In the Center and on the Periphery: Russian and Soviet Art and Visual Culture

A special issue of Arts (ISSN 2076-0752).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 May 2025 | Viewed by 1420

Special Issue Editor


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Guest Editor
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Indiana University South Bend, South Bend, IN 46634, USA
Interests: art history; Russian and Soviet art and material culture; world textiles and needlework

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Much has been written in recent decades about the Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde, so much so that it has become de rigueur to include this material in introductory art history texts. However, much less is known in the broader art history world about Russian and Soviet art and visual culture that does not fit that paradigm. The proposed Special Issue seeks to address this lacunae by offering new research on Russian and Soviet art and artists that are often overlooked in academia. At first blush it would seem that painting, icons, postcards, stamps, and the like would have little in common, but this is a mistaken notion, as all these objects represent important components of Russian and Soviet history and culture. Who created these works? Who and/or what entity commissioned them? How were they actually utilized and/or what was their function? How were these objects received by the various audiences for whom they were made? What significance did they have in their society and on that society? The answers to these questions will allow scholars of culture and politics to gain a fuller comprehension of how these facets interconnected in society, thus greatly enriching our understanding of Russian and Soviet art and history.

Prof. Dr. K. Andrea Rusnock
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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Keywords

  • painting
  • icon
  • postcard
  • postage stamp
  • Russia
  • Soviet
  • artist
  • performance

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

8 pages, 199 KiB  
Article
Gateway to the East: Decorative Art and Orientalist Imagery in Moscow’s Kazan Station, 1913–1916
by John McCannon
Arts 2025, 14(1), 3; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts14010003 - 2 Jan 2025
Viewed by 526
Abstract
At the time of its construction, which started in 1913, the architectural design of Moscow’s Kazan Station was considered by many to be out of step with the avant-garde creative energies that pervaded fin-de-siècle Russian culture. The same opinion applied to the artworks [...] Read more.
At the time of its construction, which started in 1913, the architectural design of Moscow’s Kazan Station was considered by many to be out of step with the avant-garde creative energies that pervaded fin-de-siècle Russian culture. The same opinion applied to the artworks that were installed to decorate the station’s interior. In the decades since, art historians have generally shared the judgments levied by those who complained about the station’s supposed deficits in the 1910s. The purpose of this article is to show that, while the designs and décor of Kazan Station were indeed anachronistic—especially considering the high-tech purposes and functions of the industrial-era railroad station—the anachronism, far from reflecting a lack of awareness or innovative ability, resulted from conscious decisions on the part of Alexei Shchusev as architect, Alexandre Benois as the individual who selected artists to work on the station, and the artists themselves, including Nikolai Roerich and Pavel Kuznetsov, namely, those who built and decorated the station deliberately concealed the station’s inherently modernist and utilitarian nature behind a backward-looking, past-oriented façade, both to fulfill their mission of commemorating old Russia’s imperial expansion and subjugation of the East and to assuage the social and cultural anxieties often stirred up in the late 1800s and early 1900s by the construction of infrastructural assets such as railroad stations. Full article
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