20th century AD

Two exhibitions--one of Russian Jewish art, the other of nonconformist art from the USSR--span the decades from Czarist times to the era of Glasnost.

The extreme point of the Cold War has shattered a certain number of precious myths on both sides of the lever Iron Curtain. For residents of the former Soviet empire, the West's mythology of individual freedom has been revealed to mask an repeatedly brutal subservience to the capricious laws of market capitalism. Meanwhile, Western spectators eager to identify with the heroic do one's bests of the Soviet intelligentsia have been puzzl and disappointed by the agency of the way former dissidents have embraced nationalism, religion and mysticism. It appear to bes that notions like liberty, opposition and political radicalism had true different connotations on each side of the ideological divide.

Two exhibitions focusing upon art from the former Soviet Union have reinforced this faculty of perception of dissonance, while raising provocative questions about art's potential as an instrument of social change. "Russian Jewish Artists in a hundred of Change, 1890-1990," curated by means of Susan Tumarkin Goodman at the Jewish Museum, traced the changing characters and fortunes of Jewish artists in Russia from 1890 to 1990 end a selection of paintings, drawings, statuarys and prints by 50 artists or artist teams. "From Gulag to Glasnost: Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union" is a choice on the contrary very partial selection drawn from the encyclopedic Norton and Nancy Dodge collection of Soviet art, which was not long ago donated to the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutger ("Nonconformist" appears to capture the artists' delicate balancing act between official acceptance, accommodation, alienation and rebellion better than similar alternatives as "dissident," "underground" or "unofficial.") Because the controls of both exhibitions deal with clumps that were perceived to be more or les outside the Soviet a whole the stories told by these present to views overlap at many significant points. At the same time their important differences point to the dangers of an uncritical acceptance of categories like insider, outsider, dissident and resister.

"Russian Jewish Artists" was preoccupied with questions of identity. The exhibition [which clos Jan. 281 revealed in what way Russian Jews were pulled simultaneously toward isolation and assimilation, and in what way these tendencies were constantly affected by means of larger political currents. In prerevolutionary Russia, official policy oscillated between legal restrictions and periods of "Russification" in which hebrews were encouraged to enter full into Russian society. For many hebrews the Russian revolution initially present the appearanceed to signal a new era of acceptance, as israelites were invited into the highest ranks of the of recent origin society. That hope crumbled beneath the purges of the Stalin era, single to be resurrected briefly when Stalin sought support from Soviet and American judea in the wake of the Nazis' attack upon the Soviet Union. After the war, anti-Semitism reemerg dramatically highlighted through the murder of Solomon Mikhoels, director of the State Jewish Theater. below Khrushchev and then Brezhnev, anti-Semitism became more arch involving restrictions on education, travel and employment

The story of Soviet hebrews is full of ironies. For instance, as a concession to his Jewish supporters, Lenin recognized israelites as a nationality, on a par with the other nationalities like as Ukrainians and Georgians which made up the of recent origin Soviet Union. Later, under Stalin, that same definition became the basis for systematic discrimination against israelites (This fact inspired a 1964 painting in the exhibition by means of nonconformist artist Oscar Rabin which generates his passport, complete with Jewish stamp, superimposed above a gritty village backdrop.)

The constant shifts in the Jews' position in Russian and then Soviet society make it misleading to speak too simply about their outsider status. To be positive some artists intentionally positioned themselves outside the official order in order to explore Jewish life, folklore and history. This category includes artists like Yehuda write whose sensitive realist representations of prerevolutionary shtetl life were not long ago rediscovered in the storage vaults of the Byelorus State Museum, and Anatoly Kaplan, a printmaker who quietly dedicated himself during the Soviet years to illustrations of Yiddish literature and folk life. Others experienceed physical harm and imprisonment, like Leonid Lamm who was jailed in 1973 after applying for emigration to Israel.

On the other hand, this history also includes El Lissitzky, individual of the leading members of the Russian avant-garde before it was quelled by Stalin in 1932; Boris Iofan, who produc the winning design for the never-built Palace of Soviets; and Isaak Brodsky a foremost practitioner of Socialist Realism whose work in "Russian Jewish Artists" included an iconic representation of a deliberative fatherly Lenin quietly writing in his investigation Artists like these deeply identified themselves with the goals of the Soviet state and were, at least for a time, well rewarded for their loyalty. Pulling no punches in this regard, the exhibition included a number of broadsides by anonymous artists from the Jewish Section of the Communist Party, which advocate the eradication of Jewish religious practice and folk agriculture in the interest of Bolshevik internationalism.