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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.
artists worked in ceramics workshops, visited traditional craft centres, talked to each other and to journalists and critics, and produced altogether 400 objects collectively. Many of these objects defied traditional ideas of what ceramics should be and featured abstract and fantastic forms reminiscent of folk clay toys, sculptures by Constantin Brancusi and ceramics by Picasso all at the same time (by 1971 Soviet artists were familiar with all of these sources due to greater access to professional literature and trips abroad).62 The Vilnius symposium was held for a
sexuality, the focus of Chapter 5 . The ‘art’ of light therapy There are long-standing art-historical precedents for imaging nudes in the sunlight, of mythical goddesses and biblical figures in pastoral or idyllic settings from the Renaissance onwards. Artists from Titian (1477–1576) to Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) treated the nude in the open air as standard aesthetic fare. By the early twentieth century