What’s going on?
First, the Art Institute of Chicago hosts an exhibition of Soviet TASS posters. Now, London’s Royal Academy of Arts is hosting a new show, “Building the Revolution: Soviet Art and Architecture 1915-35.”
The word “revolution” has become discredited, and this show thoroughly re-energises its meaning in art and architecture. The key fragments of Russian revolutionary creativity still glow like radium, living on in its remaining art and buildings, and hard-wired into the imaginations of some of the 20th and 21st century’s most influential architects.
Could it be that, now that the Cold War is over and in the midst of the Second Great Depression, the revolution that was all but dead and buried is now being rehabilitated?
