October 1917. The Russian Revolution wipes 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 participate in the revolutionary struggle, transforming inner cities with their progressive murals, posters, installations, and performances. The new political leaders soon want nothing to do with these radical artists. While their reputation is growing in Europe, they experience increasing pressure in the Soviet Union.
Against a background of violent social and political change, Sjeng Scheijen describes with compassion and humor the events that shaped the artistic revolution in The Avant-Gardists, the first illustrated biography to relate the rise and fall of the leading figures of the Russian avant-garde. From philosophical and political subversion, involvement with the Bolshevik administration, and links with Europe to violent repression, incarcerations, and torture in the 1930s under Stalin, events are narrated through artists’ personal memories, drawn from existing and important new archival findings. Excerpts from diaries and correspondence reveal the extent of the avant-garde’s energy and determination to survive a totalitarian regime, civil war, hunger, and terror.
Scheijen’s vivid, dynamic style; authoritative command of his source material; and extensive original research provide exceptional insight into the lives of these avant-gardists, whose art transformed modern art.
Reviews
In cutting through the retrospective romance that has clouded so many accounts of those years, Scheijen makes it more clear than ever before that the avant-garde's relationship with Bolshevism was at best shaky long before Stalin's program of annihilation was fully underway. The story Scheijen tells is full of frustrations, dashed hopes, and disasters.
— The New York Review of Books
A deep dive into the initially symbiotic but ultimately violently repressive relationship between early 20th-century Russia's groundbreaking avant-garde artists and the dogmatic revolutionaries behind the 1917 Soviet revolution… Deeply sourced and well-illustrated.
— Library Journal
An overwhelming reading experience. Scheijen is an inspired writer … The Avant-Gardists is a superb book.
— Pieter Waterdrinker de Telegraaf
Contributors
Sjeng Scheijen
Author
Sjeng Scheijen is a Dutch author and an internationally acclaimed expert on Russian art. He has curated several important exhibitions in London, Groeningen, and elsewhere. He is the former cultural attaché to the Netherlands Embassy in Moscow. His previous book, Diaghilev: A Life, received much critical acclaim, being described as “masterful” by The Guardian and “magnificent” by the Daily Mail.
