A companion site to an exhibit now on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (last mentioned in the
November 6, 2001 Scout Report), The Russian Avant-Garde Book: 1910-1934 affords visitors an opportunity to explore a lost world of artists and intellectuals who wanted to help change the world by making it see the sense in communism and socialism. Broken into three parts, provocatively titled A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, Transform the World, and Building Socialism, the exhibit awakens viewers to the passion from which it sprang. A lively interactive tour, the online exhibit shuttles visitors past more than three hundred examples of Russian avant-garde text, graphic art, and photography. Following each multi-panel tour, users are free to return to the main page of any of the three exhibits and consider at leisure the items that most grabbed their interest. Perhaps most compelling is the site's perspective of the life cycle of the Russian Avant-Garde movement itself, which only meant to help but was ultimately suppressed by a dictator who came to fear internal artistic expression as much as he did political challenge or resistance.
Comments