Soviet nonconformist art was Soviet art produced in the Soviet Union outside the control of the Soviet state. The art movement started in the Stalinist era and was, in particular, outside of the rubric of Socialist Realism. Other terms used to refer to this phenomenon are Soviet counterculture, "underground art" or "unofficial art".

History

1917–1932

From the time of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 until 1932, the historical Russian avant-garde flourished and strove to appeal to the proletariat. However, in 1932 Joseph Stalin's government took control of the arts with the 1932 decree of the Bolshevik Central Committee "On the Restructuring of Literary-Artistic Organizations", which put all artists' unions under the control of the Communist Party. Two years later, Stalin instituted a policy that unified aesthetic and ideological objectives, which was called socialist realism, broadly defined as art that was, "socialist in content and realist in form." Moreover, the new policy defined four categories of unacceptable art: political art, religious art, erotic art, and "formalistic" art, which included abstraction, expressionism, and conceptual art. Beginning in 1936, avant-garde artists who were unable or unwilling to adapt to the new policy were forced out of their positions, and often sent to the gulag, as part of Stalin's Great Purges.Kornetchuk, Elena. "From the 1917 Revolution to Khrushchev's Thaw," Nonconformist Art: The Soviet Experience 1956-1986, eds. Alla Rosenfeld and Norton T. Dodge. London: Thames and Hudson, 1995, pp. 36-41. .

End of World War II – 1953

In the wake of World War II, referred to in Russia as The Great Patriotic War, Party resolutions were passed in 1946 and 1948, by Andrei Zhdanov, chief of the Propaganda Administration formally denouncing Western cultural influences at the start of the Cold War. Art students such as Ülo Sooster, an Estonian who later became important to the Moscow nonconformist movement, were sent to Siberian prison camps.Alla Rosenfeld, Norton Townshend Dodge, Jane Voorhees, Art of the Baltics: The Struggle for Freedom of Artistic Expression Under the Soviets, Rutgers University Press, 2001, p. 9. . The nonconformist artist Boris Sveshnikov also spent time in a Soviet labor camp.Marilyn Rueschemeyer, Soviet Emigre Artists: life and work in the USSR and the United States, M E Sharpe Inc, 1985, p. 47. . Oleg Tselkov was expelled from art school for 'formalism' in 1955, which from the viewpoint of the Party might have constituted an act of treason.Nicholas Rzhevsky, The Cambridge Companion to Modern Russian Culture, Cambridge University Press, 1999, p. 227. .

1953 (the death of Stalin) – 1962

The death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, and Nikita Khrushchev's subsequent denunciation of his rule during his Secret Speech at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956 created the "Khruschev Thaw"; a liberal atmosphere wherein artists had more freedom to create nonsanctioned work without fearing repercussions. Furthermore, Stalin's cult of personality was recognized as detrimental, and within weeks many paintings and busts bearing his likeness were removed from public places. Artists such as Aleksandr Gerasimov, who had made their careers painting idealized portraits of Stalin, were forced out of their official positions, as they had become embarrassing to the new leadership.Kornetchuk, Elena. "From the 1917 Revolution to Khrushchev's Thaw," Nonconformist Art: The Soviet Experience 1956-1986, eds. Alla Rosenfeld and Norton T. Dodge. London: Thames and Hudson, 1995, pp. 46-47. .

1962 – mid-1970s

The "thaw" era ended quickly, when in 1962, Khrushchev attended the public Manezh exhibition (an episode known as the Manege Affair) at which several nonconformist artists were exhibiting, including Ülo Sooster with his Eye in the Egg. Khrushchev got into a public and now-famous argument with Ernst Neizvestny, sculptor (1925-2016), regarding the function of art in society. However, this altercation had the unintended effect of fomenting unofficial art as a movement. Artists could no longer hold delusions that the state would recognize their art, yet the climate had become friendly and open enough that a coherent organization had formed. Additionally, punishments for unofficial artists became less severe; they were denied admittance to the union instead of being executed.

As a "movement" nonconformist art was stylistically diverse. However, in the post-thaw era its function and role in society became clear. As the Russian curator, author and museum director Joseph Bakstein wrote, The duality of life in which the official perception of everyday reality is independent of the reality of the imagination leads to a situation where art plays a special role in society. In any culture, art is a special reality, but in the Soviet Union, art was doubly real precisely because it had no relation to reality. It was a higher reality.... The goal of nonconformism in art was to challenge the status of official artistic reality, to question it, to treat it with irony. Yet that was the one unacceptable thing. All of Soviet society rested on orthodoxy, and nonconformism was its enemy. That is why even the conditional and partial legalization of nonconformism in the mid-1970s was the beginning of the end of the Soviet regime.Bakshtein, Joseph. "A View from Moscow," Nonconformist Art: The Soviet Experience 1956-1986, eds. Alla Rosenfeld and Norton T. Dodge. London: Thames and Hudson, 1995, p. 332. .

The 1980s

Timur Novikov was one of the leaders of St. Petersburg art in the 1980s. In 1982 his theory of "Zero Object" acted as one of the foundations of Russian conceptual art.Tom Masters, St. Petersburg, Lonely Planet, 2005, p36. In 1988 he founded Neo-Academism.

