The Arts of Subversion:
Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union
 
The Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection
 
View rare works from the Soviet Union’s underground visual culture and learn about the collection’s extraordinary rescue by Harvard alumnus Norton T. Dodge.  Public opening: Thursday, Dec. 4, 5-7 p.m.; gallery talk with curator Anna Wexler Katsnelson and Norton Dodge at 5:45 p.m. CGIS South Building, Concourse Level, 1730 Cambridge Street. Exhibition runs through January 22. Please contact the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies for more information: 617-495-4037; daviscenter@fas.harvard.edu; http://daviscenter.fas.harvard.edu/
 
 
The Arts of Subversion: Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union showcases selections from the Nancy and Norton Dodge Collection, the most comprehensive collection of Soviet nonconformist art in the world. The art spans a period of thirty years, from the mid-1950s, soon after Stalin’s death and Khrushchev’s rise to power, through the period of stagnation under Brezhnev in the 1970s and Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika in the 1980s. The exhibition includes photographs, lithographs, etchings, oils, and collages by a diverse range of artists, displaying influences from the Russian avant-garde, constructivism, surrealism, conceptualism, and Western abstract impressionism, among others.
 
Presented in celebration of the Center’s sixtieth anniversary and the recent gift to the Center of Soviet nonconformist art from Norton and Nancy Dodge, The Arts of Subversion features works from the new Davis Center collection, the Dodge Collection at the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, as well as the Dodges’ personal collection. Together, the exhibited works speak to the interrelationship of art and power as reflected in the visual culture of the Soviet Union, and the vitality of the underground culture that emerged there as artists sought to express their own aesthetic voices.

 

----------------------------------------------------
Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies
Harvard University
1730 Cambridge Street, 3rd Floor, Suite 301b
Cambridge, MA 02138
Phone: 617.495.4037
Fax: 617.495.8319
http://www.daviscenter.fas.harvard.edu