Word: shows
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Born in Kiev in 1878, Malevich invented himself with astonishing speed. Between 1905, the year he moved to Moscow, and 1915, he ran through the gamut of early modernist styles, from pointillism to cubism. Early works like Floor Polishers, 1911-12, show his assimilative powers: this gripping image of hard labor, where every line reinforces the muscular twist of bodies and the thrust of the feet with their waxing pads on the floor, ultimately derives from Matisse's Dance. Troglodytic, pious and massive, Malevich's figures of peasants from the '20s both assert modernity and deny...
...bridge between tradition and innovation: a sort of starets, a holy man or prophet, whose images invoke deep strands of identification with religious faith and folk culture while pointing to a future wreathed in theory. The reinstatement of Malevich had been under way for years, and yet this show was certainly one of the events in the Soviet Union's intellectual life that define the cultural consequences of glasnost...
...move. But for Soviet artists, glasnost seems more like a whirlpool of possibilities, most of them still anxiously hypothetical. The artists have had to learn not to be optimists. Fifteen years ago, Leonid Brezhnev's officials sent plainclothes militia and bulldozers to break up and bury an outdoor show of unofficial art in Sokolniki, a park on the outskirts of Moscow. This goons' picnic would not be repeated today. The socialist realist line, imposed by Stalin after 1929 and kept to the end of Brezhnev's reign, held that a work of art should fulfill the criteria of partinost (party...
...reforms." Filmmaker Elem Klimov, the head of the Cinema Workers' Union, admits that the transition has been difficult, like "struggling to break down a wall, only to confront yourself on the other side." Says he: "For so long we have said, 'Give us our freedom, and we will show you!' But having freedom is not so simple. Many have discovered they have nothing...
...distinguishes this issue is the unprecedented involvement of Soviet journalists and writers. We asked Vitali Korotich, editor of Ogonyok, a leading light of glasnost, to write about the pitfalls of the new Soviet journalism. Mikhail Zhvanetsky, one the country's most popular and outspoken comedians, penned a monologue for Show Business. Yuri Shchekochikhin, who works for Literaturnaya Gazeta, co-wrote a piece examining perestroika in the provinces. The Books section features an excerpt from The Place of the Skull, the latest novel by one of Gorbachev's favorite authors, Chingiz Aitmatov. Andrei Sinyavsky, an emigre writer who spent almost...