Soviet underground artists risked prison to paint

Eileen O'Dea, an art installation specialist, prepares for the exhibit "Forbidden Art: The Postwar Russian Avant-Garde," which opens Sunday at the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College

In this story: 'Sots Art' Lessons to be learned RELATED STORIES

BOSTON (AP) -- At first, Vladmir Yakolev's "Head With Hand" looks as if it could have been painted by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque or one of the other Cubist masters.

Look closer, though, and it is easy to see that this painting is the work of a Russian artist. Buried in the lines of the despairing head is a hammer. The hand resembles a sickle. This isn't merely a painting -- it's a political statement.

It's also a perfect addition to "Forbidden Art: The Postwar Russian Avant-Garde," an exhibition of 77 works by Soviet underground artists who defied their country's leaders by expressing their beliefs through their art. The show opens Sunday at the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College and closes December 10.

"Nobody in America risks going to a labor camp because of what they paint," says Alston Conley, the museum's chief curator. "Perhaps they risk not having an audience. The worst that can happen to you is you can't pay your rent. But you don't go to prison. Some of these artists went to prison -- all of them risked it."

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Many took that risk for decades. After the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, artists were optimistic about the future. They believed they would have artistic freedom to create whatever images they wished. But in the early 1930s, the Communist government created strict guidelines for artists that limited them to pro-Socialist subject matter done in classical style.

After Joseph Stalin died in 1953, artists again believed they would be free to paint whatever they wished. And they were able to do that -- for a short time. Tension between artists and the government gradually grew, though, and in 1974, police drove bulldozers through an exhibition they deemed offensive.

Although authorities managed to force many of the alternative artists underground, the short period of freedom had inspired them.

"That moment of opening gave many artists exposure to things they'd never seen before," says Thea Keith-Lucas, the museum's exhibition coordinator.

Now they would paint what they wanted, and in all different styles. A new style, "Sots Art," grew out of a combination of the Pop Art that had become so popular in the West and an anti-Socialist sentiment.

"Forbidden Art" includes one painting that exemplifies government-sanctioned artwork: a 1957 work titled "Power to the People." The painting, displayed prominently at the beginning of the exhibit, features Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin standing in front of a rapt crowd, many of whom are dressed in military uniforms.

"Power" serves as a dramatic counterpoint to works like "McLenin," which integrates Lenin's face into a McDonald's sign, or Natalia Nesterova's "House of Cards," which depicts three people so engrossed in building a house of cards that they don't notice two tiny men clothed entirely in black running across the table.

"All of these people had some slight variation on individual expression," Conley says. "What they are exploring is an individual approach to making art and coming up with something personal as opposed to the culture's norm."

The exhibit, which was put together by Los Angeles-based Curatorial Assistance, comes from the private collection of Yuri Traisman, a Russian emigre who collected the work over 30 years. It will be paired with a lecture series that delves into many aspects of the Russian experience during the period in which most of the paintings were made.

Maxim D. Shrayer, a Moscow native who immigrated to the United States in 1987 and who consulted on the exhibit, recalls a 1987 visit with artist Grusha Bruskin, whose work is included in Traisman's collection, with his father David Shrayer-Petrov, a well-know Soviet writer and dissident.

Shrayer was particularly taken with Bruskin's painting, "The Partner," which depicts two identical men, one wearing street clothes who walks into an abyss and the other dressed in traditional Orthodox Jewish garb standing firmly on a cliff.

"At the time it was striking, because we saw that a person in a very closed, suppressive society was openly, very clearly, dealing with the problem of how a person exists in a state of duality," says Shrayer, author of "Russian Poet/Soviet Jew."

It's a lesson he hopes that his students and other visitors to "Forbidden Art" can learn from the exhibit. He believes that Americans suffer from Cold War ignorance, decades of limited information and anti-Soviet propaganda.

Many people don't realize, he says, that although making films that weren't approved by the government was impossible, making subversive artwork or literature was -- and that many artists had enough conviction to do it. He believes he knows why.

"I think basically, you do what you have to do," he says. "You write because that's your life. You paint because that's your life. Because, that's what you live for. ... But some people make choices that are braver than others because no matter what it costs, they need to express themselves."

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