04.09.2025
School of Arts and Cultural Heritage
A new episode of the podcast "Russian Avant-Garde: Past, Present, Future" has been released. Gleb Ershov's guest is the art historian and curator Ivan Chechot. The discussion focuses on how to distinguish between modernism and the avant-garde in Russian and world art.
From this episode you will learn:
- When did research on the avant-garde begin at the Department of Art History of Leningrad State University?
- What was the attitude of Soviet art history scholarship towards the avant-garde?
- What terminology was used to describe and typologize those phenomena in art that are now commonly referred to as the avant-garde?
- What can be considered avant-garde, and what truly radical features distinguish the real avant-garde from modernist art?
Similar to modernist art, the Russian avant-garde subsumes various artistic movements and schools, ultimately blurring its own boundaries. According to Ivan Chechot, the radicalism of the Russian avant-garde takes it beyond the bounds of art altogether, a fact that manifested itself particularly clearly in the ideas and concepts of Malevich, Tatlin, Punin, Tarabukin, Filonov, and other thinkers of the era.