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The major part of this book project was funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 700913.
This book is about two distinct but related professional cultures in late Soviet
Russia that were concerned with material objects: industrial design and
decorative art. The Russian avant-garde of the 1920s is broadly recognised to
have been Russia’s first truly original contribution to world culture. In
contrast, Soviet design of the post-war period is often dismissed as hackwork
and plagiarism that resulted in a shabby world of commodities. This book
identifies the second historical attempt at creating a powerful alternative to
capitalist commodities in the Cold War era. It offers a new perspective on the
history of Soviet material culture by focusing on the notion of the ‘comradely
object’ as an agent of progressive social relations that state-sponsored Soviet
design inherited from the avant-garde. It introduces a shared history of
domestic objects, handmade as well as machine-made, mass-produced as well as
unique, utilitarian as well as challenging the conventional notion of utility.
Situated at the intersection of intellectual history, social history and
material culture studies, this book elucidates the complexities and
contradictions of Soviet design that echoed international tendencies of the late
twentieth century. The book is addressed to design historians, art historians,
scholars of material culture, historians of Russia and the USSR, as well as
museum and gallery curators, artists and designers, and the broader public
interested in modern aesthetics, art and design, and/or the legacy of socialist
regimes.
5 A new production culture and non-commodities After the two turns in Soviet material and visual culture – the Khrushchevera aesthetic turn and the mid-1960s anti-functionalist turn – Soviet material culture became a site of great plurality and diversity, otherwise rarely associated with the Brezhnev era. Whereas VNIITE theorists explored the possibilities of flexible and user-sensitive systemic designing, as the preceding chapter has discussed, the critics and practitioners of decorative art chose self-reflection as their foremost professional strategy. This
Introduction: Soviet things that talk ‘A silent speech that things address to us every day in an artistic language is infinitely more convincing than dozens of lectures about aesthetic education, good taste, etc. To make this language of things contemporary and expressive is the exciting but difficult task of an artist.’1 This was how the Soviet art critic Nina Iaglova opened her article in the journal Decorative Art of the USSR in June 1961. Here, ‘things’ (veshchi, material objects) appear as active participants in people’s lives, as agents by virtue of being
‘applied art’ for pre-1965 objects, and ‘decorative art’ for what came after the mid-decade conceptual change. Variations of ‘simplicity’ While an ideal object of the Khrushchev era was honest, simple, mass- reproducible and affordable, it was not plain. An attentive look would KARPOVA 9781526139870 PRINT.indd 95 20/01/2020 11:10 96 Comradely objects reveal a degree of complexity. As art historian Galina Iakovleva argues, reducing objects to the basic functional elements, as was characteristic of the late 1950s and early 1960s, opened the possibility for focused
of stained glass in nineteenth-century society, where the many agents involved in making and interpreting stained glass –including artistic and architectural practitioners, critics, and the public –questioned the medium’s status. For, in the second half of the nineteenth century, stained glass was simultaneously and incongruously perceived as an applied art, art-manufacture, craft, decorative art, industrial art, manufactured product, commodity, and contemporary anachronistic art form. These perceptions both informed and were shaped by the official
, 1998 : 32) Therefore, from the outset, Gothic architecture manifested innovation in service to an emphatic reinstatement of past history. Certain aspects of decorative art in Renaissance buildings such as such as Coppo di Marcovaldo’s lurid mosaic ‘Hell’ (1265–70) on the vault of the Florence Baptistry conveyed nightmarish scenes of rare power. The
identity. At the age of seventeen (1889), she enrolled at the Crystal Palace School of Art, Science, and Literature, not far from the family home. Although its chief recommendation may have been that it was nearby, Brickdale later gave the Crystal Palace School credit for providing her with a firm foundation in design. 1 Its rather general aims embraced anatomy and composition, ‘artistic wood carving’ and ‘decorative art and design’; 2 and prizes were
This book presents a study that is an attempt to understand the phenomenal increase in the production and demand for stained glass between about 1835 and 1860. The book provides both history and context for thousands of Victorian stained-glass windows that exist in churches across the country. It aims to: ask why people became interested in stained glass; examine how glass-painters set up their studios; and understand how they interacted with each other and their patrons. To understand why so many windows were commissioned and made in the Victorian period, readers need to understand how buying a stained-glass window became a relatively ordinary thing to do. In order to examine this, the book focuses on those who wrote or spoke about stained glass in the formative years of the revival. It is important to look at the production of stained glass as a cultural exchange: a negotiation in both financial and cultural terms that was profitable for both glass-painter and patron. The history of Victorian stained glass allows an examination of many other areas of nineteenth-century cultural history. Readers can learn a lot about the aesthetics of the Gothic Revival, ecclesiology, the relationship between 'fine' and 'decorative' art, and the circulation of art history in the 1840s. While many interesting glass-painters have necessarily been omitted, the author hopes that the case studies in the book will provide a point of reference for the research of future scholars.
Richly illustrated with over 110 colour and black and white images, the book productively contests the supposedly exclusive feminine aspect of the style moderne (art deco). It explores how alternative, parallel and overlapping experiences and expressions of decorative modernism, nationalism, gender and sexuality in the heady years surrounding World War I converge in the protean figure of the deco dandy. As such, the book significantly departs from and corrects the assumptions and biases that have dominated scholarship on and popular perceptions of art deco. The book outlines how designed products and representations of and for the dandy both existed within and outwith normative expectations of gender and sexuality complicating men’s relationship to consumer culture more broadly and the moderne more specifically. Through a sustained focus on the figure of the dandy, the book offers a broader view of art deco by claiming a greater place for the male body and masculinity in this history than has been given to date. The mass appeal of the dandy in the 1920s was a way to redeploy an iconic, popular and well-known typology as a means to stimulate national industries, to engender a desire for all things made in France. Important, essential and productive moments in the history of the cultural life of Paris presented in the book are instructive of the changing role performed by consumerism, masculinity, design history and national identity.