Official Exchanges/Unofficial Representations

from Russia! Nine Hundred Years of Masterpieces and Master Collections



In this essay Valerie Hillings looks at the tumultuous role art played in the discourse between the U.S. and the Soviet Union during key decades of the Cold War. An era of increased artistic freedom under Khrushchev saw the initiation of cultural exchanges with the west and a move away from Stalinist Socialist Realism. In America, the identification of Abstract Expressionism with the Western ideals freedom faced challenges by Congress and the House Committee on Un-American Activities. As the USSR began to clamp down on “unofficial” art, a new generation of Russian artists—Oscar Rabin, Vitaly Komar, Alexander Melamid, and Yevgenii Rukhin, among others—moved their work underground. An examination of the history of exchange exhibitions between the U.S. and USSR highlights the delicate balance between public culture and private expression in both countries.


Excerpt

The artists decided to move forward with their plans for the First Fall Open-Air Show of Paintings. At noon on September 15, the twenty-four participating artists and their guests, among them foreign journalists and diplomats from Western Europe, the United States, Asia, and Latin America, arrived to find a group claiming to be workers volunteering to transform the land into a park. When the artists moved further into the field in order to proceed with the show without disrupting the volunteers, the “workers” attacked them and their art with physical force, dump trucks, bulldozers, and high-pressure water hoses. Works of art were destroyed, and four artists, among them Rabin and his son, were arrested and tried for hooliganism. As Rabin noted, the fact that the Cheremushki Borough Court charged him with resisting the authorities “was tacit acknowledgment that the vigilantes had in fact been plainclothesmen.”