CategoriesStyles and Movements
Soviet Nonconformist Art
Unofficial art made in the Soviet Union from the late 1950s to the 1980s outside the rules of Socialist Realism.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for Soviet Nonconformist Art are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
From the Khrushchev thaw of the mid-1950s until perestroika in the late 1980s, Soviet artists outside Socialist Realism worked largely in private. Shut out of official exhibitions and publication, they showed work in apartments and studios, circulated it among friends and foreign visitors, and supported themselves with permitted jobs such as book illustration. Hostility could be open: in 1974 the authorities broke up an open-air exhibition on a Moscow wasteland with bulldozers.
The work spans many styles. Oskar Rabin painted bleak barracks and suburbs; Mikhail Roginsky painted plain doors and kitchen stoves at life size; Erik Bulatov set propaganda slogans against skies and landscapes. Ilya Kabakov, who earned his living illustrating children's books, made albums and later room-sized installations about communal life, and with Viktor Pivovarov and Andrei Monastyrski shaped Moscow Conceptualism. Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid parodied official imagery as Sots Art before emigrating in the late 1970s.
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