Word: puny
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Dates: during 1979-1979
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...repression had begun. In Stalin's slow and terrible eye, such art was decadent and, because of its internationalism, bourgeois-formalist. The Gulag swallowed some artists, like Boris Kushner. Others, such as Larionov, Goncharova, Gabo and Ivan Puni, went into exile. Those who stayed, like Rodchenko or the architect Konstantin Melnikov, survived as ghosts, forgotten men in a culture of vindictive Stalinist toadies. Like Cronus, the Revolution devoured its children. As a wholesale trashing of a civilization, only Hitler's demolition of the German modernists compares with it. Inside the Soviet Union, the works themselves lay buried, invisible...
...change started with cubism and widely affected the European avantgarde. Its results range from the futurist sculpture of Italian artists like Umberto Boccioni and Giacomo Balla to the radical experiments of the Russian constructivists, Tatlin, Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Puni; from Alexander Archipenko's wall reliefs to Julio Gonzalez's iron constructions and Alexander Calder's fluttering mobiles. Artists as unlike as Naum Gabo and David Smith were affected by it. No sculptor interested in either ideal formal systems or new materials was immune to its promises, and its influence persists to this day. Sculpture had been solid since...
...finished a few years before he died at 27, lays no stress on its materials; it is a pure proposition of the kind of half religious ideal that was soon to be censored out of Russian art by Stalin. On the other hand, the work of Iwan Puni and Vladimir Tallin was virtually dialectical materialism transferred into art-"real materials," as Tatlin put it, possibly drawing on his own experience as a marine carpenter, "in real space." When Puni stuck a ham mer onto one of his reliefs, and a saw onto another, he did so to praise the world...
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