. With 326 color and 200 b&w plates, this volume is an unprecedented tool for understanding Soviet culture. (Nov.)