The Avant-Gardists: Sjeng Scheijen in Conversation with Elena Sudakova

We are delighted to invite you to an evening talk with author Sjeng Scheijen, who will be discussing his new book, The Avant-Gardists: Artists in Revolt in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union 1917–1935, with Elena Sudakova, Director of Pushkin House. The Avant-Gardists is a gripping narrative that traces the lives and activities of the key figures of the art movement that transformed the modern world.

October 1917. The Russian Revolution has wiped the old tsarist empire off the map. Marc Chagall, Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Lyubov Popova, Alexander Rodchenko, Olga Rozanova, Vladimir Tatlin and other avant-garde artists have thrown themselves into the revolutionary struggle, transforming the visual landscape with their progressive murals, posters, installations and performances. Perplexing, loud and always delighted to offend the establishment, they gained endless notoriety but little official acclaim under the old regime.

Under the newly-established Soviet government, these former iconoclasts were given extraordinary responsibility to lead and reform museums, art schools and even the public design of inner cities. Some were appointed as high-ranking officials – Marc Chagall because head of culture in Belarus, and Kazimir Malevich head of the Soviet national museum department. Yet their moment was short lived. The new political leaders soon tired of these radical artists, and whilst their reputation grew in Europe, they fell out of favour, became marginalised and impoverished, and many were subject to repression, incarcerations and torture under Stalin.

Against a background of violent social and political change, Scheijen describes these events through the artists’ personal memories, drawn from existing and extensive new research in Russian and Ukrainian archives and museums and excerpts from diaries and correspondence. He reveals the extent of the avant-garde’s energy and determination to survive a totalitarian regime, civil war, hunger and terror, and provides exceptional insight into the lives of these avant-gardists, whose work left a legacy that transformed modern art.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Pushkin House, 5a Bloomsbury Square, London, United Kingdom