Word: union
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Filatov, whose large canvases -- a fervent compost of '50s-style abstract expressionism and broken-up cubofuturist planes -- are beginning to sell in the West, so he has hard currency but nowhere to paint. To get studio space in Moscow on an official basis, you must belong to the Artists Union and do "real" aesthetic work. Some of the best-known figures in the Soviet avant-garde, like Erik Bulatov and Oleg Vasilyev, who share working space, are still officially registered as illustrators of children's books...
...idea the Western market tends to promote, that the Soviet Union is a mine of little-known contemporary pictorial genius, is mostly sales talk. Stalinism deformed or aborted two generations of artistic talent, and no culture recovers so fast. The sense of a time lag is acute to the visitor. Certainly, there is no shortage of artists doing earnestly secondhand versions of last year's, or last decade's, Western model. But there is also some extremely serious talent: Natalia Nesterova, for instance, with her brooding groups of figures, locked in thick, silvery paint and dense with melancholy...
...after The Errors of Youth, a bleak road movie, was shelved a decade ago, returned to Leningrad last year to finish editing the film. Elem Klimov, a tenacious renegade whose own films (the historical drama Agony, the peasant- revolt parable Farewell) have been censored and suppressed, is the union's first secretary, unlocking vaults and disarming the Goskino octopus. For the first time, a filmmaker runs the country's movie industry. Not only have the insurgents stormed the winter palace, they are sitting pretty...
...take their creations to New York City this fall. Who knows? If the hammer-and-sickle designs become popular enough in the West, they may wind up as eagerly sought after items in a place that already covets such Western garb as T-shirts and dungarees: the Soviet Union...
...first post-Stalinist era of reform, wonders about the aftereffects of the long period of stagnation. "The 'thaw' generation is tired and burned out," he says. "But the next generation is simply not prepared to carry on the 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...