Moscow artists' groups

There were many artistic groups and movements that were active in the Soviet Union after the period of the thaw. They can be difficult to classify because often they were not related due to stylistic objectives, but geographical proximity. Furthermore, participation in these groups was fluid as the community of nonconformist artists in Moscow was relatively small and close-knit.

Lianozovo Group

The Lianozovo Group formed in 1958 was named after the small village Lianozovo outside Moscow, where most of the artists lived and worked. The members of this group were: , the artist and poet, , Oscar Rabin, Lidia Masterkova, Vladimir Nemukhin, Nikolai Vechtomov and the poets , Genrikh Sapgir, and Igor Kholin. This group was not related due to aesthetic concerns, but due to "their shared search for a new sociocultural identity." critic and theorist Victor Tupitsyn considered that, "the aestheticization of misery is precisely what distinguishes the representatives of the de-classed communal intelligentsia of the thaw era from their predecessors (the Socialist Realists), who created a paradisiac image of history."Tupitsyn, Victor. "Nonidentity with Identity: Moscow Communal Modernism, 1950s-1980s," Nonconformist Art: The Soviet Experience 1956-1986, eds. Alla Rosenfeld and Norton T. Dodge. London: Thames and Hudson, 1995, p. 86.

Many members of the Lianozovo group worked in an abstract style. The 1957 thaw resulted in the discovery of Western artistic practices and historical Russian avant-garde traditions by young Soviet artists. Artists began experimenting with abstraction, as it was the antithesis of Socialist Realism. However, the fallout from the Manezh exhibition, in 1962, caused restrictions to be enforced once again. The new restrictions could not however, curtail what the young artists had learned during the five-year interlude. Additionally, Victor Tupitsyn points out that the 1960s mark an era of "decommunalization" in the Soviet Union. Khrushchev worked to improve housing conditions, and a consequence of this was that artists began to get studios of their own, or shared spaces with like-minded colleagues.

Officially, those in the Lianozovo group were members of the Moscow Union of Graphic Artists, working in the applied and graphic arts. As such, they were not permitted to hold painting exhibitions, as that fell under the domain of the Artists' Union. Consequently, apartment exhibitions and literary salons began at this time as a means of publicly exhibiting. However, the Lianozovo group in particular was often harassed by Soviet officials as they were vigilant in pursuing public exhibitions of their work. In an attempt to circumvent the law, the Lianozovo group proposed an open-air exhibition in 1974, inviting dozens of other nonconformist artists also to exhibit. The result was the demolition of the exhibition by bulldozers and water cannons, for which reason the exhibition is still known as the Bulldozer Exhibition.

Sretensky Boulevard Group

A group of artists that had studios on and around Sretensky Boulevard, Moscow, became a loosely associated like-minded community in the late 1960s. The members of this group were: Ilya Kabakov, Ülo Sooster, Eduard Steinberg, Erik Bulatov, Sergey Shablavin, Oleg Vassiliev, Viktor Pivovarov, Vladimir Yankilevsky, and sculptor Ernst Neizvestny. The artists' studios were also used as venues to show and exchange ideas about unofficial art. Like their colleagues in the Lianozovo group, the majority of visual artists who were part of the Sretensky Boulevard Group were admitted to the Moscow Union of Graphic Artists. This allowed the artists to work officially as book illustrators and graphic designers, which provided them with studio space, materials, and time to work on their own projects. Although they shared the same type of official career, the Sretensky group is not stylistically homogeneous. The name merely denotes the community that they formed as a result of working in close proximity to each other.

Moscow conceptualists

Many of the artists on Sretensky Boulevard were part of the Moscow Conceptualist school. This movement arose in the 1970s to describe the identity of the contemporary Russian artist in opposition to the government. As Joseph Bakstein explained, "The creation of this nonconformist tradition was impelled by the fact that an outsider in the Soviet empire stood alone against a tremendous state machine, a great Leviathan that threatened to engulf him. To preserve one's identity in this situation, one had to create a separate value system, including a system of aesthetic values."

Erik Bulatov explains that conceptualist art is, "a rebellion of man against the everyday reality of life... a picture interests me as some kind of system... opening into the space of my everyday existence."Roberts, Norma, ed. The Quest for Self-Expression: Painting in Moscow and Leningrad, 1965-1990, Columbus: Columbus Museum of Art, 1990, p. 72

This group includes Ilya Kabakov, Gregory Perkel, Erik Bulatov, Oleg Vassiliev, Sergey Shablavin, Komar and Melamid, , Viktor Pivovarov, poets Vsevolod Nekrasov (ru), Dmitry Prigov, Lev Rubinstein, young artist and novelist Vladimir Sorokin, and also broadly encompasses the Sots artists and the Collective Actions group, which were both influential in the construction of Russian conceptualist art.

Petersburg groups

1960s - 1970s

Mikhail Shemiakin's Group

Mikhail Chemiakin's St. Petersburg Non-conformist Group developed out of a 1964 exhibition at the Hermitage Museum, where Chemiakin worked as a gallery assistant. The official name of the exhibition was Exhibition of the artist-workers of the economic part of the Hermitage: Towards the 200th anniversary of Hermitage and it included the work of Chemiakin, V. Kravchenko, V. Uflyand, V. Ovchinnikov and Oleg Liagatchev. Opening on March 30–31, it was closed by the authorities on April 1. The Hermitage director, Mikhail Artamonov, was removed from his post.