Specters of Formalism

In this talk Margarita Tupitsyn will present several examples of the u-turn that Soviet avantgardists made from production art to modernist painting in the 1930s as a reaction to official naturalism and leicism . Kasimir Malevich, Aleksandr Rodchenko, and Valentina Kulagina’s diaries and letters are my primary sources. These documents were suppressed by official historians and are now being ignored by scholars who insist on building a bridge between the avant-garde and Socialist Realism. My aim is to undermine the historical validity and even ethical responsibility of such a history, by constructing an alternative canon developed on the margins of Soviet culture industry's seemingly impenetrable totality.  I will also demonstrate that even during the worst periods of official censorship in the Soviet capital, modernist thinking and practice endured. It is this undying commitment to formalist and leftist thinking that permitted the comeback of modernist counterculture after Stalin’s death in 1953.

Margarita Tupitsyn is an independent curator, scholar, and art critic. She received her PhD in art history from the Graduate Center of City University of New York. In 1981–83, she was the curator of Contemporary Russian Art Center of America in New York City, where she organized the first exhibitions of Moscow Conceptualism including Russian New Wave . Her many exhibitions include Sots Art and Apt Art , The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; The Green Show , Exit Art, New York; Between Spring and Summer: Soviet Conceptual Art in the Era of Late Communism (co-curated), ICA, Boston; The Great Utopia (co-curated), Guggenheim Museum, New York; After Perestroika: Kitchenmaids or Stateswomen , ICI, New York; Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s (co-curated), Queens Museum, New York; El Lissitzky: Beyond the Abstract Cabinet , Sprengel Museum, Hannover; Bauhaus: Dessau, Chicago, New York , Museum Folkwang, Essen; Malevich and Film , Fundação Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon; Klutsis and Kulagina: Photography and Montage After Constructivism , ICP, New York; Verbal Photography: Ilya Kabakov, Boris Mikhailov and The Moscow Archive of New Art , Museu de Arte Contemporanea de Serralves, Porto; Against Kandinsky , Museum Villa Stuck, Munich; Rodchenko and Popova: Defining Constructivism , Tate Modern, London; Andrei Molodkin: Liquid Black , Museum Villa Stuck, Munich. She is the author of many books and catalogues including Margins of Soviet Art: Socialist Realism to the Present (Milan: Politi Editore, 1989), The Soviet Photograph (Yale University Press, 1996), and Moscow Vanguard Art, 1922–1992 (Yale University Press, forthcoming). As an art critic and scholar, Tupitsyn has contributed to many exhibition catalogues and anthologies including Documents of Contemporary Art (Whitechapel and the MIT Press) and The Museum of Modern Art’s Object-Photo. Modern Photographs 1909–1949: The Thomas Walther Collection . She has written art criticism for Flash Art , Artforum , Art Journal , and Art in America . In 2000, Tupitsyn was a Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, and in 2011, she received a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. In 2015, Tupitsyn curated the Russian Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale.