| This dissertation examines the still largely misconceived period in the history of Soviet art, when within a matter of a few years, between 1928 and 1933, avant-garde artistic strategies were largely devalorized and its artworks already in Soviet public collections came to be exhibited only as artifacts of the past. At the same time a representational style, later united under the label Socialist Realism, was established as the only viable form of Soviet art. My project demonstrates that the so-called "demise" of the Russian avant-garde was far from an abrupt or simple process of coercion on the part of Soviet authorities, or of retreat and submission on the part of the artists. Instead, historical displacement took place gradually, spurred both by administrative decisions and by initiatives coming from active members of the art world.;This paradigmatic shift was accomplished in the public sphere through a series of experimental museum displays that served as a practical testing ground of the new art historical canon, which presented avant-garde artistic practices as remnants of the outdated bourgeois outlook, while positioning various representational styles as pointing to the truly Soviet future. Far from rigid or fixed, the new canon was continuously modified in response to visitors' reactions, specialists' feedback and authorities' often conflicting directives. In order to understand this process, I reconstruct the broader context of the Soviet museum reform, aimed to present Soviet masses with a Marxist dialectical version of historical development, and focus on those experimental exhibitions that played an instrumental role in displacing the avant-garde.;Within this framework, I examine the work of two leading proponents of the Russian avant-garde, Kazimir Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin, during this period within the context of its public presentation and reception, as examples of an active stance of avant-garde figures, who sought to inscribe their work within the current artistic debates without compromising the integrity of their projects. The last chapter analyzes a major retrospective of Soviet art, held in 1932-33, that shifted public focus from the assimilation of the past artistic legacy to the formulation of the future of Soviet art in concrete visual terms. |
